Has anyone ever run a game where the players are actual monsters? Like, a party of orcs, or drow or something? I know AD&D metiones this possibility in one of the core books, but I'm curious how often--if ever--people play this way?
This has happened a few times in my D&D games, but not enough to be anywhere near the standard. Orcs, drow, etc are semi-common options, but they are usually mixed in with more conventional elves, humans, and the like. An "all monster" campaign is overall very rare.
I've never run it, or played it this way, but I've been noodling an Underdark campaign for some time now, and I thought, what if...
I don't play 5e (no offense intended!)
Way back in the 3.5 days I ran a campaign where the PCs were various kinds of monstrous natives of Faerûn's Underdark, using the sourcebook of the same name for inspiration.
It was pretty standard fantasy, albeit with a more anti-heroic bent. The PCs were effectively mercenaries from various city-states exploring dangerous caverns, sunken crypts and catacombs, mushroom forests, and strongholds of the worshipers of chthonic deities for wealth and prestige.
It was fun, but didn't last long on account of several factors. As we were using Savage Species, the inter-party balance was broken as hell. If anything, I think that 5e can do this better, as there's a wealth of good resources for relatively balanced monstrous races. The big thing is that a lot of the more powerful and problematic abilities are nerfed, if not outright axed.
Back in 3e, I tried to run a Savage Species game. The resulting characters were extremely lopsided, with massive strong points and weak points. This might sound balanced, but generally what happened in most encounters was that the character whose weak points were hit just imploded, and the strong suits were beyond the ability for most enemies to handle unless specifically tailored for the job (something I tend to avoid doing as a DM as much as possible).
In 4e, for one season of Encounters, we played a Drow-centric game. There was a status mechanic that was easy to game (be a female Drow) and special "betrayal cards" you could use on your allies/rivals to mess with them.
One player adamantly refused to play anything other than the Human Druid he'd made. The DM ruled his character was a slave to the Drow, forced to do their bidding. The player agreed to this, then complained bitterly every time he was treated as a servant.
In the final session he went out in a blaze of glory to defy his "masters".
Generally when I pitch the idea of playing all monster races (I had this idea where everyone belonged to a humanoid tribe which was decimated and scattered to the winds by a horrible calamity- adventurers! The game would revolve around the survivors struggling to make their way in a world where they were seen as the "bad guys", gain power, get revenge on the adventurers and reclaim their home (I later found out this is basically the plot of the Goblins webcomic).
Nobody seemed too interested, with one refusing to get it, not seeing the value of flipping the script on who the heroes and villains were. /shrug
These all sound like interesting campaigns. It does remind me of how 3.5 Drow's spell resistance turned out to be quite the pain. By RAW, you needed to spend a standard action to lower it, so so oftentimes our Underdark party would forget to lower it and then realize that they can't buff themselves up with spells. The ideal mode of play would be to lower it before an encounter or ambush, buff, then charge into battle, but that wasn't something the group could prepare for so it just became a pain in the butt.
