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The Monster. Such a staple of fantasy RPGs that books and books have been published detailing all of the mean and nasty creatures that characters can run into and then kill.
It turns into a shopping list of adversaries, and instead of each creature being important, or the potential for being the focus of an entire story, instead they become a random encounter in the woods, or the monster in the cavern room 25b, destroying the wonder and danger of creatures that can not exist in the real world, reducing them to a series of combat stats and meaningless flavor text.
Take a zombie. Usually a low grade threat to any experienced adventurer. Dead guy walking? No problem! But let's re-think this one. Watch some classic zombie movies like Dawn of the Dead and Return of the Living Dead. Zombies inconsequential? This is a creature that feels no pain, requires no proper biological functions to work in order to move, and to kill. The dead are walking! This is no everyday thing! This is no easily vanquished enemy! Cut them, they don't care. Break a bone, they will continue on. Does destroying the brain work? Or do you totally have to destroy the body to the point that it can't move anymore? If it's a rotting body you're fighting, wouldn't wounds you receive be quite nasty beyond the physical damage done? And where did it come from? Are there more? Will the dead stop rising? The very appearance of the walking dead should be cause for extreme alarm in a campaign, not a moment's menace.
The worst offender of this has to be D&D's Kobold. A 'monster' of no special abilities, weak enough that a child can defeat one. They're just weaker versions of goblins which are weaker versions of orcs which are weaker versions of ogres... Seems that anyone who needs that many different creatures can't come up with decent scenarios so instead they dazzle the player with effectively interchangeable evil bad guys, and then litter the world with increasingly strange creatures for no reason other than they would be neat to fight the players.
No thought, just window dressing, and players take it all in as absolutely normal very quickly, destroying the impact that any of these creatures could have on a game.
Comments?
The Monster. Such a staple of fantasy RPGs that books and books have been published detailing all of the mean and nasty creatures that characters can run into and then kill.
It turns into a shopping list of adversaries, and instead of each creature being important, or the potential for being the focus of an entire story, instead they become a random encounter in the woods, or the monster in the cavern room 25b, destroying the wonder and danger of creatures that can not exist in the real world, reducing them to a series of combat stats and meaningless flavor text.
Take a zombie. Usually a low grade threat to any experienced adventurer. Dead guy walking? No problem! But let's re-think this one. Watch some classic zombie movies like Dawn of the Dead and Return of the Living Dead. Zombies inconsequential? This is a creature that feels no pain, requires no proper biological functions to work in order to move, and to kill. The dead are walking! This is no everyday thing! This is no easily vanquished enemy! Cut them, they don't care. Break a bone, they will continue on. Does destroying the brain work? Or do you totally have to destroy the body to the point that it can't move anymore? If it's a rotting body you're fighting, wouldn't wounds you receive be quite nasty beyond the physical damage done? And where did it come from? Are there more? Will the dead stop rising? The very appearance of the walking dead should be cause for extreme alarm in a campaign, not a moment's menace.
The worst offender of this has to be D&D's Kobold. A 'monster' of no special abilities, weak enough that a child can defeat one. They're just weaker versions of goblins which are weaker versions of orcs which are weaker versions of ogres... Seems that anyone who needs that many different creatures can't come up with decent scenarios so instead they dazzle the player with effectively interchangeable evil bad guys, and then litter the world with increasingly strange creatures for no reason other than they would be neat to fight the players.
No thought, just window dressing, and players take it all in as absolutely normal very quickly, destroying the impact that any of these creatures could have on a game.
Comments?