D&D (2024) How did I miss this about the Half races/ancestries

[Frozen_Heart]

Conceptually, there is nothing wrong with it. But mechanically they are stuck between a rock and a hard place because species weren't designed to be that modular and any system to make them is going to be complex, prone to abuse, and not backwards incompatible. My personal fear is also that certain combinations end up mechanically superior and all of a sudden, everyone* is playing halfling/tieflings because luck mixes well with infernal heritage** and nobody plays regular tieflings or halflings anymore.

* "Everyone" meaning anyone who is opting for mechanical advantage over aesthetic preference. Much of the ASI argument was about aesthetic choice over mechanical advantage. I'd hate to see people feeling they need to be mixed to optimize.

** Or whatever combo ends up being OP.

I do wonder if it's best to just keep half elves and half orcs for 1dnd, and then when a new edition rolls around in 2034 they can have a clean sheet approach to dealing with hybrid species.

As no option works well for this 'it's totally 5e but also a new dnd' thing. If they make it flavour only, all the people who like half elves and half orcs lose all mechanical representation (and mixed race people feel like they're being told to pick 'but which race are you really'). But if they make it mechanically represented, it loses all backwards compatibility with 5e.

 

[SkidAce]

And no. This isn't a "passing fad" any more than removing race/class restrictions were. Everyone gasped in horror at dwarven wizards and halfling barbarians, but now those concepts are wildly accepted. The smoke don't go back into the bottle.

There are no such things as a dwarven wizard.

 

[Bedrockgames]

A person whose parents are from two ethnicities is both 100% the one ethnicity and 100% the other ethnicity, simultaneously.

So for me "50%" sometimes makes less sense.

I think a lot of it is self conception. If someone feels equally both, I think that is fair. It is when someone says "I am half" and a person objects, where I think there is an issue.

Even the attempt to quantify it creates the impression that DNA, culture, and ethnicity are essentialist, when in fact they are fluid, miscable, and evolving.

Absolutely, I get that for sure, that is why I am leaning heavily into self identification and culture. Again going back to the problem of racialist science from the early 20th century, they would often treat those percentages as essential characteristics that pollute a person or exalt them. And I think that is a huge problem. But that is very different from someone simply recognizing their Grandmother came to the US from Italy and calling themselves a quarter Italian. If someone is a quarter Italian, but only ever thinks of themselves as an American, you shouldn't impose the hyphen on them. It doesn't indicate some magical effect that background would have on their personality (and this is why I think how you are raised is really what is important). But there is a lot of complexity and nuance here, and it is probably too big a topic to get into.

 

[Frozen_Heart]

Removing species restrictions for classes gave more mechanical options. Making hybrid species flavour only gives us less.

 

[Corinnguard]

There are no such things as a dwarven wizard.

Would you be able to tell if the Mountain Dwarf Wizard was wearing Medium (or Heavy Armor) and carrying a Battle Axe? Probably not. You would probably mistake them for a Fighter until they pitched a Fireball you.

 

[Bedrockgames]

So for me "50%" sometimes makes less sense.

And here I agree and disagree. If I say I am half something, to me that is honoring one half of my upbringing. But on the other hand, I do think people might see that and thing "but he's only half" and not get the totality of what that experience meant (which can feel more like "I am fully both these things"). I don't want to get too deep into it, but I know for me it took me a long time to reconcile all elements of my upbringing and background (in part because I live in a place where you are expected to choose one and where not everyone is going to accept a person who has 50% or 25% as belonging to it, even if they were raised that way).

 

[Yaarel]

An easy way to handle a character from complex origins is to reformat a species into half feats. Some powerful features like Flight might be a full feat. Say each character has one-and-half Special feats to represent Species, plus a Background feat to represent culture. A character from a complex origin can pick the feats that make sense for the character concept.

In earlier D&D editions, the Ability Score Improvement is the main criterion that determines the choice of Species. But in 1DD, determining the Abilities is a separate component of the character generation process. So, it is easy to mix-and-match the Special half feats and assign the Abilities according to concept, in order to model most of the options from earlier editions.

 

[SteveC]

Tanis wasn’t like a Tolkien half-elf at all.
He never became “an elf” or “a human”. He was very much a half-elf. It’s even pointed out he could grow facial hair, which I guess DL elves can’t do.

You're totally right about this, so much that I have to laugh. I never read Dragonlance when it came out, so all I knew about Tanis was that he was, Tanis, half-elven. I laugh because I was just schooled by a friend's 11 year-old son who is completely into Dragonlance and talked my ear about it when we did a grill out/egg hunt. I am properly schooled in Tanis lore now.

 

[Yaarel]

But that is very different from someone simply recognizing their Grandmother came to the US from Italy and calling themselves a quarter Italian.

Heh, that Italian grandmother might be from Morrocco. So the grandchild is both "quarter" Italian and "quarter" Morroccan thru the same grandmother.

Seriously, who could be more Italian than Leonardo di Vinci? But recent historians suspect his mother is a Circassian Jew, who was taken into child sex slavery and via Russia ended up in Italia, where his father married her and officially freed her from slavery.

Heh, to pretend that there is such thing as "half" or "quarter" of an ethnicity sounds old fashioned and is ... wrong.

 

[Remathilis]

There are no such things as a dwarven wizard.

Balazar the Mighty, invoker of devastation, master of the fires of creation and destruction begs to differ. You will find his sternly worded rebuttal attached to this delayed blast fireball.