Reverse Dungeons/Monster PCs

[thorswulf]

I read the article at the Great Svenny's website about the first games of D&D and it mentioned some of the guys played monsters. Has anybody else tried this? I think characters playing goblins, orcs, gnolls, hobgoblins, maybe bugbears would be fun for a change of pace.

Repel those filthy delvers! Hoard your gold, rip off the kobolds! Sounds like fun to me. You could even run the dungeon as a dungeon. Maybe a rival clan of orcs wants a new base of operations. Any ideas/thoughts about this?

My inclination is to let characters with high strength and charisma rolls play higher hit dice monsters. Weedy, but smart characters could still be magic users/witchdoctors or priests/shamans.

[Deleted]

Once in a while, when a player dies IMC, & the group is in a spot where it's kind of hard to "insert" a new character into the game, I've let them help me out by playing the creatures/NPC.'s. I've only done it a handful of times, but it was pretty fun for everyone involved. As for letting a player handle a monster as a character throughout a game, I've never done that.

[Finarvyn]

Remember that the original game was based on miniatures combat, and that one group of players played the forces of Law (good guys) while the other played the forces of Chaos (bad guys).

As the game evolved into one-figure-one-man, this is what led some of the players to run monster characters. And back then monsters didn't seem to have so many neat talents.

[dwayanu]

This enters my game chiefly when players arrive late for a session or I have too many (or a player's available "normal" characters are all KIA). Otherwise, there's little inclination these days to take on such a role (and it rarely develops beyond a "one-shot" expedient). The scheme of all players working together as a single party on the same side is too deeply entrenched -- partly for practical time-management reasons when sessions are relatively infrequent and short (and usually dependent on a single referee's moderation).

One approach I like is not to build up (e.g.) a Goblin to a Hero but rather to "trade up" to a more powerful type of monster when the player scores enough XP. If a player sticks with it long enough, he may eventually command a Balrog and a horde of Orcs. That obviously calls for a different sort of roleplaying than sticking with a single persona, but I think a difference is intrinsic to playing any role alien to the human condition.

Anticipating a question: I have no set rule for how many XP are required for advancement; I devise that on a case-by-case basis.

[Deleted]

Virgin post here.

Several years ago, in grad school, I ran a game for my regular players in which I designed a dungeon and assigned monsters in it that had a reasonable chance of cooperating. I told the players that they were the monsters; an invasion by adventurers would occur in roughly 30 minutes real time... this was the resources they had on hand for defense... and good luck.

TPK for the invaders. My players were merciless even though the NPCs outclassed them power-wise.

[Finarvyn]

semajthesilent said:

Virgin post here.

Welcome to the boards!

semajthesilent said:

Several years ago, in grad school, I ran a game for my regular players in which I designed a dungeon and assigned monsters in it that had a reasonable chance of cooperating.

I think that the OD&D books suggest that monsters ought to be played such that they can be reasoned with, but for whatever reason my groups always kill first and ask questions later.

As far as reversing the monster-as-villian theme, there's a book for T&T called Monsters! Monsters! designed to allow for players to play the monsters. There's also an AD&D 2E module called Reverse Dungeon where you are the monsters trying to defend your dungeon against a band of pesky adventurers. Interesting concept.

[serendipity]

Several years ago I was part of a game in which the PCs were all half-orcs. Illness had stricken the orc village--though oddly, none of the half-orcs were affected, something which the full orcs viewed with great suspicion. We were sent on a mission (read: evicted from orc society) to find the cause of the mysterious illness. To ensure we would (a) do our best to help, and (b) return with speed, they gave each of us a dose of a slow acting poison. If we didn't come back, we wouldn't survive either. I'm not entirely certain what the elders thought we'd accomplish, as we were all extreme novices (read: first level characters) with little knowledge of the outside world. (Of course, metagaming on the part of one or two of the others gave them an edge....) I was particularly upset as time passed and my fellow half-orcs did little to further our cause. As I recall, the response was, "Well, duh. They didn't really expect us to survive this anyway." Er, and we didn't. We succumbed to the poison, but not until after quite a few game sessions.

--Sere

[Falconer]

B2 The Keep on the Borderlands is easy to run from a baddies perspective. The PCs could be all from one or two of the tribes in the Caves of Chaos, and they can raid other monsters' caves, and eventually the Keep itself, which is very well designed for either a siege or a dungeon crawl.

[wulfgar]

In my early D&D days, we had a couple monster PCs, but they weren't "bad guys". They were members of the party just like anybody else. Sometimes they were taken captive and "saw the light" and sometimes they were being held prisoner by their fellow monsters and rescued by the party- in return they joined up. Two that I remember specifically were a lizard man and kobold that became adventurers.