I’m not sure why this is the case, but 5.0 and 5.5 D&D have really struggled with designing lycanthropes that have anything to do with the supporting fiction or an interesting, exciting fight. In this post, I’m going to dig into what’s wrong and what might work better. I’ll go ahead and say they tried multiple things over the course of 5.0, and some of them are fine, though never better than that.

 For simplicity, I’m focusing on werewolves; I think only wererats really compete with them for iconic status in D&D. Werebears, weretigers, and were-all-kinds-of-other-shit are great, but they can be more complicated to use well, in part because ontological alignment for werecreatures gets in the way. If I’m honest, I’m not sure what “my lycanthropy turned me Neutral” means in the narrative.

Design History

Going back as far as the 1e MM, werewolves have been described as very scary, but decidedly midrange in their statistics and built for the early game. All 1e and 2e lycanthropes require a silver or +1 or better magic weapon to hit. For most weapon-using characters in most campaigns, this is a huge problem until level 3 or 4, and a non-issue after that. In 3.0 that changes to DR 15/silver, or DR 10/silver in 3.5: a magic weapon doesn’t solve this. Getting a silvered weapon isn’t too bad, but you need to like the golf-bag-of-weapons situation.

In 4e, the whole deal with silver is handled in its Regeneration trait: “Regeneration 5 (if the werewolf takes damage from a silver weapon, its regeneration doesn’t function on its next turn),” or later with “Vulnerable silver (if the werewolf lord takes damage from a silver weapon, its regeneration does not function on its next turn)”.

5e mostly doesn’t want to tangle with the golf bag of weapons, but in 5.0 werewolves still have “Damage Immunities bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from nonmagical weapons that aren’t silvered”, and later “Regeneration. Augustus regains 10 hit points at the start of his turn. If he takes damage from a silver weapon, this trait doesn’t function at the start of his next turn. Augustus dies only if he starts his turn with 0 hit points and doesn’t regenerate.”

Which brings us to 5.5e and its complete and total disinterest in weapon materials or the idea of requiring magic weapons to hurt a target… which means the word “silver” appears exactly nowhere in the Werewolf writeup. It represents a massive break with any sense of the mythic origins and limitations of werewolves. I, for one, think those things are incredibly important for making them fit into action horror or Gothic horror. Also, I know that D&D doesn’t want to get locked into all monsters of a kind definitely sharing a particular trait, but I think the game loses something meaningful when they discard the ability for players to learn, figure things out, and apply that solution.

The other thing that 3.0 and 3.5 bring to the table, but that gets lost in 4e and 5e, is that conceptually lycanthropy is kind of a template. The lonely-fun NPC construction of 3.x is a nightmare more often than not, but if you need scarier werewolves, bolting some fighter or barbarian levels onto their base stats is pretty effective and fits their narrative well. This makes it easy to keep werewolves threatening long into the mid- and late-game. 4e and 5e solve this with new bespoke stat blocks, such as the level 13 elite brute Werewolf Lord of 4e’s MM2 and the CR 9 Boss Augustus of 5.0’s Book of Many Things. Werewolves dropping off the radar of interesting threats by about level 8 or 9 feels like a huge missed opportunity, and Boss Augustus isn’t ideal as a baseline stat block for a pack of higher-level werewolves.

5.0 Problems

The glaring problems of the 5.0 MM werewolf (p. 211 if you’re following along in the home game) are its abysmal AC (11 or 12), unimpressive Perception and Stealth bonuses (these are archetypally important skills for a werewolf!), and very low attack bonuses and damage output (+4 is miserable at CR 3, and it’s averaging 13 damage per round if it hits). This gives us a sack of 58 hit points that might be resistant to your weapon damage, but just not doing anywhere near enough damage or hitting often enough to matter. Not scary to the player, and deeply frustrating to the DM. The CR 9 Boss Augustus solves the damage output problem, if not the AC problem.

