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Yesterday, I discussed the unoriginal notion of monstrous PCs. I removed a brief mention of a topic that could be its own post, so now it is. (Yeah, yeah. I’m obsessed with this topic.) While I don’t know how to handle low level aquatic adventures involving landlubber PCs, I could easily handle an adventure that’s entirely underwater, and such and adventure is compelling.

Working under the assumption that I may need to convert at least some monsters for play as PC races, which I expect to be rather easy, it wouldn’t be much of a stretch to convert all the aquatics with more extensive writeups. Here’s a list:

• Aquatic Elves
• Ixitxachitls
• Locathah
• Mermen
• Nixies
• Sahuagins
• Tritons

The list above gives us six reasonable candidates for aquatic PC races (Ixitxachitl don’t work). Keep in mind that there are only seven standard PC races, so there’s certainly enough variety right now to make such an adventure interesting. Giving a Lizard Man gills isn’t much of a stretch. Also, this list includes only 1e Monster Manual races. Grabbing my Monster Manual II, I see the Merrow (Aquatic Ogre) as a weak candidate, but a candidate nonetheless. Fiend Folio gives us the bullywug, which can also be given gills. My point is that there are enough options to make this viable.

I’ve excluded monsters that absolutely make no sense as PCs, such as Dragon Turtles, Lacedons, and Mashers. Ixitxachitls won’t work despite having class levels, but that’s fine. They’re the kind of low- to mid-level boss that would work very well for aquatic adventures. In fact, there are a ton of aquatic monsters of all levels of difficulty that go largely unused or underused but become accessible with aquatic adventures, all acting under the orders of someone like Olhydra or Dagon.

As always, this is the start of a conversation. I’d be interested in your thoughts.

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A conversation started up (again) on Facebook about whether players could play monstrous races as their PCs. There’s a sharp divide between old-school and modern gamers on this topic, but I’m going to stick with 1st Edition AD&D (“1e“) for the purposes of this discussion. What does Lord Gygax say?

On occasion one player or another will evidence a strong desire to operate as a monster, conceiving a playable character as a strong demon, a devil, a dragon, or one of the most powerful sort of undead creatures. This is done principally because the player sees the desired monster character as superior to his or her peers and likely to provide a dominant role for him or her in the campaign. A moment of reflection will bring them to the unalterable conclusion that the game is heavily weighted towards mankind.

ADVANCED D&D is unquestionably “humanocentric”, with demi-humans, semi-humans, and humanoids in various orbits around the sun of humanity.

1e Dungeon Masters Guide, page 21.

So, it would seem that monsters may not be PCs. But wait! There’s more! He later went on to say:

My Facebook friend, Benoist, opined that Lord Gygax’s views weren’t hypocritical but rather evolved as the game did. This is a compelling explanation, though for the reasons I state below, I don’t think I’d allow a Balrog/Balor PC.

EDIT: It’s been pointed out to me that I had the order in which these were written backwards.

In any event, as someone who hasn’t (really) played 1e since 1982, and is thus a “modern” player, I’m inclined to give players more options rather than fewer. However, I don’t want to upset the game as it was designed to be played, and I’m not going to create special rules for making, e.g., dragons playable. In other words, I want to find a more expansive answer that already exists within the system itself. So, where should I draw the line?

Not All Writeups Are the Same

There are several monsters that have write ups much more extensive than the rest, and not because they’re complex creatures. Rather, these monsters have cultural write ups, including use of “human weapons,” social structure, and sometimes even eligible class levels. Among them are elves, halflings, dwarves, and gnomes, all playable races. So why shouldn’t the other ones also be playable races? Those other monsters, with varying degrees of detail, are bugbears, centaurs, gnolls, goblins, hobgoblins, ixitxachitl, jackalweres, kobolds, lizard men, locathah (don’t even have a natural attack), mermen, nixies, ogres, orcs, sahuagins, tritons, troglodytes, and wererats. Surprisingly, satyrs are not among this group. (I may have missed a few.)

