D&D 5E DMG Excerpt: Creating a New Race

[Jester David]

so ... a swede is smarter then the spaniard but the spaniard is more charismatic than the scotsman who has a higher wisdom then both of them?

yah ... let's not go there.

It's icky in a real world game, but when you're dealing with, say, the Dorns and the Sarcosans, it's easier. Or Andal, First Men, Valyrians, and Dothraki.

 

[Nellisir]

Have you read the books or seen the movies?

Ayup.

 

[pemerton]

Basically, default effects.

When it comes to not including Eladrin in your game, I really think these are minimal.

Sounds a lot like halflings are a nuclear option in your games

Not remotely. If someone wanted to play a halfling that would be their prerogative. I just don't care for them, mostly on grounds that they're rather silly outside the very narrow LotR context, and so I don't use them.

Though this exchange has reminded that one of the players in my current game was planning, at the start of the campaign, to play a halfling fey warlock called Peter. But in the end he went for Wolfren, the half-elf fey warlock (who died at 3rd level and was replaced by Jett, the drow chaos sorcerer). In anticipation of Peter, I placed a halfling slinger in the first encounter for the campaign. I thought he could be Peter's nemesis. When Peter didn't show up, the slinger's moment in the sun never came.

Halflings have been shown to add long-term fun to a lot of tables (they've been in the game and reasonably well-liked by the players since OD&D), so for the designers, you'd probably want to consider keeping them in, even if some players hate 'em. It's clearly not much of a deal-breaker for current players, and a lot of people have fun with 'em! But elfladrin were a gamble at 4e's launch: maybe they'd pan out, maybe not. And by removing other options to make room for eladrin, they were telling players who wanted to play the game supported by WotC that these eladrin should add more long-term fun to your table than the options they removed.

<snip>

4e told you how you should play guitar.

I think this is all a bit exaggerated. By putting in eladrin rather than (say) half-orcs they're not telling anyone anything. No instruction is being given. It's in the nature of an offer, or a suggestion - "Hey, here's this thing we think you might like!"

Any change has this sort of character - it is an offer of something new in lieu of something old. It's not an instruction to adopt or like the change. This is why I don't agree with the language of "forcing" or "need". If the desire to play with the latest canon was an addiction in the literal sense, then perhaps that sort of imperative language would be apposite. But it is not. If people simultaneously want to play the latest canon but don't like the latest canon, that is a commercial problem for WotC (because their potential customers will be unhappy and distressed) but it is not a case of WotC having told anyone how to play, or having told anyone what is fun.

PF was a lot more open to whatever you wanted to bring to its hippie drum circle. You could play whatever kind of elf you wanted to in either one, but only one was going to tell you that you were doing it wrong if you didn't do it their way. The other one passed you the OGL and told you to have a good time.

I think this is also exaggerated. No one needs the OGL, or any sort of legal permission, to change things for his/her home game. Anyone who wanted to play 4e but without eladrin was free to just ignore them (or to use them as celestials - a trivial house rule) and to just use elves, or allow elves with a bonus to INT instead of WIS.

There was no OGL in the first 25 years of D&D's existence, but people ignored or changed those parts of the published books that didn't suit them. I don't think I was exercising some sort of superhuman power in ignoring the halflings in all of ICE's Rolemaster books, or in converting the default Rolemaster elf stats (Tolkien-derived) to fit better with my conception of Greyhawk's (D&D-derived) elves. In my 4e game, I've ignored some errata, and applied errata (and other changes) of my own, without worrying about a lack of official authorisation from WotC.

The switch from LE to CE happened in 3e.

<snip>

Your example is minor. Tiny. You can ignore it by ignoring two small letters. It doesn't affect the portrayal of orcs in the past, change much of the lore, or affect your world.

You're correct that it happened in 3E. That was a typo in my post.

I don't agree that the example is minor. If you treat alignment as a personality/society descriptor, it is not tiny at all. It is a major change in the personality and social character of orcs.

The only way that it doesn't affect my world is if I ignore it.

But anyone is free to ignore 4e's changes to the eladrin, too. Or to strike out "fey" in the Monster Manual description and insert "immortal". (That's one word to change, not two!)

Turns out, they were right in some places, and wrong in others. And they were wrong, perhaps predictably, in regards to a lot of "hardcore" D&D players, who left for PF or the OSR. And where they went, people down the pyramid followed, because network effects.

