D&D 5E What is the appeal of the weird fantasy races?

[prabe]

So, a question for the collected - we see GMs stating a desire that players do things a particular way.

Question: How does this pay off for the player? In what way are you (generic, not EzekielRaiden) as a GM encouraging such play by rewarding it?

Well, this isn't a PC race thing, but I tell all the players who come to my campaigns they need to play characters who are at least willing to be heroes--and I give them chances to do heroic things. I figure someone unwilling to play a character willing to be a hero probably wouldn't be interested in the stories that emerge in the games I DM.

Closer to PC race thing, if the player gives me backstory/background/motivation stuff about their character to work with, I'll make an effort to fit that into the campaign, as an option for the PCs to pursue. So, if they are willing to tie their character to the setting/campaign, they get a little more spotlight time.

 

[Jack Daniel]

I said, and you've quoted it now so it's really wild that you haven't actually read it, "If you're entering a social situation, and refusing to compromise just because they "aren't your friend", then you're in the wrong."

Do you not know what the phrase "just because" means, perhaps? Or maybe you have trouble tracking the order and structure of a multi-part sentence?

This is getting wildly tangential, but whatever. As I originally understood your statement, you asserted:
• In a social situation
• Refusing to seek compromise is wrong
• If the reason for that refusal is that the recalcitrant party does not regard the other party as a "friend"
Yes? No?

A situation wherein a specific compromise was ill-advised or immoral wouldn't fit the thing I actually said. Perhaps try engaging with what people said, not with a lazy half-read assumption of what you think they probably said.

You didn't specify. So literally any specific compromise fits the thing you said. As does any social situation (a concept of nigh-infinite breadth.) That's half the reason I find what you said so objectionable.

I think you and doctorbadwolf are using different definitions of the word “compromise”. I think you are using the word in the sense of “arrive at an agreement regardless of how much you have to give up” whereas I think doctorbadwolf means “be willing to entertain open-minded discussion about an issue”.

No, I think doctorbadwolf merely intended something more situationally-specific than what they actually wrote. Replacing the word "compromise" with the phrase "willingness to entertain a compromise" doesn't change a jot of the substance of either their statement or my issue with it.

 

[prabe]

That's the point!

A lot of this isn't really a debate about the specific topic. For example, I think most of those ardent "all races, all the time, PLAYER EMPOWERMENT!" types would be happy to play in a thoughtful, all-Tabaxi campaign set on a mysterious catworld (for example).

I don't even like Tabaxi much, and I could probably be sold on that.

And the "DM, my way or the highway" types would certainly listen to a pitch by an enthusiastic player and try to find some way to accommodate that player.

I've been mostly arguing on the side of the DMs, here, and if someone comes to me with enthusiasm and an Idea, I'm going to want to make it work.

And when I'm a player, I don't mind DMs that have strict session 0 restrictions. But I do get concerned about arbitrary DMs; for the people arguing against DM restrictions or changes, that is what they are getting at (hence the desire for "justifications"). It's their shortcut. "If the DM is prohibiting things simply because the DM doesn't like it, then that's probably a bad DM."

I dunno. If a DM doesn't like, say, Kender--because he has three functional brain cells to rub together--that DM is probably going to find a reason not to have them on his world, and that reason may or may not make sense as lore. Of course, the odds someone will complain seem roughly nil ...

And it's the same when I'm DMing. If I've put in the effort to build a theme for the game, and I've communicated that theme, and that theme involves restrictions or additions ... if a player shows up and demands to play something that violates what has already been communicated, then I'm pretty sure that will be a problematic player; it's a good shortcut to knowing that this a player I won't want at my table.

Agreed!

 

[zarionofarabel]

I dunno. If a DM doesn't like, say, Kender--because he has three functional brain cells to rub together--that DM is probably going to find a reason not to have them on his world, and that reason may or may not make sense as lore. Of course, the odds someone will complain seem roughly nil ...

I complain! I LIKE Kender!

 

[prabe]

I complain! I LIKE Kender!