5.5 Problems

I’ve already mentioned the loss of silver as a relevant weakness. The combat math is better, if still not amazing: AC 15, +5 to hit with its attacks, averaging 22 damage per round. It’s fine for CR 3. But the whole curse of lycanthropy concept is almost gone too:

Bite (Wolf or Hybrid Form Only). Melee Attack Roll: +5, reach 5 ft. Hit: 12 (2d8 + 3) Piercing damage. If the target is a Humanoid (editor’s note: first problem), it is subjected to the following effect. Constitution Saving Throw: DC 12 (ed: second problem). Failure: The target is cursed. If the cursed target drops to 0 Hit Points (ed: third problem), it instead becomes a Werewolf under the DM’s control and has 10 Hit Points (ed: fourth problem). Success: The target is immune to this werewolf’s curse for 24 hours (are you kidding me? Fifth problem.).

Hokay. Breaking this down:

1. This only works on Humanoids, which represents a decreasing number of PCs and NPCs. (The rift between “this is Humanoid as a PC but another type as an NPC” is also widening, and “DMs can fix it” is a terrible answer to something that doesn’t serve a lot of apparent positive purpose.)
2. DC 12? Seriously? That is so low for something one of the iconic werewolf threats. Setting the DC that low feels like they mostly wanted to avoid this situation coming up, especially in light of 3 and 5 below. (In 5.0, every Bite included a DC 12 save to avoid the curse.)
3. Actually getting the cursed PC to 0 Hit Points is not that easy! PCs are tough and have a lot of recovery resources. This does at least punish just letting your allies drop and healing them with the cheapest available effect.
4. This one is actually two problems.
   1. 10 Hit Points isn’t really enough to be a Problem or even guarantee them a turn. Their best options are either attacking (oh no, 10 new Hit Points showed up, woo) or fleeing and hoping to get a Short Rest to recover Hit Points (whatever it is, it’s not super fun for the player).
   1. What this doesn’t cover is what happens next, once you lose those 10 Hit Points. By a direct read, I guess you’re stuck as a Werewolf until your team gets you a Remove Curse, and any healing you receive becomes Werewolf Hit Points and you just start fighting again? Nothing about falling to 0 Hit Points makes you stop being a Werewolf… and because you’re sort of an NPC you arguably don’t get death saves anymore.
5. Immunity for 24 hours after one successful DC 12 save just seems like an easy way out of what should be an iconic threat. It would be incredibly hard to curse and take down enough characters for a werewolf curse outbreak to become a problem.

I’d like to see all of these adjust, but fixing any of them helps the whole attack become scarier and more meaningful.

Stepping back for a second to look at the Werewolf traits and actions, it isn’t “wrong” on mathematical balance, but I have a hard time feeling excited about it either. I do think that a big part of the problem is just setting them at CR 3 doesn’t give the designers a lot of space for anything scary, but you can do a lot with movement, grapples, and Reactions to add some juice to a statblock.

In this case, none of the major traits or actions of the Werewolf feel like the Cool Thing an action-movie werewolf would do—it needs to be more kinetic (some kind of pounce situation) or dealing lasting wounds (cf. Infernal Glaive on the Bearded Devil) or engaging with the mythic werewolf. Sure, part of the problem is that they need to unify the statblock for human-passing, hybrid, and wolf form, and do it in a limited number of column-inches.

Addressing the Problems

So, okay. There are a set of core solutions here, and maybe someone will find it instructive (in terms of monster design) for me to lay it out this way.

1. Write my own werewolves at higher CRs, the CRs I generally want werewolves for. Let’s say CR 5 and CR 10. I’ve actually done some of this before in this blog, a long time ago as I was starting to learn to build monsters using the 5.0 DMG guidelines. This frees up some “budget” for the bone-crunching claw attacks that I want to see.
2. Work on the silver problem and simply lock into rejecting 5.5e’s decision around weapon materials, or find some other folkloric solution. This creates a minor cascading problem across class design (monks, anything else that fights with claws or an Unarmed Strike situation) that I frankly hate less than the undercutting of narrative here. Giving them Regeneration would mean hugely reworking the combat math (or deciding not to care).
3. Just fix Bite. As I laid out above, there are five or so obvious levers for improving it, and I’d try to nudge some or all of them. I strongly doubt that any word after “Piercing damage” in the Bite entry appears in the combat balancing math, so playing with those levers would have to go completely bonkers to matter to the game balance.
4. If there’s not some kind of damage resistance or healing factor, in some form, what are we doing here? Even if the healing factor is just a secondary effect of an attack. This changes the combat math just like Regeneration, but with less overall reliability. It just feels juicy to the DM during play.

