So we had a D&D 5 play session last Sunday, and armed with my new Player's Handbook, DarkgarX and I settled down to play in the Forgotten Realms setting.
Lacking a Monster Manual or module, the ground rules were as follows: there are no monsters in the world. To keep true to the spirit of the game, dragons and other creatures were 'legends' often talked about but never really seen. Oh, and the short monster appendix in the back of the book? Those are in, and that makes skeletons and zombies available for use.
I know, for all you Baldur's Gate and other D&D video-game players, this borders on the unthinkable. With no monsters, no orcs, no gnolls, no goblins, no beholders, no giant beetles, or anything else creepy crawly, what is there to do?
The answer came quickly, and the game took a pleasingly dark turn. Humans and other intelligent races quickly filled the gap the monsters left, and there were all sorts of thieves, maniacs, bandits, evil merchant guilds, dark elves, demonic cults, secretive necromancers, criminals, and other intelligent opponents you could shake a stick at. They started coming out of the woodwork, and nobody knew who you could trust or who has some sort of evil agenda.
On the positive side, there were plenty of distressed merchants, temples needing assistance, town guards trying to keep order, haughty royals, crowds of onlookers, and many other neutral and good NPCs who played a part in the action. It was interesting to see the factions and other groups in the world come alive and actually matter.
For the Realms, this was perfect. I've always imagined the Realms to be very strong on characters, factions, and personalities, and this strange turn of events made the role-playing and story systems in D&D 5 actually see some use at our table. The over-nerfing and elimination of strong and powerful NPCs in the Realms role-playing supplements (especially 4th Edition) just felt so wrong to me, and this is why. The Realms thrives on its powerful NPCs, and the good ones are just as important as the evil ones, because you should never assume glowingly good and pure PC motivations.
Oh, the "PCs are always of good alignment" assumptions of world designers, please go away. Saying "high level NPCs will always come in and save the day" makes no more sense than it would in this world, and it is a unrealistic and silly assumption about how a real world works.
You can't roleplay with most monsters, but you can with intelligent humans, so we had a blast. Players were forced to make serious decisions about moral quandaries, it wasn't assumed every hole in the wilderness was some dungeon filled with XPs, and adventuring meant involving yourself with the factions and people in the various locations in the world. We had a chaotic good thief PC agonizing about stealing from 'good' townspeople to get by, which was just pure role-playing gold.
The wilderness felt empty, but who cares? We spent the majority of our time in Arabel, and nobody really cared about getting lost in the woods. Factions of evil NPCs started coming to light, the average townperson's problems mattered, and the temples of the various Faerun gods saw some use. It surprised me how little we missed the monsters, and how well evil factions of humans and other intelligent races filled in for them.
Part of me gets this 'baby food' feeling with some monsters, that some are designed for low-level play, and they go on up from there. It's one of the things I liked and didn't like about D&D 4 was the video-game progression of the monster types. With character races as enemies, players did not know what level they were, and they had to judge fights and be a little careful not to get in over their heads. Beautiful stuff, that careful thinking ahead and judging a fight. It was a pleasure not hearing "goblins are wimps, no problem" for once at the table.
It's always been true in D&D that character classes made the ultimate enemy, and to have a world 100% devoted to that was fun and challenging.
The bad parts? The outside world felt empty and a lot less dangerous. There was really no reason to go exploring or adventuring in the traditional sense, and I could also feel the world grow a little less fantastic. There was also a reservation that the simple motivation of "bash the monsters" was gone, and players longed for places where they could just smash things based on shapes rather than have to roleplay motivations and worry about stories and justification for the guards. We switched to Pathfinder the other day, and when the monsters appeared in that setting, it felt like a relief.
It highlights the over-reliance of "monsters as motivation" for some games, and this is likely a byproduct of "monsters as XP source" in many games. Monsters, they are just so easy to use to get the players moving, aren't they? It's a problem, and a crutch too easily used in place of real stories and conflicts.
Still, without a Monster Manual in hand, this was a fun experiment, and it actually fit my feelings of how the Realms works better than a lot of the 4th Edition material did. I am tempted to keep the Realms this way for my 5th Edition games in it, and just make this world about evil and the dark hearts of man. If this world sees monsters, they would be legends encountered sparingly, demons would need a pact to be summoned (and not walk around freely), and single dragons would live in caves far away from the world of man. The monsters are needed to fill the role of legends, but putting evil characters in the spotlight made this world come alive for me.
I could never fill a dungeon full of orcs in this world ever again without feeling like I am taking a shortcut. This experiment has made me rethink of the notion of what a monster is, and if they ever reappear in this setting, they will definitely be more fantastic, out of the normal, and special than they were before. Don't let the "defeat thousands of 3d shapes" assembly-line mentality of MMOs make you discount what one monster can do or be in your game.
It's a "monster", after all, there has to be something to that word other than "XP with a funny shape."
But still, there is something far more satisfying and real about the inhabitants of the world taking up the torch as "monsters." You do not need a Monster Manual to play, nor do you need modules. Just crack open the Player's Handbook and say, "That's all there is in this world, everything else lives in legend."
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