Level Up (A5E) Changes to race (species?)

[CleverNickName]

This topic has been hashed out a lot in recent weeks, starting with Jeremy Crawford's announcement and rolling from there.

I think a good way to handle a character's race (or ancestry, or genus and species, or whatever) in an "Advanced" version of 5th Edition would be similar to what I posted about here (and later expounded upon here.) The idea is to create a system that lets you customize and build your character's ancestry:

• There is a resource called "Ancestry Points" or whatever.
• New characters start with X of these points. The DM sets the value for X based on the needs of the campaign.
• Players spend these points to buy different traits, a la carte.

This allows for a greater level of customization, and allows the player to create more interesting ancestry combinations, like a tiefling/dwarf or a gnome/dragonborn/aasimar. The trade-off is that it is a lot more complex, and would require careful attention to balance. Inevitably, there will be those who will try their hardest to cherry-pick the different options and create unbalanced combinations.

 

[cbwjm]

Something like the guide to xoth could be good. Cultures ranged from primitive to enlightened to decadent and granted different stats and abilities based on them. Of course this is a setting with only humans so it might need to be altered to take account for the various DnD races.

 

[Stalker0]

My note is pretty minor, but I miss the elves in 4e that had long but not ridiculously long life spans.

I’ve always hated having to hand wave why the top people in a city aren’t always elves and why If I need to know anything that happened 500 years ago I can’t just go and ask an elf that actually lived through it.

 

[John R Davis]

I like the idea of Character Generation pulling stuff in from 6 or 7 stages. Heritage to replace the term race. Then you could have things like class, cultural influence, event ( why are you an adventurer), background and others as people have listed. This way you can get two elf wizards that are very different.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

I think the path taken by Ancestry & Culture is the way to go. Keep ability adjustments (on the culture side), let people have the same options they've always had, but split ancestry and culture so people can mix and match if they want.

We do this with nonhuman cultures already. In fact, virtually every RPG with races does this. Is that an utterly terrible idea? For human cultures, I agree it has more potential for offense, which is why I suggest you let people do that in their own games.

Racial ability adjustments represent biological differences between species and subspecies. Culture rarely has much to do with RSIs.
Nonhuman races should not have parallels to real-life human ethnicities. However cultures most definitely do.

If a culture highly prizes and rewards intellectual genius, it will produce more exceptional intellects. If it prizes and rewards athletic genius, it will lead in exceptional athletes. How is that problematic?

Because unlike species, you can draw direct parallels between fantasy and real-life cultures. Putting attribute bonuses on a culture will indicate value judgements on equivalent real-life races and cultures.

Hardly.

American culture prized intellectual achievement and rewarded acedemic genius for much of the 20th Century, and as a result produced and attracted many of the great minds of that century.
In the later decades of the 20th, and all of the 21st Century so far, we have increasingly prized and rewarded athletic genius, and as a result we produce and attract the worlds greatest athletes.

Do you really, really think it would be a good idea to put your name on, and try to market a product, in this day and age, that portrays USA Americans as mentally and physically superior to, say Africans, Europeans and Asians?

 

[The Mirrorball Man]

Introducing optional racial levels, like in Arcana Unearthed, would be interesting. For example, a dwarf character could add a couple of racial levels to become a more "iconic" version of the dwarf, enhancing things the species is already good at, making her tougher, adding tremorsense, etc...

 

[Scott Christian]

I‘m they’re more imaginative than you give them credit for.

You are correct. They are. I have run high school D&D clubs for twenty years, introducing literally hundreds of students to D&D. They are imaginative beyond belief. They want to play crab/squid people or be a hat. They are spontaneous, fun, creative and a joy to watch.
But... and I say this with love - most of their ideas are stolen from cartoons (Futurrama's Zoidberg and Harry Potter). But that is how we all start. I mean, who in here didn't model their first D&D character after a character in a book or comic?
Which leads me to this - as imaginative as they are (they see a lot more fantasy/sci-fi/superhero creative ideas than we ever did by 16), they do not like it when logic is broken. I have found very few kids that like the fact that their racoon character is stronger than the elephant character. In fact, this is generally when arguments in game start to happen. It is when you hear young adults say, "Well that doesn't make any sense?" Make no doubt, they don't mind the racoon character winning in a fight against the elephant character. But he'd better do it with magic or speed, not strength. In effect, they don't want someone that looks like the Hulk to be overpowered by Black Widow. Mind games, speed, agility, they are on board. But for some reason strength is not in their imaginative wheelhouse.
Personally, I think it only happens when players, after years of playing, become detached from the numbers. Meaning the number doesn't even represent an attribute any more, it only represents a bonus to the skill/combat area it applies to. But, that is not how the rules are written. Hence, why people talk about breaking verisimilitude.

