Sunday, June 24, 2018

Filler monsters and races, or, making demikind more colorful?

Game bestiaries commonly suffer from filler. Filler monsters exist to pad out the book and most of them never get used. There are loads and loads of humanoids, making the fantasy world seem crowded with a village of yet another unique race dotting the land every few miles. Many monsters are also redundant, such as the countless varieties of catfolk, ratfolk, birdfolk, and other beastfolk. Most undead are just a variation of other undead, such as a half-dozen different types of ghosts who drowned or burned, and do not really deserve separate statblocks. Ideally, things like beastfolk and undead should be constructed using a toolkit.

Filler monsters are particularly prevalent in Pathfinder. Rather than providing options to customize existing monsters, the Pathfinder Bestiaries add loads and loads of monsters that exist to fulfill niche concepts that could have been adequately covered by variants of the existing monsters. Rather than making the chromatic and metallic dragons more diverse through additional options, we got loads and loads of wholly separate families of dragons like "imperial", "forest", "void", "occult", etc. Rather than making the existing demons and devils more diverse, we got loads and loads of wholly new families of fiend to fulfill random niche concepts like "hindu", "japanese", "fear demon", etc.

There are fairly simple historical reasons for this. Earlier editions of the game lacked CR or class levels for monsters, so the designers filled out the challenge ladder by inventing new monsters. Furthermore, monsters were not subject to customization and the writers were OCD, so whenever a new idea was needed they made up a whole new monster for it rather than a variant. The game also conflates race with culture and decided to split races into sub-races with different outlooks rather than have one race with different cultures. Again, earlier editions condensed race into class, and only later editions separated the two. The label of "demi-human" to the other PC races speaks volumes.

This leads to another problem: humans are the only race with ethnic diversity. Other races too often feel like funny looking humans. Too often whole races are pigeonholed into a single monolithic culture. Humans feel redundant when fantasy races steal all of their cultural uniqueness. Every member of the party acts exactly the same regardless of their race or implied culture.

With the monsters it is simple to condense them into families which include representatives at every CR, whether due to class levels or other monster building choices. The Fantasycraft game has a novel mechanic for scaling the same monsters at all levels. With the races we have our work cut out for us. We need to make fantasy races more culturally diverse within a single race without resorting to making up sub-races (or maybe separate racial and cultural traits into distinct packages), and we need to make fantasy races psychologically distinct from humans to justify them not being human or else devise some kind of explanation why everyone has human psychology.

With regard to demikind all having the same psychology, I have entertained the idea that they are all distantly descended from fey who became mortal or something. Alternately, maybe humans are distinguished by their mental flexibility compared to other demikind (that and their bizarre cross-species fecundity) and that explains why non-human cultures separated by great distances in time and space have changed little since their original division.

Critique of demikind

"Demikind" is a term for humans and near-human races in D&D, like elves, dwarves, gnomes and halflings. The core races, basically. "Demihuman" was the term prior to 3rd edition, and remains the case in OSR. I have seen a few major criticisms of the core races:
  • Race is cosmetic. "Everyone plays their character the same way regardless of race. They all speak the same language (common), they all share the same morals and beliefs, they all eat the same food and they usually share the same motives."
  • Humans are boring. Humans "contribute nothing to the game-world." They are "the race that doesn’t really have anything particularly strange or unique about it; the one that doesn’t really seem to have a niche or anything they’re particularly good at."
  • Cultures are monolithic. "When you pick a race in D&D, you’re also getting a pre-packaged culture with that choice. This happens because all races in D&D that are not human have a single monoculture that is assumed to be true and consistent across both space and time."

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