3 things have always struck me about Monsters in gaming...
1-Some of them seem duplicants of others, eg troglodytes and lizardfolk, both reptile humanoids hostile to all others, really could just be the one race.
2-People rarely play the long lived and smart creatures well, eg lich or illithid should have plans, back up plans, minions, allies, back up bases and not just be slain in a random encounter.
3-Most of the monsters all live in a vaccuum and have no interaction with any other creature until the PCs rock up to bash em and naff their loot. Really there should be alliances, enmities, wars, and trade pacts between some of them atleast. Eg the pcs could be treking on a quest and find gnolls fighting hobgoblins. Nothing to do with their plot but it shows its a wide world and not a character focused vaccuum.
My house rules I have used many times in the past for -
1 = Use Sahuagin/Skum instead of Kuo Toa.
Lizardfolk instead of Bullywug & Troglodytes.
Kobolds instead of Xvarts.
2 = Always have minions and traps wear down the pcs several adventures in a row before the PCs work out what they are dealing with, this includes PC race agents in the area. For lich, vampire, illithids and especially dragons. This does not mean the big baddy knows everything, but they should atleast be reasonably informed of local events. Naturally if PCs capture and minion and figure this out, they can use that against the big baddy, and that's cool.
3 = Alliances, or atleast non aggression pacts.
• Mind Flayer Empire - Illithid often have Bugbear, Hook Horror, Gargoyle & Umberhulk minions.
• Yuan-ti Empire – Yuan-ti often have Kobold, Mephit, Naga & Sahuagin minions.
• Demon - Tanar'ri allies – Drow, Fire Giants, Hag (Any), Minotaur, Red & Black Dragons.
• Devil - Baatezu allies – Aboleth, Duergar, Frost Giants, Medusa, White & Green Dragons.
Further to add flavour -
Seelie : Fey creatures – Not united. Encounters with them are accompanied by Time and Space distortions. Determine randomly when and who is effected, including the Seelie themselves.
• Brownie, Dryad, Leprechaun, Nymph, Pixie, Pseudodragons, Satyr, Treant.
Unseelie : Fey creatures – Not united. Encounters with them are accompanied by Light and Temperature distortions. Determine randomly when and who is affected, including the Unseelie themselves.
• Barghest, Ettercap, Goblins, Hag, Jack-o-Lantern, Lamia, Needlemen, Quickling, Trolls.
thoughts, comments and suggestions welcome as always.
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...snip...
Observations
1. Lizardfolk and Troglodytes are as different, if not more different, from one and other as Humans and Elves.One is an uderground reptile-man who stinks, another is a marsh-dwelling reptile-man who swims, they usefully occupy different ecological niches.
2. This is purely your experience. My BBEGs are complex and sophisticated, as are those that my characters have confronted. Maybe I'm just lucky.
3. Again,this is purely your experience. My monsters are part of the ecology and society in which they live, as are those that my characters have confronted. Maybe I'm just lucky.
Houserules
1. Pathfinder has no Kua-Toa, Bullywugs or Xvarts
Choosing NPCs is always the GM's prerogative and you can always substitute foes in published adventures, everybody has their favourites.
2. Generally I think lots of people do this, although I would try to mix it up and avoid all of my adventures having a set pattern.
3. Again, generally I think lots of people do this, although I would try to mix it up and avoid all of my adventures having a set pattern.
Fey stuff.
I like the fey effects, I don't have seelie/unseelie. My Fey nobles are CN all the time, capricious mostly.
So, um, yeah, I'm not sure the universals you identify are universal. But if they're a problem with your gaming circle then it's cool that you're fixing that.
To clarify, I was talking about gaming in general, not just pathfinder.
In my 21 years of gaming, i've played in 9 different groups, playing d&d 2nd, 3rd and 4th edition (al quadim, faerun, greyhawk, lankhmar, oriental adventures, dragonlance & planescape), pathfinder, rolemaster & paladium.
So I played in plenty of different games, most of them good, but the big baddies were way under played. They also have rarely had alliances or enmities between monsters. In these observations i'm including published modules.