Do we have any polling or survey data that tells us how many players left D&D for PF because of eladrin? Frankly, the idea that such numbers were significant is a conjecture that I find pretty implausible.

After fairly extensive market research, WotC has decided to include eladrins as a PC race in a 5e core book. I'm therefore guessing that they think they were right to suggest that people might find eladrin fun - that they think that plenty of people did like them.

Much as Gygax and Arneson were right to think that many people might want playable hobbits. But they weren't telling us that we had to play hobbits if we didn't want to.

 

[pemerton]

We're monsters like Ghaele Knights presented as the monster block version of eladrin as well? Just higher up the fey courts heirarchy than the PC version could be?

Are you asking about 4e? If so, the answer is yes: Ghaele, Bralani, Coure etc were present in the Monster Manuals, under the Eladrin entry. A player who wanted his/her PC to obtain those sorts of abilities would have to take the right paragon path or epic destiny.

The differences between a high elf, grey elf, and wood elf are largely cultural.

In AD&D they look different and have different stats.

And if the analogy is meant to be drawn to Tolkien's elves, in that case the differences are both familial and metaphysical, depending upon who has seen the light of the Two Trees.

But anyone who regarded the differences among elves as purely cultural, and who wanted to play 4e that way, was free to ignore eladrin and just use elves to cover the lot!

EDIT:

I can only differentiate them by their location: Mirkwood, Rivendale, and Lothlorien. I'm assuming than those equate with wood, high, and grey elves respectively. But I don't know the in-world names.

In Tolkien, the Noldor are the High Elves - in LotR this is Elrond (in part - he is half-elven) and Galadriel. They originally went to Aman (a divine realm) and then returned to Middle Earth in exile. The significance of Galadriel's refusal of the ring is that it lifts her banishment from Aman, enabling her to sail from the Havens.

The Wood Elves are those elves who answered the summons to Aman but didn't make it past the vale of the Anduin. In LotR these are the elves of Mirkwood (Legolas's people) and of Lothlorien (Galadriel and Celeborn's people).

The Grey Elves (Sindar) are those elves who answered the summons to Aman but didn't make it past Beleriand (a part of Middle Earth that has mostly sunk beneath the waves by the time of LotR). Because the Noldor, in their exile, returned to Beleriand, there was a significant degree of cultural mixing and intermarriage between the Noldor and the Sindar.

The leader of the Wood and Grey elves travelled as an individual to Aman before returning to Middle Earth. This made him metaphysically superior to the people they rule, and that metaphysical superiority rubbed off on the Grey Elves who lived under his rule in Beleriand. (But not on the Wood Elves, who were on the other side of the mountains.) Thranduil (Legola's dad), Celeborn (Galadriel's husband) and Cirdan (the shipwright and lord of the Grey Havens) are the most important Grey Elves at the time of the LotR.

Although the rule of Rivendell, Elrond, is Noldor (a high elf), many of the elves there would be Sindar (Grey Elves). In the time of the LotR there is no significant difference between the Noldor and the Sindar.

These divisions in LotR are fairly different from those in D&D (eg in D&D Grey Elves are "higher" than High Elves, unlike LotR - the LotR elves closest to D&D Grey Elves are called Vanyar and play little role in any of Tolkien's stories - they live on Aman and came back to Middle Earth only to fight in the war that resulted in Beleriand sinking into the sea). And they are not particularly connected to the Rivendell/Mirkwood/Lothlorien geography - Mirkwood and Lothlorien are both the same types of elves (Wood Elves) ruled by the same types of superior elves (Sindar, and also a Noldor in the case of Galadriel).

 

[pemerton]

The problem, the only problem, comes when the game came and said that all high/grey elves were and always had been eladrin. That eladrin were the one and only wizard elf. Because that's a whopper of a change.

As I said upthread - if you don't like it, ignore it. Just use your PHB Elf stats for your elves, and use your MM eladrin stats for you celestials.

 

[Li Shenron]

I test things against my PCs all the time.

That depends on the game. If your game is old-school sandbox where nobody dislikes rolling up new PC often, it's fine. Alternatively, if your game uses plenty of traditional "rewind" buttons like resurrection spells or generous death saves mechanics (i.e. losing life permanently is much harder than just dropping down in combat), then it's also fine.

