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

[Mecheon]

since these Goliath are tied more strongly to giants (a mistake, IMO)

I mean, let's be honest. 3.5E Goliaths were just 3.5E's half giants from the psionic handbook, but with the psionics replaced by survival stuff

Giants are in their blood (plus I've seen some popular stuff that just made them half giant linked previously)

 

[Micah Sweet]

Man, I'm rereading the Origins UA document and...there's plenty of lore to work with for the elves, dwarves, and gnomes. Dragonborn and Goliath are oddly light, but Dragonborn have all of dragon lore to draw upon, and since these Goliath are tied more strongly to giants (a mistake, IMO), I guess they have all that lore to draw upon. I'd prefer Goliaths get the same amount of lore as dwarves or gnomes, and at least keep the sense of fairplay, the love of high places (which is alluded to, but very vaguely), and competitiveness. That's plenty to hang your hat on, and makes them more interesting than "im a little frost giant".

Likewise, plenty there in the halfling, even if I strongly prefer the 4e traveller halflings and wish they'd stop trying to erase the idea of halflings having cultures that live like that, not just adventurous individuals.

Still. The fact that I dislike how wotc writes species lore, what ideas they latch onto and what they ignore, etc, doesn't mean they're doing something wrong or should change course to suit me. I can and will just write my own species lore to suit my preferences.

Hell, in my games Shadar-kai aren't elves, llolth doesn't exist and drow are literally just a regional ethnicity of elves, goliath and dragonborn have never been descended from giants and dragons and have instead always been separate species from them, gnomes are much more a mix of 4e and the 3.5 Races of Stone writeup mixed with a lot of ideas from Irish mythology about the successive waves of invasion that became the little folk in the hills over the centuries, fir bolg are the oldest mortal race and invented the first written language and are related to goliaths, and a host of other stuff.


I don't think wotc should make official dnd more like my dnd. That's my job.


Now, let's look at the A5e heritage writeups, which are excellent and are one of the things that make me want to try the game in spite of the things I don't like about it.

Dragonborn...has less lore than the UA Dragonborn writeup. If you add one of the Dragonborn related cultures, like Dragonbound, you get...roughly the same amount as the Dwarf writeup in the UA. The rest is mechanical features, in both cases.

Maybe it's a fluke. NOpe! It's all of them!

It's almost like certain folks have no problem whatsoever with a specific thing, and then treat it as a huge and terrible thing when wotc does the exact same thing. Wild!

You're right I concede. It's not like I'm buying the book anyway. Have fun.

 

[Veltharis ap Rylix]

While I applaud the goal of creating a way for more mixed character representation without having to explicitly create a race/species/ancestry/etc. statblock for every possible permutation, the "Pick a Parent and Reflavor" methodology they've put forth doesn't sit well with me.

The fundamental issue is that it presumes something that may not be true - that your character is the child of parents that are of two differing ancestries and that they exclusively take after only one of their parents in every way that matters mechanically. To which I point to the Khoravar of Eberron, a sizable population of "half-elf" human/elf hybrids who were created by the intermingling of elves from Aerenal and humans from Sarlona when they independently migrated to the continent of Khorvaire a good two-and-a-half to three millennia ago. Khoravar are perfectly capable of bearing children with one another, have formed their own communities and a sense of racial/cultural identity independent of their human and elven ancestors, and it's fully possible that a Khoravar character would have to trace their ancestry back several generations to actually find an ancestor that wasn't also Khoravar. While certainly not a universal experience, those who identify as Khoravar do not see themselves merely as the byproduct of humans and elves intermingling, but rather as true children of Khorvaire, a distinct people in their own right.

"Pick a Parent" torpedoes that. It turns every human/elf into a Tolkien-style half-elf: you can exist as a human or you can exist as an elf, but you cannot meaningfully exist as anything in between. Without homebrewing or using the out-of-date 2014 half-elf statblock, Khoravar can't even be understood to have a common shared experience over whether they sleep or not. Want to express your character's Fey Ancestry and/or Darkvision and now you're forced to bring along Trance and whatever innate magic you get for the High/Wood/Dark Elf choice, which is also now mandatory. Want to express your human side's more extensive skill proficiency options and now you're locked out of all that Fey stuff.

I've never been one to get hung up over the whole fixed vs. floating racial ASI nonsense, but if two mixed-ancestry siblings from a long line of mixed-ancestry forebears can't even be expected to necessarily share the same baseline species traits, then it becomes exceedingly difficult from a worldbuilding perspective for me to envision them as anything more than one-off statistical anomalies - certainly not as representatives of a people capable of forming a shared communal identity of their own.

"Pick a Parent" is fine as an option, but there needs to also be a standardized system to create mixed-ancestry statblocks by pulling together traits from their "parent" ancestries - a way for DMs who want to create a thousand year old civilization of dragonborn/dwarves for their homebrew setting to make characters from that civilization have a cohesive identity, rather than leaving whether they can breathe fire or are really good with stonework up to a proverbial coin flip. And if they go that direction, then creating human/elf and human/orc statblocks to show how to use that system by way of example would be a helpful thing to do, like how the '14 DMG had Aasmiar and Eladrin as examples of custom racial options well before we got the Volo/Mord versions later down the road.