But you only run human-only campaigns. 100% of your fun is destroyed if any player in any campaign you are involved with plays anything other than a human, or if anything other than humans exists in the setting as anything other than a monster that need to be killed forthwith. I don't think your opinion of Kender is worth considering, here.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

I dunno. If a DM doesn't like, say, Kender--because he has three functional brain cells to rub together--that DM is probably going to find a reason not to have them on his world, and that reason may or may not make sense as lore. Of course, the odds someone will complain seem roughly nil ...

Essentially, it's a shortcut, or a heuristic, to know that the DM isn't going to be good.*

Here's one that I often use- the DM NPC. Now, I know that there are DMs out there that can use or have a DM NPC without a problem, but that is a major red flag for me. If I know a DM uses DM NPC(s), then I will have my guard up. I've seen it go wrong far too many times, and it's correlated with DMs that like to inject themselves into the game too much. IME.


*As opposed to DMs that ban elves, which is a sure-fire sign of quality!

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Well okay, but now it's become something you're forgiving and adapting to, not just "the way it is." It's fallen short of what you hoped for.

I really don't see it that way. I see it as us meeting in the middle. Perhaps the words I chose were bad; I enthusiastically embrace any good-faith roleplay efforts, full stop. If my vision and yours aren't identical, we collaborate and build cool stuff together. I bring my players in for the building, because there's many ideas out there that I will find cool, but would never come up with myself. I need my players' input, and even if their need for mine is greater, that doesn't mean my need isn't a need. That's my whole mission as a DM, to both personally and collaboratively build cool stuff and then see what happens with/around/to it.

...it occurs to me that maybe all my years playing make-believe with my LEGO sets was practice for this exact approach. Build what you want, reconfigure as needed to make new cool things, integrate disparate parts (I treated my Megabloks and LEGO figures as coming from different universes but collaborating to face common enemies), always think about whether (and how) current structures can be extended/enhanced/reimagined/repurposed.

 

[Oofta]

I complain! I LIKE Kender!

And here I was starting to enjoy reading your posts, but now you're dead to me.

P.S. I kid.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Cool. I never said anything like that.

Never said this, either.

Cool! Cool! False Equivalences are false.

You need to leave your confirmation bias at the door.

Or maybe you need to figure out why you are coming across that way. Might have something to do with saying that you don't allow selfish people at the table, then laying out how the DM can be as selfish as they want and kick the players, because the DM is more important than them.

That's exactly how quoting works. I quoted what 5e decided to include in its game. There rest of that novel is irrelevant. All novels that don't involve 5e quoting them in the books are also irrelevant.

I didn't quote the novel. I quoted the 5e DMG.

No Max, that is not how quoting works. In any way, shape or form.

Here, I can prove it.

I'll quote The Moodswings from their track "Spiritual High (Part III)" where the song says "I have a dream that one day" then there is a small break then it picks up with "in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers. I have a dream today..."

You would probably recognize the Audio it is pretty famous. Totally from that band, here, I'll even link it
Or, we could recognize that just because Work A quoted Work B, that does not mean we are quoting Work A when we only use the quote from Work B. We are actually quoting B, since every single word is coming from that source.


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My idea was vertical shaft cells in sandstone, circular to avoid typical "wall jumping" shenanigans. Bottom of the entrance door is (say) 20' above the floor, maybe with a skylight at the top. Using your breath attack straight up is likely to cause blowback, and can't get high enough to hit the cell door anyway. Meals are dropped in from above. Prisoners on good behavior may be allowed to use more ordinary (but still sandstone-walled) cells. A maximum-security prisons might require masks like you suggest; I hadn't considered such a device, but it would make sense.

Oh, okay, that makes sense. That would be a bit labor intensive to build.

You know, since you are just making a pit, wouldn't it work just as well to make dirt pit? Most breath weapons wouldn't affect it, and even at ten or fifteen ft deep trying to dig out would be more likely to case a collapse and bury you than anything else.

It also sounds like locking someone up in jail would require enough of an undertaking that they really wouldn't bother for minor offenses. The prison would be big and represent enough effort that jailing a drunk is just wasteful. So I imagine they would have mandatory sentences for certain activities, and save prison for people worth the time and effort to lock up.

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Nope. Why, do I need to in order for me to have fun, cause I don't.

You asked, I answered. But we both knew you'd never compromise.

Why didn't you just let them play what they wanted? I mean, that's basically what I keep being told to do.

