D&D General No More "Humans in Funny Hats": Racial Mechanics Should Determine Racial Cultures

[Steampunkette]

I did read the whole thing. You misunderstood my reply.

Let's say that I'm the head writer for D&D or some other game and I create a archetype or race or whatever that is deliberately "bland and generic." I want you to change it to fit your world. It doesn't matter if it's not what I am expecting. In fact, the more unexpected, the better, because it means you're taking my tools and using them to build something unique for your game.

But if I create a fully-fleshed out whatever, then that's me saying "This is what it's supposed to be. Like it or lump it."

If I'm making a dish I want specifics.

I don't reach over to a shelf with a bunch of unlabeled white powders, pick one at random, measure out a teaspoon, and toss it in. I need to know the flavor of what I'm holding. Whether it's white pepper, salt, or baking soda.

It's the same way with game design.

"Like it or Lump it" doesn't really apply. 'Cause I can like it but decide to tweak it to fit what I want.

Take Minotaurs and Project Chronicle, for example. The standard Minotaur is Lawful, has a Strength Bonus, and has several racial traits devoted to using it's horns as a weapon.

S'not what I want them to be in Chronicle. So I changed 'em. They've still got the flavor of being a Bull-Person with horns and whatever... but they're not what Theros or Ravnica offers.

They're also not particularly good at Mazes in Chronicle, either, even though they have been in previous editions of D&D 'cause it doesn't fit what I want to use 'em for.

I didn't "Use something Generic". I took something specific, then changed it to fit. 'Cause Minotaurs have a specific cultural weight, an identity, a flavor, that I can take advantage of to make my dish richer.

 

[Malmuria]

Related question: how closely do the mechanics and fiction need to be associated?

I'm not an expert on The Forge, but it seemed their problem with dnd was that there were all sorts of ways that the types of stories it wanted to tell were not supported by the mechanics (including the mechanics of racial asi, level and class restrictions, etc). I suppose this idea eventually leads to Dungeon World, where race is actually a subset of class, and grants special moves. That is, it turns abilities into piles of narrative moves that are then subject to various restrictions for the purposes of creating theme.

Conversely, you had 4e, which some argued felt weird to play because it dissociated the mechanics from the fiction of the world, creating a 'board game' feel.

Finally, you have the ideas of the "Free Kriegspiel Revival," whose motto is "play worlds, not rules." As it pertains to this discussion, it questions the whole idea that a racial asi really has anything to do with archetype. Rather, if we know the narrative logic of the world, we can create and extrapolate the necessary rules/mechanics as we go. So, if you get a bunch of Star Wars nerds together to play a game and give them some dice, they will be more or less able to play a coherent Star Wars games, not because the mechanical complexity "matches" the narrative, but because they've already internalized some much about the world and the types of stories it tells. Interesting discussion/debate about this here.

 

[Umbran]

Bland and Generic doesn't help anyone.

I think several of you may be forgetting that not everyone has the same palate. From here on, I use "you" in a general sense, not in a "Steampunkette, specifically" sense.

"Generic" is a funny word, because its value is based upon comparison to a collection. A thing alone is not generic. A thing is generic if it is found to be similar to other things, and fails to stand out of the collection.

So, if you've already immersed yourself in Tolkienesque high fantasy literature, and have played many games based upon it, yes, D&D may seem generic. If you don't have a lot of experience with RPGs, and your genre literature background is dominated by YA Dystopian fiction, Harry Potter, Paranormal Romances, and Game of Thrones, then D&D looks rather different from those things, and D&D will not be generic in that collection of experience.

Thus, all the cries about "generic" have some base assumptions of previous exposure. They are not really objective claims about the content - they are claims that, well, you personally are kind of bored with it. But, that's a more about you than about the game. The game currently has a very large audience of relatively new players, so maybe your concept of generic is not really relevant to the market as a whole.

Personally, I spent the past... decade and a half? Running 5+ year campaigns of Classic Deadlands and Ashen Stars and short stints of other wildly different games. D&D now does not seem generic. It seems... kind of refreshing and new, actually.

 

[Steampunkette]

Good point, @Umbran, though I think when we're talking bland and generic we're meaning "Crunch with minimal Fluff"...

At least that's what I thought we were talking about. 'Cause Faolyn and Remathilis think crunch with no fluff helps me as a setting designer and, honestly, it -really- doesn't.

Doesn't spark anything creative. It's just numbers and general traits. With art and identity, though, I can do a lot.

 

[Bolares]

At least that's what I thought we were talking about. 'Cause Faolyn and Remathilis think crunch with no fluff helps me as a setting designer and, honestly, it -really- doesn't.

Doesn't spark anything creative. It's just numbers and general traits. With art and identity, though, I can do a lot.

I think it boils down to what you are trying to do. For me it really makes it easy to make a players crazy idea work in the game if there is crunch with minimal fluff, but to create a setting I agree it may be really difficult.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I feel like this whole thing is another 'what the rules are trying to do is not the same as what you want them to be trying to do' thing. The traits given in the PH are for PCs. PCs are exceptional members of their species. They don't have to conform to what their species is and their species aren't all built like PCs.

Then there's the weird obsession lately with not being 'humans with funny hats' that doesn't seem to understand what it's asking. The few playable species that aren't basically human are... annoying. The speech copying kenku and pragmatic emotionless lizard folk are rarely played as such because they're both hard to play and kind of obnoxious to play with.

I once played a lizard man fighter based on my pet bearded dragon. Everyone loved him, even though he occasionally ruminated on eating the other PCs when they annoyed him.

