LotR gets filtered from D&D more with each edition.

[God_of_Awesome]

Man, that's hilarious, Violence.

Okay, I know most DnD setting assume medieval-esque time period here, but what about places like Ebberon or Sigil? Especially Sigil, where you can and will have trade relations with Devils.

Most setting I run are more an anarchic stew of pick and choose Roman Empire, Renaissance, Victorian period and the early half of the 1900's. The latter two being minus tech except for magical equivalents but you get my drift.

You don't have isolated villages, you have town connected by highways which may not be ethnically diverse but is more passive-aggresive to anything different. Like a black guy in a very white southern town back in 1950's. Except this black guy is actual a Storm Giant or a dark elf with god knows how many levels in Rangers and a psychotic pet panther, so lynching becomes an impractical concept.

Then you have cities where everyone lives together, including kobolds and gnomes right next to each other and they have to get along. In fact, in my setting, they usually live RIGHT next to each other and have some sort of murder murderers pact going where if a gnome kills a kobold or vice versa the murderer gets the shit murdered out of him.

~

Back to medieval village though. Hasn't this been adressed to an extent? When we had a largely hostile environment, the less and less likely you are to meet any humanoid and the more likely any humanoids you meet are bad ass motherfuckers.

Apply same to village. Everyone in the village has levels in Warrior or Mage, a working militia has Fighters and Wizards and are lead by a few higher levels one too. So where do your PCs come in?

Well, at low levels, the village is low level too. Maybe a number of PC levels around the village to equal your party and a couple more NPC levels to boot. That's how they survived, seriously. But they've been playing defensively and are willing to hire you to play offensively and murder the shit out of monsters.

Once you go higher levels, you can start taking jobs from higher level settlement who obviously deal with higher level monsters.

Fuck, that would make a good campaign setting.

[RobbyPants]

Of course, just because you turn away a good "monster" doesn't mean that it won't help you when you need it anyway. That's actually a pretty common trope: the gentle giant who had to prove his worth, or what have you.

Sure, it's not particularly nice of the villagers to turn anyone away who doesn't look like them, but it doesn't necessarily doom the whole town.

[Username17]

RC, a village, any village in the D&D landscape relies upon the kindness of adventurers and shedu to protect it from Beholders deciding to wipe it out. Turning away strangers for being weird means that you don't have those adventurers and creatures at your back when the beholders come and then you die. Because high level adventurers and high level good monsters are all fucking weird looking.

You're just doing ridiculous hyperbole now.

Yeah, because we all know that high level human adventurers obviously aren't recognizable as human.

Give it up man. You lost this one.

Actually no. They are not recognizable as human. Their eyes glow, their equipment glows. They float around. When D&D artists draw human adventurers, even mid level human adventurers, they look like this:


Or this:

Or this:


When you get to high level, you stop looking like a "normal" human. That's part of the point. So no, turning away everyone who doesn't look like a human is still fucking retarded. It has always been fucking retarded and never ever stopped.

-Username17

[Lago PARANOIA]

Sure, it's not particularly nice of the villagers to turn anyone away who doesn't look like them, but it doesn't necessarily doom the whole town.

In a world where civilization is always doomed and you can only protect so many villages at a time it does.

New York City only gets away with dissing Spider-Man because it's the only city Stan Lee lets him operate in. If Philadelphia had a supervillain epidemic and were begging Spider-Man for his help and actually, you know, appreciated it and helped him out (with money, superhero support, etc.) there's no reason for Spider-Man to stay in NYC except for plot-induced stupidity. Philadelphia needs him equally as badly, perhaps even moreso, so what's NYC going to do when Spider-Man leaves for greener pastures and Green Goblin and the Lizard are still there?

[Doom]

It was formulated on the popular Roleplaying Game forum, RPG.net

Have to take some exception here...RPG.net's popularity has long since shriveled to little more than an embarrassing joke, for reasons that have much to do with

and named after the now-banned user who inspired it.

[RandomCasualty2]

When you get to high level, you stop looking like a "normal" human. That's part of the point. So no, turning away everyone who doesn't look like a human is still fucking retarded. It has always been fucking retarded and never ever stopped.

