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Almarck
2015-04-04, 12:20 PM
So, recently, I've been wondering, what games have people been playing where the point was to play races of creatures that are what people would regard as monsters? Such as say having a party made of Mind Flayers or Gnolls, Goblins, and Kobolds instead of the Elf, Human, Dwarf mixes we find universally in the context of D&D.

I for one had this one game where everyone was a dragon... in Pathfinder. It was interesting and I wondered what other fun all monster parties people ran before.



For clarification, World of Darkness and similar games that are built on the premise of playing a monster are excluded as they are the status quo. In a game playable werewolves and vampires, you would have to say play a spirit or something else to be as "unusual" in such a game

Likewise, playing animals in a game that was built with those animals being the normal assumption are also out. The equivalent might be playing a space alien or ironically, a human character.


So, anyone feel like sharing?

oxybe
2015-04-04, 12:38 PM
I ran one years ago and it's still talked about today.

"The Perry Method" is referenced in my group to this day as a method of going through a trapped hallway: by violently destroying the traps and their mechanisms and letting everyone in the area know that you are extremely angry and frustrated about your choice of traps.

I swear I never imagined a half-ogre would spent an afternoon destroying an entire hallway of crossbow traps (you know the one where both sides of the wall have holes that shoot out bolts if you misstep). Perry spent the whole afternoon swinging that great maul.

Perry was also a sorceror. No one expected the half ogre with 16 charisma. To be invisible. With a great maul.

Especially not the invisible Oni who tried to charge the party's young medusa. Who was standing a foot or so behind the invisible Perry.

Poor Oni fell flat on his arse from bumping headlong into the very large and solid Perry, became visible again only to see Perry himself becoming visible mid-swing of that hallway-destroying maul. Didn't see much after that, crits being crits.

It's also the only campaign where I used a paladin as an honest to goodness antagonist, has to deal with a pixie who brainwashed a villain via amnesia arrows into punching out his own mooks, a medusa with a love a gaudy and kitchy folk art and a half-ogre who basically wore a demon as footie-pajamas.

Keltest
2015-04-04, 12:39 PM
I had a D&D session where everyone played a zombie that had been animated by the experimental chemicals of a wizard that were leaking into the water. We had different powers like a cloud of telepathically controlled flies, or the ability to be horrifyingly disgustingly ugly in addition to our normal class powers. It was a fun session.

Mr.Moron
2015-04-04, 02:34 PM
I find that in general there is very little playing of monsters where an real earnest attempt is made to RP an alien mindset, or odd supernatural natures. Mostly it's just people playing humans in wacky skins with supernatural powers and maybe 1 really exaggerated personality trait.

It's a thing, I guess. It's mostly lost appeal to me over the years after having it play out the same way every time. I might do it as deliberately goofy 1-shot though.

Bad Wolf
2015-04-04, 05:38 PM
I haven't played one, but I've always wanted to play a game where everyone started out as Wrymlings of various dragon types.

Karl Aegis
2015-04-04, 06:35 PM
Monsters exist to be hunted. I get hunted by lots of things (mostly elves). Therefore, I am a monster.

cobaltstarfire
2015-04-04, 07:20 PM
I'd probably play in an "all monster" game if I could find one with a concept that interested me, but I've never met one that really grabbed me. Most I have spotted have been an "us vs them" sort of game, which I suppose is easy to make when everyone is a monster...I think I like games where there's just a bit of mixing rather than all one thing or another.


Though there was an interesting everyone is a pokemon/survival game I thought would be fun...then the GM fell off the face of the earth after their first post. :smallfrown:


Well it also doesn't help that of the 2 systems I really know how to play with even half way, one would require I homebrew most of the races I find interesting (5e) or the rules make it a pain in the butt to even try to make a monster character (3.5).

Bad Wolf
2015-04-04, 07:31 PM
Monsters exist to be hunted. I get hunted by lots of things (mostly elves). Therefore, I am a monster.

You ate a baby, didn't you?

oxybe
2015-04-04, 07:45 PM
It's called veal.

Karl Aegis
2015-04-04, 09:02 PM
You ate a baby, didn't you?

