Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066418Continuing the minotaur example, the myth explained why the minotaur existed and why it was in a maze. It goes all the way back to Crete's bullfighting culture and the family tree of King Minos. King Minos was the son of Zeus in the form of a bull, he was nursed by a magic cow as a baby, his kingdom was decorated with bull imagery, he refused to sacrifice a white bull gifted to him by Poseidon, Poseidon cursed his wife to screw the bull, the wife gave birth to a hideous half-bull half-man abomination, it was named Minotaur meaning "Bull of Minos," Minos commissioned Daedalus to build an inescapable maze to contain the minotaur, Minos demanded a tithe of seven or so virgins of both genders from the cities he defeated in battle to be sacrificed to the minotaur, a hero shows up and slays the monster, etc. It's all very anthropological.

And all of that is completely useless unless I'm running a game set in mythological Greece.

Whereas a generic bull-headed monster is useful in almost any fantasy campaign.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066418The monster manual stripped all that away and turned the minotaur into a generic murderous monster which has weird behavior with absolutely zero explanation or justification. It is half-man half-bull, eats human flesh, and lives in mazes for no apparent reason. They also worship the made-up pagan deity Baphomet (very loosely based on the Islamic prophet Mohamed) because it has a bull's head despite sharing zero symbolism in common with the Crete culture.

I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest at least half, if not a significant majority of players know little to nothing of Crete culture. I'm going to further suggest it's not unlikely that a lot of them don't even specifically know the mythological story behind the Minotaur, save that it was "Roman, or Greek, or something like that, I think? Lived in a maze, I guess?".

I don't mean to be as dismissive as this might sound, but the Monster Manual is what it says on the cover - a book of monsters. It's not a mythology text book. It's not even a setting bestiary. It's just stuff to throw at your players. Highly specific, story-driven one-off encounters that wouldn't be useful in the vast majority of games are not what it does.

Don't like the lack of "weird behavior with absolutely zero explanation or justification"? Change that. You're familiar with Greek myths... you tell them. The book doesn't need to, and in fact doing so would get in the way of what the book is trying to do. Meanwhile, another person can make up their own answers, if they need to, for their own game.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066418The overwhelming majority of the time the changes are not interesting, not fun on their own and never make the monster "work." The changes are made for the sake of change rather than because they serve any actual purpose.

Continuing the minotaur example, the myth explained why the minotaur existed and why it was in a maze. It goes all the way back to Crete's bullfighting culture and the family tree of King Minos. King Minos was the son of Zeus in the form of a bull, he was nursed by a magic cow as a baby, his kingdom was decorated with bull imagery, he refused to sacrifice a white bull gifted to him by Poseidon, Poseidon cursed his wife to screw the bull, the wife gave birth to a hideous half-bull half-man abomination, it was named Minotaur meaning "Bull of Minos," Minos commissioned Daedalus to build an inescapable maze to contain the minotaur, Minos demanded a tithe of seven or so virgins of both genders from the cities he defeated in battle to be sacrificed to the minotaur, a hero shows up and slays the monster, etc. It's all very anthropological.

The monster manual stripped all that away and turned the minotaur into a generic murderous monster which has weird behavior with absolutely zero explanation or justification. It is half-man half-bull, eats human flesh, and lives in mazes for no apparent reason. They also worship the made-up pagan deity Baphomet (very loosely based on the Islamic prophet Mohamed) because it has a bull's head despite sharing zero symbolism in common with the Crete culture.

Here, the purpose is to introduce an earth mythology monsters into a fictional setting, with very loose ties to the real world. There is no default setting in D&D, and the few pregen settings are not earth. Therefore minotaurs have no business being in Oerth or Krynn or Toril, because there is no King Minos or Crete.
But D&D is a mishmash of myth and folklore, and so minotaurs got in there, and got adapted to fit their settings. Dragonlance did a whole other take on the minotaurs as a race, and Greyhawk (AFAIK) just went with bull headed man monsters.
If you want to pick on D&D for not being accurate to mythology, you will have plenty of material, and I'm quite sure the writers knew this, being a bunch of fantasy nerds.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser;1066408To be fair, as a Catholic I have a similar problem with how many RPGs tend to treat Judeo-Christian angels.