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1. You are absolutely right. There is some sort of symetry in D&D that annoys me to no end. Demons and devils especially. (Balor vs. pitfiend, imp vs. quasit, erinyes vs. succubus) Chromatic dragons vs. metalic dragons.
2. Some adventures put down some very dumb smart monsters. The Speaker in Dreams is about a mindflayer who is taking over a city, in a not so subtle way. Some adventures are just badly written.
3. I dislike dungeons where monsters are all cramped together. Sunless Citadel has a group of Kobolds and Goblins fight each other, in a reasonably large dungeon. They are however living very close together. Those mistakes baffle me. It does keep you on your toes, however.
I think that the game has to concern itself with the game and not ecology. The symmetry started very early on in D&D, the made a new Monstrous Humanoid for every level, thus goblin, orc, hobgoblin, and so on. And dungeons are just a game board originally so have a bunch of crazy random monster inhabiting them was the point. And that is fun.
But it is also fun to make the world you play in make more sense from an ecological stand point as well.
As far as monster with high INT acting dumb, it's your game make them act smarter. Mindflyers and Beholders are both super smart but are also not human so they will not act like humans and that my seem dumb.
I would also like to say that I think that Pathfinder Setting does a very good job of making monster make a little more scene.
And as always it is your game play how you want too and remember others play as they want to as well.
This is the reason I love coming to these boards. I'm fairly new to gaming, okay really new to gaming (only 3 years). Seeing a thread like this makes me slap my fore-head and go, "Duh! Why didn't I realize that?" So thanks to the OP for brining this to my attention as I am ALWAYS the only one who DM's my groups.
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I can understand your frustration with apparent homogeneous monsters.
Some of us revel in variety, however. There are DMs who plug-n-play randomly rolled monsters into encounters, and those who spend hours creating complex ecologies, where both Trolls and Ogres couldn't live within miles of each other, for lack of a properly sustainable food source.
If you look at Kobolds,Goblins,Orcs,etc... as just another monster to charge the PCs, waving an ineffective weapon (Can we get the Bugbears love Morningstars crap done, please? It's been 3.75 Editions...Maybe a Bugbear wants to use a halberd...), then I can see your point.
the same argument can be made for having too many PC races (Gnomes and Halflings...do we really need them both?).Or Dragons...do we REALLY need 10+ Dragon varieties?
However, some DMs (Myself included) actually enjoy the variety, as I mentioned.
Take a few twists (Mostly with Alignment for me) and you get monsters presented in a much more fresh way.
Example:I was running a 3.5 game a few years ago.
This was an Improved game (Mine usually are, though I am running Kingmaker right now), since several of our regular players were out of town.Lvl 7 game.
Players all started as prisoners on a ship, bound for some Alcatraz-like island.
The ship passed through the territory of a Bronze Dragon, though one who I had shifted to LN from LG. He was obsessed with ships paying tribute to pass through his territorial waters. The Captain hadn't paid the last time through, and th Dragon, enraged to see the same ship, attacked. The players were understandably stunned to have to face a Bronze Dragon (A Lvl app one, understand), with one yelling to another, even as combat ensued 'Aren't these things 'Good'!?!
As I explained the situation a bit (Bard used his Knowledge to glean a bit of rumour about this wacky Wyrm), the players erupted in smiles.
With a simple 1-step Alignment shift, I turned a stalwart Scion of Good into a miserly and paranoid nutjob (He even had a poor scribe, Who had lost a year's service in a wager, when he boastfully tried to outwit the Dragon instead of paying...6 years past. He was allowed a riddle game every year, to the day...down in his sea cave,keeping track of ledgers and such).
Anyways, Dragon sinks the ship, sends the sailors adrift. Players are spared, since the Bard saved the day (Whoever says Bards suck plays in the wrong game), exchanging (Bardic Knowledge again, plus a bunch of ranks in poems,riddles etc...) some choice riddles for passage of them PCs to a nearby coast.
Players land, with enough gear to see them through, and set up camp.