 

[Micah Sweet]

As far as I'm concerned... any game where who you are as a sentient creature gets represented mechanically by like four small features that barely get used... whereas your job-- merely what you do for a living-- gets 95% to 99% of ALL the mechanical differences between you and someone else in the game...

...tells us that your race/ancestry/lineage does not matter. The game does not care. Mechanically... all races are thought of as humans with funny hats, because when a PC's mechanical expression is taken on the whole... they might as well be. Your entire life-- your physicality, your thoughts, your beliefs, your truths, your soul, who you ARE-- ALL OF IT-- is distilled down to something as inane as "you known how to use axes" or "you can hide behind tall people" or "you don't need to sleep". That's how stupid racial mechanics are to creating a three-dimensional character. And thus why anyone getting bent out of shape when the designers take away or change these practically useless mechanics they've placed in it for paying lip service to racial distinction... is a completely and utter waste of time and energy in my opinion.

You want elves to be different than humans in the game? You have to roleplay them that way. Cause you sure as hell ain't gonna get it from the game mechanics.

Personally, I'd love it if that percentage were shifted a bit, say, 75% class 25% race. Any nonhuman character in literature is defined more by their race than pretty much any PC is.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It's funny because it started as a thread about racial bonuses in a game, but someone upthread has already posted something about "How age is important to understand a given society"

Man, you guys are too big brained for me. I swear to God, it's virtually impossible to talk about games today without the conversation becoming something "profound"

gods forbid people put thought into things.

Aarakroca and tabaxi are easier to design a culture around than halflings or gnomes because the former have a unique element (mimicking an animal's behavior) and the latter not much beyond "short and quirky".

I haven't ever found it hard at all to do with halflings or gnomes.

Can I just put this as an aside:

WHY does everything ALWAYS have to justify its existence with you people?! Justify this class, justify this race... Why can't something just be cool and fun mechanics with a nice name on top and a little fluff?! Why is everything always this whole song and dance?! It gets exhausting!

Ugh. Yes. Thank you.

Anyway...

Elves and their relatives do not sleep. They trance. That means they probably don't have bedrooms and beds (trance chairs maybe?), and like the Minbari of Babylon 5, they probably see 'laying down' as a thing dead people do. They're probably creeped out by other folks sleeping and the concept of dreams must sound insane to them. They probably have a way different daily schedule compared to races that need lengthy sleep and coupled with darkvision might have activities that goes on 24/7 in different shifts. This also means you can walk into a Elven settlement at any time of the day or night and find random activities going on that you wouldn't associate with that specific time: day drinking revellers, kids playing in the street at night, classes etc. No proper bedroom and beds would probably also impact reproductive "activity" (Elven Kama Sutra?) compared to what we normally do.

Injury treatment still benefits from something like a bed, but sure you could go this wild with it if you wanted to.

This 24/7 culture, added to their long lives, might blend into a loose sense of scheduling where things happen when they need to happen, not because of a traditional schedule. They probably find the concept of specific meals for specific time of days to be quite funny. Pancakes were not invented by Elves. Add their mystical connection to nature and they probably always harvest at the perfect time without needing to really schedule it. I can see an Elf farmer getting up from a discussion at 1 AM and going "Well, time to harvest the apples!" simply because they 'heard' them be ready.

Just a "fun" note; not all human cultures share our concept of eating a small set of meals at prescribed times of day. So, a culture that doesn't even have the human day/night dichotomy as a major scheduling feature would be very unlikely to develop the idea of waiting to eat until it's the right time of day for a specific meal with certain associated foods.

It would be bad for the growth of the hobby. New players can understand a dwarf or an elf. They won't get the nuanced stuff you propose.

Doesn't have to be all that nuanced. Dwarves being able to turn partial to stone, and being able to eat literally any organic matter and gain sustenence from it, and their culture description in the PHB relfecting that, isn't more nuanced than the current Dwarf stats and writeup.

But if you think your ideas have merit then start publishing stuff. Do the groundwork to show it can work and that players will accept it. Earn your million dollar Kickstarter and change the hobby that way.

Or, discuss it on an internet forum about gaming.

 

[Faolyn]

If I'm making a dish I want specifics.

I don't reach over to a shelf with a bunch of unlabeled white powders, pick one at random, measure out a teaspoon, and toss it in. I need to know the flavor of what I'm holding. Whether it's white pepper, salt, or baking soda.

I think you're misunderstanding the difference between generic and flavored, or else using a different definition than most of us. Because this:

Take Minotaurs and Project Chronicle, for example. The standard Minotaur is Lawful, has a Strength Bonus, and has several racial traits devoted to using it's horns as a weapon.

is generic. The only "flavor" comes from its Lawful alignment and what you interpret based on its traits. You can ignore the world-specific flavor provided by Theros or Ravnica, but the minotaurs of those worlds are still "generic." It's traits are entirely centered on it being a Big Bull-Headed Dude. You can stick that minotaur anywhere and not worry about its stats.

Now, compare to something like hobgoblins, which have a bunch of military traits baked in: some martial training and the Saving Face trait. This is specific, because it revolves around the idea of hobbos being highly militarized. It's probably one reason why they made the "fey hobgoblin" race.

When we are saying "generic," we don't mean flavorless. We mean "not built for a specific concept or setting."

 

[Yora]

I decided to throw out races as part of character stats when I just couldn't come up with any abilities for all the peoples that are inhabiting my setting. Out of the five, only one has a real special ability and characters of that people just have to take the ability to stay underwater for 10 minutes instead of getting a feat at 1st level. Everyone else just gets nothing at all.