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This is a pet peeve of mine that I was recently reminded of and I am compelled to write a thread about it. I have a love/hate relationship with the idea of monster types that has been present in the WotC editions of D&D (although a type mechanic did appear in the Rules Cyclopedia). IMO, it has never really worked except in the 4e iteration which has unfortunately been discarded.

There are several problems with the type mechanic, IMO. Basically, the mechanic is arbitrarily defined, needlessly restrictive, short-sighted and infeasible to adjudicate.

The first and worst problem is that the types are supposed to be a taxonomy with in-universe physical ramifications (since spells and such key off of them), but the definitions are arbitrary and open to interpretation. Not to mention the fact that their meaning has changed, sometimes dramatically, across different editions. Furthermore, the same jargon may be used to refer to multiple different things (e.g. elemental, dragon and giant refer to both types and subsets of those types, which is pointlessly confusing). This means that in some cases it may be impossible to determine which type is most suitable for a monster and you have to basically chose arbitrarily.

An example would be the giant type. Ostensibly it includes any giant from world mythology, but that would be wrong. It only includes some giants from mythology, whereas others go into other types for no apparent reason. Many giants from Greek mythology have monstrous features, such as snakes for legs, the head of a lion, and whatever is going on with Typhon, and since they are not giant humans they have to be sorted into monstrous humanoid or monstrosity. The same goes for monstrous giants from Norse mythology, such as Fenris and Jormungand (who are the children of giant parents, and Norse mythology refers to a number of other giants born in the form of giant animals), which in D&D would be considered magical beasts or monstrosities.

Another example would be the chimera and hydra from Greek mythology. In Greek mythology they were considered dragons. In the Rules Cyclopedia the chimera is considered a dragon. In D&D, the chimera and hydra are considered magical beasts or monstrosities.

A third example would be the fey type. It's official descriptions makes vague reference to nature spirits but in practice includes many different concepts including British fairies (e.g. sprites), Greek rustic deities (e.g. nymphs, satyrs, dryads), Amerind monsters (e.g. wendigo), fairy tale monsters (e.g. hags), and monsters unique to D&D (e.g. blink dog, eladrin, guardinal), but does not include others entities considered fairies in mythology (e.g. dullahans, fomorians, valkyries). Many of these are not what you would think of when you hear the phrase "nature spirit" and this arbitrarily ignores elementals who are literally nature spirits by the dictionary definition.

The second problem derives from the first. The type mechanic has generally operated according to a hierarchical semantic structure, except in Rules Cyclopedia and some d20 derivatives where it was non-hierarchical. Since the definitions of the monster types are essentially arbitrary and open to interpretation, a hierarchical semantic structure is inadequate. Different types refer to different things that are not comparable, such as relative size, apparent physiology, extraplanar origin, etc.

In the rules as written, it is not allowed for a monster to have more than one type even if it would make logical sense. For example, a hypothetical "fire nymph" (like that appearing in the 3pp Monsters of the Mind or Tome of Horrors) would logically constitute an elemental/fey type. I could go on with numerous examples but I am sure you get the gist.

4e made a valiant effort to organize these into distinct planar origins and body types which probably resulted in the best type mechanic thus far, but this was undone in 5e. Even so, 4e still suffered from the conceit that the types need to be hierarchical, which they do not. For example, fey was defined as a planar origin. This is inadequate since the rules implicitly assume you are using the 4e world axis cosmology, and it only raises more questions since many fey are native to the material world.

The third problem derives from the second. The type mechanic is ad hoc and does not account for anything that is not designed from the ground up to work within the mechanic. For example, there is no type for an anthropomorphic spirit of neutrality to sit between the celestial and fiend types; elemental and fey do not seem to qualify: can you imagine the rilmani being typed as elemental or fey? There is no type for an anthropomorphic spirit of order, either; modrons are typed as constructs, but surely Nirvana/Mechanus is inhabited by non-constructs, yes? 4e suffered from the same problem to a lesser degree, since the type mechanic did not account for planar origins outside the world axis cosmology nor body types which did not fit the few types established as the default.

Since the type mechanic was built ad hoc, we simultaneously have more and less than we need. The monstrosity type is a vague catch-all category that encourages lazy design, there are not enough types to encompasses what can and does exist, there are too many types which are unnecessarily niche or poorly defined, and the limited number of poorly defined and mutually exclusive types in general encourages pigeonholing and stifles creativity.

The fourth problem is that types are used for game balance, even though that does not work. For example, druids are only allowed to assume the forms of beasts, but the tressym is a beast and has innate spell turning. While Paizo is generally not a good source of balance advice, Pathfinder addressed this problem by placing limits on abilities within polymorph spells. For example, Pathfinder introduced multiple levels of spells which let you turn into animals and eventually magical animals, but the spell text itself specified which abilities you had access too and it categorically denied most magical abilities. Not that this works at ensuring game balance since by the time you can assume the form of a basilisk you have access to vastly more useful spells, but as far as ideas go this wasn't half-baked.

Not only that, but 1pp and 3pp introduce new types and such. Some sourcebooks introduced new types to get around the limitations of the type mechanic, like "spirit", "manifestation" or "biomechanoid" (these are actual types and I can cite them if you like). Some sourcebooks introduce flavorful abilities which refer to adjectives that exist outside the type mechanic, such as "serpents," "arachnids," "birds" and so forth. There is no easy way to balance that without inventing guidelines for creating and adjudicating new types, which is a whole other can of worms.

In my opinion, the type mechanic needs to be overhauled. Like, rewritten from first principles.

What do you think?

OK, I'm with you here, but are we looking to increase or decrease the amount of monster types?

