Characterization of Monsters?

[Zak Arntson]

This is split from    Are non-humans neccessary in FRPGs?. To keep this thread on topic (the race threads keep diversifying, which is no bad thing, so long as new threads are made), here are the questions:

When, historically, did games turn monsters into playable PCs?
Why was this decision made?

To start, I remember my old 1st Ed. AD&D book had half-orcs as a PC race. This seems like a compromise to playing a monster: "You can't play an orc! They're evil!" "Um, okay, about a half-human, half-orc?"

Again with the orcs (I don't have a grounding in the earlier fantasy RPGs, so I may be totally wrong here), the Warcraft game allowed the player to be either Humans or Orcs. To make the Orcs a palatable choice they "humanized" them to an extent. Does this move at all coincide with the PC-ization trend of orcs/monstrous humanoids in roleplaying games? If not, when did orcs as noble savages first occur in gaming?

I'm using the orc here, as I think this was the first occurrence of this phenomenon. In fact, I think humanoid "brute" monsters were the first to be PC-ized, since the other perceived play niches were filled by other existing races. Elves were magic-users, dwarves were civilized warriors, halflings were thieves, but no race filled the "barbarian savage" presented by Howard's Conan.

[jdagna]

I don't have much more to add as far as specific games or historical timing.  I know the Warhammer games made orcs and chaos playable as armies pretty early on (before Warcraft, if memory serves).

As for why: Almost every OD&D player I've talked to knew how to make any monster into a PC with a little do-it-yourself ingenuity.  I have heard stories about people playing gold dragons (because they can morph), ogres, centaurs and minotaurs using house rules for OD&D and AD&D.  

Warhammer Fantasy Role-play even gave you a way to roll stats for monsters.  They did it in the context of individualizing monsters, but I doubt anyone read the rules without thinking "Ah... this could work for a PC."  This was especially true given that WFRP also gave you champion, minor hero and major hero bonuses to further individualize monsters, and those bonuses pretty well matched up to what PCs could earn through their careers.  So... once you knew how to roll their stats and learned that monsters advance much like PCs, there's not much imagination required to make anything playable.

[pete_darby]

Hmmm... T&T and RQ certainly had that option pretty early on, about 1979-1980 at the latest, iirc.

T&T with Youwarkees and Daemon's. Just say no, kids.

[John Kim]

When, historically, did games turn monsters into playable PCs?
Why was this decision made?

In 1976, "Monsters! Monsters!" was published as a spin-off of "Tunnels & Trolls".  It was done as a straight reversal of the D&D and T&T premise, mostly as a parody, I would say.  

http://66.102.7.104/search?q=cache:AnVFOPRxwk4J:www.rpg.net/news%2Breviews/reviews/rev_5852.html+Monsters+Monsters+Flying+Buffalo+review&hl=en&ie=UTF-8

[Mike Holmes]

TFT had goblins as an option in ITL in 1980, along with pretty much anything else if you put your mind to it. Prootwaddles were a silly option presented as PC options.

In a lot of ways, the question is really, at what point did games start treating monsters and characters in the same manner mechanically? It's an abberation caused by D&D that monsters were presented in a shorthand, and did not get the treatment that player races did. Meaning that any attempt to play a monster race would have the additional complication of having to figure out how to stat out the monster in the system's terms - which was almost impossible in D&D. What would a dragon's strength have been?

Once you start treating monsters with the same mechanics, then PC monsters are just a step away, even if the text suggests not doing it.

Also, note that Traveller (1978) had aliens as playable races - not precisely monsters, but it at least didn't treat the aliens quite as much as cannon fodder for the PCs to kill (though with Zhodani and Vargr, you saw quite a lot of that behavior anyhow).

Oh, Tekumel (1975) had extrememly non-human creatures as potential player races right off the bat. In that adaptation of D&D, at least you had the notion that even races sometimes inimical to humans could be player races. And that's in the first ever published setting.

Mike

[Jack Spencer Jr]

When, historically, did games turn monsters into playable PCs?

Answer: day one

Other Character Types: There is no reason that players cannot be allowed to play as virtually anything, provided they begin relatively weak and work up to the top, i.e., a player wishing to be a Dragon would have to begin as let us say, a "young" one and progress upwards in the usual manner, step being predetermined by the campaign referee.

A couple things.

1) it isn't very solidly defined, with the GM making it up themselves. But then, plenty of original D&D was to be defined by the GM, so what's one more thing?

