Bludgeoning-Piercing-Slashing

Making damage types make sense

Feb 27, 2026

Bludgeoning

Piercing

Slashing

With how often these three words appear in the 5e corpus (it’s a lot) a new player might be forgiven for thinking their choice of maiming instrument is important.

But how significant is old B/P/S really?

Well, there are approximately 1,000 monsters published in core and supplement books between the start of 5e and the publication of the 5.5 Monster Manual. This is not counting reprints, one off NPCs, monsters in adventures, and non-D&D setting books. We could bring this number up depending on how inclusive we’re feeling, and I’m sure everyone who crunches the numbers will come up with a different estimate, but I’m trying to be generous here. I can only find 191 monsters where your choice between bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing actually matters.

And I’m pretty sure two of them are typos.

The Diagram

For the sake of simplicity I’ve bundled together matching vulnerabilities, resistances, and immunities. So monsters like the Ice Mephit, that are vulnerable to bludgeoning damage, go in the same category as the Xorn, which resists piercing and slashing.

Not that my efforts to keep this tidy are worth a damn since this chart is going to be a mess.

Let’s start in the middle.

Resists Bludgeoning Piercing and Slashing

Now this category is outside the point I’m trying to make with this post, since they also treat all damage types the same but my diagram would look weird with a big blank spot in the middle, so let’s get this out of the way.

I’m excluding the massive category that is creatures who are resistant or immune to non-magical B/P/S which is 5e’s way of insisting you go find a magical sword and stop trying to drop anvils on the demon lord’s head. Most powerful magical creatures fall into that category.

Our first true entry in this category are Swarms. The case for swarms is clear, regardless of how big your sword is, you’re only going to hit a few rats with every swing, so you need broad area-of-effect damage to deal with a swarm effectively. This is the only example of a monster type whose damage resistances are applied consistently to every member.

Almost every member that is.

The Swarm of Rot Grubs, resists Piercing and Slashing but not Bludgeoning. I’m fairly sure this is a typo though they did manage to print it wrong in both Volo’s Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen Presents: Monsters of the Multiverse, so maybe these things are just particularly squishable?

The other entry in this list is the Ghost Dragon. Which might make sense if not for the fact that no other ghost (and no other dragon for that matter) is in this category. I was willing to write this off as someone forgetting to add the “from nonmagical attacks” qualifier but the 2025 MM adds Ghosts, Banshees, Wights, Poltergeists and Will-O-Wisps so I guess someone’s decided this is the ghost category at some point.

Now I see the reasoning behind this, ghosts are intangible, so physical damage has less of an effect. But surely if there’s ever a place to add the “from nonmagical attacks” attacks qualifier it’s here. Ghosts should be immune from all non-magical damage, I really feel you shouldn’t be able to kill one by throwing bricks at it.

This isn’t the only strange edition by the 2025 MM, it also added to this category some heavy hitters like the Demilich2, Blob of Annihilation, Tarrasque, Empyreans and their Iotas for no other reason than that they’re strong, I guess? If that was the point then just double their health. These all just feel like they’re missing “from nonmagical attacks” qualifier so just be aware you CAN actually drop an anvil on the heads of these things now.

They’ve also added the Air Elemental, Fire Elemental and Invisible Stalker, a decision I don’t hate, but we’ve really got to sit down someday and decide exactly what it is that these fuzzy elementals are resistant to.

And for no apparent reasons the Couatl, Chain Devil and Clay Golem have also been lumped in here. So as much as I’d like to say the new manual’s improved things I can’t call the 2025 MM’s recodifying anything more than a vague shuffling in no particular direction. So while I’ll mention 5.5e’s changes I have no room on my diagram for all their nonsense.

My suggested replacement for this mess is to give all the ghosts and high magical creatures resistance or immunity from mundane B/P/S and leave this category as the niche of the Swarm.

Now to begin our journey proper, starting at the top and going clockwise we have:

Resists only Bludgeoning

This is a strange group of bedfellows

First we have the Bag Jelly. A species of ooze evolved specifically to live inside of a hill giant’s spoil sack. It’s bludgeoning resistance is an adaptation to it’s environment. It’s not explained exactly what’s different about this ooze that makes it bludgeoning resistant, but we’ll talk about oozes more later. I have a soft spot for ridiculously niche monsters like this one. I hope a piercing resistant jelly exists in the pocket where the giant keeps his keys.

