Okay folks, I know this is WAY overdue, but finally here is article number 3 in the RPG series MetaGaming! Why is this article way overdue? Well, it’s a combination of Christmas break (I’m a college student), working on other projects, and general laziness on my part. But I plan on getting back into the swing of things with this series of articles, so sit back, relax, read and enjoy!

 So. As promised in MetaGaming articles 1 and 2, this article will focus on the third and final core rulebook of 3rd Edition D&D: the Monster Manual (hereafter MM). Then I got to thinking to myself: what can one really say about the MM? I mean, it’s a roleplaying manual that has a bunch of monsters in it, designed to pit unwitting player characters against an array of nasties. Yep. That’s about it. I’m not going to make a comprehensive list of each and every monster in the MM, or tell you all which ones are my favorite (dragons) or anything like that.

 I will say that the beauty of the MM and all the monsters in it are that the statistics for each monster are very comprehensive, and in order to gain experience from monsters in the MM, a game master pretty much NEEDS a Dungeon Master’s Guide (DMG) to match up the varied challenge ratings of monsters found with monster stats in the MM with different levels of experience found on the experience chart in the DMG. Clever, Wizards of the Coast. Very clever. You have, in effect, made it nearly impossible to know how much experience to give per monster per group level without also requiring someone to purchase the DMG. Again, as I keep saying over and over, the core rulebooks are called “core” rulebooks for a reason! They each inform one another to make for maximum tabletop roleplaying gaming goodness.

 I know I mentioned the term “challenge rating” in that last paragraph, so I feel the need to further explain what that is, for gamers new to this specific lingo. Challenge rating basically outlines how difficult individual monsters are (or groups of monsters, if a GM adds challenge ratings of individual monsters together) when compared to a group of adventurers. So, if we have a group of players whose characters are all pretty low level, say, first through third level, then pitting them against a Great Wyrm Red Dragon with a challenge rating of 25 would tantamount to mass murder. Characters need to build up to higher levels themselves, so that they can in turn fight and hopefully defeat monsters with higher challenge rating levels, thus gaining experience through combat. I would follow the phrase “experience through combat” with a side note, though: GM’s, please don’t give experience based solely on monster encounters and combat; players who roleplay their characters well should be awarded experience for that, as well as amazing feats of heroism, deceit, mayhem, etc. So, again, for the purposes of a low-level campaign, focus on easy bad guys, like goblins, orcs, etc. Build up to the epic level death dragons!

 The other point I wanted to make about the MM is that at the back of the book there is an appendix which offers templates for various creatures which can be played as monsters, NPCs, (non-player characters), or which can be applied to PCs to make them into said creatures. Such instances are celestial creatures, fiendish creatures, ghosts, half-celestials and -fiends, half-dragons, liches, lycanthropes, and vampires. I like this section because, as I said before, these creatures can be played as monsters themselves, or they can be adapted to characters.

 For instance, say the focus of a particular campaign is hunting down and killing undead in general or even specifically vampires. As a GM, you make a vampire NPC to be like a boss-type character, who at one point maybe infects one or more of the player characters with vampirism. Thus, the character can then be developed into a vampire him or herself. What happens next is all up the GM and PC in question: does he kill himself because he doesn’t want to be a vampire? Does he join forces with the original vampire? Does he use his new vampire powers to continue helping his fellow adventurers hunt down and kill the original vampire? These scenarios are just three of a potentially limitless number of options that can be discovered, devised, and/or worked out to make the campaign a more randomized, fun, and generally enjoyable experience. The same can be done with really any of the aforementioned creatures listed in Appendix 3 of the MM; perhaps a character dies but his ghost remains to aid the other PCs. Maybe a PC slowly discovers over time that he is actually a half-dragon or half-fiend: how will he/she handle it and roleplay it all out?

 That’s the beauty of roleplaying; anything is possible. Sure, there are some video games which are fairly customizable in the roleplaying genre (World of Warcraft, Oblivion, Dragon Age: Origins, etc.), but when it comes right down to it, they fail to be TOTALLY customizable. Somewhere, there are going to be some parameters which you as a gamer cannot get around. With D&D or any other type of tabletop roleplaying, you can literally do anything you can think up. Imagination and dedication to a character/game/timeframe are all it takes. In this way, the Monster Manual just adds another basic dimension to the core triumvirate which is also represented by the Player’s Handbook and Dungeon Master’s Guide. And as I’ve said before, it doesn’t really matter what edition of the game you play; roleplaying is roleplaying, after all. It just depends on how much money and time you already have invested in a certain edition (in my case, 3rd)!

 So, now that we have the basic three rulebooks of the most well-known and widely-played tabletop roleplaying game in the world, what can you expect from future MetaGaming articles? Let’s just say that as a seasoned Game Master, I have lots of little tricks, trials, and adventures in store for you readers, so keep checking back and see what happens next!

 Until next time, have fun . . . and play nice!