I find it works best if I ignore this stuff :D - until it comes up in some rules mechanic like Wildshape, when if GMing I'll make a judgement call if necessary. If I want to say Owlbears are (also) Beasts at my table, no one is going to stop me. But I haven't seen it come up much -  I think there's that spell that per RAW can summon Pixies. I get way more pain from my resident min-maxer using Animate Object.

I agree with your premise and that 4E is the only WotC edition to do monster tagging correctly (largely because the tags were treated explicitly as keywords for their exception-based design).

I use it in a similar way for the system I'm building. Creatures have a size tag (pretty obvious), an origin tag (indicating what plane of existence they originate from; abyssal, astral, natural, primal and shadow in my case), and a shape tag (beast - meaning it lacks the ability to perform fine manipulation with its limbs, humanoid - default for interacting with the environment, hybrid - something with mostly animal features but still able to perform fine manipulation via some means, or swarm - an amorphous mass of smaller elements, cells or creatures that acts as a single monster).

Some also have subtype tags. Primals have element tags; air, earth, feral, fire, frost, metal, plant or water. Abyssals have elemental echoes tags; brine, dust, embers, husk, miasma, rust, slush or vermin. Astrals have aspect tags; dominion, knowledge, seduction, protection, etc. Shadow may or may not have the undead tag depending on whether they arise naturally in the Shadow World or are created by necromancy. Naturals may or may not have either the bio-formed (created by ancient biomancers and, if they have animal intelligence, able to be completely domesticated if trained from young despite their often fierce appearances) or mutant (a stable mutation resulting from the Cataclysm and, if they have animal intelligence, extremely difficult to nearly impossible to train, much less domesticate). Swarms have a second size listed as a subtype that indicates the size of its constituent parts for purposes of squeezing through small spaces and such)

Each of those primary or subtype tags only exists because they interact with the rules in some way. Size and Shape determine how they interact with the environment (ex. a beast might be able to open a simple latch, but lacks the manual dexterity to work a padlock or write using a pen regardless of its intelligence... it could probably do rough writing using a stick in their mouth on dirt or another large surface though). Magic circles can hedge out specific origins or subtype keywords (but not by size or shape) for example.

3e's tags were also a mess, but at least they referred to specific elements, even if placing monsters into those categories was haphazard. When the tag said 'Ooze' it referred to a specific collection of rules about how you derive the stats (HD type, BAB, Saves, Skill Points, Weapon and Armor Proficiency) and any special rules that apply to all 'Ooze' type creatures.

5E on the other hand explicitly states that its types have zero mechanical weight other than to act as keywords to potentially hang other things off of (the example given was that an arrow of dragon slaying would work on any creature with the dragon type). As with all things 5E its half-assed design work under the philosophy of "Well, the GMs can just house rule anything that doesn't actually work" (which, while technically true, begs the question of why we're paying for this rule set if we're supposed to just ignore it in play... particularly in cases where they knew it would be a problem that would come up often but still left it to the GMs to fix on their own).

Doesn't this actually date back to the original Ranger and the "Giant" class that he gets a damage bonus against? Or maybe even magic swords getting a higher bonus (or special power) against certain creature types...

I think the "fey" is just a problem with D&D period. Early fantasy writers like Tolkien and Howard basically said "faeries weren't real, but they were inspired by tales of real life races and such" (in Howard's case, they were Picts or people before the Picts that inspired the legends).  

EGG seems to have adopted this early on, with Brownies & Pixies & Sprites possibly being related to hobbits/halflings, albeit innately magical ones. But then later someone decided there should also be late medieval/Victorian style faeries on top of it.

I always think faeries are basically an artificial creation though, because they don't represent actual ancient beliefs, but are the result of those ancient beliefs and stories being bastardized and half remembered. The Fomorians and Fir Bolg were likely just the original inhabitants of Ireland, men.  They got turned into monsters or giants. Same for the Tuatha de Dannan. They got turned into elves. Lugh was probably a war leader or king that got turned into a god, then later, corrupted into the leprechaun.

I think Fey can work as a concept, if its an origin rather than a creature type. Fey would be any creature native to that Otherworld (which is how 4E used it).

So Eladrin were Fey because they lived primarily in the parallel world called the Feywild (the world's brighter and more intense reflection vs. the Shadowfell, the world's duller and darker shadow), but Elves were "Natural" because they'd lived long enough on the Prime Material Plane for the Fey descriptor to no longer apply to them.

Notably, 4E never included a "fairy" as a monster. All those tiny winged humanoids were called sprites or pixies (who had the Fey origin tag because they originated in the Feywild) in 4E. Thus, the use of Fey was an internally consistent descriptor that could be applied to humanoids of all sizes and to beasts, even types of undead. Their uniting element was the plane of existence they hailed from; in this case a mirror of the Prime Material Plane where magic and life were more intense.

Quote from: JeremyR;1056004Doesn't this actually date back to the original Ranger and the "Giant" class that he gets a damage bonus against?

Yes, it does.

Yes, it makes sense. It makes as much sense as taxonomy, which is as old as history, and has been similarly contested with exceptions since both of them came about here on earth. :)

So as a point of reference here are the definitions

Aberrations are utterly alien beings. Many of them have innate magical abilities drawn from the creature's alien mind rather than the mystical forces of the world. The quintessential aberrations are aboleths, and slaadi.

Beasts are nonhumanoid creatures that are a natural part of the fantasy ecology. Some of them have magical powers, but most are unintelligent and lack any society or language. Beasts include all varieties of ordinary animals, dinosaurs, and giant versions of animals.

