Hi,
I am considering starting a Monsters as PCs campaign sometime in the near future. So the PCs will play things like Mind Flayers and Ogres rather then elves and dwarves. Would you guys happen to have any tips on how to run a game like this? I'm still fairly new to DMing. It will be in either Pathfinder or 4th Edition D&D.
Cheers!
-Wierdoom
I have played and DMed for a large number of monstrous races under the 3.x rules. A close runner up for the biggest problem we faced was power balance. Savage Species did a good job with a difficult task, but there are still a monster or two in there that outshines similar level adventures (either standard or other monsters). I'll have to look back, but I think it was one of the eladrin or devas that was one of the only nerfs we ever had to perform in our very liberal campaigns. It had special abilties all over the place plus full spellcasting of a cleric. So basically they were uber-clerics. However, that was a single case out of quite a few that we played.
However, the biggest problem with monsters that we repeatedly faced was Level Adjustment. Some powers are simply very nice and are balanced with Level Adjustment - losing out on advancing your hit dice (and therefore hit points, skills, saves, and BAB). However, with monsters with very high LA, they possessed a few very powerful abilities, but had far lower hit points than wizards, and such low saves and BABs, that they were pretty much unplayable.
Think of an action movie with all these tough heroes, and this guy with a HUGE rocket launcher, but such a weakling that stepping on a rusty nail kills him. If he gets to use that rocket launcher, watch out! But an untied shoelace takes him out of commission. So they can be very powerful in a very narrow window, and balanced by being painfully weak in everything else.
we found low LA monsters - even those with lots of hit dice and therefore high ECL - to be far more comparable to standard PCs and the only trouble was that monstrous hit dice sometimes lacked any interesting abilities. The "dead level" problem of just increasing some numbers, but getting nothing new or interesting when you level. Balanced fine, just felt a little underwhelming when leveling.
So Savage Species did a noble job of trying to make the monsters straight out of the MM into playable races, and succeeded as best as anyone could at that goal. (Although I do disagree with the basic advice on estimating LA/ECL by starting with monster hit dice = level, and then special abilities are added on top of that. That's like saying you determine the ECL of a wizard by counting his wizard hit dice and then adding a certain number onto that for his spell casting ability. Not to mention all monster hit dice are certainly not created equal. Compare fey hit dice to dragon hit dice for example.)
However, the 4e method of just going for the monster's theme and completely forgetting trying to match the exact numbers and powers, is a far better way to address it in either edition. If I were to re-write Savage Species for Pathfinder (hmm....), I would make a baseline PC race for the monsters comparable to all other PC races. Then you would level in ordinary PC classes but could "buy" monster abilities either with feats or swapping out class features. For power balance, the monster abilities would have minimum levels. So a mind flayer's mind blast may be crazy powerful at low levels, but if you don't allow access until a higher level, it's much easier to integrate without having to "pay" for it through lost hit dice.
Perhaps something could also be worked out for "classes" based on monster types as well. So instead of leveling in Fighter, you could level in Monstrous Humanoid. That'd be trickier to balance, but not out of the question. It could help capture some of the monstrous feel as well for those who want their monster PCs to be even more unique.
