Category talk:Dungeons & Dragons monsters
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Legendary
editIn answer to the question "Why did I remove this category from the supercategory "Legendary creatures", it's because D&D creates are not (necessarily) legendary. Some (e.g. dragons) are, but many (Gelatinous cube, black pudding, anything specific to D&D) are not. If there was a "Fictional creatures" they could be a subcategory of that. My apologies for not explaining this. DJ Clayworth 16:57, 24 Aug 2004 (UTC)
Guidelines for inclusion are desperately needed
editPlease, people, stop adding this category to every single article on every single creature that has ever been written up in D&D terms. This category should be for creatures that are specifically or primarily associated with D&D, not for everything in the Monster Manual; otherwise, this category should be also added to human, horse, and so on. A good precedent is found at List of species in fantasy fiction, in which consensus was to keep creatures from legend and mythology separate from creatures from literature and modern fiction.
On a related note, Category:Forgotten Realms creatures, Category:Forgotten Realms races, and Category:Dragonlance creatures should not be overlapping with this category the way that they currently do. If a creature is a generic D&D creature (derro, illithid), it should be in this category and not in the categories of every setting in which it appears; if it's a campaign-specific creature (saurial, draconian), it should be in the campaign's subcategory and not here. Otherwise, every creature in this category will end up in the campaign-specific categories as well, and vice versa. (Honestly, are there any "core" D&D creatures that aren't found in the Realms?) -Sean Curtin 04:34, May 29, 2005 (UTC)
Also: Category:Forgotten Realms races is a pretty misleading name: "race" in the D&D context refers to playable races, but pretty much every D&D creature has been written up as a playable race at some point. Category:Forgotten Realms creatures is a better substitute; dividing creature categories into "has been written up for use as a PC" and "has not been written up for use as a PC" is a pointless distinction. -Sean Curtin 04:39, May 29, 2005 (UTC)
- Firstly, explain to me why having Category:Dungeons & Dragons creatures added to the mythological and legendary creatures included in the Dungeons & Dragons game is detrimental to wikipedia? It's perfectly relevent, and your claim that it means we'd have to add human and horse etc. is just a silly exaggeration. This is a category for fictional creatures; that much should be obvious.
- Secondly, Forgotten Realms is, like Middle Earth or any number of other novel-based fictional settings, a universe to its own; a universe which utilizes Dungeons & Dragons so people can play that game within the setting. Forgotten Realmns was invented pre-Dungeons & Dragons. Now plenty of gaming companies have attempted to stat out Lord of the Rings as a role-playing game, but does that mean Middle Earth and all its subcategories should be a subcategories of the relevent Roleplaying game categories?
- If people are searching the Forgotten Realms categories they should have links to all relevent Forgotten Realms information. Until seperate articles are created for the FR information and the generic D&D information (which would be a waste of space), the guidleines for including generic Dungeons & Dragons creatures in Forgotten Realms (sub)categories is simply that information about their role within the FR setting is provided within the article, so all relevent FR information can be grouped.
- The reason I reverted Forgotten Realms races was because nobody bothered to explain its deletion. I agree that differing between races and creatures is maybe not worthwhile—though it seems odd to refer to elves et. all as "creatures" along with rothé—so I'm happy to merged those two categories for neatness. -Erolos 13:30, 29 May 2005 (UTC)
- Again: Just because a legendary creature has been given D&D stats is no reason to give it the D&D creatures category. No other fiction or game category attempts to lay claim to things that originated elsewhere. Phoenix isn't categorized under Category:Harry Potter animals, although by your argument it should be, because even though the phoenix doesn't originate with Harry Potter and it isn't primarily associated with Harry Potter, the Harry Potter series utilizes the creature. A conscious decision was made on the list I mentioned above and on many other categories to distinguish between creatures from folklore and mythology (dragon) and creatures from literature and modern fiction (derro) in both lists and categories. D&D should be treated no diferently.