Celestials are creatures native to the Upper Planes. Many of them are the servants of deities, employed as messengers or agents in the mortal realm and throughout the planes. Celestials are good by nature, so the exceptional celestial who strays from a good alignment is a horrifying rarity. Celestials include angels, couatls, and pegasi.

Constructs are made, not born. Some are programmed by their creators to follow a simple set of instructions, while others are imbued with sentience and capable of independent thought. Golems are the iconic constructs. Many creatures native to the outer plane of Mechanus, such as modrons, are constructs shaped from the raw material of the plane by the will of more powerful creatures.

Dragons are large reptilian creatures of ancient origin and tremendous power. True dragons, including the good metallic dragons and the evil chromatic dragons, are highly intelligent and have innate magic. Also in this category are creatures distantly related to true dragons, but less powerful, less intelligent, and less magical, such as wyverns and pseudodragons.

Elementals are creatures native to the elemental planes. Some creatures of this type are little more than animate masses of their respective elements, including the creatures simply called elementals. Others have biological forms infused with elemental energy. The races of genies, including djinn and efreet, form the most important civilizations on the elemental planes. Other elemental creatures include azers, invisible stalkers, and water weirds.

Fey are magical creatures closely tied to the forces of nature. They dwell in twilight groves and misty forests. In some worlds, they are closely tied to the Feywild, also called the Plane of Faerie. Some are also found in the Outer Planes, particularly the planes of Arborea and the Beastlands. Fey include dryads, pixies, and satyrs.

Fiends are creatures of wickedness that are native to the Lower Planes. A few are the servants of deities, but many more labor under the leadership of archdevils and demon princes. Evil priests and mages sometimes summon fiends to the material world to do their bidding. If an evil celestial is a rarity, a good fiend is almost inconceivable. Fiends include demons, devils, hell hounds, rakshasas, and yugoloths.

Giants tower over humans and their kind. They are humanlike in shape, though some have multiple heads (ettins) or deformities (fomorians). The six varieties of true giant are hill giants, stone giants, frost giants, fire giants, cloud giants, and storm giants. Besides these, creatures such as ogres and trolls are giants.

Humanoids are the main peoples of a fantasy gaming world, both civilized and savage, including humans and a tremendous variety of other species. They have language and culture, few if any innate magical abilities (though most humanoids can learn spellcasting), and a bipedal form. The most common humanoid races are the ones most suitable as player characters: humans, dwarves, elves, and halflings. Almost as numerous but far more savage and brutal, and almost uniformly evil, are the races of goblinoids (goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears), orcs, gnolls, lizardfolk, and kobolds.

Monstrosities are monsters in the strictest sense--frightening creatures that are not ordinary, not truly natural, and almost never benign. Some are the results of magical experimentation gone awry (such as owlbears), and others are the product of terrible curses (including minotaurs). They defy categorization, and in some sense serve as a catch-all category for creatures that don't fit into any other type.

Oozes are gelatinous creatures that rarely have a fixed shape. They are mostly subterranean, dwelling in caves and dungeons and feeding on refuse, carrion, or creatures unlucky enough to get in their way. Black puddings and gelatinous cubes are among the most recognizable oozes.

Plants in this context are vegetable creatures, not ordinary flora. Most of them are ambulatory, and some are carnivorous. The quintessential plants are the shambling mound and the treant. Fungal creatures such as the gas spore and the myconid also fall into this category.

Undead are once-living creatures brought to a horrifying state of undeath through the practice of necromantic magic or some unholy curse. Undead include walking corpses, such as vampires and zombies, as well as bodiless spirits, such as ghosts and specters.

Attached is a reference to every Monster Type I could find in the PHB that referenced on of the above types as part of the mechanics. I created it as part of a project I am doing with my Majestic Wilderlands and 5e.

[ATTACH]2895[/ATTACH]

Thanks for that, estar. That;s a neat list very handy.:cool:

Personally, I'm OK with estar's list.  It's just enough for me.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1055999OK, I'm with you here, but are we looking to increase or decrease the amount of monster types?

Quote from: S'mon;1056001I find it works best if I ignore this stuff :D - until it comes up in some rules mechanic like Wildshape, when if GMing I'll make a judgement call if necessary. If I want to say Owlbears are (also) Beasts at my table, no one is going to stop me. But I haven't seen it come up much -  I think there's that spell that per RAW can summon Pixies. I get way more pain from my resident min-maxer using Animate Object.

In my experience formalized hierarchical tagging systems never work to categorize all these made-up monsters, unless they are really simple like Mazes & Minotaurs list of animate, beast, folk, spirit and monster. Anyone who cares about consistent world building is better off relying on an informal non-hierarchical type mechanic. If game balance ever becomes an issue, you need to think long and hard about what you want the type system to provide in this regard. I don't think balance should ever rely on it. As always, the DM should be the one adjudicating adventures so that every PC gets a chance of shine.

Quote from: Chris24601;10560035E on the other hand explicitly states that its types have zero mechanical weight other than to act as keywords to potentially hang other things off of (the example given was that an arrow of dragon slaying would work on any creature with the dragon type). As with all things 5E its half-assed design work under the philosophy of "Well, the GMs can just house rule anything that doesn't actually work" (which, while technically true, begs the question of why we're paying for this rule set if we're supposed to just ignore it in play... particularly in cases where they knew it would be a problem that would come up often but still left it to the GMs to fix on their own).

Saying that the 5e types do not have rules attached is technically true, but in practice they do have rules attached which are simply stated in the applicable spells and so forth. I don't think this is a good decision because it means that abilities that key off of the types will work inconsistently between different writers. The developers should really have included general guidelines explaining how they intended for different types to interact with different effects, or even guidelines for making up your own types.

