So I’m working my way through Oblivion, which is an incredibly rich game, and I was mildly disappointed that the first thing I got to fight was giant rats. You know, just like every other fantasy RPG, whether video game or tabletop.
Sure, that won’t spoil what I expect to be a great game — and it won’t spoil what your players expect to be a great campaign. But even though it can be a bit of a challenge to get out of this somewhat comfortable rut, it’s worth it.
Every genre has its own stock, straight-off-the shelf weenie monsters: rats, giant bugs and skeletons in fantasy games, human cultists in Call of Cthulhu, street punks in a cyberpunk game, etc. Next time you’re sketching out an adventure for new PCs, or running a published scenario, spend half an hour adding some zip to the baddies — and if possible, avoid the giant rats entirely.
When I was in college a buddy of mine played EverQuest (1) often. He told our D&D group about a new (at the time) expansion pack that introduced another plane of existance to the EQ gameworld.
One story involved a level 60+ character (60 use to be the cap, now it’s 70 I think…) who refused to adventure in the new plane. His reason? “I refuse to fight rats again after 60 levels, even if they are planar rats!”
I’ve always hated fighting “monsters”, as in generic no real reason for existing in the world type of things, but I’m also not a big dungeon crawl player. What made them tolerable in DND 2nd. Ed. was the great descriptions and histories within the book.
Now if there is a reason for giant rats, excellent lets take down the rodentia magnus till the cows come home. One game had a little girl get hold of a wand with a growth spell in it. She went skipping through the town playing fairy princess and waving her magic wand at every cute and cuddly thing in sight. Thus giant everything. Most fun were the giant rabbits though, they just kind of sat there, munching on oaks. The PC’s couldn’t kill them because they were too cute, and so now they are the towns main tourist attraction, the Giant Rabbit petting zoo.
I think that so long as there is a reason for the enemy encounter, it has a much better chance of turning out well and being interesting. Less encounters, but more meaningful ones. Downside is it is hard to pull off in EXP per kill type of games.
Giant rats can be fun, if done right.You have to make them part of the story.
Your party has cornered the evil sorcerer down in the dungeon of his lair, but he casts a spell or uses a magic item and suddenly the rats scurrying around turn into giant rats! The purpose of this battle isn’t to fight giant rats but to see if you can keep the evil sorcerer from escaping.
Or in a modern campaign you break into the lab of the mad scientist/evil corporation and discovery research on the giant rats and how they have built a nest right under city hall. And then have a chart about the accelerated breeding of these giant rats. Maybe the PCs face only a dozen if they hurry and go take out the rats that day, but by tomorrow there will be 2 dozen, and then 4 dozen in another day.
The problem isn’t that giant rats are mundane monsters, the problem is that GMs use them in a mundane manner. The same is true of skeletons, cultisits, and street punks. If it feels like those monsters were just thrown into the story the encounters are boring and typical, but if you can build up part of the plot to include the monsters you can have a great time with such encounters.
Rats are perfect cannon fodder though. They’re in plentiful supply, nutritious, and carry that additional risk of disease to spice the mixture.
Toss in a template or two into the mix and you could create a campaign using /only/ rats. Fiendish winged dire rat swarms rule. As do the moonrats from MM-II (one of the few good critters in that waste-of-paper). Put a wererat in charge – or better yet, an Awakened Cat Bard – and you’ve got plenty of funness all round.
I recommend the Book of Templates for turning the boring into the spectacular. Nothing like a gargantuan fire-breathing rat to have the adventurers diving for cover 🙂
I just ran “Siege of the Spider Eaters” out of Dungeon Magazine. It is a first level adventure, but it does a fantastic job of presenting foes not usually encountered at first level. I don’t want to spoil any of it here, but the author of the adventure made it work perfectly: he had an in-story reason to suggest why powerful foes would be weakened to the stage that a first level party could defeat them.
The foes hadn’t just sustained damage–they were poisoned, sick, etc…, and had low HP on top of it. However, the party didn’t necessarily know or expect this.
I am now working on a somewhat standardized system by which I can weaken enemies and use them to challenge low-level heroes. After all, wouldn’t it be absolutely thrilling to encounter a fully formed adult dragon when you have no chance of defeating a creature? Wouldn’t it be fantastic to launch into desperate combat with it–and win?
Isn’t this the stuff heroes are made of? This provides a much more compelling reason that a campaign would focus on the PCs–after all, who do bards sing about: dragon slayers or rat slayers?