Even something fairly simple, like tweaking Pack Tactics to a flashier, damage-add version. I mean, the commonly-used Pack Tactics is great, and (as 4e Avengers are designed to show) more chances to hit are an incredible improvement to damage output. But why not take that a little further? They’re some of the iconic pack predators, and I think it adds some fun for the DM.

I very seriously believe that almost all monsters are improved with a cool 1/day or Recharge 5-6 action, Bonus Action, or Reaction. Monsters are designed to last for combat to last about three rounds, so why design all three rounds to be the same? That really only makes sense if you expect to use a huge number of that creature in an encounter, such as 6+ kobolds, gnolls, or giant rats—at that point, you want to keep things fast and simple, because the NPC turn can drag on a bit. You can use werewolves that way and it’s not wrong, but I think that in the balance that is the niche usage, not the situations of 1-4 werewolves.

I guess what I’m coming to here is designing monsters to be appealing and exciting to the DM. There are a lot of different ways a monster can add the anticipation of fun for the DM. Anticipating the players’ fun is one part, but not the exclusive whole, of what promises fun for the DM.

Werewolf

Medium or Small Humanoid (Shapechanger), Chaotic Evil

AC 15
Initiative +3 (13)
HP 71 (11d8 + 22)
Speed 30 ft. (Humanoid only), 40 ft. (Hybrid or Wolf Form)

Skills Athletics +6, Perception +5, Stealth +6, Survival +5

Resistances Bludgeoning, Piercing, and Slashing damage from a weapon that is not Silvered

Senses Darkvision 60 ft.; Passive Perception 15

Languages Common (can’t speak in wolf form)

CR 5 (XP 1,800; PB +3)

Traits

Pack Predator. The werewolf has Advantage on an attack roll against a creature if at least one of the werewolf’s allies is within 5 feet of the creature and the ally doesn’t have the Incapacitated condition. On a hit, it deals an additional 1d6 damage.

Lycanthropic Regeneration. The werewolf regains 5 Hit Points at the start of each of its turns. If it takes damage from a silvered weapon, this trait doesn’t function until the end of its turn.

Actions

Multiattack. The werewolf makes two attacks, using Claw or Longbow in any combination. It can replace one attack with a Bite attack.

Bite (Hybrid or Wolf Form Only). Melee Attack Roll: +6, reach 5 ft. Hit: 12 (2d8 + 3) Piercing damage. If the target is a Fey, Giant, or Humanoid, it is subjected to the following effect. Constitution saving throw: DC 14. Failure: The target is cursed with lycanthropy. Under the light of the full moon or when it becomes Bloodied, it must make a DC 14 Wisdom saving throw or become a Werewolf under the DM’s control. If it succeeds this Wisdom saving throw, it is immune to the effects of the curse until it finishes a Long Rest.

Claw. Melee Attack Roll: +6, reach 5 ft. Hit: 12 (2d8 + 3) Slashing damage.

Longbow. Ranged Attack Roll: +6, range 150/600 ft. Hit: 12 (2d8 + 3) Piercing damage.

Bonus Actions

Shape-Shift. The werewolf shape-shifts into a Large wolf-humanoid hybrid or a Medium wolf, or it returns to its true humanoid form. Its game statistics, other than its size, are the same in each form. Any equipment it is wearing or carrying isn’t transformed.

Terrifying Transformation (1/Short Rest). The werewolf shape-shifts from humanoid form or wolf form to a Large wolf-humanoid hybrid, tearing out of its skin and any clothing. Wisdom saving throw: DC 14, enemy creatures within 30 feet that see the transformation. Failure: The creature gains the Frightened condition for 1 minute. At the end of each of its turns, the creature makes a new Wisdom saving throw, ending the effect on a success.

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