For example, the 3.x "deathless" type introduced by Eberron included several paragraphs explaining how deathless counted as undead except for numerous exceptions because a lot of spells affected undead in weird niche ways. Introducing new types into 5e is infeasible because the rest of the rules would have to be adjusted, although more subtypes/keywords/tags or whatever they are called may always be added but they are essentially irrelevant since even fewer effects rely on them.

Quote from: JeremyR;1056004Doesn't this actually date back to the original Ranger and the "Giant" class that he gets a damage bonus against? Or maybe even magic swords getting a higher bonus (or special power) against certain creature types...

I think the "fey" is just a problem with D&D period. Early fantasy writers like Tolkien and Howard basically said "faeries weren't real, but they were inspired by tales of real life races and such" (in Howard's case, they were Picts or people before the Picts that inspired the legends).  

EGG seems to have adopted this early on, with Brownies & Pixies & Sprites possibly being related to hobbits/halflings, albeit innately magical ones. But then later someone decided there should also be late medieval/Victorian style faeries on top of it.

I always think faeries are basically an artificial creation though, because they don't represent actual ancient beliefs, but are the result of those ancient beliefs and stories being bastardized and half remembered. The Fomorians and Fir Bolg were likely just the original inhabitants of Ireland, men.  They got turned into monsters or giants. Same for the Tuatha de Dannan. They got turned into elves. Lugh was probably a war leader or king that got turned into a god, then later, corrupted into the leprechaun.

Quote from: Chris24601;1056010I think Fey can work as a concept, if its an origin rather than a creature type. Fey would be any creature native to that Otherworld (which is how 4E used it).

So Eladrin were Fey because they lived primarily in the parallel world called the Feywild (the world's brighter and more intense reflection vs. the Shadowfell, the world's duller and darker shadow), but Elves were "Natural" because they'd lived long enough on the Prime Material Plane for the Fey descriptor to no longer apply to them.

Notably, 4E never included a "fairy" as a monster. All those tiny winged humanoids were called sprites or pixies (who had the Fey origin tag because they originated in the Feywild) in 4E. Thus, the use of Fey was an internally consistent descriptor that could be applied to humanoids of all sizes and to beasts, even types of undead. Their uniting element was the plane of existence they hailed from; in this case a mirror of the Prime Material Plane where magic and life were more intense.

Fairies in D&D are weird because the type mechanic is ad hoc without really thinking about the world building. They do not really have a clear place in D&D and have always been obscure. I believe the intention was nature spirits, but they cover many things you would not typically consider nature spirits like the nobility of the otherworld and trickster archetypes. D&D does not have a spirit type (outside 3pp) despite it being a universal concept in comparative mythology (and Paracelsus considered elementals synonymous with fairies), so instead we got a bunch of niche types like aberrations and elementals and so forth but not as many as we really needed.

The only time I have ever seen D&D truly defined was in The Complete Guide to Fey, which laid out their physiology and spirituality in simple English. They were defined specifically as incarnated spirits, distinct from other spirits like lost souls and elementals and so forth. The text described them as, IIRC, a metaphysical opposite of undead. This is a very different definition from mythology, where they were simply spirits (mythology does not make the same weirdly specific distinctions that D&D does; at the most Christianity defines angels, demons and fairies but nothing else). On a related note, this definition was basically identical to a new type introduced in Relics & Rituals: Excalibur labeled "manifestation," or monsters which were basically living equivalents of undead. The Book of Hallowed Might introduces a monster known as an unborn which is described as the opposite of undead too in that they are human souls which have not yet been incarnated, but they did not get a new type like the deathless did.

The definition in The Complete Guide was trying to justify a weird D&Dism, but I admire the effort put into it and I think it made a great explanation for having fairies and animistic spirits in the same setting even though they originate from many different cultures (in much the same way that in Greek myth being the child of a god did not automatically make you immortal) and spirits do not technically exist in D&D unless you use the spirit shaman class or some obscure 3pp. The groundwork was simple enough that I could add some of my own ideas as well, such as connecting the fey with Chaos a la the works of Anderson and Moorcock. Similarly to, say, Exalted's Fair Folk (unfortunately they are the only reference I have), the fey were originally aberrations that became trapped in the material/echo planes and adapted to reproduce by snaring and reincarnating unclaimed vitality/souls. Being the metaphysical opposite of undead in this sense also means they can be just as diverse as the undead ended up being (just look how often undead appear in bestiaries). This could also be extended to the origins of humans/demihumans by positing that they were originally fey who lost their fey nature and became mortal, which by virtue of the transitive property also ties the mortal races to Chaos (a la some blog post I read about the Order/Chaos conflict which posited that mortals were created by Chaos to confound Order).

Of course the problem I see with this is that fey as an extraplanar origin and fey as a state of being are not synonymous. If you are playing a human world-centric campaign where fey appear sporadically, it makes sense for them all to be fey and not something else or additional. But if your campaign takes place in the planes of faerie, then abilities which key off of types other than fey are not going to be useful. This is a problem with the rules being human world-centric and applies to extraplanar campaigns in general, especially Planescape which allows players to adventure on the planes from level one rather than restricting it to high level characters.

Similar complaints may be applied to any class whose important abilities key off of specific types (ranger's favored enemy, cleric's turn undead, etc), since that means they will be less useful if the GM does not build the campaign to let them contribute. 5e deliberately took steps to minimize this issue for the ranger by changing the bonus to apply outside of combat (and 13th Age simplifies things further by letting rangers favor all humanoids at the cost of two favored enemy slots instead of one), but not the other classes even though it should be trivial to redefine the cleric's ability to "turn anything considered anathema to my faith" or replacing it with channeling powers a la Complete Divine or Pathfinder (which ripped off the idea from the former).

