D&D 5E Yes to factionalism. No to racism.

[Umbran]

Right. If the thread title was, "Your momma is ugly" and people came here offended at having their momma called ugly, an explanation about how the title really isn't calling your momma ugly and it's really just about moms in general, isn't going to help. The thread title really needs to be changed.

Mod Note:

I repeat: time to get past it.

Who wants to see what happens if I have to repeat it a third time?

All of you are old hands here, and should realize that after several warnings, it is time to get constructive, or walk away. Use that wisdom.

 

[Thunder Brother]

It's interesting to me that occasionally this discussion refers back to the Tolkien-derived races, when even in his own works we can see that elves, dwarves, and orcs all have, or are implied to have, different cultures. This is very much a D&D problem.

 

[Marandahir]

This generic faction concept also reminds me of the group patron rules from Eberron and Tasha's.

That might be a great place to start. I know those are for uniting the players more than separating them into groups, but it's worth a place to start with, especially how they took the campaign-specific concept in Eberron and made it generic in Tasha's.

To that matter, 4e did the same with Heroic Themes: they were a 1st-level character creation concept from Dark Sun based around faction that was then generisized and turned into a more robust background system in Dragon Magazine for 4e Essentials.

 

[Oofta]

RuneQuest has a built-in default setting off Glorantha, and (IIRC) no real expectation that the GM will be making their own world for it. D&D, on the other hand, has many settings, some of which are vastly different than "the norm," and expects that many DMs will make their own settings. Having all elves or all orcs act in a particular way is fine if you have a specific world, not so much if they are going to be used in any of potentially thousands of different ways.

I think it's just easier if you have default assumptions so that you can add or subvert them as needed. I don't need to give a whole lot of details on dwarves because outside of individual clan details they're pretty standard. On the other hand, most gnomes lean pretty hard into the steampunk-like gnomes and excel at gadgets and inventions which have a tendency to not always work as expected. On the other hand, one of their main cities is kind of a steampunk Las Vegas and is quite the tourist attraction if you're brave enough.

 

[Lyxen]

I agree re: Greyhawk. It did indeed immediately start to move away from monocultures, at least with certain races.

Cool.

Part of the issue is the constant return to monocultures every edition, most spectacularly to my eye with 3E.

My take is that it's not really monoculture, since the settings were not profoundly modified. My take on it is that because 3e did a really nice job of rationalisation of basically everything, they left only one racial template per race in the PH, but knowing that the culture would come from the setting.

On the one hand, I can understand how you could see it as being back to monoculture, but I don't think it's sustained at all from the rest of the publications.

2E had the most branching out from monocultures (imho), and it had from the very start (c.f. Taladas), so it was particularly shocking to see 3E "reel back in" the races (and classes, but that's another discussion), and then it never really reached the same levels of varied cultures for races, and whilst 3.XE added tons and tons of races, virtually all were presented as fairly narrow monocultures. Even ones that it made no sense for.

My take is that it's because 3e did a lot of crunchy splat books which were supposed to be generic so that they could be used across settings. But if you crossed this genericity with the settings which did not suddenly become monocultural, I don't think it's a problem, or rather I think it comes from the combination of the ever-growing generic ruleset of 3e that still had to be combined with even more setting books, so you needed a lot of stuff to see past the monoculture. But it was not, at least for me, the intent.

Re: Tolkien-derivative races, indeed, but again, we saw people take them pretty far from that pretty early on, so it was curious that they kept reverting (except Halflings/Gnomes, who were in flux through 3E-5E to a greater or lesser extent - still monocultural or the like for the most part, but what that culture was varied a bit more).

For that, I think you might need to blame popular culture and the LotR movies, actually, rather than the game itself. Because D&D is generic, the PH has to avoid cultures, otherwise it might create conflicts with the forthcoming/continuing settings. But culture cannot be left out to describe a race, especially when you want to relate to the popular culture tropes so that beginners can make the link to the cool things that they might want to play.

So, don't you think that this apparent reversal to monoculture in each new edition is not anything more than a return to genericity at the start of a new, and therefore simpler edition ?

 

[Bolares]

This generic faction concept also reminds me of the group patron rules from Eberron and Tasha's.

That might be a great place to start. I know those are for uniting the players more than separating them into groups, but it's worth a place to start with, especially how they took the campaign-specific concept in Eberron and made it generic in Tasha's.

To that matter, 4e did the same with Heroic Themes: they were a 1st-level character creation concept from Dark Sun based around faction that was then generisized and turned into a more robust background system in Dragon Magazine for 4e Essentials.

Yeah, I think I've mentioned it upthread. Patrons is a great place to start.

 

[Bolares]

I think it's just easier if you have default assumptions so that you can add or subvert them as needed. I don't need to give a whole lot of details on dwarves because outside of individual clan details they're pretty standard. On the other hand, most gnomes lean pretty hard into the steampunk-like gnomes and excel at gadgets and inventions which have a tendency to not always work as expected. On the other hand, one of their main cities is kind of a steampunk Las Vegas and is quite the tourist attraction if you're brave enough.

Okay, so we can all agrre, Eberron should be the default setting for D&D right?

 

[Oofta]

Possibly doable with archetypes?

I'm sure there are options I haven't thought of. Gods = faction works well for many of the factions in my campaign because the gods are quite often meddling in the affairs of man. They're hardly the only factions, but things like the Harpers is very campaign specific to FR even if I have a Harper-like faction in my world.

But maybe I'm just missing something? How would archetypes be different?

 

[Bolares]

I think we souldn't limit it to factions. Nation/culture should be an option too. Soetimes the PC is not tied to any faction, but where they grew up has the same impact on them.

 

[Minigiant]

People can always, and have always, made adjustments for their home campaigns. I'm talking about published materials. I think there should be some baseline, some starting point. Telling people "these are googas" with a picture and little else to distinguish them from every other race gives DMs nothing to work with. If you try to come up with a unique culture for every possible option in the published books (even just the core books), good luck with coming up with anything remotely unique that is not going to offend someone somewhere.

My point is that why do we accept only a few bland barely subraces then act surprised when these barely developed simplified races are played to the worse versions of themselves which are most prone for getting out of touch as time flies.

Wouldn't factions be easier to implement, paint, and update?