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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Sage Genesis" data-source="post: 6115974" data-attributes="member: 6706099">Well I'm not 1of3, but I do know how 4e handled creature types. It actually works rather a lot like Mon's proposed system. Creatures have an origin and a type. Optionally they can also have certain keywords to further refine their description.Origins are:* Natural (meaning, it originated on the prime material, or the "real world" if you will)* Elemental (pretty obvious where it came from)* Fey (it came from the feywild)* Shadow (it came from the shadowfell)* Immortal (it came from the astral sea, which includes the various sub-planes like the Nine Hells in 4e's cosmology)* Aberrant (it came from the Far Realm, beyond the stars, or is some other Lovecraftian entity)Types are:* Humanoid (pretty obvious)* Beast (also obvious)* Magical beast (I'm sure you can also understand this)* Animate (the creature was made, not born)Keywords can then include "undead", "angel", "dragon", and anything else you might imagine. The list is possibly endless.So a zombie is a Natural Animate with the undead keyword. That might sound strange, to call it natural, but that only means it didn't originate from a different plane of existence, not that it's actually wholesome or perfectly normal.I think 4e's system is pretty much flawless, for one important reason: given the cosmology it's intended for, it can encompass anything without any trouble. The proposed 5e system can't. There is no category for Formians. There is no category for Ethereal Marauders. Slaad are not fiends but they can't be aberrations either, because they are not unnatural within the Great Wheel cosmology - if Slaad are aberrations, then angels must also be. And so on. There are a lot more extraplanar creatures than celestials, fiends, and elementals, and not all of them can be easily classified as humanoid or something instead. The idea is that categories would need to be invented for them separately, but I think that's a terrible idea. That's not a category, that's a keyword. Categories have very specific functions within the game mechanics and just bloating that up endlessly can make older material hard to combine with newer material.</blockquote>

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