What are we talking about, superman level shenanigans where putting on a funny mask or having an ioun stone floating around your head makes you unrecognizeable to the general public. Except for the green dude in the first one, who honestly looks more half-orc than human, the other guys are just humans with a bunch of very odd looking costumes. That's totally like saying a guy wearing full plate doesn't look human anymore. Most of the other supernatural stuff (like guys 2nd spirit arms) can get turned off at will, so they can totally make themselves look more normal when they're not monster hunting. Not to mention that picture was lifted from magic of incarnum which is deliberately the book of high magic freakshow that nobody uses... so whatever.

Now while you can argue that it makes it easy to tell whose high level and whose low level, it honestly has nothing to do with looking like monsters.

As far as this bullshit about good creatures saving towns that people are spouting. I honestly can't recall any stories where people got saved by shedu or coatls and there was no humanoid heroes around. Good aligned monsters don't like in human cities. They just... don't. I don't know what else to say on that topic. The situations where a village is protected by some good aligned monster instead of heroes are the rare exceptions, not the rule.

[God_of_Awesome]

Pointing back to my original post, why could villages be made of PC-levelers if they effing live in some hostile ass environments.

[RobbyPants]

Sure, it's not particularly nice of the villagers to turn anyone away who doesn't look like them, but it doesn't necessarily doom the whole town.

In a world where civilization is always doomed and you can only protect so many villages at a time it does.

New York City only gets away with dissing Spider-Man because it's the only city Stan Lee lets him operate in. If Philadelphia had a supervillain epidemic and were begging Spider-Man for his help and actually, you know, appreciated it and helped him out (with money, superhero support, etc.) there's no reason for Spider-Man to stay in NYC except for plot-induced stupidity. Philadelphia needs him equally as badly, perhaps even moreso, so what's NYC going to do when Spider-Man leaves for greener pastures and Green Goblin and the Lizard are still there?

Of course, by this point, we're really getting into how each DM chooses to run each village, each friendly monster, and each hostile monster. Ultimately, they're all going to do whatever the DM wants them to do.

I mean, is some lawful good "monster" really going to let an entire village (including all those women and children) die just because a handful of guards told him to fuck off? He's not very "good" now, is he?

Although, really, this all seems pointless. In actual practice, the PCs do almost all of the relevant saving anyway. The only times they don't save the town is when they find out about it too late in the first place, which is really nothing more than a plot device. It's not like D&D has ever been good at modeling anything other than killing monsters and taking their stuff.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Of course, by this point, we're really getting into how each DM chooses to run each village, each friendly monster, and each hostile monster. Ultimately, they're all going to do whatever the DM wants them to do.

And there are of course going to be guidelines for what the DM wants to do. If the fluff says that humans universally hate weird-looking people to the point where they attack on sight, that will produce a very different experience on the whole for coautl adventurers than those who are in tolerant locales.

I mean, is some lawful good "monster" really going to let an entire village (including all those women and children) die just because a handful of guards told him to fuck off? He's not very "good" now, is he?

Look, the amount of good you can do is limited. Both in just the effort you can give and how much people are going to thwart your efforts.

You are a cleric with a ton of healing spells. Two villages have contracted a disease that will kill the the infected in a week. One of the villages doesn't mind that you're an orc and lets you straight into town hall to cure as many people as possible. The other one hates your orc ass to the point where not only will you be attacked for getting in but people will be attacking you while you cure people. And if that sounds ridiculous, do you think that if Hannibal Lector did a 180, escaped from the mental institute, and decided to devote the rest of his life to healing people do you think that the police would leave him alone?

So let's tally the numbers up. If you go to the first village, you can save about two hundred lives. If you go to the first village, all of the shit you have to deal with you can save only fifty.

Why would it be moral to pick the second village over the first one?

Remember, this is D&D. Civilization is always doomed somewhere. You don't even have to look very hard to find issues that need your attention. And if your goal is to help Team Civilization as much as possible (by feeding peasants, teaching children, curing the sick, solving crime, etc.) you help them more by concentrating your efforts onto people who actually appreciate the attention.

Going back to Spider-Man, if New York City and Philadelphia both needed his attention in equal amounts but Philadelphia was offering to pay him a salary, take him off jury duty, and provide a superhero squad to help him sometimes so he can take a day off, if Spider-Man was a decent person he'd go to Philadelphia. Why? Because Spider-Man still needs to eat and find shelter and take care of his citizenship duties. This takes time off from his ability to go superheroing, which means people will die.

