Quote from: Eric Diaz on February 19, 2023, 10:19:54 AM
Agreed! I do the same in my games.

However, I do show images... my players often recognize common monsters like ghoul, trolls, etc.

It is not a big problem, TBH - but I like re-skinning or adding new monsters from time to time (I wrote the Teratogenicon, my monster generator, for a similar purpose).

Good mention, I do show pictures as well. I don't have a recognition issue because I generally homebrew all my monsters, but I agree it's not a problem if the players recognize common monsters (and dovetails nicely with the apparently popular conceit mentioned above, wherein most everyone in the world is familiar with certain monsters).

Possibly worth mentioning in this regard is that for my players, a monster's behavior is much more likely than a monster's appearance to be a factor in naming the monster.

Quote from: Zalman on February 19, 2023, 05:57:47 PM
Possibly worth mentioning in this regard is that for my players, a monster's behavior is much more likely than a monster's appearance to be a factor in naming the monster.

Ergo: rape-clam

I'm almost entirely in the opposite camp, but for specific reasons. In the kind of games I run, I'm usually either dealing with monsters that have common types which would be known to the characters (trolls, elves, vampires etc.), or else I'm homebrewing monsters, and when I homebrew a monster, I tend to give it a descriptive name. So instead of calling something a "Flibbergoop" or whatever, I'll call it a "Winged Homunculus" or a "Clay Horror" or something like that. Those are names that the characters could reasonably come up with themselves on the spot, so by canonizing it as the DM, all I'm doing is avoiding the confusion that would be caused by five players misquoting my description of it back to each other later. Not to mention saving myself trouble by not having to repeat the description whenever I want to talk about it.

I also find that the style of how you name your monsters can be a big part of how you convey the tone of a setting. If you forgo that, you're giving up that tool. The same is true of items. I like most (if not all) of my magic items to be unique, and I will usually write a couple of sentences of lore to go with them. My current campaign is in a game that has no identify spell, so to find out what an item can do, the players often have to study or experiment with it. Doing it that way, the players would probably never find the lore out. I usually compromise by giving the item's name and history when they've figured out all its properties. It's not realistic, but it makes the game world more interesting.

To be clear, I totally see the appeal of doing it the other way, and occasionally I will leave a monster unnamed, but I do it pretty rarely. It's just one of those things where I don't think the juice is worth the squeeze.

My homebrew monsters are almost always some kind of kitbash, but that's mostly because the antagonists in Selection campaigns (my homebrew system) use extensive genetic engineering. Alligator with electric breath? Sure. Spiders with hornet wings? Check. Vultures which vomit noxious fumes? Yup. Housecat with chameleon armadillo armor and telekinesis? Why not?

It's not like these monsters are really intended to have a name. It's something the antagonist cobbled together in haste to throw at the PCs, and the entire point of the game is that the PCs kill the monsters and pick up the DNA from them to become more powerful.