Shortly, they explored a bit, encountered some traps, and those who had set them: A tribe of Bugbears.
these Bugbears were a shift from CE to CN,and lived in a very loose tribal structure in some old ruins deeper in the jungle.
Instead of a quick death, the players encountered a people who prized the individual above all else. They all strived to outdo each other, which led to some very funny Diplomacy rolls, as the PCs would think that they had swayed the whole group, to discover than just because you won over Berga the Smith (One guy needed work done on his sword), didn't mean that you had convinced the chief that you were worthy of his audience. That was proved when one PC (Lizardfolk Hexblade) was summarily pushed into an old pit, and forced to fight a pretty hungry Owlbear. He defeated it (Barely), and won the respect of the tribe.
Sitting there, bleeding (Down to 3HP, nobody wanted to play a Cleric, hehe), negotiating and trying to find a ship was pretty fun as well.
the Bugbears didn't have one (They stayed away from the Ocean, some huge Dragon had been spotted out there... :D ), but there was one across the river, abandoned at an old dockside. Some of the Bugbears displayed coins that they had taken, newly minted gold,stamped with the next year's Date...And again the Bard proved worth his weight in...er, Gold *ahem* with a BK roll. There had been a shipment of gold that had gone missing 6 months earlier off the coast. The Dragon was assumed to be the problem, but perhaps something else was amiss?
the PCs instantly decided that they needed to check out that Ship.
Problem is, the bugbears had been driven off from that side of the river by a tribe of Gnolls who had recently come to the area from out of the Jungle.
These Gnolls, the bugbears explained, were different from any they had ever encountered (Sporadic encounters with the gnolls in the hills to the East). Organized, disciplined and led by some sort of powerful Wizard...also a Gnoll.
In actuality, what I had done was created a group of Gnolls who were LE, having been subjugated for generations by Flinds, and currently a rising force in that part of the campaign World, an organized and very dangerous threat.
Led by a Fling Monk and a Flind Warmage, they were taking over the nearby lands , in advance of a soon to be happening invasion of the human lands to the West.
Anyways, without furthering this as a story hour for that session, I hoped that I illustrated just how you can freshen up something perceived as homogeneous with a few simple twists.
BTW: they eventually found the gold shipment, but the ship was damaged beyond repair, meaning that they trekked out of there with just what gold they could carry...
-Uriel
3 things have always struck me about Monsters in gaming...
2-People rarely play the long lived and smart creatures well, eg lich or illithid should have plans, back up plans, minions, allies, back up bases and not just be slain in a random encounter.
Depends on the circumstance but there tends to be a couple of reasons for this. One is just space limitations in any kind of written material. The module your reading needed to wrap things up in the end and it only had 32 pages.
Furthermore really intelligent monsters can easily turn into a 'careful what you wish for' situations. While a single rematch can often be fun repeated encounters by the same characters at the same level with the same bad guy grows stale surprisingly quick. Getting the combat to take place some where interesting can be troublesome as well so you get a lot of 'rematches in a hallway', which is just boring.
This element has a real tendency to simply frustrate players - the bad guy is supposed to die at the end of the story - if he always escapes its like the players are constantly loosing. A single recurring enemy that is a constant thorn in the players side in a campaign can be a lot of fun in a 'this is a guy we love to hate' sort of way but if there are many like that then its just frustrating for the players.
3-Most of the monsters all live in a vaccuum and have no interaction with any other creature until the PCs rock up to bash em and naff their loot. Really there should be alliances, enmities, wars, and trade pacts between some of them atleast. Eg the pcs could be treking on a quest and find gnolls fighting hobgoblins. Nothing to do with their plot but it shows its a wide world and not a character focused vaccuum.
Up to a point this is good stuff. However if your reading a published adventure there are limits to how much space should be devoted to material that the players are likely never going to find out and if your writing one then there is a case of diminishing returns. After a point its just better for the game as a whole if you had dropped in depth historical background and spent that extra two hours of prep on something that was actually going to come to your players attention.