2) It doesn't seem give much of an answer to "why" other than "why not"

3) I recall a Murphies Rules gig which said Balrog instead of Dragon. I have a later white box edition which had been sanitized of Tolkienisms.

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

I think it's a given that actual play included "monsters as player-characters" from day one. I bet all of us oldsters remember someone who insisted on playing a werebear. But we're talking about textual rules, right Zak?

John scooped my first reference-in-mind with Monsters! Monsters! I'll qualify Mike's TFT point further, to point out that orcs are listed in the first precursor to TFT, the microgame called Melee, and interestingly, had no mechanical differences from human characters (they were specified in all capitals as EVIL). That was, um, 1977, right?

Jack, when you reference rules-versions of D&D, please give the actual title, year of publication, and author, OK? There was no actual "original D&D."

Best,
Ron

[Jack Spencer Jr]

Jack, when you reference rules-versions of D&D, please give the actual title, year of publication, and author, OK? There was no actual "original D&D."

Erm... I don't know what you're getting at with there's no original D&D. There is the orignal digest-sized three-book box set published 1974 republished 1976. The quote comes from, as noted, Men & Magic: Volume 1 of three booklets.

[John Kim]

Jack, when you reference rules-versions of D&D, please give the actual title, year of publication, and author, OK? There was no actual "original D&D."

I can confirm his quote, at least according to scans of the early books  that I have copies of.  This is from the "Vol. 1: Men & Magic" book, which is one of three booklets (along with "Vol. 2, Monsters & Treasure" and "Vol. 3, The Underworld & Wilderness Adventures").  I don't see a copyright date, but it has a Forward on page 3 dated "1 November 1973" by "E. Gary Gygax".  I believe that these were printed in January of 1974.

[Scourge108]

Somebody already mentioned Monsters! Monsters!  I remember another game that came out right before the Storyteller system hit the shelves called Night Life.  It was a good game that was ignored for being cheaply done, and sure to be in a WOD heartbreaker category even though I think it may have preceded Vampire.  The characters all played modern monsters, like vampires, werewolves, witches, etc.  White Wolf took the same idea, focused on one "species" of monster at a time, and made it much more successful.

I know it started for my first AD&D group with reincarnation spells.  Death was only an inconvenience, but if you couldn't afford a ressurrection spell from the local clergy, you'd have to get a reincarnation spell cheaper from a Druid or Magic-User.  I had one character who was reincarnated twice, once as a bear and once as an orc.  So we were kind of forced to figure out a way to deal with monster PCs.

[Mike Holmes]

And people have been refering to that edition of late as "Original" or OD&D, of late. As in "I'm such a pure gamer, that I've gone back to the source of RPGs, OD&D." Weird.

Anyhow, yes, Melee was 1977. But I didn't mention it because of the fact that it's a board game. :-P And note that orcs in TFT were different because of the addition of the IQ stat.

It does, however set a precedent for taking a monster character, and may be a first in some ways there (you can see the proto-GURPSness). Again, what I think is seminal about the whole thing is how it decides to treat all monsters with the same rules as characters. That is, you don't bring the monsters over to the special character rules, there is only one set of rules. Even Traveller had "monster" rules now that I think about it with the special rules for "animal encounters".

Interestingly, Chivalry & Sorcery first edition had levels for their orcs about 30 years before D&D did. Full treatment, really, as opposed to Rolemaster which said that specific races could vary in level, but only in a range (not too different than some of the special 1AD&D rules for orcs and hobgoblins, etc).

Mike

[Ron Edwards]

Hello,

Mike, you wrote,

Again, what I think is seminal about the whole thing is how it decides to treat all monsters with the same rules as characters. That is, you don't bring the monsters over to the special character rules, there is only one set of rules.

That's a good point, and I think that you're right that TFT is probably where that happened first.

Monsters! Monsters! presented a way to re-do the very basic monster-rules in T&T such that they were more like player-characters, but it was fairly rough in terms of the conversion. In fact, the 5th edition of T&T presents a range of methods to achieve this goal, none of which are entirely smooth.

Regarding D&D, it's interesting to me that neither the first boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons (1977, Eric Holmes, not to be confused with "Basic Dungeons & Dragons, which is another game entirely) nor the first versions of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (Gygax, 1978-1979; the first three hardbacks) included rules for monsters for player-characters, as I recall. So that text from the 1974 boxed set just sort of vanished.

