D&D 3.x Monster PCs

[Tinker Gnome]

How common were monster pcs in any 3.x games you ran or played in? I never had any, only thing with an LA that we had was a Tiefling. 3.X tried to make it "easy" to play a monster as a character and by the book tended to err on the side of making them too weak relative to a character of the same level.

 

[EricNoah]

Let's see, I had one guy who played a wemic (kind of a leonine centaur) in a Planescape game of mine. Lots of oddballs in that setting of course. It kept me on my toes; I had to think through what a large, heavy quadruped might find challenging (climbing a rope?) to navigate in a humanoid-centric game.

I played in a game where another player ran some kind of flying imp type creature; the rest of us found that kind of annoying because he could also become invisible pretty much at will and would go off ahead and start having the adventure without us; this was as much a personality problem as anything else.

I ran a one-shot where everyone was an orc.

That's all I can think of in decades of gaming...

 

[Mannahnin]

How common were monster pcs in any 3.x games you ran or played in? I never had any, only thing with an LA that we had was a Tiefling. 3.X tried to make it "easy" to play a monster as a character and by the book tended to err on the side of making them too weak relative to a character of the same level.

Pretty uncommon, for the reasons you outline. A lot of monster abilities could be pretty busted in the hands of PCs, but on the other hand no one likes to be permanently stuck levels behind the rest of the party. It's kind of like TSR-era demihumans, in way - rather than being balanced, they wound up being UNbalanced in two different directions at different times.

 

[haakon1]

ARE, not were, for me.

Across 17 characters in the 2 campaigns I currently DM in 3.5, only one is not a PHB race. A tiefling NPC they adopted - actually Karlach, who I converted from BG3.

In the past:
(1) In a one shot, someone played a centaur. Since it was outdoor exploration, it was fine and fun for everyone as an early experiment.

(2) A first-time player (long-time novel reader) joining late in a campaign took over a rescued prisoner NPC, I think Tiefling, rather than make their own character. They played about 2-3 sessions before it ended, with the final fight victorious but the tiefling dying. It was in the Underdark, so it didn’t matter much that the character was unusual, and we didn’t play him long enough to level up.

(3) In a new campaign with new players, that turned out to be a one-shot, a player created a lizard creature I didn’t know from 2e with lots of special abilities. That added to like 3-4 ECL. I allowed it in a 1st level party because his heart was set on it, and he claimed to be an experienced player down for the roleplaying downsides. In that session, he got annoyed that captured armor from orcs I ruled didn’t fit him (he had a tail) and I said needed to be altered by an armorer at a cost before he could use it, and that local villagers were afraid of him and didn’t want to let him into a fortification. He also decided to eat some humans who the orcs had killed, and his girlfriend’s half-elf joined in, to the disgust of other players, so … that “campaign” was a wet squib. More player issue than the monster concept, I think.

(4) In the Sunless Citadel, the PCs adopted Meepo the kobold sorcerer, as an NPC party member/mascot. They had fun with “no kobolds allowed” in Oakhurst, sneaking him in under a sack and hiding him in the barn, “ET” style, and they helped him become king of the Sunless Citadel, at peace with the locals. That - King Meepo of the peaceful magic apple trading Sunless Citadel - is still part of my instance of Greyhawk, in the 2 current campaigns, and it happened in like Session 4 (2nd adventure) of campaign #2 above. Monster races to Alpha and Omega in that campaign, which was something like 38 4-hour games over about 12 years.

 

[Celebrim]

How common were monster pcs in any 3.x games you ran or played in? I never had any, only thing with an LA that we had was a Tiefling. 3.X tried to make it "easy" to play a monster as a character and by the book tended to err on the side of making them too weak relative to a character of the same level.

They basically didn't exist because LA was terribly flawed as a mechanic. I did work on fixing it, but it wasn't worth the effort to allow it given the problems.

The fundamental flaw of LA is that there is basically only say one level in 20 where a LA character is (potentially) balanced with a non-level adjusted one, and that's probably not going to be the level you are playing at. Suppose you have a LA character at low level, then the flat penalty to their HD makes them much weaker than a character without LA. But then, at some point with a enough added HD, the cumulative advantage of enhanced CON or STR or whatever more than makes up for a few missing HD as the relative gap between the two characters HD becomes smaller. So it just doesn't work.

The fix is to minimize the HD penalty while giving the character an earned XP penalty. But then I also just didn't want monsters roaming around like a Star Wars cantina, because of other problems with players treating what is not human as if it were human and so reducing the numinous and mystical nature of the setting by making the extraordinary and alien commonplace.

 

[aco175]

I think one players wanted to use this with the effective character level mechanic. I do not recall it lasting long. My group tends to just play the PHB stuff.

 

[Tonguez]

I once played a Ghoul gladiator which was great fun
My weirdest was will-a-wisp psion named Zyxz

 

[bloodtide]

Very common.

As I run a high powered game the 'power' and 'LA' don't really matter.

 

[Richards]

So far, I think the only "monster" PC in our 3.5 campaigns has been my lizardfolk fighter/barbarian, Jhasspok. I tried him as an experiment, none of us ever having tried a PC with Level Adjustment before...and it was disappointing, having to have my first three "levels" be in "lizardfolk," so that it wasn't until 4th level that I finally became a 1st-level fighter, in a group with a dwarf barbarian and a dwarf fighter. I really felt like I wasn't pulling my weight in combat, compared to those two.

However, I did still manage to have a blast running Jhasspok, if only because of his completely different mindset. He saw nothing wrong with eating the flesh of sentient beings ("meat is meat" was one of his favorite sayings), and because his egg had been stolen from the surface and he had lived his entire life as a slave to the drow in the Underdark, he had no idea what the sun was, or mountains, or birds...it was quite an eye-opening experience when he first ventured up onto the surface world. (He immediately tackled one of the dwarves, thinking the sun was a fireball about to explode and he was saving the dwarf's life.) When we met up with a caravan, he assumed the horse pulling the lead wagon was the leader, since he was the biggest creature of the group. He figured out (on his own, through observations of the night sky) that the moon was a Really Big Pearl and that high up, the sky was made of acid because he saw it eating away at the moon each night. He was brutally honest and painfully blunt, and his 6 Intelligence was a real boon in the long run, as far as my enjoyment running him was concerned.

Johnathan

 

[Voadam]

It was moderately common in my experience.

I ran two pbp campaigns with a lot of options where monster manual type races could be appropriate, my Oathbound Wildwood game where creatures were grabbed from different worlds and thrown together and my Death in Freeport game set on a nautical crossroads mercantile hub island. By clicking on the links you can see what players actually picked, mostly humans, some PHB races, some other source races, and a couple LA monsters. The monster races included a half-dragon, a lizardfolk, and a tiger-man Chiao from Jade Dragons and Hungry Ghosts.

I also played in a high level all monster game where I was a fiendish troll rogue.

The LA rules were an option, but they were often a poor one mechanically and left you behind your equal ECL compatriots, particularly if you wanted to do magic.