Those times when the DM allowed a monster PC

[Libertad]

Savage Species. Complete Book of Humanoids. The Ghostwalk Setting. That Eberron campaign set in Droaam where everyone was something other than a Humanoid. Those times when human/dwarf/elf/etc were getting boring and the group sought to try out new options.

How did things go? Did the DM homebrew rules, or used monstrous PC rules from an existing source?

When I first got Savage Species we were all eager to play as monsters. The excitable group of 14 year olds that was my gaming circle got to work on some crazy combinations: a troll who'd be our tank, a doppelganger who'd be our rogue stand-in, a succubus who dipped one level in Sorcerer for dem mad spell save DCs, and an elf wizard.

Suffice to say the party sucked outside of their special roles. The doppelganger's signature feature made him less effective in typical dungeon crawls which is what our sessions heavily leaned on, the troll didn't have true regeneration yet and his natural attacks made him more of a subpar monk. The succubus was played by a horny teenage boy and figured that casting Charm Person to make enemies undress while the rest of the party "catches him flat-footed" was the funniest thing ever. The elf wizard was well...a wizard who greased up everyone and summoned monsters and was overall competent at his job.

[Foxwarrior]

The Tome games in my current group allow monster PCs, but playing a monster from the monster manual tends to be much less interesting than playing a Tome character with class levels, so we don't do it much. A decent number of non-humanoid characters with class levels though, and not all of them are mine. (talking and having thumbs are actually just roles you can leave to other party members, it's only being able to fit down staircases that's important for everyone)

Playing an Open Sprite in Shadowrun works more or less well (one of core Shadowrun's big flaws is too few playable classes), although you do sometimes get instantly killed without warning or a save by environmental hazards. Luckily a generous reading of the rules allows Technomancers to bring you back from that kind of death.

[Avoraciopoctules]

When I was running regular Pathfinder games, the monster PC rules offered immense amounts of free power. Our group liked making gonzo super-characters, so grabbing a caster monster PC and then playing them as a super gish was very popular. One guy absolutely loved playing liches, which led to a lot of encounters where the enemies just routed after a turn or two of not damaging him. Another liked making armies of mummy spawn. Someone went absolutely nuts as a devil making dark pacts and creating webs of psychic suggestions. It was a lot of fun, but it also meant that most tactical encounters became utterly trivial.

It was all about what kind of big things you could achieve in the world then, and looking back it might have been better to transition to a different system. Then again, the game of CREATING those PCs within the limits of our d20 ruleset was a ton of fun, so I look back on those campaigns very fondly.

[OgreBattle]

I've played in games where wizards n' druids often transformed into battle forms, and then everything not related to dungeon murder was abstracted.

Then there's RIFTS where everything is quite different. So I'm thinking that playing as a bear or flying bear or fire bear isn't any weirder to run with how much handwaving already happens

[The Adventurer's Almanac]

I played a mutated orca in a game of Apocalypse World. He was basically a Street Shark in corrugated metal shogun armor who brutally ran a village of bandits because of his uplifted killer whale brain.
My partner was a regular chef. His name was Slops, and he was a cannibal quasi-rapist who knew right from wrong and chose wrong anyway.
We were both monsters, but I still think he was worse.

[Iduno]

I was in a 3.0 game where the GM encouraged us to use savage worlds rules or whatever (taking Level Adjustment as a class, where some features came online each level) to play monster characters. Even then, we realized the rules were dumb as hell, and it was going to take twice as long for your character to finish becoming whatever race you wanted as the game would last.

[Emerald]

I've run two "party of monsters" games in 3e using different approaches. In the first, I hadn't intended to run a monstrous game, but ended up giving the entire party a free +8 worth of LA (for reasons that are largely irrelevant for this thread) and having the party refluff themselves into monsters as desired.

The PCs were a "rainbow dragon" (spellscale dragonfire adept with multiple dragon-related templates), a "storm elemental" (goblin sorcerer with multiple elemental-related templates), an "anthropomorphic spider" (thri-kreen swordsage with multiple templates granting extra arms), and a "spawn of Kyuss" (elf dread necromancer with Favored Spawn of Kyuss and several undead-enhancing templates).