- On the FR creatures category: All FR creatures are D&D creatures by association. FR was created as a D&D setting in 1975, and every creature worth writing a Wikipedia article for either first appeared in D&D products, or appeared in a novel and was later adapted into D&D stats. Every remotely major general D&D creature has also been placed in the Realms; adding Category:Forgotten Realms creatures to all of them is a pointless duplication of Category:Dungeons & Dragons creatures. If you do duplicate the categories like that, the hypothetical Category:Dungeons & Dragons creatures that are not found in the Forgotten Realms would actually be smaller than Category:Forgotten Realms creatures. -Sean Curtin 03:54, May 31, 2005 (UTC)
- The reason why the phoenix is not categorised under Category:Harry Potter animals? There is no information in the article pertaining to the the Harry Potter portrayal. It has obviously been the decision of the Wikipedians focusing on that category not to edit the articles about the legendary creatures featured in Harry Potter to include their depictions in their apprearances in the books. Thus the Harry Potter animals category only has creatures created there. Orc, elf and others, even Sylph, however, have in their articles relevent information about the depictions of the mythical creature in the Dungeons & Dragons game. Therefore, with the inclusion explained by this information within the article, these creatures should be included in Category:Dungeons & Dragons creatures so that someone browsing through Dungeons & Dragons material (for, we could say, a paper on role-playing games' depictions of non-human species) can navigate easily to all relevent information.
- Whilst all Dungeons & Dragons creaures MAY be used in the Forgotten Realms setting that is not the same as them being a part of the setting. Just because manticore appears in a few 'Random Encounter' tables in FR books that doesn't mean we include information about its appearance in FR in the article—it adds nothing to the article. But to the creatures where detailed information can be added to their depiction within the setting, it is appropriate, and as I said above, we should group all written information together so that people looking for all relevent FR information can find it within Category:Forgotten Realms, Category:Forgotten Realms creatures/Category:Forgotten Realms races (which I incidently think works well as a subcategory of the former), and related categories. It is a simple matter of making the wikipedia efficient. -Erolos 23:41, 1 Jun 2005 (UTC)
D&D Monster Manual as a WikiBook??
editThis sounds great -- how do we do it? I am a neophyte so I apologize if my questions are trivial.
I clicked on the link but it appears to go to a completely blank page. What are the guidelines for what should be in such a WikiBook, and what is the procedure for actually editing it? Can someone explain here and/or put the answer on the link?
I'm deleteing the "help make the monster manual into a wikibook", but i'll leave this for reference. The Monster Manual is copyrighted work, if you put any part of it (not covered by fair use) up you will violating Wizard's of the Coast's, et al's copyright. Ask them for permission first. Personally I don't feel the Monster Manual needs to be here, sure it's a piece of reference material but mistakes and/or vandalism can ruin that. Secondly, if we put up the Monster Manual we'll need to put MM2, MM3, MM4, the Miniture's Handbook, and so fourth, esentially ending with every DnD book wikified. Pandemic 11:10, 19 September 2006 (UTC)
- I think the D&D articles themselves have gone rampant and well above what is needed let alone for just monsters. There is too much in depth content about the specifics of the game and as you said I think some of it infringes on copyright. Is there really a need for any monster to be on Wikipedia? If it is mentioned in an article then shouldn't the references for it to the actual book be enough. I have mentioned this in several other places where it seems the entire SRD looks like it is migrating onto Wikipedia as indepent articles as well as too specific information on the specific rules of the game. Maybe the creatures should have little to no details, but just a list of those specific to the various forms of D&D. shadzar|Talk|contribs 12:24, 25 October 2006 (UTC)
What I think should be included on what pages and how we should structure the categories and articles
editI understand there has recently been a lot of debate on how to include what creatures on which pages. Here is what I think would be best: We preserve the articles on the monsters themselves, but delete the dungeons and dragons creatures category and then make a few new pages. There should be a standard D&D creature category/page, for the creatures in the Monster Manual. A supplemental monster page, which has creatures from Monster Manual II, Monster Manual IV, Fiend Folio, Stormwrack, older D&D creatures, adventure specific creatures, ETC... The Campaign Setting creature pages should only have creatures unique to the setting. Finally, a compendium page, an enormous page with all monsters listed. Dungeons and Dragons creatures should bring you to a page with links to each of these pages in a short list. Also, at the top of each of these pages, it should briefly explain what a Standard D&D creature is, or what a Supplemental Monster is, ETC... Other pages