Quote from: Opaopajr;1056039Yes, it makes sense. It makes as much sense as taxonomy, which is as old as history, and has been similarly contested with exceptions since both of them came about here on earth. :)

That is a false equivalence. Real taxonomies attempt to describe things that exist in reality, which operates according to consistent physical rules derived from first principles. The D&D rules are wholly arbitrary, but have physical effects in the game world. It makes no sense that physical laws would be semantically arbitrary that way.

For example, a number of the types have multiple meanings depending on their context. For example, some types have been used to described physical/spiritual nature as well as extraplanar origin and these are not equivalent. For example, demons are anthropomorphic personifications or spirits of the abstract ideal of evil and are thus considered fiends. Fiend also refers to anything from the lower planes, regardless of whether it is a spirit or a mortal. Should the rules distinguish between fiends based on whether they are spirits or mortals? Should different jargon be used?

That is the basic problem with D&D's tagging systems. They never account for anything not specifically built to fit into them. Real taxonomy, on the other hand, is built to describe an independent and arbitrarily large reality. The hierarchical nature is the subject of debate since it attempts to apply a ladder hierarchy to an endlessly branching tree, but these problems are one of semantics relevant to scientists and not stuff that determines the laws of physics.

In other worlds, real taxonomy describes reality as it is observed by scientists whereas D&D taxonomy defines the laws of physics as arbitrarily decided by the developer. They are not comparable.

Quote from: estar;1056045So as a point of reference here are the definitions

Thanks for that. For anyone who doesn't know, these are the 5e types. I'm going to go through and criticize them one by one.

I have already stated my problem with a formal hierarchical tagging system in general, so I won't repeat that. What I will add is that 13th Age Bestiary sometimes includes suggestions for giving monsters different types in order to emphasize different world building or even change a monster's type over time to represent some kind of transition, and I am pretty annoyed WotC did not do something similar or at least allow monsters to have multiple types if applicable since the type rules are so simple in 5e.

Also, the subtypes/keywords/tag rule. It is largely irrelevant in 5e but in 3.x it was really important. 3.x ultimately suffered from a huge amount of subtype bloat as developers kept adding new subtypes whenever they wanted. The Advanced Bestiary by Green Ronin (Pathfinder edition) attempted to address the issue by introducing the concept of "subtype categories" into which subtypes could be grouped, such as the alignment category, elemental category (including the minor elements like vapor or steam), energy category (fire, acid, cold, positive, negative, etc), racial category (angel, demon, elf, elemental, etc), swarming category (swarm, troop, mob, etc), and miscellaneous category for everything else. A valiant effort, though it only highlights the problem with bloat.

QuoteAberrations are utterly alien beings. Many of them have innate magical abilities drawn from the creature's alien mind rather than the mystical forces of the world. The quintessential aberrations are aboleths, and slaadi.

This definition is too vague and inaccurate. What it really means to say is that an Aberration is anything that originates from Limbo or the Far Realm, or the equivalents in other cosmologies.

My problem with aberrations is that they are too vaguely defined, at least far as my world building is concerned. So I took a paragraph from the OGC 3pp Legends & Lairs: Darkness & Dread, which described "abominations" (aberrations, basically, but labeled a new mechanic) as being entities from outside the fantasy universe and when they manifest in said universe they are so horrible that reality itself cloaks their true appearance behind a hunk of flesh and bone. This mask still causes sanity loss and they interact strangely with mechanics like alignment. That is pretty similar to how Exalted's Fair Folk work (hence my setting connecting the fey to them) as well as to a much lesser degree the Eidolons in 13th Age.

QuoteBeasts are nonhumanoid creatures that are a natural part of the fantasy ecology. Some of them have magical powers, but most are unintelligent and lack any society or language. Beasts include all varieties of ordinary animals, dinosaurs, and giant versions of animals.

One of the Sage Advice tweets claimed that a beast was any animal that could exist without magic, in clear contradiction to this definition. Whatever.

I have a long-standing issue with the beast and humanoid types. For the most part they are distinguishable, but we run into problems whenever beasts approach a humanoid body plan or have the capacity for fine manipulation and society. This is similar to the tvtropes "furry confusion" and "sliding scale of anthropomorphism." D&D tries to clearly distinguish beasts and humanoids when in fact they exist on a spectrum. For example, gorillas and dolphins are really smart and have simple language and society but are not considered humanoids. Fair enough, they can be considered the dividing line.

The problem comes in when you have things like intelligent lemurs who build tiny villages in forests. They are primates, which is where the humanoid body plan originates from in reality. Do they type as beasts or humanoids? Why or why not?

What about non-traditional PC races with a non-humanoid body plan? The humanoid type exists not just as a category but for purposes of game balance. Does the character who is a sapient goldfish floating inside the helmet of a space suit count as humanoid or not? Why?

QuoteCelestials are creatures native to the Upper Planes. Many of them are the servants of deities, employed as messengers or agents in the mortal realm and throughout the planes. Celestials are good by nature, so the exceptional celestial who strays from a good alignment is a horrifying rarity. Celestials include angels, couatls, and pegasi.

Angels are a well-established concept in real religious studies so defining them is trivial. A problem I have, and which extends to the other spiritual types, is that this type seemingly only applies to extraplanar creatures and disallows celestials native to the human world. For example, the sphinx is described as a guardian placed by the gods or belief but they are monstrosities rather than celestials. There is no logical reason for this to be the case.

