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

[doctorbadwolf]

Yes. It would be. I think elves are a staple, just like pepperoni. If someone removed them from the pizza toppings, it would cause consternation in a lot of pizza eaters. I would even call the decision odd. But it doesn't mean that for a certain percentage, that they would care. They may find it strange, but they wouldn't care.

And I know it is not relevant, but I have not ordered pepperoni on a pizza in probably twenty years.

Yeah I find pepperoni too greasy, personally, and prefer linguisa when I can get it, or other spicy sausage alternatives.

I figure Dragonborn are kinda like pineapple and ham, some old timers hate it, but it’s on most pizza menus for a reason. Difference being the expectation in 5e D&D is much stronger, so it’s more like a restaurant that has had ham and pineapple on the menu for years, and you’re buying pizza from them for a party, and you refuse to put them on even one half of a pizza, even though there will be plenty of other pizza for everyone else, just because you don’t like it.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

The fact that you don't get that, and insist the player has as much right to create the world as the DM almost makes it seem like you want to play a different game, not D&D.

Or, get this, people play D&D differently than you.

But, in the end, it is the DM's world; this goes for rules, lore, everything.

No.

"No." Running The Game #94 - YouTube

Okay?

 

[billd91]

Depends. Is it a vegan pizza place?

Or kosher?

 

[prabe]

Or kosher?

Or halal?

 

[Chaosmancer]

You're reading a whole lot into very specific subset of words that he used. @ModernApathy did the same, taking what I said out of context of the rest of my post. Ignoring every post where I say that people should play what they want.

I'd apologize for not saying things exactly correctly but I can't help what you read into posts because of selective reading.

I've repeated time and time and time again: play how you want, as long as you and your table are having fun you're doing it right. How is that not clear?

Because quite often we've seen this.

"Play how you want, I'll continue playing my artisanally crafted soup with only the finest and most perfected ingredients in a perfectly made bowl, and you can continue with your cupboard stew boiled in a tin pot. As long as we both have fun right?"

You aren't just saying that your way is better for you, you are implying it is better. Again and again and again. And I get it, you honestly do think your way is better, your way is the way you want to have fun with, you see your way as superior. For you. But every time I see someone making that judgement call in general terms, then trying to hide behind the "as long as we both have fun" I'm going to call them out on it.

Because both ways can lead to a high-quality game. Not just a fun game. A high-quality game.

 

[Oofta]

Because quite often we've seen this.

"Play how you want, I'll continue playing my artisanally crafted soup with only the finest and most perfected ingredients in a perfectly made bowl, and you can continue with your cupboard stew boiled in a tin pot. As long as we both have fun right?"

You aren't just saying that your way is better for you, you are implying it is better. Again and again and again. And I get it, you honestly do think your way is better, your way is the way you want to have fun with, you see your way as superior. For you. But every time I see someone making that judgement call in general terms, then trying to hide behind the "as long as we both have fun" I'm going to call them out on it.

Because both ways can lead to a high-quality game. Not just a fun game. A high-quality game.

Making up things I've never said to prove your point that I said things I never said while ignoring what I have explicitly said time and again? That's ... an interesting tactic. Typical.

P.S. If you and your group are having fun you are doing it right. Even if that means you're serving burgers from the grill instead of fancy cuisine. Or vice versa of course. Personally? I'd probably prefer the burger.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Making up things I've never said to prove your point that I said things I never said while ignoring what I have explicitly said time and again? That's ... an interesting tactic. Typical.

P.S. If you and your group are having fun you are doing it right. Even if that means you're serving burgers from the grill instead of fancy cuisine. Or vice versa of course. Personally? I'd probably prefer the burger.

You do realize you aren't the only person I have conversations with, right? That maybe I'm also referring to things said by @Maxperson , @Scott Christian , @Jack Daniel , or any number of other people?

 

[Chaosmancer]

This is flat out wrong. There are no implications. Why? Because there are no elves. I don't need to explain the subclass abilities, just like they weren't explained in Tasha's. Nothing in them screams elf. Any race can dance and get bonuses.

Really? No implications?


Why are Elves the ones who invented Bladesinging in the RAW game? Because they are the ones who studied how to mix martial skill and magic. Look at their racial abilities. High Elves get both weapon training and basic magical study in their cantrip. Look at their stats, Bonus to intelligence for magic, but Dexterity is their physical stat.

What is the "elven style"? Graceful, flowing, Elves seek beauty in all that they do, which would apply to how they would seek to blend magic and fighting. It is a "Bladesong" for a reason, because it was designed to dance and song, it was designed to be beautiful as well as effective.


Now, I know, "But elves don't exist so that doesn't matter" except you are trying to transfer all of that over into your world. All of that is the lore and style of the Bladesinger Wizard.

And you transferred it to Tabaxi.

Immediately we run into style differences. Tabaxi are not known for their magic, or their martial skill. Maybe they are now, but what style of magic would they have? Well, Bladesinging is their art, so they'd be leaning towards that style. Interestingly, Tabaxi (as you know) they have Claws. Why would a Tabaxi Art of combining fighting and magic not take advantage of their natural weapons? And a style that relies on claws would be very different than one based on long, thin swords.