In other games it's not. Throwing a winged-designed encounter and then having to fudge the rolls because it's really too easy or too hard sucks by my standards.

I don't actually use custom monsters normally, only monsters with class levels or some specific modifications. But my point is that if we get only "wing-it" rules for creating monsters, then IMO those rules are not worth DMG space, since they practically tell you "we couldn't design monster creation rules, so just do something by yourself and see if it works". Why would you need to spend money on a book to be told that?

This just to say that I hope monster creation rules are not of the "wing-it" type. They don't have to be as rigid as the 3e ones, but if they are as loose as race creation rules, then they are indeed worthless. For PC races is less of a problem however. But basically these PC races creation rules tell you not to even bother considering allowing races with significantly different power level than the PHB ones.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

They were so easy to co-opt. Same with Archons. In Planescape, they were important. Everywhere else..... eh.
So the designers probably saw the gamble was worth it. Make them fey, make the PC version the novice version of eladrin, and run with that. Couldn't be worse that a dozen types of elves, right? Or having dwarves be better wizards than PHB elves again, right?

Their mistake was in underestimating the passionate cult following of Planescape. Add what you want, but don't take our stuff away! (And I'm only a "Planescape-lite" fan)

Seriously though, in the 3e they gave official sanction to one website each for the AD&D settings they chose not to publish for the edition. They were allowed to create an authorized free 3e conversion for the setting. The 3e Planescape Campaign Setting that came out of it was probably over a thousand pages--plus a website full of additional content and fans. The only other 3e conversion that came close was Dark Sun. WotC could have done some research and discovered how popular certain settings were before they decided to mess with them. In any event, I think they're taking a smarter approach this time around by trying not to recant much previous material.

 

[Jester David]

I don't agree that the example is minor. If you treat alignment as a personality/society descriptor, it is not tiny at all. It is a major change in the personality and social character of orcs.

The only way that it doesn't affect my world is if I ignore it.

But anyone is free to ignore 4e's changes to the eladrin, too. Or to strike out "fey" in the Monster Manual description and insert "immortal". (That's one word to change, not two!)

It's more than that. Even ignoring the silly motives for the change (gone over at length) and the massive lore retcon the abilities of the race don't fit.
This was struggled over in the Dragonlance and Ravenloft communities, where there needed to be an elven wizard race (the Silvanesti and the Sithican). The elf mechanically did not fit (until Essentials) but the eladrin were not an adequate substitute as the ability to teleport made no sense.

Most of the time the content was rewritten and new abilities added. The content paid money for failed to work.

All that together is why the execution of the eladrin was bad. They rewrote 30 years of lore of one of the major races in the game. They rewrote the lore of a (lesser) monster. They did so assuming players would not be able to tell the difference in races. And the design of the race made it difficult to overlook to use while ignoring the lore.

Regardless, I've said my peace here and get the feeling I'm fighting a proxy edition war, because I'm saying I'll of something kinda sorta related to 4th edition. So I'm calling my participation on the thread here. G'day all.

 

[Beleriphon]

Are you asking about 4e? If so, the answer is yes: Ghaele, Bralani, Coure etc were present in the Monster Manuals, under the Eladrin entry. A player who wanted his/her PC to obtain those sorts of abilities would have to take the right paragon path or epic destiny.

Yes, that's essentially what I was asking. And getting confirmed. I have the 4E MMs I just couldn't be bothered to go dig them out of storage. So in essence the eladrin in the 4E is the 2E/3E eladrin is just a playable version of the monsters from those editions, with the added link to elves as fey creatures.

 

[Minigiant]

I just realized that I have a gripe.

I can't customize common monster races into NPCs outside of "upgrading" while keeping flavor.

Here's what I mean.
In the last 2 editions, many of the common humanoid "monsters" had race stats for them. In 3rd I'd build a wizard and slap the hobgoblin race on it to make a magical advisor to a hobgoblin warlord. In 4th, I'd find a monster humanoid mage close to the one I like and swap its race for hobgoblin. Even easier than before.

But in 5th. I don't think I'll be able to this. The humanoids in the MM are built as monsters. They have crazy abilities.. You cannot distill them down to PC races and swap the result onto a "customizable" NPC. If you run true, they are unbalanced to normal monsters. And if you built the monster as a race, they don't feel like the rest of their kind.

I hope official versions of the staples appear.