I'm sure followers of Baal would empathize.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066418The overwhelming majority of the time the changes are not interesting, not fun on their own and never make the monster "work." The changes are made for the sake of change rather than because they serve any actual purpose.

Continuing the minotaur example, the myth explained why the minotaur existed and why it was in a maze. It goes all the way back to Crete's bullfighting culture and the family tree of King Minos. King Minos was the son of Zeus in the form of a bull, he was nursed by a magic cow as a baby, his kingdom was decorated with bull imagery, he refused to sacrifice a white bull gifted to him by Poseidon, Poseidon cursed his wife to screw the bull, the wife gave birth to a hideous half-bull half-man abomination, it was named Minotaur meaning "Bull of Minos," Minos commissioned Daedalus to build an inescapable maze to contain the minotaur, Minos demanded a tithe of seven or so virgins of both genders from the cities he defeated in battle to be sacrificed to the minotaur, a hero shows up and slays the monster, etc. It's all very anthropological.

The monster manual stripped all that away and turned the minotaur into a generic murderous monster which has weird behavior with absolutely zero explanation or justification. It is half-man half-bull, eats human flesh, and lives in mazes for no apparent reason. They also worship the made-up pagan deity Baphomet (very loosely based on the Islamic prophet Mohamed) because it has a bull's head despite sharing zero symbolism in common with the Crete culture.

This strikes me as a very puritanical approach to creativity and games, where the quality of something is measured purely by how much it connects to the original source material. Adding in the requirement that 'it has to add something', just feels like an arbitrary way for you to dismiss anything people come up with. If adding the twist on the maze isn't sufficient for you, I really don't know what will be.  

I am not saying the original mythology isn't interesting. But the D&D minotaur worked great, in part because its was easy to run without knowing the myth (though I am sure it helped plant seeds of interest in learning more about the mythology). And I don't ever remember finding any of the abilities to be a problem. They are great for tracking people in dungeons, which makes them scary. But they also aren't tied to something highly specific. There was only one minotaur in the myth if I remember, for example; and you can only really use the details you describe, if those details exist in the campaign world. The monster entry is just a fast, effective monster you can deploy. We can debate the value of abilities over different editions. I mainly used Minotaurs in 2E and 3E, but always found them to be a great challenge for a party and a threat I could add to in interesting ways. You didn't like it. That is fine. It isn't for everyone. But I think you'll find a lot of people found it an interesting monster. And I think you'll find a lot of people like it when legends and myths are taken as a kernel for a completely new idea. After all, especially in horror movies, half the fun is not knowing what the creature is exactly. It is pretty much a staple of the genre to take a few key features of a legend and build them into something new. Overtime, that almost creates a new legend (like people pointed out with zombies---which have moved very far from the source material and been codified into a new creature).

That said, I think it is great when people put out material that gets more at the real world myth. There is definitely an audience for that. I don't think though, that authenticity to the original legends, automatically makes something better for gaming purposes. And I think there is room in the hobby, and in genre fiction since that came up as well, for people to take both approaches.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066397For example, the Greek minotaur was trapped in a maze. In D&D, they can solve any mazes. The change is bad because it contradicts the intent of the myth.

So what would YOU call a race of bull-headed humanoids in a fantasy setting?

Frankly, the most common reason to call a monster (or PC race) by a given name is because its FAMILIAR. You don't have to say "[Race X] are tall muscular humanoids with a cow's head"... you can just say "Minotaur" and 99.9% of your audience knows what it looks like.

Likewise, if you want to get absolutely "accurate" there should only ever be one Minotaur ever and it should be trapped in a maze on Crete (or dead by Theseus' hand). The same would go for Medusa, Hydra, Chimera, Pegasus, etc.

