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Why Monsters, and Why So Many? (lemmy.world)

submitted 3 days ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I was watching some RPG YouTube, and of course there was talk about Monsters. And with the recent OMG CONTROVERSY with the newest Monster Manual, I got to thinking about something that is more inherent in D&D and in fantasy games in general, why so many monsters? I've played various other games, and read many books, watched many movies, but it seems that fantasy games, with D&D leading the charge, seem to have more monsters than any other medium in the genre, or other genre's in particular. So yeah, why are there so many monsters?

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 days ago

While the D&D Fight monsters ad nauseam is more an exception rather than the norm in RPG, it still has a couple of asset.

Monsters are easy bad guys, there is not much moral consideration in fighting giant spyder or "children eating satanic Goblins" while if you fight against other humans who live in the forest that the Duke want to cut-downt to get wood for his navy it make everything more nuanced and complex. It's great in regular RPG where you can get tons of interesting moral dilemna out of it, but if you're into dungeon crawling monsters are removing all of that, and allow you to focus on the manage ressources to fight monsters apect of D&D.

if you're in zero to hero fantasy, you need opponent within that scale. so start with Goblins, then orcs, and finally dragon, and had a whole list in the way

A you mentionned, it's pretty specific to D&D and in many RPG you don't use much monster, or come with something unspeakable and too powerful for the PC to fight against