Shapurnippal
2012-05-02, 03:23 PM
I've been musing over this for a while both as a DM and as someone who likes to play Special Snowflake weirdo templated monster characters.
It occurs to me that one interesting thing about both 3.5 and Pathfinder is the way that the way they calculate monster PCs fall down on their faces pretty much the instant one understands them. Oh, sure, with a certain degree of system mastery everything in DnD is broken, but you only had to skim Savage Species once to realize immediately that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong when a hit die of humanoid was apparently equivalent to a class level, or that having SR made light blindness, a con hit, and being two levels behind everyone else worth playing a drow, and everything was designed to straight-up shaft anybody fool enough to want to play a monster. Or you get cases like the pixie, a creature which walks the line between being brokenly overpowered and unplayably fragile.
Pathfinder changed it of course, to a system which I think is superior, but goes too far in the other direction, and here I'm referring to the rules for monsters as pcs found in the Bestiary. Even their example for how it works gives away the game - it's pretty obvious that a minotaur Barbarian 8 could probably toast a human Barbarian 10, given the minotaur's 4 hitdice more than the human, with corresponding save and bab increases, better stats, reach, etc. Or an Aranea Sorceror 8 (casts as 13th level!) versus a human Sorceror 10. Okay, that's maybe an edge case, since the aranea may be the best monster in PF to synergize with a class in that way in actual play.
But the point is that neither system is anywhere near adequate for gauging how strong a monster will be as a pc, or taking class levels, or whatever. Is there any system that would work well? Or is the gap between how a creature works as an encounter and how it would work as a pc so large that it should just be handled on a case-by-case basis (after all, how often will you really need to figure it out, especially given that even if every player did it you only need to do it once per campaign, probably) and hope that ad hoc judgements will suffice?
It occurs to me that one interesting thing about both 3.5 and Pathfinder is the way that the way they calculate monster PCs fall down on their faces pretty much the instant one understands them. Oh, sure, with a certain degree of system mastery everything in DnD is broken, but you only had to skim Savage Species once to realize immediately that something had gone horribly, horribly wrong when a hit die of humanoid was apparently equivalent to a class level, or that having SR made light blindness, a con hit, and being two levels behind everyone else worth playing a drow, and everything was designed to straight-up shaft anybody fool enough to want to play a monster. Or you get cases like the pixie, a creature which walks the line between being brokenly overpowered and unplayably fragile.
Pathfinder changed it of course, to a system which I think is superior, but goes too far in the other direction, and here I'm referring to the rules for monsters as pcs found in the Bestiary. Even their example for how it works gives away the game - it's pretty obvious that a minotaur Barbarian 8 could probably toast a human Barbarian 10, given the minotaur's 4 hitdice more than the human, with corresponding save and bab increases, better stats, reach, etc. Or an Aranea Sorceror 8 (casts as 13th level!) versus a human Sorceror 10. Okay, that's maybe an edge case, since the aranea may be the best monster in PF to synergize with a class in that way in actual play.
But the point is that neither system is anywhere near adequate for gauging how strong a monster will be as a pc, or taking class levels, or whatever. Is there any system that would work well? Or is the gap between how a creature works as an encounter and how it would work as a pc so large that it should just be handled on a case-by-case basis (after all, how often will you really need to figure it out, especially given that even if every player did it you only need to do it once per campaign, probably) and hope that ad hoc judgements will suffice?