Do babies have some sort of nutritional value I don't know about?

Kane0
2015-04-04, 09:23 PM
Well there was that one time i played a young man possessed by four ghosts, so i was pretty much undead.

Between me, the evil wizard and the neutral gunslinger we turned that party evil and monstrous as characters died or left in disgust. We had a MLP centaur witch and a sir bearington build amongst us before the game ended.

And I was one of the more normal ones of course. Some of that party is currently in the World Serpent Inn, awaiting their glorious return.

Almarck
2015-04-04, 10:15 PM
Monsters exist to be hunted. I get hunted by lots of things (mostly elves). Therefore, I am a monster.

While I admit that interpretation is rather witty, I do feel that it goes against the point of the thread. A whole party or atleast a few members of one playing what is traditional a monster or NPC only race option (in the context of the gametype) is the point, not a condition of whether or not the character is being hunted or not.


Regardless, I do understand the big problem with playing a monster. It takes a certain kind of individual or group of players to willingly distance themselves from their characters so as to avoid being "too human". In the game I was in where we all played various dragons, half the party would not attack an elven caravan that was tresspassing into the territory because it was seen as objectively wrong to hurt "people". Despite the action of the elves being something akin to an act of war in the setting... and despite the fact that dragons regard humanoid lives as something just above animals in that verse.

In short, they failed to grasp that humans now filled the role of orcs, while the elves took the role of hobgoblins.

cobaltstarfire
2015-04-04, 11:28 PM
I think it's a mind set that just takes practice to get into, and some extra forethought to get right.

Really not any different from any other character, but I think when you slap "its a monster" on the character it becomes easy to forget to develop them as much as one could, or might have, had it been a human or an elf. I mainly glean that from the response many people have to monsters as PC's. That most people just play monsters like humans, and put less effort into the culture/story/personality of the character.

Bad Wolf
2015-04-04, 11:38 PM
Do babies have some sort of nutritional value I don't know about?

They're an important part of a nutritious breakfast.

oxybe
2015-04-04, 11:51 PM
They're an important part of a nutritious breakfast.

THEY'RE GRRRRRREAT!
-Some rakshasa.

Maglubiyet
2015-04-04, 11:55 PM
Maybe it would help, when playing an all-monster campaign, to draw up a list of traits those monsters exhibit and use that as a guideline to RP. Make a "monster credo".

Like for the dragons campaign, have something like:
1) Dragons are the dominant species of the world. Lesser races (humanoids, giants, undead, etc.) always need to show proper respect to dragons or they must be taught respect.
2) Large animals are food. (The fact that humanoids consider some of these animals as property is laughable and irrelevant.)
3) Only dragons, with their superior intellect, magical aptitude, and long lives, can truly appreciate the value of treasure. When lesser races accumulate treasure it is no better than rats piling diamonds in their dung heaps.
etc.

Kane0
2015-04-05, 12:30 AM
They're an important part of a nutritious breakfast.

Actually they're quite good on toast
-Some Ogre

Inevitability
2015-04-05, 03:29 AM
I once played a game that had amongst its participants a giant anthropomorphic baleen whale, a yeth hound, a tiny spider possessed by intelligent slime (yours truly) and a regenerating opossum barbarian.

Belkarseviltwin
2015-04-06, 07:56 AM
I'm in an occasional not-very-serious 4e game where the playable races were gnoll, bullywug, hobgoblin, kobold, kenku, goblin, orc, minotaur and bugbear.

The PCs are:
Hobgoblin Warlord
Goblin Rogue|Vampire
Kobold Paladin|Sorcerer (my PC)
Bugbear Berserker
Gnoll Assassin
(I think someone has turned up with a wizard of some sort but I missed that session).

As you can see, this is an amusingly striker-heavy party- I think the general idea is to kill everything before it has the chance to hurt us too much.

We're definitely an evil party- we work for a red dragon, who sends us on missions like shaking down villages for tribute, kidnapping Santa Claus and killing the Easter Bunny (we tend to have this game on holidays and our DM themes the adventures accordingly). We also occasionally have to fight off parties of good-aligned adventurers.