However, does anyone more scholarly than myself know when the first articles in Dragon (or possibly Dungeon) presented rules for playing, e.g., minotaurs, dragons, lizardmen, were-creatures, and ogres? (those being my first guesses at monster PCs) I do remember a Dragon article about playing liches from roughly 1981.

Best,
Ron

[Sean]

My dragon magazine archive isn't working (some graphics problem - weird) so I can't look that up for you. However, I do remember Phoebus (a lizard man) and Talbot (a centaur) as featured PCs in the Rogues Gallery, published 1980, which was amusing because this supplement was published at the same time the general 'clampdown' on more free-form D&D play and house rules from EGG's bully pulpit in Dragon and elsewhere was going on in full force - 'only officially approved races' and that kind of thing (which actually even contradicts the 1e DMG, which is tighter than OD&D, but at least leaves some flex up to GM option).

The explanations given were that these characters got their races by way of Reincarnation spells, which then became institutionalized as the one approved way to get a weird nonhuman character.

(Enter the Arduin Grimoires, which had a random reincarnation chart with stuff like Star Demons on it. Did I ever tell you folks about my 36th level Pit Fiend magic user? That was a reincarnation job too...)

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By the way, people of my acquaintance use the term OD&D much more consistently than some discussions here (possibly reacting to sloppy usage at rpg.net?) would suggest. 'OD&D', short for "Original Dungeons and Dragons" - meaning the first widely produced version of the game - refers to the 'three brown books' game, sometimes also called 'white box' (though that box only came with the later editions), all of which contained that bit about playing any ol' monster race you wanted (before and after the purge of Tolkienisms). People who use OD&D to refer to the J. Eric Holmes-edited "Blue Book" 'Basic Set' rules or to early AD&D ('1e') are just wrong - I don't know where this usage is the norm, but it's nowhere I've ever been, and not standard among any D&D players of my acquaintance.

[james_west]

As far as "Why was this decision made?"

I think the answer that most easily springs to mind is Exploration - once you've seen Orcs, you've got to wonder what it's like from their point of view.

- James

[M. J. Young]

Regarding D&D, it's interesting to me that neither the first boxed set of Dungeons & Dragons (1977, Eric Holmes, not to be confused with "Basic Dungeons & Dragons, which is another game entirely) nor the first versions of Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (Gygax, 1978-1979; the first three hardbacks) included rules for monsters for player-characters, as I recall. So that text from the 1974 boxed set just sort of vanished.

Not quite.

OAD&D's DMG (mine is an original cover copy, but the cover and title page are long gone from it so I don't have the copyright information at my fingertips) devotes most of page 21 to a discussion of THE MONSTER AS A PLAYER CHARACTER. It primarily focuses on why player character races are the best options, and how to discourage players from playing monsters without outright forbidding it. In the end, it says

So you are virtually on your own with regard to monsters as player characters. You have advice as to why they are not featured, why no details of monster character classes are given herein. The rest is up to you, for when all is said and done, it is your world, and your players must live in it with their characters. Be good to yourself as well as them, and everyone concerned will benefit from a well-conceived, well-ordered, fairly-judged campaign built upon the best of imaginative and creative thinking.

So it was covered, but in the loosest of ways.

I don't recall it being covered in BD&D1, but it has been far too long since I perused those pages.

By the way, people of my acquaintance use the term OD&D much more consistently than some discussions here (possibly reacting to sloppy usage at rpg.net?) would suggest. 'OD&D', short for "Original Dungeons and Dragons" - meaning the first widely produced version of the game - refers to the 'three brown books' game, sometimes also called 'white box' (though that box only came with the later editions), all of which contained that bit about playing any ol' monster race you wanted (before and after the purge of Tolkienisms). People who use OD&D to refer to the J. Eric Holmes-edited "Blue Book" 'Basic Set' rules or to early AD&D ('1e') are just wrong - I don't know where this usage is the norm, but it's nowhere I've ever been, and not standard among any D&D players of my acquaintance.

I'm given to understand that OAD&D is the currently accepted abbreviation (at least by those who interact with Mr. Gygax on it) for Original Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and that OD&D applies, as Sean suggests, to that earlier game. No current abbreviations are standard for the two versions of Basic Dungeons & Dragons, although BD&D crops up, usually in reference to the second.

--M. J. Young