Spider-Man can save MORE people if he goes to Philadelphia where he doesn't have to worry about getting a job or paying for his own medical bills if he gets injured. Similarly, heroes in D&D can save more people by going to villages where they will get support, or at least won't be attacked on sight.

Thus is a village is self-interested they'll put themselves in the good graces of Team Good. The heroes have already made the choice which village to help and that means that they'll pick the one in which they can save the most people. And if your village is going to fight heroes every step of the way just because they're the 'wrong' kind then heroes will do the math and decide that saving 1000 halfling lives is a better result than saving 100 human lives--so sucks to be you! This means doing whatever you can to drive the number of lives the hero can save up so that if the human has the choice of saving 1500 human lives then he'll come back to your locale after all. This means not giving a shit if the adventurer is a goblin paladin or whatever the fuck.

[A Man In Black]

3) Most high-level adventurers shouldn't be humans. Stock critters like Sahugain and Deep Gnomes are universally more hardcore than any human beings (not just in racial advantages, but in levels past that) and go on the same plots. The fact that most Who's Who books show the majority of high-level adventures as humans is a damning indictment of author-induced ethnocentrism. It makes no sense in the fucking universe that mid/high-level human good warriors outnumber that of, say, Githyanki. Those guys start off more stronger than humans, have a culture that's more devoted to training and self-improvement, and live in a harder-core environment than most humans.

Running with this tangent, githyanki, deep gnomes, and sahuagin all live in weird places full of danger, so they don't really have to go on high-level adventures or even travel very far to go adventuring. While they may have high-level challenges, they're less adventuresome because they can just commute from home to the danger, and they're needed at home so something horrible doesn't come and destroy it.

Human villages are threatened by this:

]

Githyanki settlements have to deal with this:

[Lago PARANOIA]

I honestly can't recall any stories where people got saved by shedu or coatls and there was no humanoid heroes around.

That's because stories about creatures with good hearts trying to save the ungrateful bastards, or at least integrate with them, and getting turned away because of something petty (like their appearance) then getting all hateful are more common.

I wonder if you'll be able to see the irony in these two statements and thus get the appropriate moral lesson. Probably not, or you wouldn't have said such a thing.

Most of the other supernatural stuff (like guys 2nd spirit arms) can get turned off at will, so they can totally make themselves look more normal when they're not monster hunting.

There are many more creatures capable of disguising themselves to look like your kind than there are good-aligned monsters incapable of hiding their appearance, so your statement (once again) makes no sense whatsoever.

[Rejakor]

I think that like anything involving humans the result is actually somewhat closer to the middle and a hell of a lot more slapdash and individual.

In the frontier town of Thwash, Joe the Crap Covered Guard Sergeant peers over his 20' high move earth and stone built town walls at the Shambling Mound that has just wandered up to the town gates. Since there's no screaming peasants heralding it's wake, he hasn't given the signal to attack but his men have loaded their crossbows, the ballista, and the traps in the gate-tunnel have been armed. Since it's a plant, they're passing out the alchemist's fire. It stops in front of the gate. This is around the time the messenger reaches Captain Derrows'(ranger 8) favourite tavern with 'somethin weird came up to the gates!'. Captain Derrows immediately sends for Jon of Sarth(wiz 5), the evocator's guild journeyman overseeing the construction of the keep. Meanwhile, Sergeant Joe has poked his head over the battlements and yells out 'What is your business here?' and then, out of caution '..sir?'. From then, depending on what the shambling mound says, the bluff checks it makes, and the short 'customs' questioning it undergoes in a room in the tower, it might be given a pass that lets it move about the city although it has to check in with someone at the tower each day, or not. If it makes a gargling sound and tries to rip the gates off, odds on, it will be filled with fire and arrows.

Some towns might have wondrous items that scan for glamers. Some might have a Town Wizard (adept) with a Hassmati Guild Representative (Sense Motive-o-mancer) to point out the suspicious people to scan for magic/lieing. Some might have a paladin detecting evil (unlikely, lots of evil people and most towns actually benefit from their actions, so, evolution, etc, however some towns especially theocracies might do this). Others rely on everyone knowing each other and the 'him! The outsider!' system. If little suzie shows up drained of blood one night, the lynch mob forms, and then adventurers are called in to hunt down the origin of the vampire, and purge any vampiric covens in the area.


