D&D 5E Companion thread to 5E Survivor: Species

[EzekielRaiden]

The flavor is already in the Monster Manual, or Volo's, or in your favorite mythology book, or your favorite novel... whatever inspired you to play that particular character in the first place. It's as difficult as you want it to be, really.

Or you can create it yourself from whole cloth and pure imagination, as you describe. Which would be the most challenging part for me, because it requires me to first decide why I need a different species in the first place. But I've seen it done... my players love doing it that way.

Okay. I want you to take that feeling--of having to invent the thing from whole cloth--and now apply it to every single time you use Custom Lineage to create a race/species that "already exists."

Because, properly speaking, if we did things the way you're saying we should, then mechanically strictly no races/species "already exist." Zip, zero, nada. There is nothing written about "elf" or whatever, except your impressions of the literary canon of fiction. There is only the sterile Custom Lineage Creation Rules, and your perceptions of things. You are, each and every time, reinventing the satyr or the orc or the dwarf (or whatever), from the ground up. That's how your rather flippant just-use-Custom-Lineage-4head response comes across: literally an instruction to completely reinvent each and every race/species, each and every time you make a new character, with the one and only consistent throughline being "what you feel like playing." Which, as I think you would agree, is...not exactly much of a throughline.

I am sympathetic to both positions, just to be clear. I think it would be an exceptionally bad idea to trash all races/species and just have "here's Custom Lineage, have fun!" Yet, conversely, I absolutely recognize the power (in a design sense, not a "become overpowered" sense), flexibility, and utility of the Custom Lineage rules. They are extremely good at what they do, and what they do is enabling players to play what excites them--and that's a thing I support most strongly.

Trashing all writeups and just having fluff descriptions and "here's Custom Lineage, have at it!" would be very bad. It would suck a lot of the flavor, and the joy, out of D&D. At the same time, Custom Lineage is extremely useful, and should probably be a feature of future PHBs (or "PHB1," if there's more than one) because of that.

 

[Undrave]

I think this coming down to Dwarf and Halfling is just because they both appeal to the same universal fantasy:

Being the little spoon.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think this coming down to Dwarf and Halfling is just because they both appeal to the same universal fantasy:

Being the little spoon.

Frankly, I think it just came down to "there were several people consistently upvoting some version of both of these things."

Like I legit genuinely believe these two only survived because they had several boosters, but relatively minimal opposition, because people were focused elsewhere. E.g. if the folks wanting to take down gnomes had instead targeted dwarves first, we would've had halflings and gnomes, or whatever other combination you like.

As usual, it has little to do with what is powerful or well-made or well-liked, and everything to do with "does it attract hatred?" Dragonborn got torn down because there are several users on this forum who genuinely believe they don't deserve to exist in D&D,* and it was solely because I (and a couple other people) were actively propping them up that they merely slowly bled out rather than being destroyed in short order. Likewise, there was a crusade to eliminate the "anthropomorphics"/"animal people"/"furries," and another to eliminate the perceived unfairness of tieflings getting an enormous number of "slots."

*E.g., people complained about Dragonborn getting six entries...but that's the same number both Human and Halfling got, only slightly more than what Gnome or Dwarf got, and less than what Elf or Tiefling got. Yet the only one of those that got any complaints was Tiefling, and that only because it got the most entries at 10.

 

[CleverNickName]

At the same time, Custom Lineage is extremely useful, and should probably be a feature of future PHBs (or "PHB1," if there's more than one) because of that.

I agree. I wish that framework had been included in the original Player's Handbook. It can be a lot of fun for certain players who enjoy that kind of creative freedom... and, IMO, would have cut down on a lot of bloat.

 

[Xamnam]

Like I said earlier, I fundamentally like both of these options, so it's nice to just sit back and relax on the final day of voting.

 

[CleverNickName]

That's the thing about hate: it only leads to suffering.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I just learned to play the game and trumpeted voting for the good species but quietly upvoted my favorite every once in a while to keep it middle of the pack.

I knew everything new (less than thirty years) would be slain by Enworlders, but even with the burning hatred for halflings here, the hatred for good game design is stronger still.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That's the thing about hate: it only leads to suffering.

And yet the Jedi were singularly garbage at actually processing and discharging hate.

You will, sometimes, hate things. You must learn to identify when that is happening, and techniques which will let you respond to that hate without letting it control you. Pretending that you can avoid having problems by simply never feeling negative/destructive/harmful emotions is self-destructive, and worse, it creates an inherent guilt/shame complex, where new destructive emotions will be created because of the destructive emotions you're already feeling.

(Of course, the actual fact of the matter is, Lucas allowed his sometimes-unpleasant life experiences between the end of the original trilogy and the start of the prequel trilogy to shape the doctrines of the Jedi, making them into painfully idiotic, blinded dogmatists who have become ossified in a dangerously unstable structure just waiting for a Force-powerful, charismatic, emotional individual to throw the whole system out of whack. This stumbled backwards into an actually interesting idea, that the Jedi of a generation or two before the Clone Wars had been manipulated by the Sith into being self-destructive dogmatists, presenting Darths Tenebrous, Plagueis, and Sidious as talented master manipulators who were able to soft-shape the psychology of the entire Jedi Order over time to set up their revenge.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I knew everything new (less than thirty years) would be slain by Enworlders, but even with the burning hatred for halflings here, the hatred for good game design is stronger still.

Oh yeah. It's in no way unique to ENWorld, the D&D community in general has this problem. Design is viewed as an art absolute: it is seen as being practiced by auteur designers who emphatically must not ever be subject to something as crass and limiting as analysis or study, and instead must be liberated to do whatever they want, whenever they want, no matter what. Proposing that there might be actually useful analysis is dismissed as "white room theory" (one of the phrases I, heh, hate the most) or as trying to crush the beauty and individual-expression of the auteur designer. Suggesting that it is possible to develop any form of theory is dismissed, usually with the intended-to-be-devastating, always scathingly stated term, "jargon." When anyone admits that there has ever been anything even remotely like progress or discovery in game design, it is presented as either a trivial observation that couldn't possibly act as part of a broader framework, or as an exclusively empirical observation that each and every designer must stumble into on their own. Empirical experience is not only more important than theoretical understanding, it is the one and only thing that ever matters. The idea that someone could be taught design, as an actual subject of study, is never even considered.

 

[Undrave]

As usual, it has little to do with what is powerful or well-made or well-liked, and everything to do with "does it attract hatred?" Dragonborn got torn down because there are several users on this forum who genuinely believe they don't deserve to exist in D&D,* and it was solely because I (and a couple other people) were actively propping them up that they merely slowly bled out rather than being destroyed in short order. Likewise, there was a crusade to eliminate the "anthropomorphics"/"animal people"/"furries," and another to eliminate the perceived unfairness of tieflings getting an enormous number of "slots."

Well I've played both Dwarves and Halflings and enjoyed them both (though I much preferred the 4e versions, heck, I think I prefer 4e race design better in general) so I'm not suuuuper mad they were there to the top.

Warforged, Lizardfolk, Dragonborn, Goblin, Kobold, I would have been fine with any of them winning too.