Definitions CHANGE over time. Pegasus came to mean any winged horse, not the unique offspring of Medusa's blood. So too did Minotaur come to mean any bovine-headed humanoid.

Again. If you want to create a "Mythic Greece Authentic" RPG setting... more power to you. I have my own fantasy setting with zero connections to Ancient Greece so my critters get named based on what a casual person would recognize. My Minotaurs are herbivores who live in tribes in plains regions of my world. They're called Minotaurs because everyone knows what that word means whereas something like "Cowfolk" brings up a whole different set of expectations (like that they ride horses and shout "Yippie-ki-yay!").

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Maybe not a minatuar.  But I like this guy.  

Shats your source for the Wendigo?  You seem to know a bit about it.  I like mythology, always looking to to expand my references a bit.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066297I guess so?

Writers need to actually know the original myths, since there's no excuse in the age of Wikipedia and Google Books. They should at least do something to disambiguate their creations so that readers aren't confused by the massive disparity between the game monster and the myths that everyone is familiar with.

Nobody cares.

The level of assine pedantry the rpg community gets up to seriously makes me question my hobby.  I see threads like this and I picture neckbeards in a game store circle jerk.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066397For example, the Greek minotaur was trapped in a maze. In D&D, they can solve any mazes. The change is bad because it contradicts the intent of the myth.

Um... News flash... But you really just want to PC this instead of actually think dont you?

The minotaur was trapped in the maze but could navigate it pretty damn well. He just could not escape it due to the mechanical nature of its containment. So a minotaur being really good at mazes makes perfect sense when viewed that way.

This and other things you rant about without actually stopping to understand. You just want to SJW bitch and lay down more impositions and restrictions.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;1066424This strikes me as a very puritanical approach to creativity and games, where the quality of something is measured purely by how much it connects to the original source material. Adding in the requirement that 'it has to add something', just feels like an arbitrary way for you to dismiss anything people come up with. If adding the twist on the maze isn't sufficient for you, I really don't know what will be.  

I am not saying the original mythology isn't interesting. But the D&D minotaur worked great, in part because its was easy to run without knowing the myth (though I am sure it helped plant seeds of interest in learning more about the mythology). And I don't ever remember finding any of the abilities to be a problem. They are great for tracking people in dungeons, which makes them scary. But they also aren't tied to something highly specific. There was only one minotaur in the myth if I remember, for example; and you can only really use the details you describe, if those details exist in the campaign world. The monster entry is just a fast, effective monster you can deploy. We can debate the value of abilities over different editions. I mainly used Minotaurs in 2E and 3E, but always found them to be a great challenge for a party and a threat I could add to in interesting ways. You didn't like it. That is fine. It isn't for everyone. But I think you'll find a lot of people found it an interesting monster. And I think you'll find a lot of people like it when legends and myths are taken as a kernel for a completely new idea. After all, especially in horror movies, half the fun is not knowing what the creature is exactly. It is pretty much a staple of the genre to take a few key features of a legend and build them into something new. Overtime, that almost creates a new legend (like people pointed out with zombies---which have moved very far from the source material and been codified into a new creature).

That said, I think it is great when people put out material that gets more at the real world myth. There is definitely an audience for that. I don't think though, that authenticity to the original legends, automatically makes something better for gaming purposes. And I think there is room in the hobby, and in genre fiction since that came up as well, for people to take both approaches.

The zombie isn't actually a new creature at all. It's a folkloric vampire with the name of a Haitian creature. In fact, even in modern fiction vampires are commonly depicted as being able to create (often carnivorous) zombies that may or may not be able to graduate into more powerful forms. This outright combines the two, with the zombie being a slave to the vampire that raises it as well as a vampire itself.

