Humanizing the Monster
I've been thinking about dragons and such. Creatures. Beasties. Monsters.*
Monsters are kinda hard to get just right, especially when it comes to classic fantasy. I always have these two opposing urges. There's a common vernacular, a vocabulary that everyone who's been exposed to fantasy shares. Everyone knows what a dragon is, and frankly most people are bored of the vanilla pantheon of D&D MONSTERS. I don't want to bore anybody!
At the same time, if I'm running a relatively straightforward fantasy campaign, I don't want to get too weird or gonzo. I still want the creatures I run to be relatively parseable, even if they're not adhering strictly to the most vanilla version of themselves. I want to play the hits, without things getting stale. I'm not going to run an encounter with 1d6 Beholders with all the dryness that that suggests, but I also don't want to overwhelm my people with neon mecha-eyelords that only speak in death metal riffs, you know? (Well, maybe occasionally, but that's not my default). You've gotta dilute your weird if it's going to have the impact you want.
That common vernacular really is a bear, though. Video games exist, right? Everyone's smacked a slime or whatever, in some format or other, and people are conditioned to categorize a potentially dangerous encounter in a comfortable way - that's a survival skill, even in a fictional situation. No matter how fantastic your creatures or the circumstances of your players' meeting them are, most people with cultural context for them or something like them are going to immediately say "Oh, I've seen something like this before, and I dealt with it like this." No matter how immersed you all are in your game and your characters and your world, that's still going to funnel you toward some sort of default action, which is certainly something I'd like to avoid in my games.
So how to thread the needle? If you're trending in the weird cosmic horror direction, making them inscrutable is the default. That can be fun now and then! But my problem with inscrutable is that it tends to mean un-gameable. How do players make informed decisions, or construct intelligent plans, or reasonably do anything but flee against something strange to the point of being unknowable? There's got to be some familiarity there to glom on to for your players' choices to mean anything.
There is a point to all of this mulling, I promise: I want a system to make monsters interesting, unique, and gameable. I want it to be simple, so I can quickly plug in a few bits of input and have a result that I know what to do with. And I want it to be easy to recall and to leverage for my limited brainpower at the table.
So here's my thought: humanize the beastie.
I'm not talking about diluting everything in your game into a toothless NPC in dragon skin (my taste for cutesy art notwithstanding). Nor is this just about whimsy, the novelty of a wyrm that speaks in received pronunciation or an owlbear with a passion for ballroom dancing. I'm talking about injecting identifiable traits and motivations into the behavior of your monsters, while maintaining what makes them strange. Another way of putting it: let your players know what your monsters are thinking. Make them fathomable.
There is a good reason to do this: it makes encounters easier to run for you, and far more gameable for your players. Specific, easily identifiable qualities in your big tent post monsters, the ones you build dungeons around, are the key to getting your players out of the mindset of routine encounters. The more obvious you make the humanizing stuff, the easier it is for your players to latch on to it and think about how they can use it. Or abuse it.
An example: recently I ran Skerples' Tomb of the Serpent Kings (spoilers incoming) for some of my nearest and dearest, and inevitably they stumbled on the big headline beastie of that dungeon - the blinkered basilisk.
There's been plenty of discussion of how great this encounter is, helped along by the two pages of advice and analysis in the module itself, so I'm not going to go too deep here. Just let it be said that an extremely dangerous and powerful adversary (a big fuck-off basilisk with stone-ifying vision) that has obvious, exploitable weaknesses (chained to a single room, vision restricted by a visor) and a hook for potential diplomacy (hungry, will be friendly with anyone that offers food) is a really good formula for a memorable, varied encounter.
Unfortunately, the several high quality, super actionable paragraphs of behavioral analysis that the module provides were too much for me to hold in my head - I'm a notorious GM choke artist when I have too much data to track. So instead I boiled it down to a couple of qualities. They just happened to be the headings of the previously mentioned paragraphs, in fact.
The basilisk was Hungry. He wasn't evil, or cruel, or needlessly violent. But he wanted to eat, and a bunch of very silly, very foolhardy adventurers walking into his chambers was not a situation he was going to pass up. Throughout the encounter, he attempted to isolate, petrify, and munch on the most convenient target. Call this a monstrous trait, though still a gameable one. This guy wanted to eat, and there was little chance to enact diplomacy with him short of providing a substantial meal that was more convenient than the adventurers themselves - something they could have exploited, perhaps, if they didn't latch on to his other trait.
The basilisk was also Curious. I figured he didn't get many visitors, and the party was particularly, um, colorful.** So he was fascinated by them, despite himself - call this a humanizing trait. When someone in the party did something weird and unexpected (often, constantly, incessantly), the basilisk naturally took a moment to check it out. Like, get a load of these assholes. Crazy.
Marveling at these assholes was his downfall, as it is often mine.
The party identified pretty quickly that our reptilian friend had a terribly short attention span, and while fighting off the half-petrifaction that most of them had been stricken with before they got their bearings, they took turns doing increasingly foolhardy things to keep its focus moving. Some parkour stunts, dangling hirelings and companions as bait, some song and dance, generally roping the dope until they had a chance to do some very dastardly things with an oil flask and torch that I daren't mention in polite company. (It helped that his hit dice almost all rolled ones, as well...but still, a win is a win).
It may seem like simple stuff, but this turned out to be an almost pure combat encounter with nearly zero traditional combat. There were no more than two attack rolls on the part of the PCs throughout the hour-long battle. This kind of approach creates a variety and a distinctiveness to your encounters that I think can be really valuable. A fairly basic situation can spontaneously, organically become a sort of minigame that nobody planned for, the GM least of all.
Alright, maybe with all this talk about gameable content I put some actual Content in this post. Here's a table of qualities for the monster stars of your world. Personality traits, or motivations - one list that's humanizing, one that ramps up the strange, alien, or traditionally monstrous. And a list of monsters to apply them to - pretty entry level dudes, mostly, so we can focus on the traits bit. I dunno, maybe roll once on each column and think about what that creature's behavior would look like? I'm not about to assign homework. (But please do let me know if you come up with anything cool).
*There's a discussion to be had about what qualifies as a monster in a fantasy ttrpg context, but that's not the topic of this post. For now, let's go with something like "a non-player entity with agency that has an element of strangeness and the potential for conflict, often one who is non-humanoid and with whom convenient communication is impossible."
**Prayers up for Tarnan, the Dwarven Wizard who had spent all of his research funds bequeathing his toad familiar incredibly muscular humanoid legs. Dirt, the Human contractor who apparently misread the job posting and was in way over his head. Not to mention the radically xtreme Bagel the Racoonfolk Fool, and the incredibly beautiful Goblin Plague Doctor, Dr. Pepper, MD.
***The more I put together examples of human vs monstrous traits, the harder I find it to differentiate between the two. Deep, man.
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