This is fairly minor complaint, but the name does not make very much sense due to both context and the fact that it is an adjective without a noun. When they were first introduced celestials referred specifically to angels which were associated with the celestial bodies, taken directly from the writings of Theosophy. D&D gave us the solar, planetar, astral deva, monadic deva, and movanic deva. 3pp like Monsters of the Mind gave us the lunar and contemplative deva. This terminology made no sense when extended to cover angels from outside of Theosophy (http://www.geocities.ws/ripvanwormer/archons.html), like the choirs described in Dante's Paradiso.

QuoteConstructs are made, not born. Some are programmed by their creators to follow a simple set of instructions, while others are imbued with sentience and capable of independent thought. Golems are the iconic constructs. Many creatures native to the outer plane of Mechanus, such as modrons, are constructs shaped from the raw material of the plane by the will of more powerful creatures.

I have no problem with this aside from the world building surrounding the modrons (and by extension the inevitables). The construct type does not get targeted by the same spells as celestials and fiends, so a spell which targets both angels and demons would not affect modrons even though they are anthropomorphic personifications of order. For that matter, what type would Rilmani be? This is a huge oversight considering all the flak 4e received for overturning the Planescape cosmology and 5e's subsequent reversal.

QuoteDragons are large reptilian creatures of ancient origin and tremendous power. True dragons, including the good metallic dragons and the evil chromatic dragons, are highly intelligent and have innate magic. Also in this category are creatures distantly related to true dragons, but less powerful, less intelligent, and less magical, such as wyverns and pseudodragons.

I don't understand why this is its own type, but there is no type for sphinx and sphinx-like monsters (http://genericcleric.blogspot.com/2015/12/sphinxes-etc-of-nefret.html). It feels really arbitrary. Also, why are a lot of monsters that are considered dragons according to comparative mythology study, like the chimera and hydra and naga, not typed as dragon?

Also, why is dragon both a type and a subset of monsters within that type? That is needlessly confusing! The same complaint applies to elementals and giants. From a historical perspective this goes back to AD&D having dragons, dragon-kin, elementals, elemental-kin, giants and giant-kin, a distinction which was lost in the WotC era. It makes no sense for any semantic tagging mechanic written from the ground up. If I had to rename "true dragons" to something that isn't arbitrary, I'd pick something like "drake" which is a synonym for dragon but sufficiently different to avoid confusion and ties into Tolkien's correct use of the word drake (as in firedrake, cold-drake, etc) from Teutonic myth. D&D already has smaller dragons called drakes, which I would rename to "dragonets" which literally means smaller dragon to avoid confusion.

QuoteElementals are creatures native to the elemental planes. Some creatures of this type are little more than animate masses of their respective elements, including the creatures simply called elementals. Others have biological forms infused with elemental energy. The races of genies, including djinn and efreet, form the most important civilizations on the elemental planes. Other elemental creatures include azers, invisible stalkers, and water weirds.

The "simply elementals" are a perfect example of the weird D&Disms that have accumulated over the decades. I mentioned the issue with the confusing jargon already and I cannot really think of a unique name to replace it, nor do I care because the simply elementals are really boring compared to all the other elemental monsters added. When Paracelsus invented the concept of elementals he considered them synonymous with fairies, and as far as I can see there is no convincing reason why the elemental and fey types cannot be condensed. What is a dryad if not a wood elemental?

As I mentioned with celestials, I cannot imagine why we cannot have elementals native to the human world. The elemental planes are another weird D&Dism and D&D lacks animist spirits anyway which elementals could easily stand-in for. Wood elementals have been published before IIRC, so why not animal elementals? (not to be confused with "elemental animals" which are animals native to the elemental planes, like fire fish, fire crabs, oil sharks, etc) Monte Cook's Thule campaign setting already changes the elemental planes to be responsible for all weather phenomena and so forth in the human world, which instantly makes it vastly more interesting. I've criticized the elemental planes for being boring before so I will not digress here.

QuoteFey are magical creatures closely tied to the forces of nature. They dwell in twilight groves and misty forests. In some worlds, they are closely tied to the Feywild, also called the Plane of Faerie. Some are also found in the Outer Planes, particularly the planes of Arborea and the Beastlands. Fey include dryads, pixies, and satyrs.

The clause concerning Arborea and Beastlands is part of the eladrin and guardinals being retyped as fey by the developers, but this is trivia since AFAIK they have yet to be officially published in 5e (DM's Guild conversions make them celestials because the converter didn't get the memo). The fey stand out among the various spiritual types because they are the only one explicitly mentioned as being able to be native to multiple different regions of the planes. They also suffer from being too vaguely defined, since hags and blink dogs are fey for some reason.

I already mentioned that The Complete Guide to Fey salvaged the fey in my mind so I won't repeat myself.

QuoteFiends are creatures of wickedness that are native to the Lower Planes. A few are the servants of deities, but many more labor under the leadership of archdevils and demon princes. Evil priests and mages sometimes summon fiends to the material world to do their bidding. If an evil celestial is a rarity, a good fiend is almost inconceivable. Fiends include demons, devils, hell hounds, rakshasas, and yugoloths.

This is a no-brainer and that's probably because it shows up way more often than fey or celestial or modron. The only issues I see are the name, which is not an antonym to celestial like "infernal" or something, and that again the type precludes the existence of fiends native to the human world even though rakshasa and ogre mages are fiends native to the human world. Conversely, the cosmology is structured in weird way such that you cannot have humanoid races native to hell, heaven, or whatever even though those are briefly mentioned in some Planescape material, some obscure 1pp/2pp rules somewhere, and at least one 3pp (my go-to example of Secrets of the Planes: Planar Races). For all the flak that fans threw at 4e for defying Planescape cosmology, remarkably few people seem interested in forcing the rules to take Planescape's take on planar adventures from level one into account.