> Isn’t this the stuff heroes are made of?
Amen!
Mind you, we still talk about the Pied Piper of Hamlyn……….. 🙂
I don’t know. As an old player, I think there’s something nostalgic about your bread-and-butter, low-level monsters. I don’t think I’ve played a D&D character yet who hasn’t killed his fair share of kobolds.
On that note, I liked what my DM cooked up a few weeks ago. It was a high seas campaign and, instead of throwing kobolds, he threw pygmies with kobold stats. The rehash was pretty much nonexistent for him, but the player experience was completely different. I’ve used this tactic similarly in the past, playing thugs with orc stats. It’s a pretty solid way to introduce more variety without any added work.
For the most part, I think this call for “new new new” is not really necessary. When was the last time they added a new piece to chess… Repetition need not be boring.
In fact, in my thought, the drive to add more and more new new new to D&D has made D&D a bloated game that’s hard to balance, and perhaps hard to prep (gee, had they stayed with the monsters in the original Monster Manual, but spent the same number of pages between MM1, MM2, MM3, MM4 and FF, we could have 10 pages each of different levels of orcs, goblins, trolls, etc. Far more usefull than “yet another monster”). Of course the whole more monsters really started with the need to have humanoid monsters at each hit die since monsters for some reason didn’t get levels…
When I ran Cold Iron hot and heavy, I relied on a standard stable of perhaps 20-30 monsters for 90% or more of the encounters, and really perhaps less than 10 for 80% of the encounters. No one ever complained about fighting goblins or trolls yet again. I had 4 undead that got used regularly, skeletons, ghouls, wights, and wraiths (and the only real difference between wights and wraiths was that wights were the fighters and wraiths were the casters).
Frank
The problem is not rats. The problem is WHY they’re fighting rats. If there’s no reason to be in the sewers looking for rats, then that’s just dumb. Who VOLUNTARILY goes into the sewers?
But, if the players have to descend into the sewers to find a noble’s kidnapped daughter, then there’s reason to fight the nasties. And what if she was dragged off by the rats? Why are these noctural denizens of the deep coming to the surface to menace the people there? Are the city’s sewers connected to the Underdark? Has something nasty moved into the cesspit that used to keep the rats happy? Perhaps an Otyugh? And why did that move from its old home? Perhaps there’s some sort of underground migration going on due to 1) a Drow/Illithid war or 2) a particularly nasty Dracolich and its cronies moving into the caverns, etc., etc.
At the end of the day the PCs will be really happy fighting almost ANYTHING as long as there’s an immersive in-game reason for ir, it all comes back to ecology.
I like the idea of playing a ‘Pied Piper of Hamlyn’ scenario. Players know they are going into the sewers to fight rats, and only for EXP and cash, but they ALSO know that should they succeed, the town will try to weasel out of paying the party their agreed-upon bounty (the townsfolk’ll have caught some rats ahead of time, and released them behind the party, they’ll demand that they kill the reason for the rats coming, they will mention their ‘sick children’, etc.) and the party will have to figure out a way of getting their money or reconcile themselves to having lost their money. (I don’t think I could get away with this one in a lot of groups though…)
While it is killing giant rats again and again, but often limited to combat that entirely bypasses the round-by-round nature of combat if possible and PCs are getting bored. (However, the more intentionally funny or meaningful combats would not be shortened like this.)
The real adventure is not exactly the rat-killing per se, but the rat-killing serves as a backdrop.
I agree with Frank and Cedric. I ran a 3E campaign where I used very few “weird” monsters, and only then sparingly, and with some magical reason for them to be around. The bulk of the fights were against animals (giant or otherwise), goblins, orcs, advanced versions of same, etc.
That the orcs and goblins were in various tribes, some neutral, and some even sort of friendly, made it interesting. Humanoids with personality is not the same old thing. Of course, it’s hard to make a giant rat into an interesting NPC, sans the wererat gig. However, Ptolus has “ratmen” in it, and I assure you they are not the same old thing. 🙂
I think a lot of it has to do with the personality you lend to encounters. For instance, the D&D (first ed!) campaign I’m in right now has frequent encounters with orcs. They never get boring or tiresome, however, for several reasons. One is that the orcs are integral to the major plot arc and thus they don’t feel random. Another is that any given orc band has a specific reason for being where they are–they’re couriers delivering a message for their master; they’re assassins sent to kill the party; they’re spies sent to find and relay the location of the party; etc. Finally, they tend to have personality. Their armor and trappings aren’t always the same, their items and abilities aren’t always the same, and the DM simply plays them with personality (of course he’s an amateur actor, a linguist, and an army officer who’s traveled all over the world, so he can do the most amazing accents and NPC personalities you’ve ever seen in your life).