Some Practical Concerns

As I’ve written, I want to include alignment (and reputation), and evil campaigns aren’t the norm, so any gnoll PCs would have to be exceptions to the general rule. I have no problem with that. In fact, I think it’s naïve to think that all creatures of a given type are hard-and-fast stuck with a particular alignment. Rather, their inherent alignment will linger in the form of a particular temperament, so I can live with typically evil races being used as PCs even in a “good” campaign.

But what do you do with a centaur? Modern gamers handwave away the practical issues with centaurs adventuring in dungeons, but that’s not the way 1e works. “Horses (and ponies) are not sufficiently agile to take into dungeons” (1e Monster Manual, p. 53). As I’ve repeatedly said, for better or worse I want to work within that system, so I must give that one more thought. Mermen and other aquatic races are out, as I have trouble dealing with low-level aquatic adventures. I wouldn’t know where to begin with a low-level party of humans and tritons. (More on that tomorrow.)

Also, the write ups for kobolds (for example) don’t expressly contemplate class levels (though Ixitxachitl do!). Instead, they simply point out that there are more powerful versions of the monster. Perhaps those creatures should be excluded, which would knock out most that I’ve listed. Nixies certainly should be, if for no other reason than their built-in ability to charm. Again, I must think this through on a creature-by-creature basis, needing to come up with reasonable limits on class levels and ability scores just as playable races have. The wealth of experience that exists on social media will help me form my opinions or point me to resources where others have already done this. This post is just the start of my conversation, not the end of it.

But no, you can’t play a balor in my game. As always, YMMV.

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My friend (Vic) and I have been slowly designing our own game system for years. When it started, the idea was to do a clone of our favorite game system. This was a game that we both love to play, which shall remain nameless because I don’t want that to serve as a distraction to the main point. The only thing that matters is that we love to play it.

On our first session, I proposed an exercise: Create a table of the broad gaming elements that we don’t like about the system, the ones we like about the system that need no improvement, and the ones we like about the system that need improvement. There were 6 likes, 5 likes requiring improvement, and 9 dislikes. That is, there were more dislikes than likes. Only about 1/4 of the broad categories we identified needed no improvement in our opinions, and therefore had to be maintained in our new system. Gaming is, as we all know, about having fun, so logical breakdowns aren’t always a good predictor of whether any given individual will like the game. Remember, this apparent disaster (about half of it we dislike) is our favorite game system, and that’s not because we didn’t legitimately love playing it. Don’t be afraid to criticize what you love, including your own work. Whether you’re designing a game or picking and choosing which rules to use at your table for an existing game, try things out and make decisions based on your own sensibilities.

All of this reinforced a lesson I learned a long time ago: Nothing is perfect. You (and others) can always reasonably criticize even your favorite [fill in the blank], and there’s nothing wrong with that.

You Do You

I’ve spent the past several months publishing posts criticizing various gaming systems as a reaction to my impending return to 1st Edition AD&D (including 1e itself). My blog’s audience isn’t very big, and I’m not even sure how seriously anyone takes me. However, if you’re designing a game system and have ever heard criticism from anyone, even an established game designer, that claims you’re going in the wrong direction, never lose sight of the fact that the only person that knows the right direction is you. You should design the game you want to design. Maybe it’ll be a commercial failure, and not just because there’s too much competition. Maybe most people simply won’t like it, but maybe fewer would like it, including you, if you weren’t honest in your approach. It’s also easily possible that all those critics might really enjoy your game despite its inclusion of gaming elements they criticize.

Listen to the critics but form your own opinion. Design the game you want to design. If a career as a game designer isn’t in the cards, you should accept that. At least you’ll have done the best job you’re capable of doing, but perhaps, with persistence, future redesigns may result in something you and everyone else likes.

And you certainly shouldn’t get upset that someone else’s work is being criticized. 🙄

This post reads like a Roxette song.

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Dungeons & Dragons is a trademark of Wizards of the Coast, LLC, who neither contributed to nor endorsed the contents of this post. (Okay, jackasses?)