Also, one thing to be remembered is that generally most areas settled by races of humanoids (like humans) will NOT be awash with monsters that want to eat them. Simply, if the humans are living there, they managed, somehow, to drive out or KILL the monsters living there. If they didn't, they're not living there, because the monsters ATE them. Thus, the only regions with /plentiful/ monsters (there can be new monsters moving into 'safe' regions, or leftover monsters that hid/were tied to locations etc) are newly settled areas, areas that have had some ubermagic causing monsters to appear cast on them, or targets of some kind of monster migration (underdark hole opens up etc) and if the inhabitants can't beat BACK the monsters, they will die or LEAVE. Look at warring groups of humans. Scottish Highlanders may have been mistrusted in English towns, but they were allowed to come in, and trade or buy things or whatnot, most of the time. If one of the local scottish highland farmers was hung by the english because he looked at a good english girl funny, then suddenly no scottish highlanders are allowed into the town and any english that try to go to the highlands without a large body of armed men are tortured to death by jeering groups of highland youths.

If humans are utterly at the mercy of monsters, and have no way of fighting them, then the humans die. Simple as that. Or they live somewhere the monsters can't get to. Or have some kind of advantage there that lets them kill any monsters that show up there. Like on an island made of sand that kills sea creatures and creatures that can fly or something. Or as slaves to their Hobgoblin Cleric masters.

But that's all setting specific. While it might seem that humans would be xenophobic or xenophilic, in reality, they'd do whatever worked, which would be an untidy mess of both with a good helping of prejudice and unjustified hope, occasionally ending in the destruction of human settlements entirely because people were stupid.

[RobbyPants]

I mean, is some lawful good "monster" really going to let an entire village (including all those women and children) die just because a handful of guards told him to fuck off? He's not very "good" now, is he?

Look, the amount of good you can do is limited. Both in just the effort you can give and how much people are going to thwart your efforts.

You are a cleric with a ton of healing spells. Two villages have contracted a disease that will kill the the infected in a week. One of the villages doesn't mind that you're an orc and lets you straight into town hall to cure as many people as possible. The other one hates your orc ass to the point where not only will you be attacked for getting in but people will be attacking you while you cure people. And if that sounds ridiculous, do you think that if Hannibal Lector did a 180, escaped from the mental institute, and decided to devote the rest of his life to healing people do you think that the police would leave him alone?

So let's tally the numbers up. If you go to the first village, you can save about two hundred lives. If you go to the first village, all of the shit you have to deal with you can save only fifty.

Why would it be moral to pick the second village over the first one?

While I agree with you on this point, this case assume both:

1) There is another village nearby (or the monster is nomadic), and

2) The villagers actively attack the monster rather than turn it away.

I was making neither assumption when I posted what I did earlier. I'm not saying your scenario wouldn't or couldn't happen. It's just not what would happen all the time.


Even still, these fictitious xenophobic towns have to make judgment calls. They're going to run into more bad monsters than good monsters statistically (if the typical encounters of PCs are anything to measure this by), and even if they do make friends with a good monster, they need to have the monster to either live with them or at least be there when the bad monsters come.

I mean, if a silver dragon comes down from the mountains to a town to eat some of their cows and play chess, are they going to build him a barn and have him move in? Probably not. So when the orcs come marching in, they'd better hope he happens to be flying in the neighborhood, or else their new found friend will come by next week to find a ghost town.


Of course, we've all been ignoring the most obvious option three here: get a damn sage in your town with some Knowledge ranks so you can know who to turn away and who to keep!

[RandomCasualty2]

That's because stories about creatures with good hearts trying to save the ungrateful bastards, or at least integrate with them, and getting turned away because of something petty (like their appearance) then getting all hateful are more common.

I wonder if you'll be able to see the irony in these two statements and thus get the appropriate moral lesson. Probably not, or you wouldn't have said such a thing.

I realize what you and Frank are saying, and yes, having a xenophobic outlook can sometime be a hindrance, but in the D&D world, mostly it's a boon.

