Levistus's_Leviathan
5e Freelancer
They can. They just have advantage on saving throws made against becoming drunk.
Edit: Got ninja'd by @JEB.
D&D General Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes and Halflings of Color
Edit: Got ninja'd by @JEB.
It isn’t treated as one, RAW, probably because the amount of alcohol you’d need to consume to die from alcohol toxicity is very high as compared to, say, arsenic.
Yaarel
He Mage
Maybe the Norse alfar are good, in the sense of bringing good fortune to human individuals and families, and sometimes being guardians. But they can be disturbingly vicious when lashing out against enemies.
The Scottish sith seem ethically ambiguous, and in any case dangerous, albeit they teach humans how to heal and do magic.
The French fay (faie) are inscrutable, causing both magnificent and devastating fates, without obvious reasons.
Mythological accuracy helps me enjoy the game more, and beauty is central for these kinds of elves. And Greek nymphs too.
That said.
I strongly agree with the WotC decision to remove alignment from every D&D player race.
Every character of any race, requires the player to decide what alignment their character is. That includes any elf, including any drow, and any orc.
For D&D, I want to see male nymphs (of any kind of nymph) and valkyries, and so on. (While the valkyrie can be various races, I agree with the scholars who suggest they were mostly female alfar, the dis, who choose the fate of an honorable valorous death.)
Honestly, the constant discourse about separating one's biological heritage from their cultural heritage strikes me as misguided-- and it bothers me deeply. It only serves to further dilute the archetypal nature of nonhuman races by introducing more and more convoluted individual lineages and further divorcing "racial" mechanics from any kind of narrative purpose. Frankly... I think separating race from class, and introducing the half-elf and half-orc races, were amongst the worst design decisions between OD&D and AD&D, and this is pushing the game even further in that direction.
You look at the lineages described in the PHB, and how often are any of those different-- really different-- peoples actually adopting infants from other lineages and raising them as members of their own? (And don't talk to me about Bruenor Battlehammer; neither of his human "children" knows their way around either the mines or the forge.)
People like to complain that the urge to play monstrous PCs is either "powergaming" (laughable) or trying to be a "special snowflake", but then rush to engage in and/or defend this nonsense-- and what else would you call a character that is half-human, one quarter elf and orc, who was raised underground by dwarves?
What we're doing in this thread, here, taking the European cultural assumptions of standard PHB races and replacing them with non-European cultural assumptions? Even mixing them and matching them, because even our human cultures aren't supposed to be 1:1 with real-life cultures, and using those to define either whole nonhuman monocultures, or differentiate multiple nonhuman cultures of nonhuman lineages? That's really cool stuff, and I want to see it goes. I want my D&D to be less Eurocentric, in practically any way possible.
It's right up there with meaningless symmetry for compulsive behaviors that people pour countless hours into, that usually harms the game it's applied to and almost never improves it. D&D would not be a better game if it had a Martial Controller (for the sake of having a Martial Controller) or a Shadow Defender (likewise), and it simply wouldn't be a better game for answering what would happen if a bunch of gnomish orphans were adopted and raised by an orcish warband.
You look at the lineages described in the PHB, and how often are any of those different-- really different-- peoples actually adopting infants from other lineages and raising them as members of their own? (And don't talk to me about Bruenor Battlehammer; neither of his human "children" knows their way around either the mines or the forge.)
People like to complain that the urge to play monstrous PCs is either "powergaming" (laughable) or trying to be a "special snowflake", but then rush to engage in and/or defend this nonsense-- and what else would you call a character that is half-human, one quarter elf and orc, who was raised underground by dwarves?
What we're doing in this thread, here, taking the European cultural assumptions of standard PHB races and replacing them with non-European cultural assumptions? Even mixing them and matching them, because even our human cultures aren't supposed to be 1:1 with real-life cultures, and using those to define either whole nonhuman monocultures, or differentiate multiple nonhuman cultures of nonhuman lineages? That's really cool stuff, and I want to see it goes. I want my D&D to be less Eurocentric, in practically any way possible.
It's right up there with meaningless symmetry for compulsive behaviors that people pour countless hours into, that usually harms the game it's applied to and almost never improves it. D&D would not be a better game if it had a Martial Controller (for the sake of having a Martial Controller) or a Shadow Defender (likewise), and it simply wouldn't be a better game for answering what would happen if a bunch of gnomish orphans were adopted and raised by an orcish warband.
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Yaarel
He Mage
The Egyptian clothing and jewelry are cool.
At the same time, I want to ask Egyptians if they are cool with this. Egyptians today are proud of their antiquity, and view their heritage as culturally sacred, even while being a different religion today.
While wanting to be ethnically diverse, it is important to invite players from other ethnicities, as opposed to appropriating other cultures.
Zardnaar
Legend
Cultural appropriation of the Greeks much? Lol.
Zardnaar
Legend
All 7 of my grandfather’s siblings died from alcohol-related afflictions. He was a teetotaler.
While I grew up learning how to drink responsibly, I did my fair share of heavy boozing in college. My senior year, I helped host a Mardi Gras party where I got drunker than ever before (or since)- even blacked out for a portion of the evening.
The next day yielded an insight as to my great uncles’ and aunts’ relation with alcohol. For me, it was like any other post boozing day: no hangover, no sickness. This confused the hell out of everyonr who was at that party. I got scared that the lack of negative consequences was what let my relatives become alcoholics.
That day, I consciously stopped drinking hooch like it was water. I still drink, but almost never more than 1-2 at a time, and only a few times a month, max.
Would you support having some lineages-- a very small percentage of the total-- that are highly sex-dimorphic, such that males and females are mechanically different lineages? It would take much, much less dimorphism than occurs in the vast majority of real-life species to necessitate such a differentiation in the D&D rules.
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