QuoteGiants tower over humans and their kind. They are humanlike in shape, though some have multiple heads (ettins) or deformities (fomorians). The six varieties of true giant are hill giants, stone giants, frost giants, fire giants, cloud giants, and storm giants. Besides these, creatures such as ogres and trolls are giants.

Again, the "true giant" thing is nonsensical. Also, this type arbitrarily precludes the semi-humanoid or non-humanoid giants featured in Greek and Norse mythology for no apparent reason. Ogres and trolls in D&D have no relation to their mythological or fairy tale origins, but that is another topic.

Another thing is that the true giants, who are inspired by Norse mythology, are treated as entirely separate from elementals despite having elements in their names and elemental powers. For comparison, 13th Age types genies as giants. In terms of comparative mythology and world building, it makes perfect sense to me that fire giants and efreets would be different ethnic groups of the same species since they are both giant, anatomically humanoid and made of fire. In D&D, we get the weird D&Dism of forcing multiple culture myths into a single context with no attempt to reconcile them and then we expect them to play nice. I could go on forever but I should really stop here.

QuoteHumanoids are the main peoples of a fantasy gaming world, both civilized and savage, including humans and a tremendous variety of other species. They have language and culture, few if any innate magical abilities (though most humanoids can learn spellcasting), and a bipedal form. The most common humanoid races are the ones most suitable as player characters: humans, dwarves, elves, and halflings. Almost as numerous but far more savage and brutal, and almost uniformly evil, are the races of goblinoids (goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears), orcs, gnolls, lizardfolk, and kobolds.

I don't have a problem with this type other than the name being provincial and restrictive. Other RPGs like FantasyCraft and Mazes & Minotaurs use "folks" instead to refer to races suitable as PCs, including potentially non-humanoid ones.

QuoteMonstrosities are monsters in the strictest sense--frightening creatures that are not ordinary, not truly natural, and almost never benign. Some are the results of magical experimentation gone awry (such as owlbears), and others are the product of terrible curses (including minotaurs). They defy categorization, and in some sense serve as a catch-all category for creatures that don't fit into any other type.

I absolutely dislike this type and feel it is pointless and encourages lazy design. It's the direct replacement for the 3.x magical beast and monstrous humanoid types, and like them it suffers from being arbitrarily and inadequately distinguished from the beast and humanoid types. As I said before, the stirge, tressym and cranium rat are beasts, whereas the centaur and griffon are monstrosities. The former do fit the description of their type, but the later do not since they are allies of druids. Why are nagas and sphinxes monstrosities? Most of them are benign and seemingly natural to their environment.

Beyond the inconsistency of being a needless catch-all whose actual definition is ultimately irrelevant, that definition raises questions about the world building. It's a classic appeal to nature fallacy: who decides what is or isn't "natural"? If natural things can somehow become unnatural, shouldn't the reverse hold true? How can a monstrosity become a beast or humanoid?

I had such a huge problem with this type that I wrote a long post on my personal D&D blog providing suggestions for retyping every single monstrosity in the MM.

QuoteOozes are gelatinous creatures that rarely have a fixed shape. They are mostly subterranean, dwelling in caves and dungeons and feeding on refuse, carrion, or creatures unlucky enough to get in their way. Black puddings and gelatinous cubes are among the most recognizable oozes.

This type suffers the jargon confusion, since "ooze" also refers to a subset of oozes alongside slimes, puddings and jellies. At one point in time these names meant something (http://hackslashmaster.blogspot.com/2013/03/on-oozes-slimes-jellies-and-puddings.html), but by the modern era they seem to be meaningless artifacts.

QuotePlants in this context are vegetable creatures, not ordinary flora. Most of them are ambulatory, and some are carnivorous. The quintessential plants are the shambling mound and the treant. Fungal creatures such as the gas spore and the myconid also fall into this category.

So anything not terrain, includes fungi event though they are more closely related to animals, etc. The only problem I have with this type is that I cannot determine whether a wood elemental belongs here or in elemental.

QuoteUndead are once-living creatures brought to a horrifying state of undeath through the practice of necromantic magic or some unholy curse. Undead include walking corpses, such as vampires and zombies, as well as bodiless spirits, such as ghosts and specters.

The definition is outdated since some undead were never alive, but I don't see any problems. There is conceptual overlap between this and all the other types which may be described as "animated terrain," i.e. the constructs, elementals and plants. The world building rationale is questionable and it is easy to create concepts which overlap multiple types (e.g. junk elemental, spontaneous construct). Really, the problem may be boiled down to "how do you type X object or substance animated by Y spiritual entity?" If golem are animated by bound elementals, why can't said elemental be targeted either separately or as part of the golem? What if a construct or mass of elemental matter is animated by a spectral undead? What if a corpse is animated by an elemental? Is there a difference between an elemental spirit and an elemental spirit animating a body of base matter? Since these types are well-defined, the only way to fix the problem would be to allow a monster to have multiple applicable types a la 4e or Fantasy Craft. For example: the zombie is a construct/undead, the vampire humanoid/undead, the junk elemental construct/elemental, etc.

Sigh. 4e's origin/type/keyword mechanic was provincial, a bit arbitrary (I couldn't tell the difference between a beast and magical beast) and probably missing a few things (like a spirit type), but it was a lot more sensible than 5e's types/tags.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1056100Fairies in D&D are weird because the type mechanic is ad hoc without really thinking about the world building. They do not really have a clear place in D&D and have always been obscure.

