Monster PCs

What have been your experiences with Monster PCs in your games? I am mainly talking about DnD 3.X and Pathfinder here, but anyone who has played or GMed a Monster PC under other systems is welcome to share their experience.

Galeros said:

What have been your experiences with Monster PCs in your games? I am mainly talking about DnD 3.X and Pathfinder here, but anyone who has played or GMed a Monster PC under other systems is welcome to share their experience.

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My friends and I have made frequent use of monsters as PCs, mostly templates but standard monsters as well. In the 3.X rules, we used the ECL rules although we often dropped them down a step because they seemed over called (that is, we would often use an ECL 2 if the MM said ECL 3 for example).

Overall, it seemed to work fairly well as long as everyone was within 2-4 ECLs of each other, depending on the overall level of the campaign. We typically did this in campaigns starting at level 6 or higher so that the class level for folks with ECL was still 4 or more. It seems the lower the character level, the more awkward ECL is so starting higher level worked better.

In general, while the PCs with an ECL were more colorful, they were rarely the same power as a character with ECL 0 (i.e., the normal races) but we liked the color of it.

Our character selection method allowed the players to choose their characters from a slate of figures, each figure having its own ECL and some other bonuses.

One of the most elaborate setups we did had 36 figures each with their own cards and ECLs ranging from 1 to 6. I put the cards together but I didn't paint the figures Our group painter did those (you can see figures for our new campaign at Affliction: The Draft Figures not as fancy as the cards below though and no ECLs since we are going with 4E races.)



You can find 2 pdfs of the cards at Affliction: Ophir Draft for our take on how to include quite a range of creatures. Rule set was 3.0 IIRC.

I've had (DMed) a few monster PCs.

My two findings on the ECL system are:
*LAs are almost always wrong (for my game) as written (both too high and too low), but I can eyeball a reasonable one.
*Monster classes are a good concept, but most of the published ones suck (because the abilities aren't spread out enough). Again, fixable.

I had an invisible stalker PC who went through a monster class I wrote for it. The appearing in the elemental plane of air after death wasn't unbalanced and actually drove plot. The crit immunity and invisibility weren't unbalanced and likewise drove plot. I thus conclude that even the things you'd think would be unbalanced are okay in the hands of a reasonable player.

I've also had an epic pixie mage, a monster of legend centaur-type thing, a treant, and probably others I can't remember, all of which worked reasonably well. I've also played/DMed some simple ones, like my anthropomorphic owl druid, or an anthro feline PC from a while back or the current goliath PC. All in all, I've had pretty good experiences.

I am not a big fan of monster PCs.

RC

Make Yak-Folk.

Game over.

-O

I ahve had enough trouble with them that I would not allow them, though this is all via PBEMs, with a face to face group I would be more flexible.

If I were to have a Monster PC in the group, I think I would use Monster class levels over LAs. It just seems to be easier to deal with, and it allows the monster character to be on the same power level as the rest of the group.

First off, I don't see any need to artificially distinguish between PCs and "monsters". It's just different, non-standard races that take a little extra work for the DM to balance them out. I use ad-hoc LA as I see fit on a case by case basis, and most of my games start out at around level 8 or 10, so there's usually plenty of wiggle room for players to go crazy with anything they want to play - and especially being in planar focused campaigns of mine, you can go pretty dang crazy (Clueless played a cranium rat hive in a oneshot game I ran at NC Gameday once).

The cranium rat hive is probably the most crazy I've seen in a game of mine, but there have been plenty of others. I've had players with half-ogre PCs, and currently there's a half-guardinal arcanaloth PC in my current campaign. Myself, in the last campaign that I played in, I played a shadow dragon druid (admittedly he started out as an elf - long story).

At some point I truly, truly want to play either a mephit, imp, quasit, or cacodaemon* PC. That would be truly awesome.

*forthcoming Pathfinder NE imp-like critter

I've allowed them for one-shots, but I am not a fan for a long-term campaign.

Power wise, monster PCs are definitely weaker than pure-classed PCs.

However, if you use the monster class rules, they can be fairly strong at lower lvs. For example, while I do find a troll woefully underpowered at ECL11, it is quite potent from 1st to 4th. At 1st lv, it gets 3 natural attacks, and can do a lot of damage on a full attack. Then at mid-higher lvs, they start becoming less attractive.

I suspect you may need to gauge where your campaign is expected to end. For instance, a ghaele or trumpet archon gets full clerical spellcasting for the first 14 lvs. If you don't expect your game to stretch beyond that, go ahead and play one - you are no weaker than a normal cleric (and that's saying something!).

Also, here is a blog I found where the DM plays a sigil-based campaign with quite a few monster PCs (they have a troll, red dragon and trumpet archon in the party, and I think a medusa guest-starred somewhere as well).

http://mxyzplk.wordpress.com/session-summaries/city-of-sigil-session-summaries/

A most entertaining read.