The party ended up being surprisingly well-rounded and versatile without increasing their power levels too much. All the stat boosts from the templates led to high skill modifiers across the board, and everyone could fill multiple roles fairly well (e.g. the "elemental" was sneaky and tanky in addition to being a blaster), unlike what you'd see with monster classes or monsters with lots of RHD and LA where having lots of dead HD makes everyone pretty pigeon-holed as Libertad saw with his group. And I didn't need to do anything fancy to compensate for the extra power, mostly just bump up the party's effective level by +3 or so and build encounters normally.


In the second, we did set out to have a monstrous game and planned to use the SS savage progression classes, but after everyone picked the monster they wanted to be, they looked underwhelming at best. So we decided to go with the gestalt variant, pairing one monster class with one PC class, ending up with a firre eladrin//bard, an astral deva//cleric, a storm giant//wizard, and a silver dragon//paladin.

In that case, there was more of a gain in power than breadth (the bard and cleric basically doubled up on their classes, the wizard went the gish route without losing any casting, the paladin had great stats), but again, it wasn't so much more than you'd expect for a normal gestalt game.


So basically, my group has found that the monster rules work well if you take WotC's deliberate inflation of LA into account, and either reduce them outright or compensate for monster progressions getting abilities fairly slowly. Having seen how those campaigns played out, I definitely wouldn't want to run or play in a campaign that used the stated LA values or used the monster progressions on their own.

[Koumei]

One day I'd like to run a game where everyone is a monster using one of the monster prestige classes from that project I did.

Anyway, I have played a Mephit before (using one of aforementioned prestige classes) and had great fun doing so. Overall the main strength was "constant flight". That was the thing that nobody else had. Offensive abilities were certainly good enough to be there (SLAs for damage and defences, and breath weapon for penalties and some damage), but it wasn't outshining anyone else.

There was one game where we were all half dragons (Red), and it turned out we shared a common draconic parent. Given we started at ECL 4 (level 1), things were often pretty dicey but we somehow made our way to level 10-ish before the game fizzled out. The main thing I remember is that the MC and one of the other players had a particularly adversarial relationship in all things so it was largely about fucking with each other in various ways. It was 3.0 so "having a tower shield" meant "you never suffer Attacks of Opportunity, go fuck yourself". The player would end up finding new ways to provoke the statement "Okay so it gets an Attack of Opportunity" and he'd just mime holding a shield in front of his face. Then apparently people learned from us and everyone went about carrying tower shields like they were in fashion. We fought a huge black dragon who was cranky that someone had slain his mate... a medium black dragon. We didn't have time to make accusations of going on a special list, because he noticed that one specific asshole had mounted said mate's head on his tower shield. It was funny in a "we're all in our early twenties and fucking around" sort of way, but not actually a good game.

Then, in a very Slayers-inspired game, I joined when the campaign was already underway and they were searching an area where the main villain had gone on a "soul-destroying" rampage with ~= thinaum spikes. So the MC and I agreed on the best fit for an early addition to the game: they found corpses that had withered and rotted, with small shards of black stone. And one perfectly preserved corpse with the dagger still jutting out. They remove the dagger, and because it hasn't been destroyed (with the soul still in it), the corpse awakens and that's me, a 1st level Human Lich. While my offensive capabilities were quite lacking (the touch attack being better than any 1st level class features), I did enjoy having a very high AC, very good DR for that point in the game, and assorted other immunities - I ended up helping the MC create things that could specifically threaten me without one-shotting other PCs.

I also ended up being one of the most "classically Good aligned" members of the party. And ended up befriending a Shadow Asp, which would hide (harmlessly) inside my ribcage.

[Sir Aubergine]

It makes me sad how much pushback to playing monster pcs exists even now. Giving up 95-100% of the monster's stats, defenses, special attacks, movement modes, senses, and turning them into a re-skinned dwarf or elf is the first step. Step two is for the referee to ALSO ladle X number of humanoid-centric social penalties on top of everything else.