Do you use some kinds of monsters more?

[Bruno]

When I GM, I lean pretty heavily on humanoids, Elder Things, classic Gigaxian bizarre monsters, and too many giant animals to really be useful in a DFRPG game. I also tend to just put them in an underground dungeon, classic style.

How about you? Do you have "old standards" you like to fall back on?

[Bruno]

Also, why?

I like humanoids because you can have them doing anything, you can change them up with lots of skill sets and equipment sets for variety while keeping with the theme, they're bread-and-butter foes.

I like Elder Things because you can also have them doing anything... and they don't even need to have some kind of motivation. Which is fun! It's really just a metacategory of "people and animals and weird monsters, but skinned by HP Lovecraft and HR Geiger". I was raised on Lovecraft, so that's got warm fuzzy feels for me.

Gygaxian weird things are nostalgic - I got started in D&D, so that's also got warm fuzzy feels for me.

Giant animals is some sort of bad habit.

[Brandy]

I have in the past leaned pretty heavily on undead. I'm a little uncomfortable with the trope that "all creatures of type x are evil and so not worthy of restraint or mercy" when those creatures are thinking beings.

[Yssa]

Originally Posted by Brandy

I have in the past leaned pretty heavily on undead. I'm a little uncomfortable with the trope that "all creatures of type x are evil and so not worthy of restraint or mercy" when those creatures are thinking beings.

I have the same problem -- Orcs are people too, after all.

I also struggle because I like like coming up with giant animals, but then I get attached to them and I don't really want to put them into risky situations.

And humans are tricky to, cause how many of them are actually really truly evil?

Good thing my players are up for navigating a swamp of grey-area rather than bashing skulls every day. . .

[Anthony]

My usual encounter design theory is to look in a book of monsters and find something that looks like it would be an interesting challenge and that I can shoehorn into the current storyline. It does probably mean I underuse 'vanilla' monsters, though humanoids are good because there's a lot of room to customize them.

[Rasputin]

Originally Posted by Brandy

I have in the past leaned pretty heavily on undead. I'm a little uncomfortable with the trope that "all creatures of type x are evil and so not worthy of restraint or mercy" when those creatures are thinking beings.

Originally Posted by Yssa

I have the same problem -- Orcs are people too, after all.

Yeah, I have that issue as well. I do tend to have them often as bandits, however. My game world is stereotypically crapsack and nobody's ideal. After several sessions of kobold bandits, I convinced my players to give up on them, as I was sick of them.

[Turhan's Bey Company]

I tend to use one class of monsters per location/adventure. Mostly humans here, mostly demons there, mostly undead elsewhere. It makes a bit more sense to me as a designer. That said...

Originally Posted by Yssa

I have the same problem -- Orcs are people too, after all.

I've been shying away from orcs and "evil races" in recent years. I'm finding them increasingly problematic, and I have no particular interest in rehabilitating them. So it's usually people (humans/elves/dwarves/etc., who are fully functional moral actors and are good or bad on an individual basis), very unhuman humanoids like lizard people (ditto, but very culturally different rather than potentially troublesome stand-ins for ethnic stereotypes), dangerous automata like undead, Things Man Was Not Meant To Know (because they're inherently inexplicable), demons (intelligent, but just plain evil for its own sake in ways that don't have to be justified), or unintelligent beasts.

[b-dog]

I tend to use faerie the most. And by faerie I mean pretty much any supernatural creature that is not a demon, angel or Elder Thing. The faerie are beings from other realities or cosmologies. They are neither truly good nor evil but they are often corrupted by demons.

Another reason is that slaughtering mortal tribes of ogres does not seem right but but if the ogres are interlopers from other worlds then it is not as problematic to me, mostly because faerie minds and logic are alien to humans so they are almost impossible to negotiate with unless they want to. Ogres in my world come in and then become gluttonous eaters of human flesh, especially babies so it is not hard to see why they are killed.

I like to have the mortal realm where the PCs live be natural which means all supernatural creatures are unnatural and usually come from another realm.

[evileeyore]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Do you have "old standards" you like to fall back on?

Nope.

I was once accused of "using too many Orcs", but to be fair in that campaign the PCs went into the Orc lands one a single adventure and then never left and it was their own choice, so, tough.

[martinl]

Originally Posted by Bruno

Do you have "old standards" you like to fall back on?

I'm fond of "quirky NPCs" and "reskinned" monsters.

The quirky NPCs because they give the PCs options about how to handle things, are fun to play, and hard to read. Is the crazy old guy in the dungeon some sort of dungeon bum, a disguised monster, or a mondo-powerful old guy? It's always interesting.

Ilove reskinning because so many monsters change dramatically in feeling if you jut present them a little differently. Karkadann become "man-eating cows" with no changes to stats, that "Roidgoblin" in the goblin line is an Ogre with berserk, and the "Ogrish Slobberbeast" is a dire wolf stat wise. This sort of thing adds variety and fun,keeping the monsters feeling fresh.