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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5747957" data-attributes="member: 4937">Interesting topic.Sounds interesting.  I should note my bias before hand by saying that I have fairly extensive experience with Aarakocra in this role.  In one of the campaigns I played in, the PC's set up a kingdom in newly explored territory and one of the assets/difficulties that they had to deal with was a native tribe of aarakocra in this role.  Now this is a jump in logic that I don't really understand at all.  Just because a creature is good aligned and relatively weak, doesn't mean its automaticly qualified to be a PC race.  Certainly it wouldn't have been seen as such at the time that the race was originally introduced.  First of all, I should admit another bias and say that the latter sort of challenge is one I find to be a higher level of design, and a more mature approach to RPGs in general, than pure tactical or system mastery challenges.  That said, I still don't understand the criticism at all.To begin with, while most PC parties are clustered around 'good' alignments, its by no means universal that all PC parties are good and their primary antagonists evil.   And even if a PC party is good aligned nothing precludes misunderstandings, xenophobia, disagreements over what is in each cultures best interest, differences over law and chaos, and specific differences in culture or custom from creating conflict with another good aligned culture.  Finally, even if a race is 'usually' good, doesn't mean that there aren't individual members and somtimes communities and societies that aren't.Secondly, the combat attributes of aarakroka are equivalent to that of orcs or goblins.  Are you suggesting that because orcs and goblins have generally poor combat stats that they aren't meant to be antagonists?  Granted, neither stock orcs nor stock goblins nor stock aarakroca are much of a threat in a straight up fight past 5th level or so in any edition, but increasing longevity of these foes into higher levels is the same regardless of which form the low HD intelligent humanoid takes.  You up their 'tech level', give them champions with higher than normal HD, and put them into tactical situations that highly favor them.   In the case of goblins that means ambushes, traps, and fortifications to hide behind.   In the case of aarakroca that means ambushes, higher tech or magitech bombs and so forth.Squadrons of 2HD aarakroca dive bombing you with javelins, yellow mold bombs, canisters of flaming oil, and 'fire trap' bombs can maintain their status as threats over a fairly signficant period, especially when backed up with pet giant eagles and higher HD champions and leaders.  Welcome to 3D you poor land bound saps.I would say that Flight is always a problem with Heroic tier PC's, but that at some point, D&D has always assumed that the means to fly will come into PC hands and eventually the means to fly over long periods will become available.   I don't believe that it presents a big challenge at high levels provided the DM is prepared for this fact and takes it into account when imagining and inventing challenges for high level PC's.  Have we seriously come to the point where we are asking questions like this?  Really?  Honestly, I don't think there are many creatures in the Monster Manual that might always be battled to the death.  Most creatures in the Monster Manual are far more interesting when battle to the death is not the immediate and foregone conclusion.  Red Dragons, for example, make interesting NPC's, and at the very least, are more satisfying foes if Smaug like, they get a chance to interact with the PC's beyond a suprise round ambush with a breath weapon.  Are we so beaten down as DMs that we have to wring every tactical advantage out of every combat in order to worry our players?   Seriously, if we've come to the point where we only see monsters as stat blocks and numbers, then I'm done with RPG's because I got past that in about the 7th grade when the endless dice rolling in contests I was supposed to lose just started to bore me to tears as a DM.Look at their original intention.  Now imagine a king builder style campaign were one hex of the map contains a couple hundred aarakrocaa and the neighboring hex contains a couple hundred human goatherders and their flocks.  'Hilarity' ensues.</blockquote>

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