Monsters as Monsters? ...or Monsters as Evil?

...the mob.

Or in programmer terms, the "mobile object" in an MMO.

Ever since D&D 4, monsters have taken on this "mob mentality." Monsters are not monsters, but artificial challenges for the party to defeat for "fun and treasure." The MMO design continues into D&D 5, which is just a reskinned and cleaned-up version of D&D 4. The class powers are hidden in text blocks, the spells for martial classes have been renamed so they don't look like spells, and most of the D&D 4 "improvements" were just shifted around and given an old-school veneer.

Monsters in many games aren't alive, but merely things summoned by the simulation in which the characters live. I get this artificial feeling in D&D 5, and I can't shake it in alternative versions of the game, even ToV and A5E.

In more simulation-based games, such as GURPS, I don't get that "inside the Matrix" feeling. Monsters are real inhabitants of the world; they live and breathe the same air as people, they need to eat and sleep, and these creatures need to survive and fight for food and resources, just like anyone else.

A simulation-based game is an equalizer for everyone. Monsters are the things that try to take the things you have, and kill the people you like. We are in a zero-sum game here.

In the first edition, I didn't get that feeling either. However, monsters often reflect the concepts of chaos and evil; they are not just mobs, but usually metaphors for sins, human failings, weaknesses, and our fears. Monsters were introduced in original D&D as metaphors for evil and the human fears and weaknesses we face every day.

This is why religion came after D&D in the 1980s.

D&D started to replace religion as a way for people to deal with the fears we all have. It is still doing that today, but extending the reach to identity and a place in society. D&D these days is trying to completely replace societal structure with its own, corporate-branded, identity-reflective version of reality. Most of our "fears" these days revolve around social media and how we are perceived. D&D gives the online-addicted people an avenue for this expression, and monsters have taken the back seat.

Instead of greed, gluttony, temptation, or anger, we fear being rejected on social media. Even the fear of death has become secondary to the fear of being attacked and piled on by social media peers.

The quest for a false identity has replaced the metaphor of the monster as a symbol of evil and personal struggle. This is why there are 101 character races to choose from today, since that "self-reflection" of "what you identify as" becomes an insulation layer against who you really are on social media. If I am a blue fox, that comes first, and that is the face I present to others. It makes everything so easy.

If I had to "be myself," then that is hard.

That blue fox identity also serves as an insulation layer for us, allowing us to be worse people online and giving us the bravery to stand behind that persona and act unlike ourselves, because that blue fox is not ourselves. Sometimes, this is "better than ourselves" in those identities, but many times, the false identity subsumes the real one, and you get a generation living in a fantasy world.

This is why old games had a "human-based" world, and some of the character races reflected human failings (dwarves as greed, elves as pride, halflings as gluttony, and so on). These kin were in decline precisely because of that reflection of human weakness, and this was each kin's "original sin." Some of the new character races make no sense since they don't have a role to fill, which is why a race of butterfly-people makes no sense and only exists to fill some identity-based fantasy. They exist solely to sell books and are irrelevant to the moral conflict the game presents.

So if we all have pretend identities, and we all are acting worse toward each other, then we become the monsters the original game had us fighting. We are the representations of sin, fears, and weaknesses. Our new identities embody those traits, be they wrath, lust, gluttony, pride, envy, sloth, or greed. We become a vampire, and now we are the darkness we feared.

The game is now upside-down.

We are playing the monsters now.

The bestiary monsters in these games are inconsequential. They are not a representation of evil. They are punching bags to fill a numerical function of providing us the "slow grind" to level our characters from. It is like any MMO - you are meant to get to the maximum level and then "the real game" starts. It is all designed to keep you in the game, encourage you to spend money, and draw everyone in your social circles in.

Go into any MMO, and you will see the players are worse monsters than anything in those worlds.

And notice how playing an elf or a dwarf isn't "cool" now, unless they provide some min-max benefit to a character build.

Also, notice the late-stage phase we are entering with "cozy gaming," where the games are non-violent and players are asked to take on the roles of baby animals and the like. The alternate-identity gaming trend is nearing its end stages and burning itself out. This happens with many kid-focused entertainment IPs, from Muppets, to Muppet Babies, and then, nothingness. You may see a "teen phase" in here at times, but in general, this is how an IP burns itself out by going younger to stay relevant.

If you take away anything, it is to realize what purpose your monsters are serving in your games. Are they "things in rooms to provide entertaining combat," or are they metaphors for a greater evil, inside us or outside of us? Does fighting them help us deal with our fears and daily struggles? Are they "real factions" in our worlds, or do they just wander in because some table said they were there?

While I love my monster books, I can have so many that my game becomes a mess. There is such a thing as "too many monsters" in a world, and nothing can relate to the thousands of other things in there, with dozens of humanoid races fighting to fill the "orc" role in the world.

I always find it better to play with one monster book and a limited subset first, and explore those relationships before moving on. If the red dragon is the symbol for destruction, greed, and power, let's go with that for a while. Let's give that dragon a tribe of orcs to command and cause trouble with. We don't need to introduce giants, mind flayers, Drow, or any other villains yet, since we have a solid working model with a few key components that we can use to tell focused stories. We don't need Bestiary 4's "steam dragon" showing up, or a shadowed stalker from Bestiary 3.

Pick five monsters that represent fears and weaknesses, make one of them a boss, and go with that.