Next we have the Boneless. A great monster with a stupid name; half the creatures on this list are boneless. It’s a living sheet of human skin and it’s bludgeoning resistance seems a natural extension of it’s floppy nature. Fighting it must be like going to war with a bedsheet. A+ example of damage resistance done right.

Finally we have the Mighty Servant of Leuk-o. A giant magical mech suit with immunity to

*deep breath*

Acid, Bludgeoning, Cold, Fire, Lightning, Necrotic, Poison, Psychic, Radiant; Blinded, Charmed, Deafened, Exhaustion, Frightened, Grappled, Incapacitated, Paralyzed, Petrified, Poisoned, Restrained, Stunned, Unconscious

*Gasp*

It also has resistance to Piercing and Slashing in case you thought you were getting off easy. This one’s a real head scratcher and a contender for possible typo status. This is actually the only thing in the D&D multiverse that you can’t bludgeon to death with a magic hammer.

So I’m going to ignore Mighty Servant of Leuk-o as a statistical outlier and make this the category for Flexible monsters, things so soft and bendy that there’s nothing for a warhammer to crack. This includes the Boneless as well as the notably absent Rug of Smothering and any textile-based monsters you decide to cook up.

Resists Bludgeoning and Piercing

This is the only coherent category.

Treant, Awakened Tree, Wood Woad. I don’t even need to describe these guys for it to click. You’re fighting trees so you bring your axe. I’m a little surprised there’s no living puppet or animated dining chair monsters. An artificial wooden monster would be a nice addition to this category.

We can bundle all these together under the label Wooden or Plant.

Which begs the question of why the other plant monsters don’t have a home here. Blights look wooden enough to me and the Shambling Mound and Corpse Flower are just begging for a good slash of the machete. Oddly some seem to have migrated into our next category.

Resists only Piercing

This is where things stop making sense.

First we have the Awakened Shrub. It’s piercing resistance is the most logical of anything in this category; your spear will go right through it. What doesn’t make sense is why it doesn’t also have bludgeoning resistance like it’s woody relatives. In fact I would imagine a bush could bounce back from hammer blows better than wood.

Next we have the Vegepygmy and its variants. They’re also a plant, technically more of a mold, but it seems like their piercing resistance is a result of their alien anatomy. They don’t have a centralised brain or vital organs for a spearman to pierce so pinpoint attacks aren’t as effective.

The Flameskull3 is also in the category for reasons so unfathomable I’m almost certain it’s a typo. Actually quite certain it’s a typo since they corrected this in the 2025 MM.

So for this category we could use the label Porous for something like the awakened shrub where a piercing attack is more likely to go through it rather than into it. I already feel the shrub doesn’t belong here though and I’m struggling to think of another monster this would apply to, maybe some sort of wicker golem?

A better label in my opinion is Decentralised, which gets at what the vegepymies have going on. This is for creatures without a centralised brain or locus of control and movement. If a monster doesn’t have a body it can’t live without then it’s decentralised. I like to think of this category as the niche of fungoids, but this could also be a home for plants, sturdy undead, or animated objects.

I’m not totally happy with the term decentralised, it feels a bit clinical for a fantasy game. Something along the lines of dispersed or amorphous could also work but they risk being confused with swarms or slimes. Since there’s not too much competition for this spot I’ll go ahead and label it Fungal.

Resists Piercing and Slashing

Our biggest category, in fact it’s even bigger than it looks on the chart.

The first group, Skeletons, also includes some of their variants like the Warhorse Skeleton and Minotaur Skeleton. Skeletons have been susceptible to bludgeoning since early editions which also makes for a nice in-game justification for the cleric’s fondness for blunt weapons. I like it.

However most boney enemies aren’t here. Note the absence of the Gnoll Whitherling, Bone Naga, Flameskull, Bone Lord, Boneclaw, Death Tyrant and Demilich.

The second group in this category are elementals made from brittle substances. It’s also a patchy application; Earth Elemental Spirits resist piercing and slashing but Earth Elementals don’t (though they are vulnerable to thunder damage). Ice Mephits are vulnerable to bludgeoning and Xorn4 resist piercing and slashing unless made with magical or adamantine weapons5. But icy Rime Hulks and rocky Pechs don’t interact with damage types at all.

Reflections are technically fey but I’m lumping them in here since I presume their bludgeoning vulnerability is due to them being made of glass. You’re putting in more of an effort then most elementals do reflection! You deserve this!