There are many more creatures capable of disguising themselves to look like your kind than there are good-aligned monsters incapable of hiding their appearance, so your statement (once again) makes no sense whatsoever.

I don't even see what point you're making here and it seems like you're either misunderstanding or just twisting the words of what I'm saying.

The idea is that there are more evil monstrous creatures that can't disguise their appearances than there are good-aligned monsters.

I mean seriously, this isn't that hard. As I said before, it's a numbers game. If you take a random sampling of monstrous looking creatures, a strong majority of them will be evil. Yes, there are exceptions to that rule, but I don't give a fuck, because the most likely case is that you're letting evil creatures right past your defenses. So you and Frank can go on quoting exceptions all you want, but it still doesn't change the underlying probabilities.

Yes, you can win big by betting on individual numbers in Roulette, but that doesn't make it a good bet, because most of the time, you end up losing.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Even still, these fictitious xenophobic towns have to make judgment calls. They're going to run into more bad monsters than good monsters statistically (if the typical encounters of PCs are anything to measure this by), and even if they do make friends with a good monster, they need to have the monster to either live with them or at least be there when the bad monsters come.

most likely case is that you're letting evil creatures right past your defenses.

They don't have a choice. If it's a bad monster they're fucked no matter what they do. A Worm that Walks or a Manticore or a Wyvern is going to level your village whether you greet it friendly-like or get all surly and hostile. You're trying to convince the minority of neutral and good monsters.

The typical defenses of most places ain't gonna do shit. Like a gang of trolls is really frightened by the militia of a typical village.

[RandomCasualty2]

The typical defenses of most places ain't gonna do shit. Like a gang of trolls is really frightened by the militia of a typical village.

Villages pretty much have no reason even existing in D&D, because they literally have no defense unless they have a resident badass like Elminster living there.

Anything with a wall though (which is any town or city) has a decent shot of repelling invaders. And yes, they need those defenses, because rolling over and playing dead just doesn't work with the majority of D&D crap. Yes, hobgoblins may enslave you instead of killing you, but either way, your town is fucked and so are you.

While it's true that there are some monsters that will just fuck up even a walled town, a decently organized militia and a wall can repel a reasonable amount of threats. Granted they'll probably take some losses but it'll be costly for the invading force, and that alone may be a good enough deterrent. Even to stupid creatures like ogres or trolls, rushing a well defended wall with archers and boiling oil isn't a tempting prospect.

The "you're fucked anyway, so you might as well maximize your risk" argument is garbage.

[Username17]

The "you're fucked anyway, so you might as well maximize your risk" argument is garbage.

That's not the argument. The argument is that there are five types of monster encounters:

• Good
• Neutral
• Evil
• Nonspeaking
• Invasion

And there are two responses:

• 1. Reciprocal Altruism
  2. Xenophobia

And the result matrix is:

Monster is...	Reciprocal Altruism	Xenophobia
Good	Trade, possible ally	No result
Neutral	Trade, possible ally	Possible combat at wall
Evil	Combat, enemy may get surprise round	Combat at wall
Nonspeaking	Combat at wall	Combat at wall
Invasion	Combat at wall	Combat at wall

Considering that you need allies to stare down Beholder invasions, selecting the right hand column is batshit insane. You're gaining very little in very few circumstances and you're losing super hero protection, which s the only thing that can save you when any of he shit-vs.-fan events happen.

Your rubric of insularity doesn't make any sense. It's just bad game theory to do that.

-Username17

[God_of_Awesome]

I still say the number of humanoids goes down as the percentage of humanoids being bad ass rubric applies here.

If the world of DnD is so hostile and village such prime targets, everyone in the village will have some levels in bad ass. It's merely a matter of evolution in action.

[Cielingcat]

Correction: if the world of D&D is so hostile and villages are such prime targets, then every village that manages to survive will have some method of surviving.

Constant danger from outside monsters does not mean everyone in the village will be a badass, because that would mean everyone in the village would have had to fight the monsters. It means that the village will have enough badasses to repel any threat they have so far faced.

So yes, if your village is protected by the presence of Whatsherface the Wizard, you might be able to get away with being xenophobic because you already have the means to repel invaders. If Whatsherface is like, level 7 or something, you can just go ahead and say "fuck you" to a bunch of people because she can, with preparation and the guards' help, repel anything of at least CR 8 or lower. And that's most of the things that are going to come near you village.