Possibly the most amusing moment was when some adventurers turned up at our cave and my character was clanking her way down the centre of the main tunnel (she wears full plate) shouting challenges in the name of Tiamat, while the other 3, significantly larger, PCs were successfully hiding in the shadows behind her...

Joe the Rat
2015-04-06, 08:16 AM
Mostly it's just people playing humans in wacky skins with supernatural powers and maybe 1 really exaggerated personality trait.I'm not seeing the difference between this and how "normal" nonhuman PCs tend to be played, besides more skin texture.

It's an idea my various groups have toyed with before, but rarely followed through on save the occasional one-shot. The closest we came was a Planescape game, but being Planescape, it was not all that out of place, which loses a lot of the roleplay potential for being "all monsters."

oxybe
2015-04-06, 09:03 AM
Most people pay dwarves like short, iron-plated Scotsmen with a nordic beard and elves like vegan Spock clones.

I can't see how playing an ogre like Shemp Howard is any more offensive or heinous then those other stereotypes because it's supposedly more exotic then tieflings for reasons of... It's not a race with natural bishonen tendencies?

Mr.Moron
2015-04-06, 09:31 AM
I'm not seeing the difference between this and how "normal" nonhuman PCs tend to be played, besides more skin texture.

It really isn't fundamentally. It's the exact same sort of thing.

It does tend to be a much bigger difference in terms of degree. A lot of settings seem to point at greater division in the nature of the existence for the civilized or "Person" species and the monster "non-person" species than there is between any two "person" species. You often kind of see things framed like this:


Creations of the god of the mountains Dwarves are stubborn, a tad inflexible and have an affinity for working with their hands. Dwarves by their nature cannot ignore an oath.
Creations of the mad god of slaughter Gnolls have a rabid desire to consume flesh. The scent of blood drives them into a berserker frenzy that compels them to rip apart everything around them.


Clearly in both cases a PC playing them as a person with some odd habits is kind of ignoring some things the setting are saying about these species. The Gnoll player is probably ignoring a few more of those things and probably in a way makes the Gnoll lose more Gnollyness than the dwarf loses Dwarfness.

Really I'd be perfectly fine having neither. I'd vastly prefer to run my fantasy games as human-only but my player base has the D&D model so deeply ingrained in it that I've never bothered trying to run one, because I know there'd be no interest.

Flickerdart
2015-04-06, 09:34 AM
I played in a gestalt monster game once - monster class on one side, regular class on the other side.

The party (at various points in time) was a ghost, a barghest, a succubus, a golem, a psychic dinosaur, and my character - a Savage Vampire Thri-Kreen Tauric Monstrous Scorpion Totemist. Thankfully the game was on MapTool so I could build a macro for the approximately one billion claw attacks he got.

Almarck
2015-04-06, 09:45 AM
Most people pay dwarves like short, iron-plated Scotsmen with a nordic beard and elves like vegan Spock clones.

I can't see how playing an ogre like Shemp Howard is any more offensive or heinous then those other stereotypes because it's supposedly more exotic then tieflings for reasons of... It's not a race with natural bishonen tendencies?

I believe the justification is that orcs, goblins, kobolds, and all other excluded races being non playable is that they are "savages" and thus not suited for play since they would be problematic to use. Tieflings get a pass because in older editions they were born to normal members of civilized races and were not a true race on their own. 4e changed that by making the default that they had their own civilization.

So, a part of me wants to say that it's that they have "natural bishonen" tendencies because they were made to be a player race?



Granted, sometimes you do want to run a party of all savages with unique roleplaying difficulties. Savage races tend to mostly human and thus only partially removed from the norm. Most of the problems that arrise will likely boil to "cultural" things.

Although true monster races, particularly those with nonhumanoid bodies pose even bigger problems."

In the all dragons party, no one can use ranged weapons or swords at all. Not that they need it, but that causes a few characters to lose out. One player wanted to play a Katana using lung with Magus so that spells he casted used the critical hit rating of the sword and well, it did not work out due to absurd penalties to using a sword.


Flickerdart, that situation exactly describes what I went through. We all rolled dragons but had different classes as our secondary... As a result, all of us got max HP, BAB, and Save bonuses.