By all means, clean up the language used to describe mixed ancestry characters wherever it needs it, but give me a way to make a Khoravar that still feels like a Khoravar as well.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Those are likely some of the "legitimate" criticisms Alzrius alluded to. Nobody here is advocating a return to strength caps or penalties for women characters.

Oh, maybe not nobody. I sort of like the idea of mechanically representing sexual dimorphism in the probability distributions for PC stat distributions. Call me a soft advocate, with the prerequisite of 3d6-in-order stat rolls so that extremely strong women, extremely wise men, extremely nimble dwarves, and extremely hardy elves are rare rather than impossible.

Edit to add: please also understand that I'm soft-advocating for a playstyle, or at most an optional rule sidebar, not a mandatory rule. I'm under no illusions that the majority of players would be interested in this playstyle; most 2023 players are looking for other things than verisimilitude, such as connection to other players and a sense of found family. Most people don't care about fantasy demographics. It can be a lot of fun though.

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

For the record, on the subject of killing orc babies, while I don't think it says anything about a persons' real world ethics, I have never found that to be a convincing idea (even if you accept all the conceits of the D&D alignment system cosmology, somehow killing babies because they were born evil, just doesn't pass the smell test. And when you dive into the actual ethics of it, it just strikes me as an evil act that uses events which have not yet and may not transpire to justify killing something that hasn't done any wrong.

One way to deal with this issue is to abandon Gygaxian naturalism to some extent and embrace the mythic underworld: there are no orc babies. And no orc females, or orc factories where orcish arms and armor are produced. There are only full-grown armed and armored orcish warriors, for the same reason there are only full-grown bogeymen and not babies. Orcs are wickedness and violence personified, rage and greed and darkness somehow made flesh. They don't reproduce through mammalian sexual reproduction; they simply exist wherever enough potential for hatred and malicious glee invites them to exist.

It's not the only way to run orcs, but it's an easy way to avoid the "orc baby" issue if you want orcs to be an "automatic bad guy" faction.

 

[Hussar]

Pick a Parent" torpedoes that. It turns every human/elf into a Tolkien-style half-elf: you can exist as a human or you can exist as an elf, but you cannot meaningfully exist as anything in between

I don't understand this line of thinking. "Pick a parent" only applies to mechanical abilities. It's not like any of the half races had unique abilities to those half races. A half elf doesn't have anything that an elf or a human doesn't have. So, your half-elf uses elf powers and my half elf uses human powers.

Do people actually define the race of their character by the abilities of that race? Is that what it means to be an elf? +1 to hit with a longsword and a spell?

 

[Maxperson]

That number is all nine PHB races (human, elf, dwarf, halfling, gnome, orc, tiefling, dragonborn, goliath) and every permeation of those nine. That doesn't touch the MotM races. If we're only going to have elf/human and orc/human as viable combos, the only reason to include them is nostalgia. Why bother...

That's way too many. You don't need to have all of them in every combination. Just a few major ones and let the DM's figure out the oddball cases.

Edit: And unless you have other info than what is in the OP, they are not limited to PHB combinations. You can have half-dragonborn/half-tabaxi or half-triton/half-kenku if you want.

 

[MGibster]

Do people actually define the race of their character by the abilities of that race? Is that what it means to be an elf? +1 to hit with a longsword and a spell?

Well, yeah. For a lot of players, I suspect mechanics had a very strong influence on what race they'd play with them favoring whatever synergized with their preferred class. It's not like the adventure was going to be markedly different because they chose to play an elf or a gnome instead of a human.

 

[Maxperson]

I don't understand this line of thinking. "Pick a parent" only applies to mechanical abilities. It's not like any of the half races had unique abilities to those half races. A half elf doesn't have anything that an elf or a human doesn't have. So, your half-elf uses elf powers and my half elf uses human powers.

Do people actually define the race of their character by the abilities of that race? Is that what it means to be an elf? +1 to hit with a longsword and a spell?

The longsword not so much. The innate spell, darkvision and resistance to sleep and charm? Yep.

 

[Hussar]

The longsword not so much. The innate spell, darkvision and resistance to sleep and charm? Yep.

Innate spell, maybe, but, then that only applies to one flavor of elf. Does no one play a wood elf? Innate spell isn't innate to elves, it's just innate to one version of elf. Darkvision is hardly a defining aspect of any race. I'd argue that a lack of darkvision is probably more defining considering how many races get it. Resistance to charm or sleep? Ok, fair enough.

But, here's the thing. Your half elf could easily have all that. Resistance to charm, darkvision and cantrip. The only real difference between a 2014 PHB half elf and the revised half elf is that you would lose a couple of skills but gain a cantrip. Hardly the most defining aspects of a half elf. Conversely, you would lose darkvision and resistances, but, gain one skill and one feat as well as gaining Inspiration on a long rest (I believe that's the current version of human).

Again, not exactly screaming, "I'M NOT A HALF ELF" here. If the spell thing is a hang up, burn the feat on Magic Initiate and now you're pretty much an elfy half elf.

The point being, the half-races never really had any unique mechanics. They basically had watered down mechanics from both parents. Well, now, you don't have to worry about that. You now have the mechanics from one or the other parent, and the player gets to choose.

Nothing is being lost here. And quite a bit is being gained since now my mixed heritage character isn't restricted to the two (well, three if you include tiefling) in the PHB.