D&D General elf definition semantic shenanigans

Divine2021 said:

In the recent LotR works by Free League, The Folk of Dale, Men of Bree, and Wardens of the North are all different regional heritages/races/lineages. That’s why I consistently referred to regions/peoples above. They all have innate stat differences, because the mechanics all purposefully match the lore. It leads to better, more differentiated storytelling.

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I definitely question how forcing players towards particular heritages or species if they want to play a particular class leads to "better, more differentiated storytelling." In fact, the plethora of mountain dwarf fighters and barbarians, especially in early 5e, suggests the latter: when you build in a mechanical advantage for playing one particular combination, players soon see that and gravitate towards it. Which is presumably the design intent, no? To create more homogeneity, not less.

So it's actually doing the opposite of creating more differentiated storytelling. Oh look, another burly dwarf fighter who is good at mining and blacksmithing. Never seen that before!

"Better" is, of course, subjective. For me, what you describe would be worse because it leads to less variety, but YVMV.

Also, I find it odd that you, and others, cite LotR as the impetus for using broad stereotypes to justify forcing specific stat bonuses and thus character archetypes onto player characters, who are supposed to be unique outliers. Bilbo Baggins gets our attention not because he is like all the other hobbits, but because he turns out to be different. I mean, the text emphasizes that really heavily. Legolas and Gimli defy all of the typical cultural animosity between dwarves and elves to become BFFs, and so on. Great characters are typically outliers, not standard.

So what if most elves tend to be one way, or most "men of Bree," or whatever? Why should that prevent a player from having a great idea for a dwarf who, for example, never really fit in because they were drawn to arcane lore and the city, or whatever. Maybe my "man of Bree" is actually a woman, or non-binary, and decided they would fit in better in Minas Tirith where they could learn history and magic. Isn't great fiction full of characters who felt constrained by their circumstances and wanted something different? "I must be this way because I am a Man of Bree" seems like about the laziest, lamest character concept imaginable. I think one of the great problems of early D&D was that it tried to prescribe how players should think about their characters.

And that's setting aside the IRL issues with racial essentialism, because we know how that conversation always goes. From a narrative perspective, I think tying stat bonuses to species or culture is super lame.

How does telling a player, "no, your character can't do that because she's an orc," lead to more differentiation?

bedir than said:

This works really well for Forest Gnomes, but the Rock Gnomes of traditional D&D don't do this (they're much more like Dwarves).

One of things I like about Black Flag/Tales of the Valiant is the combining of Halfling and Gnome.

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Well, I kind of left them out because I didn't want to write overmuch; the intent with the "etc" was that the other types also exist. So the idea (for me anyway) is that rock gnomes absorb the "hobbits live in holes" angle, becoming "cragstep" hinn, and blend together the "landed gentry" angle with the "tinker and creator" angle. They tend to the land's physical resources, rock and soil, as opposed to living resources. And yes, this does mean that Bilbo would have been a particularly homebody flavor of cragstep hinn, quite proud of things like his collection of silver spoons, but he has a bit of "fairy blood" from his Took mother. More adventurous cragstep hinn would be stereotypically associated with artifice, smithing, and/or wizardry.

And then ghostwise hinn, which absorb svirfneblin, are connected to the Deeps of the world, drawn to dark caves (themselves a land one can be bound to!), but also to the places where alien things try to leak into the world, mostly from the Far Realm.

Humans who got Weirded by spending too much time in deep space would be an example of what happens to living things that aren't protected from the alien things that try to leak into normal reality. A relatively tame example, at least. Much, much darker things can arise from it too (e.g. in this setup, one possible explanation for the origin of mindflayers is that they were once perfectly normal life, twisted into something horrible by the Far Realm due to lacking protectors analogous to the ghostwise hinn.)

Minigiant said:

Pfft that's easy.

mastiff

make it small for a small dog
make it tiny for a tiny dog
make it large for a large dog
Use rules for sizes.

6 words
Stop Focusing on ability score adjustments.
Even in AD&D a race description took up half a page plus tables.

+X to Y -X to Z never mechanically meant much. Having a 12 never meant much in any edition.

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Ok.

The Elf Race for Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) Fifth Edition (5e) - D&D Beyond elf.