The problem I have with the monster manual isn't that it disposes of specific mythology, but that it writes all its monsters as existing in a vacuum devoid of context. This generally makes them nonsensical because there is now no explanation for why a bunch of random features have been thrown together into a monster. They become boring. Contrast this with the Scarred Lands Creature Collections, which provided myths for every single monster that generally explained what they were and why they existed.

Quote from: Chris24601;1066425So what would YOU call a race of bull-headed humanoids in a fantasy setting?

Frankly, the most common reason to call a monster (or PC race) by a given name is because its FAMILIAR. You don't have to say "[Race X] are tall muscular humanoids with a cow's head"... you can just say "Minotaur" and 99.9% of your audience knows what it looks like.

Likewise, if you want to get absolutely "accurate" there should only ever be one Minotaur ever and it should be trapped in a maze on Crete (or dead by Theseus' hand). The same would go for Medusa, Hydra, Chimera, Pegasus, etc.

Definitions CHANGE over time. Pegasus came to mean any winged horse, not the unique offspring of Medusa's blood. So too did Minotaur come to mean any bovine-headed humanoid.

Again. If you want to create a "Mythic Greece Authentic" RPG setting... more power to you. I have my own fantasy setting with zero connections to Ancient Greece so my critters get named based on what a casual person would recognize. My Minotaurs are herbivores who live in tribes in plains regions of my world. They're called Minotaurs because everyone knows what that word means whereas something like "Cowfolk" brings up a whole different set of expectations (like that they ride horses and shout "Yippie-ki-yay!").

Greek mythology did multiply some of its unique figures into races long before Gygax and friends did. In some cases this was because they were the descendants of the original, much like how humans might be called "adamites."

I take issue with D&D turning EVERYTHING into a "race" as part of its often absurd ecology series in Dragon magazine. As opposed to, I don't know, minotaurs being recipients of the Minotaur's Curse (and a separate thing from bovine furries entirely, and for extra fun bovine furries can also contract the curse), all hydras being grown from the severed members of the original hydra and becoming smaller with every severing until they can't split further, lamias being the transformed ghosts of women who died of heartbreak, or dragons being born from the movements of ley lines and weather phenomena and auspicious circumstances.

Really, D&D claims to be fantasy but as far as I can see it isn't remotely fantastical.

Quote from: Omega;1066433The minotaur was trapped in the maze but could navigate it pretty damn well. He just could not escape it due to the mechanical nature of its containment. So a minotaur being really good at mazes makes perfect sense when viewed that way.

I mentioned that when I described my reinvention of the game monster to better fit the original myth.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066435The zombie isn't actually a new creature at all. It's a folkloric vampire with the name of a Haitian creature. In fact, even in modern fiction vampires are commonly depicted as being able to create (often carnivorous) zombies that may or may not be able to graduate into more powerful forms. This outright combines the two, with the zombie being a slave to the vampire that raises it as well as a vampire itself.

The problem I have with the monster manual isn't that it disposes of specific mythology, but that it writes all its monsters as existing in a vacuum devoid of context. This generally makes them nonsensical because there is now no explanation for why a bunch of random features have been thrown together into a monster. They become boring. Contrast this with the Scarred Lands Creature Collections, which provided myths for every single monster that generally explained what they were and why they existed.

Greek mythology did multiply some of its unique figures into races long before Gygax and friends did. In some cases this was because they were the descendants of the original, much like how humans might be called "adamites."

I take issue with D&D turning EVERYTHING into a "race" as part of its often absurd ecology series in Dragon magazine. As opposed to, I don't know, minotaurs being recipients of the Minotaur's Curse (and a separate thing from bovine furries entirely, and for extra fun bovine furries can also contract the curse), all hydras being grown from the severed members of the original hydra and becoming smaller with every severing until they can't split further, lamias being the transformed ghosts of women who died of heartbreak, or dragons being born from the movements of ley lines and weather phenomena and auspicious circumstances.

Really, D&D claims to be fantasy but as far as I can see it isn't remotely fantastical.

