The Tavern

Both names are very misleading, in a part of the game when not having misleading names is especially important. Specifically:

--) When a monster based on a real-life animal is proportionately much more dangerous than the actual animal, the monster's name should indicate this. Increasingly, monster naming conventions have indeed been moving in this direction, but the porcupine is an exception. Rename to "giant porcupine."

--) While the porcupine has spines, the spiny frog does not. You take a lot of damage when meleeing it simply because it hits very hard (26 + poison; compare to a yak or elephant's 20 and a death yak's 30). This is inexcusably confusing. For the longest time--like hundreds of hours and a bunch of wins--I thought the opposite, and believed that more AC would make a big difference in protecting me from the retaliation damage. Rename to something that indicates its high melee damage, perhaps "stinger frog" or "manticore frog."

edit: OR YAKFROG! (as a step up from bullfrog!). Maybe a bit much given that there are also yaktaurs, but otherwise this would imo nicely communicate "this is a big beefy frog, and it's a hard-hitting fast-moving threat in much the way frogs associated with a less scary bovine were at the beginning of the game."

Idk I'm pretty sure real life bullfrogs, tyrant leeches, and frilled lizards aren't very dangerous to humans

Well, tyrant leeches do like to delve and bite inside human buttholes (as well as eye, vaginas and urethras)...

Spiny frog --> Poison Frog

Porcupine --> Yakuspine

A reference to base attack power could be "huge poison frog", but then there is Crawl's size system in which huge is the size of trees and one version of the Serpent oH. Jumbo Poison Frog sounds legitimately strange. "Mighty Frog of Poison" contains everything. Otherwise, one could go with "Death Frog", in analogy with Death Yak, but I think it would be better if "Death" were limited to necromantic and undead monsters and spells.

Hell Frog!

IIRC tyrant leeches squirm into peoples' urethras; all things considered I would prefer to not engage in melee with them

Please don't rename spiny frogs. They've been around for forever, and I like them.

Every player who has been to lair a couple of times knows perfectly well what a spiny frog is. It is absolutely not important to make their name less misleading.

Alternative proposal: remove monster spines. Then there is no possible confusion wrt spiny frogs not being spiny.

Even if there were not already at least one conclusive counterexample upthread to this statement, there are lots of players who haven't been to lair a couple of times.

Just because something has been around forever and you like it doesn't make it good design.

Last thing: people are suggesting that the name of a monster change to reduce ambiguity, and you're opposed because... you really love the name "spiny frog"?

FR: Add spines to spiny frog, reduce their melee damage very slightly to compensate.

I'd be okay with Bladehogs and Toxic Frogs personally

What, not razorbacks?

They would fit right in with the orb spiders, and you could generate them in bands like hell hogs so that they're actually threatening.

Indeed, Porcupines don't do the one thing you'd expect them to do: reflect damage. Instead they're relatively low HD and high DPS. Maybe mongoose would be better?

Also, the idea of an animal with some form of mirror ain't a bad one...

Until now, I thought that spiny frogs had spines too.... Also, I quite like the name "razorback", although the flavor text would probably have to be changed. Hogs are fast as well, so they fit in the category nicely.

A problem with yaking the porcupine is that yak monsters are all large or big, while porcupines are tiny. So it might be misleading. Unless it's a baby yak, and all baby yaks have spines... (so much for my dreams of yakupines). Hogs are small, so they are better sized.

I'll be in favour of renaming them both. They both have names that set up preconceptions of their abilities and spiny frog hits particularily hard and is not evocative of its deadliness.