Also, for those of you discussing about the eating of a children in a joking manner, I don't think that conversation is on topic. I do not feel it contributes to the discussion and like would ask you to drop it.

Thankyou.

Flickerdart
2015-04-06, 09:50 AM
In the all dragons party, no one can use ranged weapons or swords at all. Not that they need it, but that causes a few characters to lose out. One player wanted to play a Katana using lung with Magus so that spells he casted used the critical hit rating of the sword and well, it did not work out due to absurd penalties to using a sword.
Dragons have hands, why can't they wield bows or swords?

Almarck
2015-04-06, 10:03 AM
Dragons have hands, why can't they wield bows or swords?

We did not use actual dragon statistics. Third party class and race combo from a free data slated. Mostly because it allowed us playing dragons without having to fiddle with racial hit dice and let us be grow much faster. We lacked a couple of dragon specific things without using options to get them, but it was simpler and customizable.

One of the downsides was claws did not hold weapons properly. Not a problem for us, but one played who joined later got it.

Maglubiyet
2015-04-06, 10:08 AM
Dragons have hands, why can't they wield bows or swords?

Those are just manipulative talons, not hands. A dragon is still essentially a quadruped. Its arms and shoulders are designed for walking and supporting weight; they don't have the same reach or range of motion as a human's.

It couldn't perform the necessary footwork either for wielding a blade. Pivoting and lunging on hind legs meant for an in-line gait would be difficult.

Of course, we're talking about a fictional species, so I suuppse you could make your dragons any way you want.

Flickerdart
2015-04-06, 10:10 AM
Even for creatures with no grasping hands at all, there are items such as Gloves of Man, Spare Hand, Arms of the Naga, as well as various grafts that add or replace hands. Additionally, Mouthpick weapons can be wielded in the mouth without needing any hands at all.

Mr.Moron
2015-04-06, 10:16 AM
Even for creatures with no grasping hands at all, there are items such as Gloves of Man, Spare Hand, Arms of the Naga, as well as various grafts that add or replace hands. Additionally, Mouthpick weapons can be wielded in the mouth without needing any hands at all.

Assuming you're playing an all books open 3.5 game, this holds true. That's a rather huge pile of assumptions though.

Almarck
2015-04-06, 10:16 AM
Even for creatures with no grasping hands at all, there are items such as Gloves of Man, Spare Hand, Arms of the Naga, as well as various grafts that add or replace hands. Additionally, Mouthpick weapons can be wielded in the mouth without needing any hands at all.

What edition are these items? They would have solved so much problems if the game lasted long enough and we looked through magic item catalogs (and could afford it)


But yeah, the assumption was that Quadruped was their default locomotion and thus they acted like it.

Flickerdart
2015-04-06, 10:19 AM
Assuming you're playing an all books open 3.5 game, this holds true. That's a rather huge pile of assumptions though.
All books? Absolutely not. You only need one of the many books in which one of these items shows up.

Almarck
2015-04-06, 10:31 AM
Assuming you're playing an all books open 3.5 game, this holds true. That's a rather huge pile of assumptions though.

It was Pathfinder when we had, so it was technically not an "all books open 3.5" game. But close enough. Still did not realize such items existed. Probably should have asked about importing them.

Granted, they exist, but the fact that nonhumanoids needed to spend for these items to remove a normally race defining weakness is still a consideration that sets them apart from normal adventurers.

Metahuman1
2015-04-06, 10:38 AM
I've done 2 on the playground.


1: Was an all dragons game were we had homebrew dragon progressions, and used Gestalt rules to have whatever classes we wanted on the other side.

2: Was a game were we all got 2 free LA and permission to play whatever, with the story that we'd been experimented on and use to be normal players handbook races and were now whatever we were, and were escaping the facility as something had attacked it and cleared most of it out.



Pity both games died when they did. I'd like to get another crack at them.

Joe the Rat
2015-04-06, 10:54 AM
It really isn't fundamentally. It's the exact same sort of thing.