Speaking of creatures in ill-fitting categories, Stone Cursed are constructs with vulnerability to bludgeoning. From their description they sound more like a kind of semi-petrified undead and I mean did you really “construct” the man you just turned to stone? Unbelievably, Stone Cursed are the only construct on this list. Not a single type of golem, robot or wooden contraption made it onto this chart. What a string of missed opportunities.

Finally we have the aforementioned Swarm of Rot Grubs, whose presence here makes even less sense in light of the monsters they share this space with.

With this one exception excluded, this category is obviously the place of Brittle monsters. Things composed of bone, stone, ice or cream crackers. Regardless of how tough it is, if it snaps instead of bends, it’s a Brittle monster.

Resists only Slashing

Two entries in this category. Both are oozes and both have an interesting relationship with being cut in half.

The Black Pudding or Ochre Jelly are both totally immune to slashing damage and when they are hit with a slashing attack they split into two oozes. This also happens with lightning damage for reasons still unclear to me. It’s also unclear why other oozes don’t have this ability. Or why these two in particular share it in the first place. This took me on a detour into the world of speculative ooze biology that I’m cutting out and making into it’s own post. I’ll add a link here when I write it.

Suffice to say I don’t quite think oozes belong here, slashing off great chunks at a time seems like as good a method of killing an ooze as any other. What we’re looking for to fill this category is something that’s hard to cut but which can be effectively pierced and pummeled.

Armored or Shelled fits the definition well enough. It’s hard to cut through plate and mail so you have to rely on piercing its gaps or the sheer force of a bludgeoning weapon. The issue is that armor is something the system already accounts for and it drags us inexorably to rebalancing the game around armor-based resistances.

Scaly is my preferred concept for this category. A dragon’s scales can’t be sliced across but you can slide the tip of a spear in between them or just break its bones. It feels a bit more natural for a monster and thus has none of the problems armor implies (until someone decides to make armor out of their skin, sigh). My only hangup is that I might need to specify that this is a category for monsters with particularly tough skin and not just, like, iguanas.

Resists Bludgeoning and Slashing

I was worried one section of this diagram would be totally empty but there is in fact one monster in the entire corpus of everything written for fifth edition, including adventures, supplements, and content of dubious officialness, which is vulnerable to piercing damage. Can you guess who it is?

…

It’s Rakshasa!

But only when the weapon it’s being pierced with is magical AND only if it’s being wielded by a good aligned creature. So not only is the Rakshasa the only monster with piercing damage vulnerability, it’s the only one with alignment specific vulnerability too. Believe it or not the 2025 Monster Manual updates this to the EVEN MORE constrained: “Piercing damage from weapons wielded by creatures under the effect of a Bless spell”. So add a fourth weird requirement to the list.

Obviously there’s no real general rule we can draw from this one example. So we’re going to need to come up with something new wholecloth (tempting as it is to leave this category as is).

One option is to invert what’s on the other side of this diagram. If creatures that are resistant to piercing are Decentralised, then creatures that are vulnerable to piercing might be Centralised: based around a locus of control somewhere deep in their body.

I feel this covers either too much or too little. The only monsters I can think of that fit this description are the elementals in Hot Springs Island, who have a core at their center.

So imagine a water elemental whose liquid body reforms after being slashed and bashed but who turns into a puddle once their elemental core is pierced. But then again aren’t most complex organisms “centralised” around a brain or nervous system? It feels like this category could include almost everything. So this one’s a bit of a non-starter.

What I think is that we could make this the category for Fat, Blubbery, Thick Skinned or Giant monsters. Maybe if a creature’s big enough, your swords and hammers just lack the penetration to have any real effect. Maybe you need a nice big pike to get through the meters of skin and fat between you and it’s vitals. In a way this makes for a pleasing symmetry with the decentralised monsters on the opposite side, fat monsters have a centralised weak point that they protect with a cushion of expendable meat.

Now even the chubbiest of monsters have surface features like eyes that would be susceptible enough to hacking and whacking, which threatens to drag us into the dangerous world of locational hits. If the idea of cooking up rules for those makes you as nauseous as it makes me, then just allow players to ignore these resistances on a crit.

Conclusion

And here’s what we’re left with:

I think you’ll agree it’s a much cleaner setup, and lest we forget the actual point of this exercise, something that gives damage types the coherence they need for a player to actually plan around them.

Its a little less then perfect, I’m reducing each category down to one word when I know there’s a few that might fit, so substitute any of the other terms I tossed around or suggest your own:

Vaults of Zin

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