The style would be more savage, faster, the positions of the body would be different. The Style would not likely have the restriction of one hand needing to be "free" because a Tabaxi would alter hands at will. A person adopting this style would favor dual-wielding more often, because it would more closely resemble the claws on each hand.

That took me... a few minutes to type out? Unless you decide "Tabaxi have all the cultural traits of elves" then simply copy and pasting the lore of the class into their culture feels janky and broken. It clearly doesn't fit. It clearly ends up becoming a conceit of the meta, that this class was intended to fit with a different race of people, but that race was unavailable so the DM slapped it on another.


In other words, just changing the word "elf" to "Tabaxi" doesn't work seamlessly.

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I prefer PCs pick options that are part of the world vs gap filling. A smaller list if allowed races helps define the world's imho. Eg Warforged and co in Eberron, Kender in Krynn, Mul in Darksun etc.

sigh

I made a list in another thread about the... think it was 25 races in Darksun? I also reposted it in this thread.

Krynn had just off the top of my head, mutliple races of elves, multiple races of dwarves, kender, draconians, humans, ogres (beautiful and ugly), minotaurs, tritons, orcs, giants, lizardfolk, kobolds, yuan-ti, dragons, and probably far far more if I actually went looking.

Eberron? Whoo boy, Warforged, Changelings, Shifters, Halflings, Humans, Orcs, Kalashtar, Giants, dragons, medusa, harpies, lizardfolk, dragonborn, yuan-ti, elves, dwarves, gnomes, ogre-kin, tieflings, Aasimar, gnolls, goblins, hobgoblins, bugbears, and those are again, without looking.


No official setting has a "smaller list" of races in it.

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The bolded sentences are where you're making a conceptual error. If a DM does all the world-building and house-ruling for a campaign, and also has players who continue to play in that campaign, that DM has those players' de facto approval (however tacit) to do the world-building and house-ruling. That's a form of group consensus. And it's really no different from the DM's authority over rules-adjudication during gameplay being derived from the "consent of the governed." How the group arrives at consensus regarding who among them has authority over the rules and the setting is immaterial to the issue of when and how rules and lore become fixed for that campaign, and trying to drive an artificial conceptual wedge between DMs who create rules and lore with broad player input and DMs who create rules and lore without broad player input (but with said players' tacit approval) is either disingenuous or fallacious.


The problem is, nobody else here is talking about that. It's a sign of a problem player to insist on altering the rules. It's a sign of a problem player to repeatedly harp on altering the rules. Your player with a polite proposal is a strawman. (Still. Sixty pages later.)

It is not a strawman, unless the other side is simply terrible at expressing their views. The other side has consistently presented it as a problem if the player asks to change the rule after knowing what the rule is.

Was I simply supposed to assume that they meant "it is a problem if the player repeatedly harps on changing the rule"?

And, you can go with the "consent of the governed" model, but if you end up still viewing a player who does not consent, and who would like things to be changed, but the DM labels them as a problem and boots them, well, how easy is it to tell who was at fault here?

Sure, if the DM only booted them after they had asked every session to play a half-dragon half vampire whose cloak flutters in an imaginary breeze for the last sixteen sessions, and everyone was sick and tired of it, then clearly and without question the player was at fault.

But if the player came to the DM privately, after table hours, twice to ask about their idea, and the DM booted them and the other players have no idea what is going on... is it the player's fault?

After all... can you consent to something you have no knowledge of? That is why transparency is a government issue, because "just trust us, you don't need to know" isn't a position that is always tenable. Which is why there is a big difference between "I am the DM, and therefore I have the consent to make unilateral decisions and everyone agrees with me as a matter of principle" and "We arrive at decisions by group discussion, making sure all parties are heard"

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I usually have at least half a dozen character concepts wizzing around in my head at any one time, but since I rarely get to be a player most, if not all of them I will never get to run. That's what comes of living in a universe with finite time.

.... and?

I also DM the majority of the time, so this is also true for me. So I should just abandon playing what I want the few times I get to play? That doesn't sound like a sound argument.

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I don't buy it. If you are telling me a player puts in more work you are discussing an anomaly, not the norm. Your DM wrote zero words. Just read the book once. Then ran it using impromptu (because that is what it would be). That's cool. Good for him or her. Maybe they even did a good job. But again, that is not normal.
Here is the thing. You know that is not the norm. You know that is not the consistent viewpoint I have clearly laid out regarding DM's that build stories and worlds. Yet, that's the path you choose to argue. I am beginning to see why you take issue with a DM that says, you can use all these things, not these. It must be because you instantly try to use the ones they tell you not to use.

So is your position that the norm is not to use existing settings? Not even say... 40% of the time?

When you run Eberron how much of the world are you writing? When you run Forgotten Realms, how many NPCs can you take solely from the existing material? Did you create the magic system of Dark Sun?