It does tend to be a much bigger difference in terms of degree. A lot of settings seem to point at greater division in the nature of the existence for the civilized or "Person" species and the monster "non-person" species than there is between any two "person" species. You often kind of see things framed like this:


Creations of the god of the mountains Dwarves are stubborn, a tad inflexible and have an affinity for working with their hands. Dwarves by their nature cannot ignore an oath.
Creations of the mad god of slaughter Gnolls have a rabid desire to consume flesh. The scent of blood drives them into a berserker frenzy that compels them to rip apart everything around them.


Clearly in both cases a PC playing them as a person with some odd habits is kind of ignoring some things the setting are saying about these species. The Gnoll player is probably ignoring a few more of those things and probably in a way makes the Gnoll lose more Gnollyness than the dwarf loses Dwarfness.

Really I'd be perfectly fine having neither. I'd vastly prefer to run my fantasy games as human-only but my player base has the D&D model so deeply ingrained in it that I've never bothered trying to run one, because I know there'd be no interest.

I think we're actually on the same page here, though my preference is to give the player the option, and encourage them to think outside the species. It often ends up "funny ears and fantasy cosplay" or "I'm feeling very Gnollish. have I mentioned that I'm a Gnoll today?" anyways, but occasionally you get some nuggets of insight.

I can see an argument here for making humans the best choice mechanically, such that the main reason to play another race is to play another race, not solely to snag that sweet nightvision & agility bonus combo for optimizing your burglar.

Jay R
2015-04-06, 11:07 AM
The first such published game was Monsters! Monsters! which I played in the 1970s.


Do babies have some sort of nutritional value I don't know about?

He's referring to to the humorous game, Kobolds Ate My Baby!

What is it with monster games and explanation points?

Joe the Rat
2015-04-06, 11:15 AM
What is it with monster games and explanation points?
They're very loud! And angry about the lack of representation on the Council of Beings Who Are Not Walking Bags of XP! But mostly the loud part!

Almarck
2015-04-06, 11:35 AM
The first such published game was Monsters! Monsters! which I played in the 1970s.



Wouldn't that make the topic not valid as the assumption of that game was that you would be playing a monster? Granted, my interest is piqued. Tell me more.





He's referring to to the humorous game, Kobolds Ate My Baby!

What is it with monster games and explanation points?


They're very loud! And angry about the lack of representation on the Council of Beings Who Are Not Walking Bags of XP! But mostly the loud part!

Also, guys, I asked you to please drop that line of conversation. It's not constructive nor do I find it entertaining.

Jay R
2015-04-07, 08:54 AM
Wouldn't that make the topic not valid as the assumption of that game was that you would be playing a monster? Granted, my interest is piqued. Tell me more.

No, it doesn't, really. It's just that Flying Buffalo published a game, more-or-less based on Tunnels and Trolls, to do exactly what you're talking about.

In Monsters! Monsters! (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsters!_Monsters!), the monsters get fed up with the humans coming down into their lairs, and start going up to the town for food and treasure. You can order the game in pdf form here (http://www.warehouse23.com/products/monsters-monsters).

TheEmerged
2015-04-07, 11:33 AM
One of the few times in decades that I've gotten to be a player instead of DM\GM was in fact a Monsters campaign in 3.0. We started at 3rd level and ended up playing through a conclusion at 18th level. I played a psionic kobold named SythRyss (started Psion 2 / PsyWar 1). The party ranger was a gnoll, the party rogue was a half-orc, and so on. The backstory was that we were part of a loosely-knit Axis Alliance that was trying to carve out a place for the refugees of The Covenant's (the good guys) advances into the wild.

Leon
2015-04-07, 12:16 PM
Not so much as a Monster game but more an Arc: 2ed campaign and we had to go through a Portal to achieve a goal that transformed us all into something else for the duration of our stay in that place, most of it was fairly benign and not memorable ~ the stand out one (aside from the 2 who were turned into Sea creatures and were apart from the rest of us for most of it) was the Cleric of Tempest who ended up as a Swarm of +/- 300 Rats.

Constantly losing rats but also gaining young ones to replace the lost he had to roll a complicated set of rolls at the end to see if he lost any significant assets such as limbs or general health when the mass was returned to its natural state. I recall he got out of it without losing anything important but was down a lot of general hp