Because, since the beginning of the thread, there has been the obvious acknowledgement that allowing characters who are too powerful causes issues. The player in question wanted to be an undying Paladin who devoured the souls of the unholy to fuel his powers. Allowing him to regenerate and continue using his spells after he ran out of slots as long as he had enough souls.

I don't think I need to explain why that would have been too powerful for a level 1 game. When I re-explained to him that that concept was too much, he went to a Dwarf Fighter.

I keep being told I'm a big meanie because I want to run a game with only humans and don't want to allow non-humans in it.

What? I never said anything about being "strong" or having a "deeply curated world, with culture and history".

What praise?!?!? Where is this praise coming from? Who is praising me? What the hell are you even talking about?

Have you not been following the conversation? Plenty of people like Maxperson, Oofta, and Jack Daniel have been heaping praise on DMs who "hold the line" against players, and develop "far superior" worlds with deeply crafted history and cultures, by denying those players who want a kitchen sink of more than four options.

I mean, you had to have seen the parts of the conversation about how DMs shouldn't cave to player pressure, they should be free to express their artistic vision of their world, how players who are looking to do something outside of that vision are just seeking shallow stereotypes.

You've made a few claims like that yourself, now that I think about it, wonder why you don't know what I'm talking about.

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So, a question for the collected - we see GMs stating a desire that players do things a particular way.

Question: How does this pay off for the player? In what way are you (generic, not EzekielRaiden) as a GM encouraging such play by rewarding it?

Very few of my players go very in-depth with it, but mostly by geeking out with them about how cool an idea that was. Or by working those ideas into the story. This is all little stuff, things like Dwarves having an all-fungus diet stuff like that.

But, as much as I love it, a lot of my players haven't done deep dives into yet, and I'm not really sure if rewarding doing so in any way other than praise and the occasional inspiration is really appropriate.

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I will repeat, for I think the third time, that my point is in reaction to EzekielRaiden:

"Non-humans that are neither rubber forehead aliens nor simplistic caricatures? That's what I've been trying to say (evidently poorly). Instead of those two things, players giving their characters the full breadth of individual-personality and societal-culture elements that sapient beings can have, while still having physiological differences that matter and, thus, can influence their culture and outlook."

If you don't care how the players are playing their characters, my question isn't for you.

Oh, that is your question?

I don't. Because I don't need to reward them for playing people, they play people anyways.

Ezekiel's point is in response to people saying that it is impossible to play a non-human character as anything other than a stereotype. And since it is impossible, there is no reason to give non-human options, because they will just be stereotypes anyways.

But, that isn't true. Just because someone plays something other than human does not mean they will be a stereotpye and just because they are human doesn't mean they won't be. See your bespectacled wizard and cockney rogue examples.

I've only had one guy who really tried to play a stereotype... and even he could not be 100% stereotype all the time. So, I have no need to reward or encourage people to play people. They do that on their own. And if I think their character could be trivially translated into human... well it is none of my business. If they wanted that character to be human they would have made them so.

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Sure. I absolutely did quote him saying that in my post. I fully admit it and embrace it. That was in my post.

The designers chose that one specific statement for their 5e book. They did not choose anything else from that book(that I know of). Nor did they choose these other books that @Chaosmancer wants to incorrectly attribute to 5e. I am not going to that book for my quote. I am going to 5e for that quote. Where they got it isn't relevant to the fact that the quote being in the 5e book is proof that 5e considers lungs to be in their game. If Chaosmancer can show me a quote from a 5e book stating that Tabaxi have retractable claws, that will be an equivalence. Until then, trying to equate a quote from a 5e book with a quote that is not in a 5e book is a to prove what 5e is saying is in their game will remain a False Equivalence.

You are also engaging in a False Equivalence by the way. Quoting a passage for inclusion in a game product is different from quoting someone to respond in a debate.

Okay Max, so you at least admit that the text you quoted was not part of the 5e DMG, now you are merely saying that they included that text for a reason.

That reason being... they wanted a description of the Astral Plane. That is the section they put in there. And they felt like that novel from Third Edition was still accurate, because the Astral Plane hadn't really changed much.


So, since we have older works that describe the Tabaxi claws, and the 5e book does not say one way or the other. Then we could assume, much like the novel you quoted, that my sources still remain true.



