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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8044453" data-attributes="member: 18">See this has the same problem as the OP. Is it a joke, or do you just not know that this specific sort of scenario, including LITERALLY WITH A BELMONT AND DRACULA, has been around for decades and decades? The most recent example is the Castlevania anime, which basically has this scenario. "Who is the real monster?" is a valid question. They're both intelligent beings who seek to destroy each other. It's still basically Dracula, but it's not for very simple reasons, and nothing Dracula does is anything a human hasn't/wouldn't do.And indeed, with vampires, this is often a question, depending on the nature of the vampire - even in Buffy, for example, where the vampires are demons who seek to kill humans, and thus to be dispatched, the issue is that their soul has been displaced by the demon, and when that soul is returned, the demon potentially can be tamed, and suddenly you're looking at a more complicated situation.So as I said, same problem as the OP, except inverted - you think you're making a joke, but the joke is on you, because people have been taking that scenario seriously (indeed it's blimmin' theme that pops up a couple of times in even the Castlevania games - "What is a man but a miserable pile of secrets", that sound familiar to you?). So you trying to invoke it as if it's "proof" that this is silly and vampires are "obviously" monster is a hilarious misjudgement on your part. I mean, like welcome to 40+ years ago buddy. Hell, one of the earlier D&D PCs was Vampire as a class - the Cleric class was designed specifically to counter him (and Cleric made it into actual books, whereas Vampire only sort of lingered around the edges as a class, though it did re-appear in 4E).Re: naming, I think it's fine, because the MM has always had a lot of stuff which isn't monsters in it, but I do think it might be worth designing the MM to more clearly separate free-willed humanoids and the like from the rest, and it would be downright useful if they made stuff like "Bandit", "Barbarian", "War Wizard" and so on into stat blocks which you could then apply a specific race to, adding X abilities (but they'd obviously be runnable without applying a race - many races would just give something like Darkvision or whatever). As races and stat bonuses are being disconnected already, stat blocks wouldn't be an issue. Even leaving social stuff aside, I think that would be a better design. If I just wanted bandits right now I could just run the block without applying a race (because the chances of it being relevant in any given combat are slim) and describe as I wish, but if I wanted to do something more detailed, I could add actual racial abilities.</blockquote>

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