Well, I'm sorry it disappointed you. Perhaps you should try the myriad of other games out there that might fit you better? Or maybe write your own?

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066435The problem I have with the monster manual isn't that it disposes of specific mythology, but that it writes all its monsters as existing in a vacuum devoid of context. This generally makes them nonsensical because there is now no explanation for why a bunch of random features have been thrown together into a monster. They become boring. Contrast this with the Scarred Lands Creature Collections, which provided myths for every single monster that generally explained what they were and why they existed.

I had the scarred lands book. And it certainly had some good flavor, but wasn't always useful if your campaign didn't fit the flavor without reskinning. And to be totally honest, a lot of the flavor still felt very much in the realm of D&D monster manuals to me. I think though the thing to keep in mind here is this is about evaluating something by its purpose and intent. The monster manual is intentionally giving you creatures in a vacuum. you find creatures tied to specific settings in many of the monster books for campaign worlds. But in the core book, you need stuff you can throw into just about any campaign.

If you don't like the monster  manual, you don't like it. That is entirely fine. I think the issue people are having is it is pretty clear your reasons for disliking it are very much about wanting to run something different than what the monster manual is meant to provide. No one really objects to your ideas of a more mythologically based game. Those are out there, and there is always room for more. I don't know that such an approach would be the best fit for D&D though. And again, I think when we start creating all these rules about what constitutes a good/cool monster, it gets a bit stuffy when the bar is 'must be mythologically authentic'. That is a bar that only applies to 10% of what people want. Most people aren't looking for that when they buy monster books for a D&D campaign.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1066435Really, D&D claims to be fantasy but as far as I can see it isn't remotely fantastical.

I would say play Runequest, or Godbound, Agnon, or even Hercules and Xena if you want something more in the myth and legend. Everyone and their brother has been where you are at some point. D&D is a broad game, that is trying to give a taste of fantasy while sticking to some tried and true approaches to play. Sometimes that is at odds with what you are after. There are plenty of games out there that do exactly what you want. I'm not especially interested in standard D&D myself these days. But I understand why people like D&D. And I understand why the formula works.

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1066439Well, I'm sorry it disappointed you. Perhaps you should try the myriad of other games out there that might fit you better? Or maybe write your own?

It hasn't disappointed me and I'm terribly sorry for giving that impression. I've had more fun devising ideas for D&D than I have any other game.

Quote from: BedrockBrendan;1066442I had the scarred lands book. And it certainly had some good flavor, but wasn't always useful if your campaign didn't fit the flavor without reskinning. And to be totally honest, a lot of the flavor still felt very much in the realm of D&D monster manuals to me. I think though the thing to keep in mind here is this is about evaluating something by its purpose and intent. The monster manual is intentionally giving you creatures in a vacuum. you find creatures tied to specific settings in many of the monster books for campaign worlds. But in the core book, you need stuff you can throw into just about any campaign.

If you don't like the monster  manual, you don't like it. That is entirely fine. I think the issue people are having is it is pretty clear your reasons for disliking it are very much about wanting to run something different than what the monster manual is meant to provide. No one really objects to your ideas of a more mythologically based game. Those are out there, and there is always room for more. I don't know that such an approach would be the best fit for D&D though. And again, I think when we start creating all these rules about what constitutes a good/cool monster, it gets a bit stuffy when the bar is 'must be mythologically authentic'. That is a bar that only applies to 10% of what people want. Most people aren't looking for that when they buy monster books for a D&D campaign.

You're right and I'm sorry for giving a negative impression. I'll keep your words in mind and try to avoid alienating others. It wasn't my intent to be nonconstructive when I deconstruct fantasy gaming.

Quote from: Angry_Douchebag;1066431The level of asinine pedantry the rpg community gets up to seriously makes me question my hobby.

Hey, now, asinine pedantry is the point of any hobby. Listen to firearms aficionados debating guns or oenophiles debating wine sometime.