Monster Manuals: Things You Don't Kill

[I'm A Banana]

Recently, a post randomly referenced these things:

Y'know what they are?

Campestri. A joke of a critter who popped up in a Monster Manual once upon a time, whose main purpose was to annoy characters and have a laugh. Here is a blurb about them:

Campestri are a musical people, and will flock to anyone singing or playing instruments, even if they music is extremely bad. They sing and dance along with the music, and are capable of imitating both words and instrumentation. They tend not to repeat the words very well, as they lack understanding of any language. A bard that can teach campestris to sing on key has accomplished an awesome task.

D&D has a long history of these types of critters. I'm not talking about "weird" critters. Everyone loves the flumph. I'm talking about "noncombat" creatures. Creatures you aren't supposed to fight, but that are present in the MM's of D&D (which, come to think of it, may include the Lawful Good flumph). Singing mushrooms aren't, believe it or not, unique in the game's lexicon. There's been a comfortable place for the humble regular bat in every edition's very first MM until the most recent. Regular bats aren't horrifying monsters. They aren't even credible threats.

So I asked myself: Why were they stuck in a Monster Manual and given stats? What gameplay purpose might they have served? What were you supposed to do with these things at the table? Why did someone go through the effort of writing up a whole page of fluff about singing dancing mushrooms?

And here's the answer I came up with: Monster Manuals aren't just lists of things to fight. Or at least, they weren't, up until 4e's MM's. They are lists of interesting things to interact with.

You can't battle the Campestri in any kind of a satisfying way. Killing inoffensive mushroom creatures and taking their stuff is pointless. Same with bats. "Oh, big hero killed a flying mouse!"

But you can have interesting encounters using either of them. A situation in which the party needs to teach the Campestris to sing and dance to impress a bard? Sounds like an interesting challenge. A druid befriending a bat in order to have it spy on some goblins? Sounds like a cool use of a player resource.

In both situations, combat stat blocks are kind of useless. No, I don't usually need to know how much damage a bat does, or what a Campestri's Constitution score is. But stats of some sort are useful. I could probably stand to know the mechanics for teaching a Campestri to sing, or how good the bat is at spying.

Now, 4e's MM's are a more focused tool. They don't muck about with things you can't beat the snot out of. That's a strength; all killer no filler. But I feel like it's leaving a gap, a place occupied by bats and housecats and terries, a place for the Campestri and the Wisdom Bird (who delivers your destiny, but flees at violence!) and the Afanc (who creates whirlpools, but is too big to battle!) and the old-school fey like the Nymph (who you wouldn't fight, but who might still serve to be a hazard). Angels and metallic dragons fall into this category, too. You could even make a case for GIANT monsters like colossi, rocs, or the Terrasque: too big to fight, but a lot of fun to encounter, even if all you're doing is fleeing from its immense limbs!

So, I'm wondering if we can't conceive of a new kind of "Monster Manual," maybe more of an "Encounter Encyclopedia" rather than "Combat Compendium," a book full of stats, but stats for things you fight, and for things you negotiate with, and for things you train, and for things you summon, and for things that may interact with your character in interesting and challenging ways aside from trying to murder them with pointy things.

This also strikes me as the natural home for things like diseases, traps, and hazards, environmental effects like thunderstorms, sandstorms, hurricanes, etc.

What kind of critters would you put in there? What are your favorite "monstrous" encounters that didn't involve necessarily beating the enemies to death? How would you describe their challenge for your favorite edition/game? Do you think such a book, with such contents, would be more useful than the current and past MM's (current ones being all combat, earlier ones giving you combat stat blocks for things you'd never fight and blowing page space), or is the kind of book most useful to you one chock full of combat stats and an excuse to pit them against the party?

Well, what do you think?

 

[pawsplay]

I think in 4e, teaching mushrooms to sing is some kind of skill challenge. This is an area of game design dear to me: that of organizing ideas and offering suggestions, rather than mechanically limiting actions. Virtually any RPG could have singing mushrooms, most would even have a useful means of resolving the interactions if it was supposed to be some kind of challenge, but part of what makes D&D, D&D is, "Here, have some singing mushrooms."

 

[Obryn]

I'm perfectly fine with cutting down on the whole Monster-Manual-as-Discovery-Channel-Special excesses that characterized much of the 2e MMs... And heck, even 1e to an extent. Even now, looking back, I ask, "Why is this statted up again?" and think that such things as the Household Pets in Dark Sun belong more in flavor text than in monster manual. Simply put - I don't want them gone. I want them, but assigning stat block space to them seems ... wasteful.

I don't need stats for something my players aren't interacting with in a mechanical way. I don't need stats for what amounts to setting pieces. I do think the animals described have a place in the setting, but putting them in the MM is .... weird .... in retrospect.

