So, the Advanced Races guide essentially allows many monsters to be converted to races.

But has anyone taken the time to do this in detail, by the book RAW for a lot of them?

Can you guys share links to anyone who's done this or possibly do it yourself (show your work).

If it's done 100% by RAW, we MIGHT be able to allow monsters that don't currently have RP ratings into the arena. But this would be a collaborative effort.

What do you guys think?

"YES, let's do this!"

or

"NO, let's not open that can of worms."

(also provide links/ideas/reasons if you can)

"NO, let's not open that can of (frost)worms."

 The more I play, the more I think the Arena would benefit in terms of competitiveness and sportsmanship if we had fewer options and less need to refer to a dozen obscure books for a ruling.

"NO, let's not open that can of worms."

What Josep said is right on point

"NO, let's not open that can of worms."

Keeping track of what exists is hard enough without complex costs for monsters and their abilities o.o

That might be somewhat skewed because I'm not very experienced with the rules that exist, but it seems there's some consensus towards that direction.

I tried to create a monster race, and got stymied by the ability scores. It seems unless a monster has class levels, there's no pattern to the ability scores, and if a monster does have class levels, it probably already has a player writeup. So any monsters we'd want to convert would probably involve arguments over the "right" ability score modifiers, and that's not something I really feel like getting involved in.

So I'm voting "no".

I'm going to be the wierdo and vote "yes, let's do this".

There are no caps or exclamation points because I can't take the bulk of the work solo, but I'd be willing to help out if here are others wanting work on it.  Also, having a player write up doesn't make it arena legal - we'd need to gather player write ups and approve (or fix) them.  If this goes through I'd recommend having an extra post in the character creation thread that gets each approved race's abilities written out explicitly so that the ref's don't need to go research each ability (as Joseph implied, having to go look up all the abilities rather than clicking on a link like for current races would be a pain).

I'm going to say yes, assuming we can pull off the RP cost. Because I already know what I would want to play!

2 to 1 "no" in favor. Looks like this is a case closed. Thanks for coming everyone!