  This is arguably in keeping with the spirit of the Fair Folk. See C.S. Lewis, The Discarded Image, on the 'longaevi'. :)

QuoteThat is a false equivalence. Real taxonomies attempt to describe things that exist in reality, which operates according to consistent physical rules derived from first principles. The D&D rules are wholly arbitrary, but have physical effects in the game world. It makes no sense that physical laws would be semantically arbitrary that way.

You obviously don't know about earth taxonomies, histories, and what people really thought (AND think) is in existence. :) You are exceedingly wrong here. And further, you take your model and are attempting to presume its cosmology is applied as the accepted truth for a system to run fantasy worlds. ;)

D&D's model is a model, nothing more, and as relevant as any other. It works perfectly fine, is accessibly simple, and is easily adjustable. :)

I'm not a fan of tags in general.

Tagging? What?

Oh, so that's what they used all those extra pages for.

My problem with the tagging systems is they're pretend taxonomies, and try to systematize the world. Which is another way of saying they're trying to limit the world.

If you go back to the older editions, monsters were mostly behavior, physical descriptions, and game stats. DMs need that -- if you want to run a game, it really helps to know what monsters look like, how they react, and the numbers that serve as an interface with the rules. But the nature of demons, or which monsters are related to other monsters? That kind of information is irrelevant. You don't need any of that to fight a type IV demon, but you do need to know it has telekinesis and how that works.

Where that kind of detail is useful is at the setting level. And that's the problem. Because by tagging all these monsters, the designers are limiting the type of worlds that a DM can create. More importantly, they're robbing games of the opportunity to explore those details. Because if what faeries really are is baked into the game stats, the players will know what they're facing. That means individual games lose one important avenue for creating that sense of mystery that makes exploring an unknown world so wondrous, because they won't have the opportunity to discover on their own what makes the monsters of a new campaign tick.

Quote from: Pat;1056472My problem with the tagging systems is they're pretend taxonomies, and try to systematize the world. Which is another way of saying they're trying to limit the world.

If you go back to the older editions, monsters were mostly behavior, physical descriptions, and game stats. DMs need that -- if you want to run a game, it really helps to know what monsters look like, how they react, and the numbers that serve as an interface with the rules. But the nature of demons, or which monsters are related to other monsters? That kind of information is irrelevant. You don't need any of that to fight a type IV demon, but you do need to know it has telekinesis and how that works.

Where that kind of detail is useful is at the setting level. And that's the problem. Because by tagging all these monsters, the designers are limiting the type of worlds that a DM can create. More importantly, they're robbing games of the opportunity to explore those details. Because if what faeries really are is baked into the game stats, the players will know what they're facing. That means individual games lose one important avenue for creating that sense of mystery that makes exploring an unknown world so wondrous, because they won't have the opportunity to discover on their own what makes the monsters of a new campaign tick.

I agree with this. Beyond things that are generally self-explanatory like beasts, humanoids, giants, plants, oozes, undead, etc, the spiritual/natural/whatever stuff should be decided by each setting. The aberration/celestial/elemental/fey/fiend/undead division (the types mentioned in the 5e spell detect good and evil) does not make sense for a setting like Moorcock's multiverse since good/evil are not alignments therein. Fairies are only ever mentioned by Poul Anderson's work as aligned to Chaos and never feature in Moorcock's multiverse either.

What I liked about 13th Age was that it only added as many types as were absolutely necessary (since the type system barely figures into any other mechanics) and the monster books sometimes provide guidelines for changing the type of a given monster to indication something about its background or a transition or so forth. As far as I know there is only one monster with two types and it is a rider and its steed, but the types are so minimal that I do not predict many monsters would need more than one type. Only two more types (elemental and spirit) were introduced in later books. The article on fey stated that the author did not feel they needed their own type but that GM's were free to make one up (although I think the existing spirit type more than covers fey).

In 13th Age the write-ups for demons, devils, fey and so forth provide multiple sample explanations for their origin and place in the cosmology that the GM could choose if they didn't make one up. That's the sort of thing I think D&D should have done. Their current setup only pays lip service to the idea of alternate cosmologies since the rules do not change if you rearrange the planes.

Quote from: Pat;1056472My problem with the tagging systems is they're pretend taxonomies, and try to systematize the world. Which is another way of saying they're trying to limit the world.

If you go back to the older editions, monsters were mostly behavior, physical descriptions, and game stats. DMs need that -- if you want to run a game, it really helps to know what monsters look like, how they react, and the numbers that serve as an interface with the rules. But the nature of demons, or which monsters are related to other monsters? That kind of information is irrelevant. You don't need any of that to fight a type IV demon, but you do need to know it has telekinesis and how that works.

Where that kind of detail is useful is at the setting level. And that's the problem. Because by tagging all these monsters, the designers are limiting the type of worlds that a DM can create. More importantly, they're robbing games of the opportunity to explore those details. Because if what faeries really are is baked into the game stats, the players will know what they're facing. That means individual games lose one important avenue for creating that sense of mystery that makes exploring an unknown world so wondrous, because they won't have the opportunity to discover on their own what makes the monsters of a new campaign tick.

Then the Ranger came along, with it's 'Favoured Foe' mechanic.

Quote from: Christopher Brady;1056517Then the Ranger came along, with it's 'Favoured Foe' mechanic.

You mean giant class opponents. Which is, in a backdoor way, very setting dependent, because they're quite clearly inspired by the forces of Sauron.