So the xenophobic village of Whatsherface is going to be perfectly fine throwing away the goblinoid adventuring party because they're not going to be in danger from the Hill Giants until Xr'chtal the Lich enslaves them to conquer the wilds. But when that happens, they're probably going to die anyway, because the goblinoid adventurers don't get on the case until Xr'chtal has already leveled enough villages that they learn about it.

[Fuchs]

Also, one thing to be remembered is that generally most areas settled by races of humanoids (like humans) will NOT be awash with monsters that want to eat them. Simply, if the humans are living there, they managed, somehow, to drive out or KILL the monsters living there. If they didn't, they're not living there, because the monsters ATE them. Thus, the only regions with /plentiful/ monsters (there can be new monsters moving into 'safe' regions, or leftover monsters that hid/were tied to locations etc) are newly settled areas, areas that have had some ubermagic causing monsters to appear cast on them, or targets of some kind of monster migration (underdark hole opens up etc) and if the inhabitants can't beat BACK the monsters, they will die or LEAVE. Look at warring groups of humans. Scottish Highlanders may have been mistrusted in English towns, but they were allowed to come in, and trade or buy things or whatnot, most of the time. If one of the local scottish highland farmers was hung by the english because he looked at a good english girl funny, then suddenly no scottish highlanders are allowed into the town and any english that try to go to the highlands without a large body of armed men are tortured to death by jeering groups of highland youths.

If humans are utterly at the mercy of monsters, and have no way of fighting them, then the humans die. Simple as that. Or they live somewhere the monsters can't get to. Or have some kind of advantage there that lets them kill any monsters that show up there. Like on an island made of sand that kills sea creatures and creatures that can fly or something. Or as slaves to their Hobgoblin Cleric masters.

But that's all setting specific. While it might seem that humans would be xenophobic or xenophilic, in reality, they'd do whatever worked, which would be an untidy mess of both with a good helping of prejudice and unjustified hope, occasionally ending in the destruction of human settlements entirely because people were stupid.

I run it similar to this - human lands are generally not full of monsters, good or bad ones, since humans cleared them out long ago. Humans did that because as "team human" they are more effective overall than most of the other teams. That means of course that many humans are levelled, not just the PCs, else humanity would not have survived anyway.

Good and evil doesn't enter in there as much as "looks like us" and "doesn't look like us" does - demihumans are on "team good" since that's what team human calls itself, and they look like humans, and some time ago learned to better get along with humans since otherwise they end up on team monster, and get genocided by team human, or driven out to the wastes and frontiers, like all the "evil races".

So, yeah, in my campaign, humans are the ones other races are nice to out of neccessity, since otherwise it's crusade time again, and adventurers, knightly orders, wizard circles, etc. start gaining exp on your lands.

Even if individually, and even if adventuring, humans may not be the equal to a bunch of monsters, as a race and culture, they're among the most badass teams because when push comes to shove, most of those those wizards, CoDzillas, and other epic heroes, as well as all the up and coming adventurers and the career military pick team human over everyone else.

[Fuchs]

Considering that you need allies to stare down Beholder invasions, selecting the right hand column is batshit insane. You're gaining very little in very few circumstances and you're losing super hero protection, which s the only thing that can save you when any of he shit-vs.-fan events happen.

Your rubric of insularity doesn't make any sense. It's just bad game theory to do that.

-Username17

As pointed out - depending on the setting, Beholder Invasions only occur on the frontier, or in special circumstances, since the last few times beholders and humans clashed was when the great paladin Sir Robert led the crusade that eradicated three beholder cities (and netted Sir Robert the crown of his kingdom), when "The Golden Dagger Company" tracked down the Cult of the Beholder, gaining the artifact they later used to turn the orcish lands into farmland (founding their own country, with the orcs used as fertilizer), and when Lord Maligant the Wizard retaliated against an attack on his home town, causing part of the underdark underneath the town to still be filled with magma to this day.

[RandomCasualty2]

Considering that you need allies to stare down Beholder invasions, selecting the right hand column is batshit insane.

Okay, you greatly understated the case of having evil people in your town. It's not just "gains a surprise round." It's the fact that you now have someone roaming your town killing people and you can't bring the full force of your guards to bear on it because it can be very mobile. Killing shit at the wall is easy because you can gather a good number of archers to that point and take something out.

