Thought experiment: human and variant stats as expressions of culture

Ovinomancer said:

Ooh, which culture gets to be the smartest?

/runs away from bomb

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The two will have identical Int averages.

Immortal Sun said:

*shrug* How does this reflect in the citizenry? Is CivA made up of ONLY well-rounded citizens? Is CivB made up of ONLY specialized citizens?

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I don't understand how these questions are important, but anyway the racial stats apply only to player characters i.e. adventurers, while commoners are another matter completely (and they aren't usually even statted).

What I did for human ethnies/races was create variant stat bonus arrays that added up to +6, ie:

Altanian: +2 STR +1 DEX +2 CON +0 INT +1 WIS +0 CHA.
Amazon: +1 STR +1 DEX +0 CON +0 INT +2 WIS +2 CHA
Plus some racial abilities.

A PC can always choose to have a Feat & 2 +1s instead.

Li Shenron said:

The two will have identical Int averages.

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They, um, won't. Have the same average INT, that is. Or STR, or WIS, or CHA. CivA always has +1 to these, CivB sometimes does. If CivB spreads their +s out evenly, INT will be lower by one point 2/3s of the time. Assuming a large enough population to have an average of 11 INT in CivA, CivB will have an average INT of 10.3, maybe slightly higher due to INT boosting half-feats.

Nevvur said:

I'm considering some revisions to a homebrew world which features two major human civilizations. I thought it would be interesting if all the humans from CivA used the normal racial bonuses for humans, while CivB used the human variant option. The underlying assumption here is that CivA tries to produce more well rounded citizens, while CivB puts more resources into specialization.

1) Does this sound like a plausible interplay of narrative and mechanics? If not, why?
2) As a player, if your DM used this model and the racial bonuses did not correspond to the civilization you prefer, or vice versa, would you switch one?
3) As a DM using this model, if one of your players asked to use one civ's narrative and the other's racial bonuses, would you permit it?

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Answers:
1) maybe, but it sounds more like conformity vs individuality. I’ll add more on this later...
2) I lean towards RP first, so the choice would depend on the description of the cultures, but with no other information, I’d lean towards the variant human.
3) yes, though I may be biased (see below).

I did something similar in my 4e campaign, where I had a broad range of human ethnicities and several PHB races which were not present. So for one totemic ethnicity, I allowed players to use human stats OR Shifter stats; for another that had a history of demonic interaction, I allowed human OR Tiefling stats; and so on...

They all looked like the appropriate human, ethnic norm - only the mechanics changed. This allowed me to include more options without doing a lot of redesign to force them in.

Getting back to your proposal: I’d allow either mechanical choice from either culture. As a DM my goal is always to get the culture into play, that’s why it’s there. But no culture is homogeneous, and there are always outliers. For the same reasons, I don’t get too upset if a PC doesn’t RP according to cultural norms - there are always rebels - but that does affect how their cultural peers interact with them, and strangers will still treat them according to the cultural stereotype (which may work for or against the PC, depending).

Adventures in Middle Earth does something similar where almost every Human culture has +1 to one fixed ability, two +1 ability choices, one pre-determined skill proficiency, and a free feat to pick from a culture-specific feat list. It allows for very flavourful and meaningful differences between human cultures. If you're going to do something similar, I'd use a somewhat similar array to all cultures, else you're making a one cultural 'the bland one'.

DEFCON 1 said:

1) If you allowed all the possible feats to be taken for CivB, then no. There are just too many completely different things you can take with a feat to have it fall under this one idea that they are a "specialized" culture. If they are "specialized", then select like 3 or 4 feats total that CivB specializes in.

2) If I played a human PC, I'd select the Civ that gave me the mechanic I wanted, not the Civ.

3) No. If I'm going to switch upon request, then there's no point in having them be different in the first place.

To be truthful... if I was going to make two differing human Civs... rather than one regular human and the other variant human... I'd instead choose like 4 or 5 feats for each Civ that their culture is known for... then let players select either standard human, or variant human and the feat they take has to be one of the 4 or 5 for the culture. On top of that... I most likely would not select combat feats for either of them. They'd all be roleplayingish feats so that they could apply to the largest swathe of human players regardless of the class they end up playing.

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I like this idea, maybe make it something of a package of Skill and tool profficiencies and a choice of 2-3 feats. It offers some good use for some of the more feats that arn't used much. You can always change them a bit if needed. Xanathar's expansion on tool proff's and what they offer might not be the most applicable for your campaign, but might server a bit of inspiration aswell.

Li Shenron said:

The two will have identical Int averages.



I don't understand how these questions are important, but anyway the racial stats apply only to player characters i.e. adventurers, while commoners are another matter completely (and they aren't usually even statted).

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Because it's being suggested that entire civilizations are based on what those numbers represent. But players are typically the exceptions rather than the norms. Which would imply that characters from CivA and CivB would trend towards having stats opposite of their civilization.