And all of this, spawning because you wanted to say that Tabaxi would "have their weapons out" and could be logically discriminated against by a barkeep. Heck, you never even addressed the "they could wear gloves" part of the counter argument. Just the fact that you want to insist their claws are not retractable.

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You sound a lot like one of the other GMs in my group. We've been playtesting a sci-fi setting that he created, where he's clearly put a great deal of time and thought into all this stuff and the cultures are deeply fleshed out. And the non-human characters range from near-human to super non-human. I can tell he loves thinking of these implications and is excited to be presenting such distinct and coherent cultures to us.

I like reading about these cultures, but when it comes to actually making a character, I run into a bit of a roadblock. I find it difficult sometimes to find the space to make an individual in such a pre-detailed culture. And in addition, suddenly I have to worry about playing my character wrong--to use your example, if I accidentally made a Dragonborn talk about the flower of youth, that would now be wrong because the correct term is snow. I keep hoping that if I get more familiar with the cultures, I'll internalize this stuff and it will get easier, but so far it's been an on-and-off struggle.

To summarize, I think this can be chalked up to the different things people find easy and/or exciting, and all we can do is remember that not every approach is going to work for every player.

I completely agree with you, but I also think that that proves the over-arching point Ezekiel had. If you feel like you could play them wrong, by getting the details mixed up, then that shows that there is a difference between them and humans.


But also, I don't think anybody would rake you over the coals for it.

I mean, I'm playing a character who is an elemental spirit for all intents and purposes. They don't have a gender, they don't even understand the concept of sex really. And it has been hard to remember that. I'll refer to them as he on occasion, so do the other players.

And while I wanted them to really loose control in battle, to highlight the dichotmy of them normally being a very scholarly and in control person... I haven't been able to actually pull it off.

And that's fine. I don't think anyone expects to actually pull this stuff off perfectly. But the very attempt of it can be a lot of fun for some of us, despite other people telling us that it is impossible and a waste of time.

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That's the point!

A lot of this isn't really a debate about the specific topic. For example, I think most of those ardent "all races, all the time, PLAYER EMPOWERMENT!" types would be happy to play in a thoughtful, all-Tabaxi campaign set on a mysterious catworld (for example).

And the "DM, my way or the highway" types would certainly listen to a pitch by an enthusiastic player and try to find some way to accommodate that player.

I think that most of this is about the fears that people have, and about (for lack of a better term) some of the heuristics we use to determine if people are going to be "problem players" or "problem DMs."

And when I'm a player, I don't mind DMs that have strict session 0 restrictions. But I do get concerned about arbitrary DMs; for the people arguing against DM restrictions or changes, that is what they are getting at (hence the desire for "justifications"). It's their shortcut. "If the DM is prohibiting things simply because the DM doesn't like it, then that's probably a bad DM."

And it's the same when I'm DMing. If I've put in the effort to build a theme for the game, and I've communicated that theme, and that theme involves restrictions or additions ... if a player shows up and demands to play something that violates what has already been communicated, then I'm pretty sure that will be a problematic player; it's a good shortcut to knowing that this a player I won't want at my table.

Sure, I can completely agree with this point.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

This is getting wildly tangential, but whatever. As I originally understood your statement, you asserted:
• In a social situation
• Refusing to seek compromise is wrong
• If the reason for that refusal is that the recalcitrant party does not regard the other party as a "friend"
Yes? No?

If the only or even primary reason is that, yes. Which directly rules out any situation wherein the reason for recalcitrance is some sort of moral ambiguity or other such factor. It cannot both be a scenario wherein you refuse to compromise because it would be immoral to do so and a scenario where you have no reason not to compromise and choose not to simply because you only care about other people if they’re your friends.

You didn't specify. So literally any specific compromise fits the thing you said. As does any social situation (a concept of nigh-infinite breadth.) That's half the reason I find what you said so objectionable.

No, only a situation wherein your unwillingness to compromise is determined by the fact that the person isn’t specifically your friend.

No, I think doctorbadwolf merely intended something more situationally-specific than what they actually wrote. Replacing the word "compromise" with the phrase "willingness to entertain a compromise" doesn't change a jot of the substance of either their statement or my issue with it.

No, you just read the sentence incorrectly.