IMO, an encounter should never be 100% random. It might not necessarily be connected to the adventure or the arcplot, and the PCs might never find out entirely what was going on. But if you have even a detail or two in mind about what that group of kobolds or orcs is up to, or why those rats are where they are, then that’ll show through in how interesting your encounters are.
I agree that palette swaps (giant rat stats, looks like something else) and some mix of purpose (mobs are there for a reason), realism (and they act like real monsters) and unique elements (different tribes, etc.) are great ways to include old standards without being boring. Great points!
One additional comment is that the veneer of purpose to the encounter can be very thin. I have played plenty of successfull campaigns with a very thin veneer on top of “kill things and take their treasure.”
The veneer is important, without it, the players are just fighting again and again and again. Of course chess has no veneer whatsoever.
But that veneer of a “story” is key to what makes a game an RPG, except that it isn’t story in quite that sense. What is important is that their is a fictional space that the GM and players all contribute to, and that the game serves as a system to help the players negotiate contributions to that fictional space (for those knowledgeable about the Forge etc. this is essentially the Lumpley Principle). That veneer of course does demand that one encounter be different from the other (because otherwise we aren’t actually changing that fictional space and there’s no RPG – chess does have a fictional space, though it’s a paper thin veneer, but nothing about the play allows the players to make contributions that change that fictional space other than the pre-determined allowed changes [white wins, black wins, draw]).
Frank
Take a lesson from Zelda: Wind Walker. Giant rats with bombs! Lots and lots of rats with bombs. Not very powerful bombs, just powerful enough to kill a giant rat. 🙂
Well, to take that out of the realm of the video and into the RPG, what about Giant Rats (or even normal rats) who have a sort of Fire Shield spell cast on them? Here’s a critter that can get into nearly any part of town and light it on fire. Talk about a siege weapon!
Perhaps there’s an army marching across the continent using this tactic. The city hears about it from the (few) survivors of another siege. The players, shanghied into the militia, and being low level having little to contribute to the overall defense are tasked to exterminate the rats/giant rats. This leads naturally to uncovering 5th column elements within the city and fighting them. By the time the army arrives the PCs should be a decent level and have a powerful hate on for the big bad guy who has been sending assassins, etc. after them.
Tell you what. Have your players encounter a Titanic Paragon Rat and see what happens. 😀
T
Gobrats? You mean Jermalines?
Fire breathing demonic rats aren’t the point of the original post, standardized enemies are. Having standard enemies helps players enter the game.
I have to say, though, that after 30 years of gaming, running up against Rats (in the Platonic sense) has grown boring. As a DM, I hate encounters that exist just to give the PCs experience points and gold. It’s just so stale.
I rarely play as a player these days, but when I have that rare opportunity, I’m expecting a little more. If I want to fight Rats, I’ll play a video game. RPGs offer more than that–or they should.
What’s funny – last night we had an encounter with… giant rats… (ok, so these days they call them dire rats…)
But as I’ve said, from my point of view, it would be better to have a smaller stable of monsters than all these new monsters. Back in the old 1e days, I used the Monster Manual almost exclusively, with the occaisional new monster from a magazine or module, and a few of my own creation (some to fit miniatures I had). I bought the Fiend Folio when it came out, but honestly, I don’t think we ever used it all that much.
I guess my feeling is also that if you have to rely on the Monster of the Week Club to sustain your gaming fun, perhaps you should re-examine things. Heck, whole genres of fiction do perfectly good with exactly one “monster” (humans) for all their adversaries.
Another consideration is that when everything is new all the time, it’s a lot harder to create exception. When day in day out, you’re fighting the same monsters, the new monster is really exciting. And there are other ways to make each combat different.
Frank
In a way, it seems like this complaint (rats = boring) polarizes folks in much the same way that random encounters do.
Both discussions focus on two valid styles of play that are fairly different, and the far end of the “every encounter should be unique in some way” spectrum is almost identical to the far end of the random encounters vs. scripted encounters spectrum: “every encounter should be carefully selected.”
There are other elements at work too, but I think it’s interesting that those two line up so well. Not sure what to make of it beyond that, though. 😉