Make these stats represent:

Athasian elves
The Tarinadal elves of Eberron
The Shadow Elves of Mystara
The Valley Elves of Oerth
Rockseer elves
Star elves of Faerun

Or, Maybe we could make elf a super type of a bunch of different similar species each with their own unique traits and abilities?

Clint_L said:

I definitely question how forcing players towards particular heritages or species if they want to play a particular class leads to "better, more differentiated storytelling." In fact, the plethora of mountain dwarf fighters and barbarians, especially in early 5e, suggests the latter: when you build in a mechanical advantage for playing one particular combination, players soon see that and gravitate towards it. Which is presumably the design intent, no? To create more homogeneity, not less.

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or maybe the intent was to make sure species have mechanical parity with their lore and descriptions, and people just decided they couldn't not have the biggest bonuses possible, nobody 'forced' them to make a dwarf barbarian or half-elf bard, or stopped them from making an orc wizard or dragonborn ranger.

Micah Sweet said:

At the risk of being flippant, the idea that fantasy cultures are analogous to real life ones and that this needs to limit our design is a choice, and the idea that it isn't a choice is also a choice.

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Please tell me the racial stats you would give Shou humans on Faerun.

CreamCloud0 said:

or maybe the intent was to make sure species have mechanical parity with their lore and descriptions, and people just decided they couldn't not have the biggest bonuses possible, nobody 'forced' them to make a dwarf barbarian or half-elf bard, or stopped them from making an orc wizard or dragonborn ranger.

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But that is obviously what players will tend to do, and if you don't understand that, then you probably shouldn't be a game designer (not you, personally, I mean generally speaking). Since the 5e designers were and are talented professionals, they knew what they were doing and what the result would be. They wanted half-orcs and mountain dwarves to be a bit better choices for fighter/barbarian/paladin types.

And I very much question the underlying logic that "because the species tends to be like this, therefore the player character's stats must reflect that tendency." That's my fundamental beef with that kind of paradigmatic thinking. It's basically an attempt to constrain player imaginations. It's absolutely fine to tell the players that a typical orc is like this or a typical elf is like that. But don't try to coerce them to be a typical orc or elf.

Edit: the whole history of D&D has been a slow movement away from trying to prescribe those sorts of decisions that should be left to individual players and DMs. That's a good thing.

Divine2021 said:

In the recent LotR works by Free League, The Folk of Dale, Men of Bree, and Wardens of the North are all different regional heritages/races/lineages. That’s why I consistently referred to regions/peoples above. They all have innate stat differences, because the mechanics all purposefully match the lore. It leads to better, more differentiated storytelling.

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NGL, I'm really uncomfortable with such a classification. That they are all human, and thus all have the same stats, is...kind of a major selling point for me. Culture as an additional layer on top of "these are the characteristics humans have" is another thing entirely.

Remathilis said:

Please tell me the racial stats you would give Shou humans on Faerun.

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I see nothing about them that would justify different stats. However, I could definitely see a lean toward mechanically different cultural traits for different groups of humans, a la Level Up, "while you can choose any culture for your Shou Human character, the X, Y, and Z cultures are especially relevant". It would obviously be setting-dependent. That's how I see the culture rules in The One Ring.

But no, I don't see any good reason for different groups of Humans to have ability score adjustments. I just don't necessarily think that idea should be extended to include other heritages.

EzekielRaiden said:

NGL, I'm really uncomfortable with such a classification. That they are all human, and thus all have the same stats, is...kind of a major selling point for me. Culture as an additional layer on top of "these are the characteristics humans have" is another thing entirely.

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I'm not really comfortable with culture mechanics even as an addition. Certain cultures might have tendencies when we look the population as a whole, but those do not necessarily apply to individuals. Finns who do not like coffee but do like small talk might be rare, but they do exist!

Remathilis said:

Ok.

The Elf Race for Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) Fifth Edition (5e) - D&D Beyond elf.

Make these stats represent:

Athasian elves
The Tarinadal elves of Eberron
The Shadow Elves of Mystara
The Valley Elves of Oerth
Rockseer elves
Star elves of Faerun

Or, Maybe we could make elf a super type of a bunch of different similar species each with their own unique traits and abilities?

Click to expand...

Every one of those could be modelled via a cultural Background, especially is using High Elf base -You know one cantrip of your choice - all Elfs are medium sized (even 7 foot tall Athasian elfs) and the difference are cultural/magical not inherent.