Ok, so beyond the obvious explanation of NPC =/= PC, is there a reason people don't typically use NPC races for PC characters? Is it simply against the rules to do so, or is it just not done because it's not seen as being worth the trade off.
I use Hero Lab for building my characters and I've noticed some NPC races, like the brownie, seem to give you an awful lot of benefit for only one level lost.
I have a lot of fun playing a brownie summoner right now and I'm in the process of building a druid and thought of the Brownie again, but I wasn't sure why more people don't mention things like this.
I'm not 100% sure on how relevant this is. I think you're talking about D&D and I'm talking about 40K RPGs, but here goes.
I'm thinking of homebrewing up some Xenos PC rules for the Only War system to use in a campaign involving a mixed group of xenos trying to escape the Imperium. So I'm clearly for using NPC races. I'm also for twisting/messing with the ruleset to make interesting settings.
There's a multitude of reasons.
Balance is a big one. Although you can just pretend the CR is equal to starting level, it's really not. Monsters are built with the CR system to challenge PCs, not to adventure as them. It's much more balanced for a monster to have dominate person as an At Will ability because it might be able to use it perhaps four times before it's dead. In that sense, At Will is equivalent to 4/day. But once you put it in the PCs' hands, it becomes much more useful and much more deadly -- while a hostile dominate person might be quickly fixed by an adventuring group through protection from evil, players with that ability can quickly and easily enslave most NPCs they meet and twist an adventure far from what is manageable and, to many, preferable. How do you design adventures for a fighter, cleric, rogue, vampire sorceror, twelve trolls, half of a town, three cyclopes, eight centaurs and nymph?
It may be possible, but it's not necessarily going to be fun, and it's probably not going to be fun twice.
Moving further, a lot of the monstrous races don't have a lot of supplemental material. You can find Tengu in the Bestiary, and that's about it. There aren't standard Tengu towns that I know of in Golarion, there isn't a Races of Shiny Things splatbook, there aren't major Tengu gods, archetypes or important bits of history. The core races are a lot richer and better-integrated into the setting, where the Bestiary entries are usually left in decent shape to run as monsters and occasionally expand into community of allies, antagonists, or otherwise.
Stylistically, it also leads to a certain amount of Weird-factor. Once you allow somebody to play a Brownie, then somebody is going to want to be a treant, an Awakened zombie and a minotaur. Soon you have an adventuring group that no town would reasonably allow inside. It becomes unrecognizable as almost any variation of medieval fantasy game of heroes, which is what I think the most people enjoy playing.
Then there's the interaction issue, which deserves tackling. A GM has to decide; 'do I just warn my players "people will attack you on sight",' and tirelessly enforce that by having them attacked by town guards, which turns the original plot into a wildly different direction? Do commoners miraculously not know anything about these monsters, and not distrust them enough to have them attacked? And if so, what balancing has to be done for the fact that the campaign's antagonists would probably need to succeed a knowledge check for each creature to know something about its advantages and how to attempt to deal with them?
It's just a big hairy mess that I don't really like dealing with. I've learned how to happily cope with tieflings, but they're by far one of the more forgiveable unusual races, and so far I've drawn the line at creatures that would deserve a level adjustment.
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Troubleshooter has covered a lot of the in-game issue to look out for (particularly the fact that 'monsters' are designed with abilities that it would be insane to give to a PC, or even, in some cases, were already insane to give to a monster, such as create spawn or grant wish).
One 'meta' or out-of-game problem I've noticed is that you sometimes run into a player who just loves rollerskating uphill. Sit down to a game of Werewolf the Apocalypse, and he wants to play a Tremere vampire. Sit down to a game designed for crusading Iomedans risking a possible suicide mission to purge demons from the World Wound, and he's written up a Tiefling necromancer who has zero motivation to go on this mission. Shady Lankhmar shenanigans and 'medieval cyberpunk' with a dash of Vulgar Unicorn? Here he is with the Paladin who has sworn an oath to never tell a lie.
One problem with a monster race, in a game not explicitly designed for wild and crazy race options (like a Great Beyond set game, or one in Kaer Maga, or the Darklands, or Spelljammer / Distant Worlds, or one set in Geb, where the whole party are undead) is becoming 'that guy' and making the game less fun for everyone else, because you are off marching to the beat of your own drum, and throwing the campaign off kilter for everyone else (including the GM).
I love playing me some monster races, but it's best to stick to such things in a party where everyone else is playing a wemic, centaur, giff, xixchil, thri-kreen, lizardfolk, goblin, gnoll, daelkyr half-blood, half-ogre, full ogre or half-ogre-magi, etc. and not be the spanner in the works that derails everyone elses fun to deal with his presence having incited another riot, or him not being able to go out in daylight or whatever.
I ran and played in fairly large events, so we had new players about every session. Given the different nature of games that probably saw up to 30 players at a time, there was more emphasis on plotting against each other than in tabletop games, but we still didn't want a game where players went on murderous rampages. We tried pretty hard to make long-running plots that engaged the community at large or individual groups as necessary.
Still, with all of the unusual character requests we had to write down a rule that we would not approve Sabbat infiltrators, and we still got requests to play them anyway. People begging to play bloodlines; Sabbat Tremere; free Gargoyles; werewolves; werewolf-vampire abominations; or access to forbidden Paths of Thaumaturgy. Every single session. Often between sessions.
These were the same players that wanted to put points in Demolitions or buy enough Lore to know how to diablerize. I don't think a lot of us ever really quite saw eye to eye on what level of 'building a new character to kill swaths of other PCs' was acceptable.
Rollerskating uphill. I like that.
Try this fan-made thing that interprets 'NPC' races as Class Levels.
Try this fan-made thing that interprets 'NPC' races as Class Levels.
Hero Lab does the same thing as this document and spans the abilities over a span of levels, the brownie stats are very similar. I suppose some of the super crazy stuff could be problematic, but restricting it to a certain CR or lower and using it over a period of time like this doc presents seems like it should make many cases doable.