Killing shit in your town is much harder because you've got much more ground to cover and your troops are now forced into melee, something that most monsters tend to excel at. And yeah, people are going to fucking die.

And the real big deal is that once it's in your walls, you can no longer count on simple numbers to take it out. You may have been able to take out the troll with bolts and oil flasks at the gates, but if it's wandering your town haphazardly ganking people, you now need a hero to take it out, because your guard force is just not large enough to have individual patrols capable of beating that thing. So long as it stays on the move, you're basically screwed. And in the time it takes to find someone to kill it, dozens, potentially hundreds, are going to be dead.

Now if you're calling that "a surprise round at best." I can only conclude that you're being deliberately obtuse here, because I know you're smart enough to understand the concepts.

You're gaining very little in very few circumstances and you're losing super hero protection, which s the only thing that can save you when any of he shit-vs.-fan events happen.

You keep quoting some kind of super hero protection... but when the fuck does that even happen? Like ever... I can't even think of any stories where that happened in any campaign world. Most of the time when a dragon or whatever gets involved it's because a human hero recruited it.

What really happens is that you get a few trading partners. Seriously, that's it. Your cities economy may be bolstered slightly from selling a suit of chainmail to a lizardman or a hobgoblin. Of course, nothing these guys trade you is even going to be all that great. It's not like there exists special armor or weapons that only hobgoblins can make, and thus trading with them makes you better. You gain a little extra trade, but you could just as easily trade with humans. And worse still, the longsword you sold the gnolls may one day end up killing your own merchant caravans as they turn your weapons towards raiding. Selling weapons to criminals may make profit on the short term, but it's going to hurt your economy in the long term.

And lets get one thing straight... cities are protected by classed humans, elves, dwarves. That's the general rule. This bullshit about "well maybe you find a friendly couatl who decides to risk its life to save your town" is such a rare case that it's not even worth considering. In all likelihood, you'll be fucking dead before then, because monsters are going to exploit your policy of "let anyone in, regardless of the fact that they're members of an evil race, on the off chance that you may find the 1 in 100,000 who is good."

Letting monster races that are almost always evil into your gates on the honor system is fucking stupid. It's a system based around a highly unlikely but potentially high payoff. You're betting individual numbers in Roulette and we call that a sucker bet. You will not win out on the long term working with that system.

[A Man In Black]

What really happens is that you get a few trading partners. Seriously, that's it. Your cities economy may be bolstered slightly from selling a suit of chainmail to a lizardman or a hobgoblin. Of course, nothing these guys trade you is even going to be all that great. It's not like there exists special armor or weapons that only hobgoblins can make, and thus trading with them makes you better. You gain a little extra trade, but you could just as easily trade with humans. And worse still, the longsword you sold the gnolls may one day end up killing your own merchant caravans as they turn your weapons towards raiding. Selling weapons to criminals may make profit on the short term, but it's going to hurt your economy in the long term.

No, you get no trading partners with that logic, because the longsword you sold to a human dude may end up killing your own caravans, etc. And the "troll" that gets into the city and wrecks shit might be a werewolf instead, who looks just like a human at the gates.

And, in the meantime, you turn away the people who are most likely to deal with the longsword-armed human bandit and the werewolf.

[RobbyPants]

Of course, any village that managed to survive for any length of time probably did so for a reason. Humans are good at adapting to their environment. We're assuming that everyone in the village has so idea what the green thing with feathers and six eyes is.

There's actually a very good chance someone in the town knows. The longer the village survives, the more likely it is to collectively know these things. Given this whole xenophobia/be friends with everyone gambit, why know take the time to learn things ahead of time and be more likely to make a good informed decision?

Assuming that people in the town wouldn't learn this stuff is really kind of crazy. Seriously. In real life, people take time to learn the differences between different types of animals and plants. It pays to know which things will poison/bite/kill you. D&D should be no different other than that the things can look even weirder, and do stuff like turn you to stone.

[Fuchs]

The whole "people don't know what this monster is" seems for a big part made up to a) curb "metagaming" and b) make some knowledge skills kind of useful. That the DC to recognize a famous monster is higher than to recognize a weaker monster is another problem.