Post/Author/DateTime	Post
Corey_Austin 02-24-08, 12:53 AM	Looking for some information/house rules. Does anyone have any details on how to run a PC-monster campaign similar to the Red Crawler one (if you know what that is without stating where its located, since my last thread got deleted)? I've heard savage species helps, is savage species a 3.5 or 3.0 book? Does it matter?
Paladin's Pride 02-28-08, 01:57 AM	Well, if you are running a monster campaign, savage species definitely does help. Mainly it gives you the advantage of leveling up as a monster, so you don't have to start at exceptionally high level if someone wants to play a mind flayer. If you are playing 3.5, make sure you check to see if the monster has changed from the edition change. The biggest problem with an all monster campaign is that certain character types become difficult. Casters take a hit because there are very few monsters that make truly good spellcasters (sylph from MMII stands out as one of the few in my mind). You can play ECL +0 monsters like goblins or kobolds to remedy this. Monsters tends to have more extreme abilities. That is to say, while a particular monster may be fair for it's ECL, the difference between it's area of strength, and areas of weakness are much greater than for a normal character. This means you must tailor encounters more than with a typical group. Beware of monsters that have a high ECL due to a powerful ability that doesn't scale. For example, since a medusa gains no racial hit dice, her petrifying gaze DC will eventually be too low to be worth the ECL being paid for it. Many monsters like this don't really advance well once they are forced to take class levels. You might consider lowering the ECL of such characters over time so that they can remain competitive with other players, or make custom prestige classes or feats that let the player remain viable. For example, a custom feat that allows class levels to stack with racial hit dice for the purposes of calculating special ability DC's would be immensely valuable to the aforementioned medusa. Hope that helps!