Kamikaze Midget said:
why haven't we seen more of these? There's obviously a problem with some monsters not having survivability...why don't these monsters have or frequently ally with creatures that have the ability to extend their existence? Why aren't there very many healing/buffing/defense-focused monsters out there?
Since everyone else appears to be providing "how to" style of answers, I'll step up to the plate with my views on the "why" questions that you posed. Frankly, I'm surprised that no one else has come forward with this. Perhaps all the posters so far haven't played much 2nd ed or earlier? I don't know. In any case, my personal theory as for why there aren't as many monster clerics or monsters that are built around defensive / buffing tactics is due to historical reasons.
Consider the original version of D&D. It was a dungeoncrawl and nothing more. You had four basic "classes", one of which I believe was "Elf". There were no towns, no wilderness, no intrigue, in fact no real setting to speak of. There was the dungeon, and you went into it and
(often randomly) encountered different monsters who were in various rooms for no apparent reason other than to create conflict and XP rewards...
With such a paradigm for the game, the monsters were only ever intended to be fodder for the slaughter.
Then the idea of the town as a "refueling station" was introduced. This was perhaps the first crack in the original concept, and it was a very important one because once a town existed, then players
(and GMs) began to wonder about what else was in the town other than the tavern and provisioning store. Then they began to wonder what was near the town, what other towns existed, etc. Before you knew it, there were wilderness adventures, and then large-scale maps, and eventually whole worlds were being crafted as the settings to play in. Yet at this point in the evolution of D&D, it was still structured like a dungeoncrawl. All that had really changed was the definition of "dungeon", plus the addition of some alternate "inbetween" adventures to have that didn't follow the dungeoncrawl structure. Monsters were still for the most part thought of as cannon fodder. Even the higher level monsters were just tougher cannon fodder.
Then about midway through 2nd ed the Humanoids Handbook was published. For one of the first times,
(technically there were previous smaller instances, but this was the "big one"), the idea of treating the monsters with the same rules as the PCs was introduced on a broad scale. This opened the doors for people to start considering monsters as simply different races that aren't typically PC races. Yet the rules in many ways were still different for monsters versus PCs.
When 3rd ed was crafted, the idea of standardization across multiple system components
(combat, magic, characters, damage, etc) was a "bg idea" and one of the ways in which it was implemented was by creating and controlling the monsters using the exact same rules as the PC races. Now any creature can be any class so long as they meet the prerequisites... This is a huge change in the underlying concepts of just what a "monster" is. Practically thrown out altogether
(from a system standpoint) is the idea of monsters being only there to be killed. Instead, they are as much a part of the mosaic of the setting as the PCs are. NOW people are free to introduce fully-developed monster cultures, including everything from Orc farmers to Goblin seamstresses if they want!
However, the heritage of the previous 20-30 years is still with us and many game designers, publishers, GMs and players still have in the back of their minds strong undercurrents of the "monsters as cannon fodder" paradigm. Intellectually we KNOW that there's no reason at all why Bugbears wouldn't have clerics, shamans, holy men, etc. Yet emotionally we hesitate, still thinking of monsters in terms of semi-static stat blocks in a monster manual that are still somehow intrinsically different from the PCs on a fundamental leve. Oftentimes, they are there to be "thrown at" the players in a specific CR-determined encounter. In many settings, published and homebrew, the PC races are where the world's cultures are and the monsters lurk in the shadows and the fringes of "civilized territory"... They're the ones we hunt and kill, not get hunted by...
So, while we could
(and a case could be made that we should) introduce monsters who are just as diversified and defensive as PCs, still many players don't think to do this right off the bat.