-O

 

[humble minion]

Interesting idea! It does seem a bit silly (speaking from a 3.5e gamer's perspective) to have full-page stat blocks for non-combat encounters. While there's obviously a need for stat blocks for summonables, I do remember shaking my head in bewilderment at a critter called, I think, the Bytopian Thrush(?) from one of the later 3e MMs. Basically it was a sparrow-sized critter that made you heal quicker if it sang near you - and it needed a full-page stat block why exactly?

Green slime was converted from a monster to a hazard in 3e - there's probably no reason why other critters couldn't go the same way.

A lot of fey could probably benefit from this kind of redefinition. Traditionally fey are extremely powerful in limited fields of interest (making shoes, cleaning houses, scaring the pants off miners, etc, etc) and are generally handled with intelligence, resourcefulness and good manners rather than brute force.

Food for thought, definitely.

 

[I'm A Banana]

Simply put - I don't want them gone. I want them, but assigning stat block space to them seems ... wasteful.

I don't need stats for something my players aren't interacting with in a mechanical way.

Characters interact with normal animals in a mechanical way all the time, though! Not necessarily fighting them (though enemy mounts, evil wolves, and swarms of things are standard fantasy fare), but through encounters with them.

The disease that the bat carries?
The DC for a gnome to train a fox to spy for him?
The challenge involved in getting a mule to obey?
The damage a cow can take before exploding when you duck into a cattle field for cover against a dragon?
How easy it is to cling to the undersides of sheep while the cyclops feels for you in their fur?
The level of the challenge of "breaking a wild stallion"?
How to use a cat to detect magic?
Using an owl as a familiar?
Chatting with squirrels to figure out the lay of the land?

I probably don't need the bat's Charisma if I'm just maybe getting a disease from it, but if the party druid wants to train it to spy on our enemies, I'll need the Charisma more than I'll need its Attack Roll.

That's why an encounter encyclopedia might be a better way of viewing the MM than a combat compendium. Instead of just a list of things you fight, it's a list of possible things that happen to your characters.

I guess, for me, a book that included "teaching mushrooms to sing" as a skill challenge (or whatever) alongside "beating up goblins" as a combat challenge would be much more useful and interesting than anything we've had in any of the editions so far. Combat stat for noncombat things are really useless. On the other hand, the idea that an MM is only for combat stats is something I don't really buy. It should be for all sorts of threats and creatures! All sorts of encounters, with the stats for running them! In one place, so I don't need to hunt over 4 different books to find the special encounter I'm looking for!

 

[Mentat55]

I kinda like Monster Manuals for monsters, i.e., terrible creatures that my PCs may fight.

However, I like the idea of a comprehensive volume that covers traps, hazards, obstacles, and challenges for the PCs -- things that may affect them in combat, may affect them out of combat, may require skill checks / challenges, or may just involve RP interaction.

 

[Nymrohd]

I think that the monster manual as the third of the big three books for D&D is an outdated and ultimately problematic template. What is needed is an encounter manual, including in one place encounters with archetypical monsters, traps and terrain effects, skill challenges or in non-4E systems examples of adjucidating non-combat encounters, and why not a bit of fluff as well. The monster manual as a title forces the book to be a bestiary while what is needed from the third core book imho is what I described.

 

[Verdande]

I would love a book that wasn't focussed entirely on monsters that you can beat up. Like somebody mentioned, little tidbits about recommended ways to handle somebody trying to befriend a singing mushroom or how good, exactly, a bat is at spying, or how difficult it is to control a flying griffon would be great.

But that takes creativity and lateral thinking, and in the end, it seems to be quicker and easier to make a higher level variant of a low-level monster, throw some stats on it, and call it a day.

 

[Doug McCrae]

If you can't kill it, it's not D&D. Even the gods have stats. Odin has hit points, that means he can be killed.

I'd like to see concepts like love and death given stat blocks. That would be something, eh? To kill death.

 

[TerraDave]

KM, I fully support your arguments here, at least those I read, as your first post was simply too long.

Going back to early D&D, I see six kinds of monster encounters:

-the obvious foe: the, well, obvious one

-the odd diversion: the singing mushroom, the mildly annoying browny.

-the ally: yes, way back when you could use in charecter talk and a high charisma and try to actually recruit allies. Imagine finding that gold dragon, then teaming up with it.

-the "wrong" foe: in D&D golden age pretty much everything had combat stats. And who's to say you won't "need" to attack that peasent farmer or house cat or...gold dragon. Stuff happens.

-the frenemy: another variation on the above, who knows which side that tribe of carnivourous apes will take. The enemy of my enemy principle also applies.

-the hidden foe: a variation on some of the above, this includes werewolfs and dopplegangers, but also wrong foes that really aren't. Sometimes gnomes go bad.