which we might have, but I think would be less nesscessary would be an Extraplanar Creature page, Fiend page, Real-life D&D creature page (horses, humans, ETC...), and a mythological D&D creature page (Griffons, Centaurs, Giants, ETC...). Possibly others if anyone can think of them. Obviously, some of the creature articles would overlap pages (Griffon would be in both Standard D&D creatures and Mythlogical D&D creatures), but I believe we could keep it neat if we did it the right way. If a creature is a standard D&D creature but it signifigantly features in a particular campaign setting (Beholders and Aarakocra are standard, but feature prominently in the Forgotten Realms, for example), then the campaign setting creature pages could be divided into two sections: Creatures unique to the setting, and standard creatures which prominently feature, the later of which would have the standard creatures which feature prominently listed, as well as a link to Standard D&D creatures. The same thing could be done for supplemental creatures which feature prominently in a setting. As for creature types, each creature article should state what type of creature it is, with the name of the type of creature being a link. That link would bring you to a page where it tells you what creature types are, and a brief description of each. The creature type page should not be included on the page with links to each of the category pages (Standard D&D creatures, Supplemental... mentioned earlier), or on the Compendium page; creature types are not D&D creatures themselves. For creatures with sub-species (Demon; Balor, Succubus), in the lists in the category pages, it would have the super-creature at the top, and then beneath it the various sub-species. I think their articles could be all on the one page, but each one should have their own link, which would take you to their paragraph in the article. Another thing I think we might do but I'm wondering whether it would be too copyright infringing of the Monster Manual is try to make the creature articles themselves a bit more structured. They should all have basic information (Name, diet, lifespan, creature type) at the top on one side, and then a picture of them on the other side. Below would be an overview paragraph, and then paragraphs on society, combat, physical description, ETC... Some, but not all, would have paragraphs on history, famous charachters, or whatever, if needed. If they feature prominently in a setting, they'd also have a paragraph on how they feature in that setting. I'm afraid that this might infringe copyright, however, and maybe we should just write the creature articles the relatively unstructured way we currently do. Write below or send me a message if you agree with any of this. -- Fastzander -- 9:03, 8 November 2006 (UTC)
Cutting the cruft through intensive inclusion
editProposed new page: Creatures in Dungeons & Dragons or similar (from new short section in the rather busy Dungeons & Dragons I suppose). Both describing how creatures work within the game, i.e. be 'em, so you can kill 'em all and take their stuff. Basic principles of Avatars, NPCs, and monsters. Remember historical DnD perspective and cross-RPG perspective (may be tricky to be neutral and unoriginal there). Possibly appropriate to mirror the idea in Role-playing game and throw as much upstream as possible.
Sections to include minimal summaries of at least: standard Playable Races (from the PHB), other folk (anyone with a pantheon or similar not better fitted elsewhere), dragons (iconic to the game), angels and fiends (and 80's controversy thereof), "classic" creatures (illithid, beholder, rust monster), fantasy ripoffs (Tolkien, Leiber, etc), and finally generic monsters of myth and legend (note more heavily used or modified examples, like minotaur). Include note that DnD includes uncountable thousands of creature types. World pages should have mirrors of that format, like "Creatures in Eberron" that shows notable additions and changes to the core.
All with suggestions that everything which is small enough should be folded back into the above categories, and work on merge notices. Any section that's too big has to add/keep it's own page, any subsection ditto. As much copyright and OGL info as possible to be cut to make things fold back neater; e.g. Goblins aren't 45 pound, they're just small. They should surely be folded back into the generic Goblinoid too. Wikipedia is not the SRD, and it's not OGL compatible (there's wikis that are, so point to them). But that's all far too bold for me at this time of night. Tussock 16:19, 14 February 2007 (UTC)
- I've done a mockup, the intent being to shape DnD monster articles into something more like the DnD spell article.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spells_of_Dungeons_%26_Dragons covers the encyclopedic nature of spells fairly well.
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Tussock/Sandbox should be able to cover an encyclopedic overveiw of the creatures.
- Comments would be greatly appreciated before I unleash it, and it obviously needs a lot of extra stuff included to give people a more complete idea of what's encountered in the typical DnD game, plus similar sections added to the root Dungeons & Dragons article and in the campaign setting pages, plus some better inter-page links. Tussock 07:00, 17 February 2007 (UTC)
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