The Monstrouist Manifesto
Chapter 1: Players and Monsters
The history of all hitherto existing role-playing adventure games is the history of PvE struggles.
Fighter and orc, cleric and skeleton, paladin and zombie, wizard and necromancer, in a word, player character and NPC, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on a sometimes hidden, sometimes open fight, a fight that each time ended in a not-so-revolutionary victory of the player characters, or in the common ruin of the contending creatures (which doesn't matter to the players anyway, since they just get resurrected), but always with a veritable cache of experience points to be rewarded to the victor.
In the early epochs of RPGs, we find almost everywhere a complicated arrangement of society into various classes and levels. In Dungeons & Dragons we have fighters, mages, clerics, wizards, rogues; and all these classes, monsters included, are divided up into a hierarchy of twenty levels. And to move up through these levels requires nothing other than – you guessed it – experience points.
The modern MMORPGs that have sprouted from the early paper-and-pencil RPGs have not done away with these antagonisms. They have but established new classes, new species of monsters, new conditions of player-on-monster oppression, new forms of real-time combat in place of the old turn-based ones.
Our epoch, the epoch of the MMORPG, possesses this distinctive feature: it has simplified the antagonisms. The characters as a whole are more and more splitting up into two great hostile camps: Players and Monsters (also known as MOBs).
The invention of broadband, the rise of the Internet, opened up fresh ground for the rising MMORPG. In just a few short years there were dozens of MMORPGs – dozens of lands where monsters were ruthlessly oppressed and slaughtered.
The paper-and-pencil-RPG system of adventure, under which loot and experience-point production was monopolized by closed Dungeon Masters, now no longer sufficed for the growing demands of the players. The monster-killing system took its place. The Dungeon Masters were pushed on one side by the repeated-monster-killing adventuring class, for experience points were now gained in one way and one way only: killing innocent monsters, hundreds of them.
Meanwhile the MMORPGs kept growing, the demand ever rising. Even the monster-killing system no longer sufficed. Thereupon, the respawning system revolutionized experience-point production. The place of the lone adventurer was taken by the giant, the team of adventurers, who formed whole loot-collecting and experience-point-production armies, whose mode of operation was to stay at, or "camp", a spawn point, killing the monsters that appeared and then waiting for them to respawn, only to kill them again.
The MMORPGs, whenever they have got the upper hand, have put an end to all "role-playing" in "role-playing games." They have left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous "gold-piece payment." They have drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of role-playing religion, of role-playing a code of honor, of role-playing interpersonal relationships, in the icy water of egotistical calculation. They have resolved personal worth into the number of points of damage one can do per second, and in place of the stat-less indefeasible goals of role-playing, have set up that single, unconscionable goal: Phat Lewt (and experience points too).
The MMORPGs have torn away from allegiances their sentimental veil, and has reduced the allegiance relation to a mere loot-for-experience-points exchange relation.
Chapter 2: Monsters and Monstrouists
In this sense, the theory of the Monstrouists may be summed up in the single phrase: Abolition of all loot.
We Monstrouists have been reproached with the desire of abolishing the right of personally acquiring loot as the fruit of a creature's own labor, which loot is alleged to be the groundwork of all personal advancement in one's ability to adventure.
Hard-won, fought-for, self-earned loot! Do you mean the loot of the petty 1st-level orc and zombie, a form of loot that preceded the 3-magical-sword-of-destruction form? There is no need to abolish that, the development of adventurers has to a great extent already destroyed that form of loot by ruthlessly killing the helpless monsters that possess it.
Or do you mean modern high-level magical loot?
But do monsters create any equipment for the monster? Not a bit. They create loot – that form of equipment that encourages adventurers to kill those that possess it, and that cannot increase except by gaining a level, which give the adventurer access to another zone, begetting a new supply of higher-level monsters for fresh exploitation.
Conclusion
The Monstrouists disdain to conceal their views and aims. They openly declare that their ends can be attained only by the forcible overthrow of all existing adventuring conditions. Let the ruling high-level adventurers tremble at a Monstrouistic revolution. The monsters have nothing to lose but the chains that bind them to within the same server zone as their spawn point. They have worlds to win.
MONSTERS OF THE WORLD, UNITE!