question for DMs everywhere!

[blelliot]

Have any of you ever made a campaign in 3.5 using only monsters from the monster manuals as is, i.e. no class levels, you just picked a bunch of different monsters and used them straight out of the book you found them? I'm curious to see if its plausible to do this for an extended period of time. Thanks in advance for the replies.

[HammeredWharf]

Not en entire campaign, but multiple sessions. It's entirely possible, but hard if the players are fighting against a specific and uncommon race or group, because you run out of monsters. It could work in a campaign against undead, demons, devils or some other common creatures.

[Raezeman]

nope. Though there have been plenty of monsters straight out of the manuals, there have also been more than plenty of humanoid with class levels enemies.
I think it is possible to do a campaign with only monsters out of manuals, but why would you not make some specific enemy with class levels? It might take more time than just looking up the appropriate challenge rating beasts in the manual, but you can really make the bad guy the way you want him to fit into the story or a certain theme.

For example:
in my campaign, there is this group of 5 evil obad-hai clerics that all have the spontaneous domain alternate class features for the plant, earth, fire, water and air domains respectively. Even though this took a lot more time than just searching a level appropriate monster, but i like the end result.

[Octopusapult]

Yes and no. I've done "straight from the books" encounters in regards to a lot of monsters. Two or three Aboleth Mages make for a pretty friggin' noteworthy boss fight, and require no alterations really.

Then there's the Dalkyr (sp?) from Eberron who are strong and smart enough with enough motivation to be major villains for an entire campaign relevant to the plane of dreams. (I want to say Dal Quor? I don't have the book on me at the moment.)

It is entirely possible to create a substantial and remembered campaign doing little to no effort and only using monsters from published sources. But it's better for you to learn how to create worthwhile villains by hand, and it's more fun for the players to have a unique entity to fight.

In my opinion...

[lytokk]

Straight out of the box monsters typically worked pretty well for me, at least until my players hit about level 7-10. Around that time I had to start advancing monsters, to maintain a steady CR. My group tends to run relatively lower powered, at least compared to other groups I've heard of, and around that point the CR system in the monster manual tends to get limited for the power of my group, so unless I wanted them constantly fighting the same group of creatures, I needed to add some levels to lower CR creatures.

[BWR]

Short answer: no.

Long answer: for the most part, monsters are played mostly as written. Sometimes I will switch out a feat or two for something more appropriate, or some skills if those are important. I will generally find higher CR opponents than increase lower CR ones simply because I like running the game like that. However, this is only a strong tendency, not hard rules. Humanoids tend to gain class levels, and there have been instances of other types of creatures either getting more HD or gaining levels.

With enough monsters to choose from, or if you don't mind throwing much of the same stuff at your players repeatedly, you don't need to do much with them. At least I don't need to. I'm sure there are people who play are far more optimized games than the ones I play or run who need to do that or everything will just fall apart.