Wandering Monsters: Unlikely Heroes

This week's Wandering Monsters is about letting players run with the normally wrong crowd. As someone who has played an earth elemental paladin, half-blink dog/half-blue dragon, and gynosphinx diviner this is something I can get behind. If done properly, that is.

I never owned Complete Book of Humanoids, having severely throttled gaming funds during the Age of 2nd Edition, so my exposure to monstrous races began with Player's Option: Skills & Powers. I tended to roll with gnoll, though minotaur was another popular choice, that despite whats it's Monstrous Manual entry stated thankfully did not start with a Strength of 18.



Though 3rd Edition advanced the game in what I would consider to be a number of very positive ways it, among many other things, had some very, very poor rules when it came to rolling up monsters due to a combination of Hit Dice and the infamous Level Adjustment.

The idea was that no matter what abilities the monster had, its level was at the minimum equal to its number of Hit Dice. For example a minotaur has 6 Hit Dice, so it is at least considered a 6th-level character. Once you established that it was a matter of dividing up a monsters powers between each Hit Dice, similar to everything a class gets its divided up over the course of 20 levels. The problem is that often times the package of what a monster gets--ability score modifiers, various features, perhaps more--ended up being a check that their Hit Dice could not cash, and so you get a Level Adjustment (that despite being a positive modifier was actually a penalty).

Keeping with the minotaur example, they got a +8 to Strength, +4 to Constitution, -4 to Intelligence, -2 to Charisma, a gore attack, natural armor, darkvision, natural cunning, and scent. I guess they were able to reasonably divvy everything up over eight levels, because it has a Level Adjustment of +2. The problem is that normal 8th-level characters have an extra pair of Hit Dice, which means their base attack bonus, base saving throw modifiers, and maximum skill ranks are higher. It also means that they get another feat, extra attack, and ability score increase sooner, and are more likely to be immune to spells with a hit point or Hit Dice cap.

Now aside from the fact that most non-spellcasting classes were woefully underpowered in 3rd Edition, if you were to compare your minotaur fighter 1 to a human fighter 9 you would likely be a fair match: your Strength and Constitution are virtually guaranteed to be many points higher (helping to offset the attack bonus, hit point, and saving throw issue), natural armor would more than offset your size penalty to Armor Class, and your size would not only let you wield Large weapons, but also give you a hefty bonus to grapple, disarm, trip, etc (potentially making them actually viable tactics).

What about a spellcasting class? The same minotaur would be 9th-level before he gets his hands on 1st-level spells, so have fun pegging CR 9 monsters with magic missiles or finding a random encounter in which sleep will work. It is even worse for the mind flayer, a race that I would expect to excel as psions, as given their 8 Hit Dice and +7 Level Adjustment they are unable to manifest even the weakest of disciplines until 16th-level. So while you are ineffectually zapping dragons with energy rays for 1d6 damage, the elf wizard is obliterating the opposition with 16d6 damage polar rays (and that is not counting utility magic and save-or-sucks).

4th Edition thankfully abolished both Hit Dice and Level Adjustment, changing up a monster as needed so that would be on par with other races. It was now possible to say, play a minotaur at 1st-level that not only still felt like a minotaur, but would not lag behind the rest of the party down the road (ditto for drow and tieflings). Combine this with 4th Edition's removal of racial penalties, and you could experiment with race/class combinations that were pretty much impossible before. Minotaur wizard, anyone?

4th Edition also briefly dabbled with the idea of monster-as-class with the vampire from Heroes of Shadow. Though I found it to be very viable, flexible, and evocative of the base creature, the concept of a monster class was sadly never revisited.

I think that combining both of 4th Edition's approaches, with perhaps a dash of 3rd Edition multiclassing, is how monstrous races should be handled. Relatively "dirt-simple" races like the goblin, orc, kobold, gnoll, hobgoblin, tiefling, and so on can just be easily designed as a standard race. Since feats are not going to be an assumed thing, you could go the direction of 3rd Edition's Unearthed Arcana (man, but I do bring up that book a lot) by giving them access to a handful of racial levels that let them gain more abilities. Just, you know, make them actually worth it and play well with spellcasting classes.

More complex monsters could still arguably start out with "standard race" iterations, so you can have a satyr monk or umber hulk bard if that is your thing, but could also have a full-blown class if you just want to stick with it. I keep pitching the idea of flexible classes capable of realizing a variety of concepts, and the same principle could apply here, making it possible to design, for example, a dragon class that lets you pick the color/metal you want, as well as if you prefer to rely on your natural weapons, breath weapon, transform, cast spells, and so on.