Heck, when you created a custom world, did you copy most of the lore about Dwarves and Moradin? Did they bother to rewrite the lore for orcs, or did they just write "orcs here" on the map?


You seem to want to say that the DM always puts in years worth of effort to craft a unique and compelling world. But first rule of world-building is to steal ideas from everywhere. Meaning that you are actually supplementing work done by others.

And, none of this even addresses the point. Since it is all about who puts in more effort, if I as the player have written more words, crafted more ideas, and put in more money, time and effort... does that give me the final say over the DM? No matter how unusual that situation is, would that be your position? That what matters is who put in the most effort?



Also, your assumptions about how I make characters are hilariously off base.

One, directed at Chaosmancer. Two, it is an observation. It is not personal. It is an observation based on his desired tactics on how to argue.

1) Just because it is targeted at me doesn't make it not a personal attack

2) Your "observations" are heavily flawed.

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Hell, the abilities don’t require dancing.

My Bladesinger projects an arcane augmentation to his perceptions, causing him to see ritual circles and geometric designs that interplay and things move, allowing me to predict terrain and movements of objects and people, which is what gives him his AC, movement, and Acrobatics, buffs, while also helping sharpen his focus, giving him his concentration boost. Predicting people requires analyzing body language, and observed details about the people, in a Holmesian fashion.

As a side effect of training in this ability, he also has become better at analyzing a “room” and playing to it, giving him proficiency in performance.

I do wish I had enough skills to give him Insight, but investigate stands in a lot of the time.

I just wanted to pop this out, since I gave a lot of discussion about what Bladesinging means by RAW.

I love your Gnome Bladesinger, I think it is amazing, and reflavoring it has made it exactly what I would expect from a Gnomish Bladesinger.

But, you also put in the work to rewrite it, to take the same end results and find new explanations for it. That is the work I'm talking about for Max, the thing he says that you don't need to do.

 

[Jack Daniel]

Okay wait so, let me get this straight.

Us pro-variety folks aren't allowed to talk about any DM that acts in bad faith, because that's rude and mischaracterizing your position.

Further, us pro-variety folks aren't allowed to talk about players acting in good faith, because if the player is doing so, no DM here would have a problem with them.

In other words, y'all are telling us the ONLY conversation we're allowed to have is one where the DM is by definition never in the wrong, and the player is by definition always in the wrong, as anything else is insulting or irrelevant.

1. Why are we still having a conversation, if you're going to fix so many terms of it that there's nothing left to discuss?
2. I hope you can see the bitter irony here, of folks demanding that only one set of options be allowed, and the people not okay with those demands being confused, frustrated, and openly considering bouncing out.
3. Maybe try turning those ideas around and seeing how that makes us feel? Making it so the only players worthy of discussion are those presumed to have bad faith isn't exactly friendly to the people who mostly play the game as players, and it certainly mischaracterizes our position. Further, presuming it is impossible for the DM to act in bad faith is deeply frustrating for exactly the same reason that it would be to presume it is impossible for a player to act in bad faith: it insulates DM behavior from any form of criticism whatsoever, making them (as I have repeatedly said in the thread now) a beleaguered victim and thus unquestionable and untouchable.

The "pro-DM" side has repeatedly argued, essentially, that players acting in bad faith are bad. If the "pro-player" side counters this with but players acting in good faith are good, well, hallelujah, we agree, and there's no interesting conversation to be had about players anymore.

The sticky wicket here is the idea of DMs acting in bad faith. This is, to put it simply, a very difficult thing to picture in the context of this discussion. There are lots and lots of ways for DMs to act in bad faith (excessive fudging, railroading, illusionism, bait-and-switch, gotchas, "rocks fall," magical realm, etc. etc. etc.), but leaving elves or warlocks or whatever out of a campaign setting simply isn't one of those ways. If your thesis is some flavor of "DMs acting in bad faith are bad," again, no arguments here—but curating a setting or a ruleset isn't bad faith, and it's really really hard to imagine how it could be in a situation that isn't cartoonishly absurd.

Kind of like this:

But if the player came to the DM privately, after table hours, twice to ask about their idea, and the DM booted them and the other players have no idea what is going on... is it the player's fault?

More of another strawman than a reductio ad absurdum, but still so unbelievable as to be beneath worthwhile discussion.

You aren't just saying that your way is better for you, you are implying it is better. Again and again and again. And I get it, you honestly do think your way is better, your way is the way you want to have fun with, you see your way as superior. For you. But every time I see someone making that judgement call in general terms, then trying to hide behind the "as long as we both have fun" I'm going to call them out on it.

Both sides have implied that their way is better. This should surprise nobody.

Only posters on the pro-collaboration side in this argument have come right out and said that collaboration is objectively always better, and that DMs who don't collaborate are something "the hobby" has or ought to have "grown out of."

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Or halal?

Or good?

Yes, a lot of American-style pizza, pizza places have pepperoni pizza.

But if you've been to places that serve "gourmet" pizza, or real Italian pizza, you don't find pepperoni.

The lesson, as always? Elves, like pepperoni, suck.