 

[cbwjm]

Racial ability adjustments represent biological differences between species and subspecies. Culture rarely has much to do with RSIs.
Nonhuman races should not have parallels to real-life human ethnicities. However cultures most definitely do.

Because unlike species, you can draw direct parallels between fantasy and real-life cultures. Putting attribute bonuses on a culture will indicate value judgements on equivalent real-life races and cultures.



Do you really, really think it would be a good idea to put your name on, and try to market a product, in this day and age, that portrays USA Americans as mentally and physically superior to, say Africans, Europeans and Asians?

Judging by what's happening in the states, maybe not mentally superior...

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Eh. There’s never a good time. If you wait, it’ll be bad timing for another reason. The best time is the time you actually just do it.

I dunno man, the idea is to make a potentially successful product long-term, rather than a one-off, right? I think most of what Level Up is doing is smart and sounds potentially interesting, because it's largely areas WotC seems to have no interest in engaging with, but where there is clearly interest from consumers.

So that makes sense. Even if WotC changes their mind later, you'll have been there for some time, and I think it's less than likely that they will change their mind.

Whereas with race/species changes, we know for a fact that WotC have them planned, and it sounded like that book wasn't a million miles away - given the playtesting of new feats and further subclasses, it seems likely to be even sooner. One of the books is going to come out first, I have no idea which, and I think it's quite likely to create an annoying situation for everyone if we have two separate, incompatible systems for the same thing, rather than an "Advanced" version of WotC's system.

I don't think general points about bad timing apply when there is a specific issue, as is the case here.

I mean, who in here didn't model their first D&D character after a character in a book or comic?

* Raises hand *

I'd been playing D&D for a couple of years before I modelled a character on anything (Giogi Wyvernspur was the first - my version was called Theon, which I was very pleased with making up, until a decade or so later GRRM ruined it for me!). Looking at my group that's broadly true for most of them. Indeed it's true for a lot of people I played RPGs with in the 1988-1992 era. I actually saw a lot of that slightly later on, oddly enough, from people with a bit of experience, but not a huge amount. I had a player model a character on Doctor McNinja like four-five years ago too, and he was very experienced!

Not criticising people who do base characters on cartoons - my first adventure (rather than PC) was inspired by an episode of the Gummi Bears cartoon (which was, bizarrely, medieval fantasy) - but just pointing out that probably quite a lot of people do have a different experience there.

Had we started with a superhero RPG, as opposed to fantasy, I think the picture would have been very different. We got Marvel FASERIP a bit later, and almost no-one wanted to make their own character when they could play various X-Men, Spiderman, Cap, etc.

 

[Helldritch]

You are correct. They are. I have run high school D&D clubs for twenty years, introducing literally hundreds of students to D&D. They are imaginative beyond belief. They want to play crab/squid people or be a hat. They are spontaneous, fun, creative and a joy to watch.
But... and I say this with love - most of their ideas are stolen from cartoons (Futurrama's Zoidberg and Harry Potter). But that is how we all start. I mean, who in here didn't model their first D&D character after a character in a book or comic?
Which leads me to this - as imaginative as they are (they see a lot more fantasy/sci-fi/superhero creative ideas than we ever did by 16), they do not like it when logic is broken. I have found very few kids that like the fact that their racoon character is stronger than the elephant character. In fact, this is generally when arguments in game start to happen. It is when you hear young adults say, "Well that doesn't make any sense?" Make no doubt, they don't mind the racoon character winning in a fight against the elephant character. But he'd better do it with magic or speed, not strength. In effect, they don't want someone that looks like the Hulk to be overpowered by Black Widow. Mind games, speed, agility, they are on board. But for some reason strength is not in their imaginative wheelhouse.
Personally, I think it only happens when players, after years of playing, become detached from the numbers. Meaning the number doesn't even represent an attribute any more, it only represents a bonus to the skill/combat area it applies to. But, that is not how the rules are written. Hence, why people talk about breaking verisimilitude.

This is exactly what I have seen through litterally hundreds of new players and not so new that I have introduced in the hobby over the years. From the teenager, to the man that was 10 years older than me (he was in his 50s when I introduced him in the hobby) this is what I saw time and time again. Experienced players see the stat for what it is. A simple bonus. New players and casual ones, see the stat for what its tag represents.