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Kaiwen
2019-12-18, 12:12 PM
In Pathfinder, all monsters are potentially PC races via the Monsters as PCs (http://legacy.aonprd.com/bestiary/monstersAsPCs.html) rules. The SRD includes some examples, (https://www.d20pfsrd.com/bestiary/npc-s/npcs-cr-4/ghast-cleric-6/) but the official PRD does not (https://aonprd.com/NPCs.aspx?SubGroup=All).

If I had a PC who wanted to play a ghast cleric, what would their racial ability modifiers and abilities be?

The SRD ghast cleric has 2 ghast RHD and 3 levels of cleric, but is not built on top of the stock ghast monster (It has less strength), so just advancing a ghast through 3 levels of cleric isn't it.
Psyren
2019-12-18, 02:55 PM
The PFSRD has a lot of third party or otherwise unofficial content; I'm not sure if the Ghast Cleric you found there is printed anywhere (I couldn't find it in Monster Codex or the Bestiaries), which means that using it to draw conclusions about not starting from a base ghast or being able to use custom/rolled stats might not be accurate.

Speaking more generally, you have two choices for playing as a monster statwise:

1) Use a creature's printed stats as-is
2) "Reverse-engineer" their stat adjustments by subtracting 10 from each even stat and 11 from each odd one. (You would do this even if a given stat is less than 10 or 11, i.e. resulting in a stat penalty.)
meschlum
2019-12-18, 08:42 PM
The SRD ghast (base creature) has attributes 17 / 19 / - / 17 / 18 / 18

Which translates into bonuses of +6 / + 8 / - / +6 / + 8 / + 8

Removing the adjustments from the ghast cleric gives base attributes of 8 / 9 / - / 11 / 13 / 12, matching the distribution for a basic NPC (see https://www.d20pfsrd.com/classes/npc-classes/non-player-characters/)

So what happened was that a basic ghast (all attributes 10 or 11) was converted into a basic NPC (some attributes go down, others increase), and then got levels of Cleric.

Of course, the bonus attribute points from leveling are not included in this, but then they are rarely tracked or factored into monster blocks anyway. Maybe the ghast got a bonus to Constitution?