In terms of dungeon environments its usually best not to get to pedantic about realistic living arrangements vis a vis other creatures. Dungeons are inherently unrealistic in any case. They exist only because they make a great trope in fantasy gaming and its usually best to just run with that in order to allow your players to fight the really weird and awesome monstrosities that exist in the fantasy world. Allowing the creatures to live in close proximity to each other encourages players to keep on adventuring instead of resting up to full power between every encounter and keeps the action going in a fun environment where its possible to explain why horrid monstrosity A lives beside horrid Monstrosity B. If your too careful with this sort of thing you deny your players the pleasures of fighting things like Behir's and Gibbering Mouthers, creatures that have a tendency to strain suspension of disbelief to the breaking point outside of the dungeon and yet are really fun to fight.
GeraintElberion & Uriel393 - I like variety too, but for me i'd need more differences. Eg lizardfolk and troglodytes are both reptiles with 2 arms, 2 legs, 2 eyes, egg laying etc. They exist in different terrain, but i'd give each an ally and enemy for their region, probably make one group socialist or theocracy just for a twist. Variety is equipment is great, its boring having all enemies with the same stuff.
This goes for elves and humans, both mammals with the same respitory, circulatory, dietry systems, 2 arms, 2 legs, 2 eyes etc. I know it doesn't say they are both mammals, but everyone treats them that way. They have far more in common than the few abilities that seperate them. There need to be more differences otherwise people play them the same, which defeats the point of having different species, and people just play for stat bonuses.
Uriel393 - Your example game sounds like a great game to play in!
The Smitter - You are right that alien creatures think differently and that what they value would differ from Humans.
Jeremy - I guess I have always tried to link adventures together, so that there are 2-3 overall plots which alternate. Even if the link between adventures is one group of creatures or alliance of creatures.
You are right that there is limited space in published adventures and that dungeons are inherrantly unrealistic. I try to have atleast 2 groups of creatures working together in a dungeon, even if it is just 'the kobolds lead people towards the violet fungus for amusement'
I don't have all bad guys get away and come back, just the odd one to show not all creatures are fight to the death moulded.
3 things have always struck me about Monsters in gaming...
1-Some of them seem duplicants of others, eg troglodytes and lizardfolk, both reptile humanoids hostile to all others, really could just be the one race.
2-People rarely play the long lived and smart creatures well, eg lich or illithid should have plans, back up plans, minions, allies, back up bases and not just be slain in a random encounter.
3-Most of the monsters all live in a vaccuum and have no interaction with any other creature until the PCs rock up to bash em and naff their loot. Really there should be alliances, enmities, wars, and trade pacts between some of them atleast. Eg the pcs could be treking on a quest and find gnolls fighting hobgoblins. Nothing to do with their plot but it shows its a wide world and not a character focused vaccuum.
Partially agree with you.
About 1), having a significant amount of similar, humanoid creatures make sense to a certain extent, at least from an evolutionist perspective. Indeed, the game could do with humans only, but having Elves, Dwarves, Halfling and Gnomes enriches the world significantly despite their similarities. In the same train of thoughts, I prefer to have monsters that are physically similar but with different racial and cultural traits.
For me, having multiple entries for similar creatures is important because of your second and third points; not all of these cultures will have the same degree of intelligence, planning, environment, access to technology, allies, enmity and relationship with other races and other environment etc.
A racial difference that is trivial for you (troglodyte stench) makes the whole difference for me. For me, Troglodytes are not simply underground primitives reptilians that stink, they are reptilian that were forced to flee underground and unable to develop partnership with any other race BECAUSE they stink. Their whole civilization is the unfortunate consequence that no one with a sense of smell is able to tolerate them. They probably got bullied - as a race - and turned into bitter bullies themselves. I see similar differences between Sahuagin and Kuo-Toa.
Now, could the Troglodyte have been a sub-entry of the lizardman? Probably but from a gaming perspective, it makes no difference. Same number of pages, same net result of different entries. What could be saved in stat block space would be lost in template-like cross reference.
That being said, there is a point where the game "saturates" and designers are forced to publish either aberrations that have little to do with a believable world or a repeat of yet-another-lizardman-with-barely-noticeable-differences. Too much is like not enough...
'findel