D&D (2024) Half Race Appreciation Society: Half Elf most popular race choice in BG3

Do you think Half Elf being most popular BG3 race will cause PHB change?s?

  • Yes, Elf (and possibly other specieses) will get a hybrid option.

    Votes: 10 8.7%
  • Yes, a crunchier hybrid species system will be created

    Votes: 8 7.0%
  • Yes, a fluffier hybrid species system will be created

    Votes: 5 4.3%
  • No, the playtest hybrid rules will move forward

    Votes: 71 61.7%
  • No, hybrids will move to the DMG and setting books.

    Votes: 13 11.3%
  • Other

    Votes: 8 7.0%

That, is part of a specific ruling that all (seemingly) Human/Half Elf's of the area are given Militia training. Its a nice house rule that Larian implemented for their specific campain.

Much like what you can do for your take on background/culture.

This is much like how Elves had their specific proficiencies, until people online started complaining about 'what if my elf was raised by a dwarf in a port'.
It is fine for the elven tree-towns of High Forest to include among its cultural backgrounds one that has longbow proficiency. This background also recommends Dexterity and Strength for the ability improvements, and suggests skills such as two choices from Survival, Athletics, Nature, and Stealth. Elven Accuracy might be too powerful for a level 0 feat, but thematically it would be appropriate. An other High Forest background might focus on primal magic and attunement with plants and animals.
 

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All High Elves, have this proficiency. Background (capital b) has no bearing.
In the playtest, the High lineage doesnt grant any special proficiency with longbows. There are no elven weapon proficiencies since these are overtly cultural.

But the High Forest culture can grant a longbow proficiency (whether as a member of a familys warriors or as a deer hunter or both).

I view Everelsk as a gishy culture having a national magi-military that elven adolescents grow up training in.
 

According to the playtest, the lineage is a "supernatural" feature. It seems negatable by antimagic. Since the lineages include "spells", a "lineage" probably is vulnerable to antimagic. Certainly the spells of a lineage are vulnerable to antimagic, and the supernatural darkvision and the supernatural waterbreathing are arguably vulnerable to antimagic too.

In any case, the 2024 core rules need to present the Elf and to characterize its features in a way that is 100% free from any trace of racism.
Yaarel, you seem to be inventing definitions that weren't previously there for 5E. Or you are borrowing from older editions and are assuming they can be used as truth for 5e. You seem to be using those invented definitions as justification to change rules. I'm not following the justification.

First of all, just as a reminder, in 5E, "Antimagic" doesn't exist outside the Antimagic Field spell, which is very specifically defined. It does not say anything like you are asserting. If the species itself was affected by the spell, it would say so. Every race in the game was created by higher powers, and it doesn't make them inherently affected by Antimagic Field. (hundreds of millions of years of natural evolution isn't a thing in D&D worlds.) I brought that up because you are asserting that because lineage provides spells, the lineage itself would probably be vulnerable to Antimagic Field. So elves, gnomes, tieflings, and any species that can cast a spell because of their species (or any race that was divinely/magically/supernaturally created, which is all of them) is affected by Antimagic Field? What does that even look like? Do they just disappear like summoned creatures? Because that makes no sense. We already know that spells can't be cast. That's not what is being discussed here.

You say your suggestions are to get rid of racism. Are you thinking that the very existence of variant species itself is a source of racism? If there are high elves, wood elves, sea elves, and drow, and they can breed with one another because they are all elves, are the rules are racist? Is being different from each other enough reason to assume they are racist against each other? Do you think the words "subrace/subspecies" or "lineage" are racist? I really don't get what source of racism you are referring to.

Or is it that you want something more simplistic with less variation? For instance, there being only one type of Dwarf with no species variations? Is that right? Because it also sounds like you also want Culture to absorb mechanical physical and magical variations. So, a human that takes the "sea elf" or "aquatic" Culture gets waterbreathing that is dispellable? That's never been what Culture means. I also don't want a Terrain/Environment entry where every player chooses between a land humanoid, or a waterbreathing sea humanoid, or a winged sky humanoid.

The D&D fantasy game has all kinds of creatures that are biological variants of each other. You see it in the Monster Manual, and you see it in the Players Handbook. For example, the existence of Dragonborn, and there being multiple variations for every base dragon-type, and different ways to portray even the same dragon-type, does not make dragonborn racist.

If the natural language used to describe something doesn't quite match the rules as written, it is usually the problem of the natural language being used, and it may need an editing pass. If the printed game rules are causing narrative conflicts compared to your preferred house rules, and is the reason why you want to make changes to the game, why do you think the problem is with the rules as written? Because I'm not seeing suggestions to make things better. I'm only seeing suggestions to make the rules as written fit your house rules better. It's fine to want that, but I won't be accepting non-factual facts as good enough reasons to win me over to support it.
 

In the playtest, the High lineage doesnt grant any special proficiency with longbows. There are no elven weapon proficiencies since these are overtly cultural.

But the High Forest culture can grant a longbow proficiency (whether as part of a familys warriors or as a deer hunter or both).
Yes, if we go back to the playtest and or BG3 or 5e as implemented.

That is because Wizards was told by segments of the internet that they needed to drop culture considerations.

Which they did, until the Giff! :D
 

Yaarel, you seem to be inventing definitions that weren't previously there for 5E. Or you are borrowing from older editions and are assuming they can be used as truth for 5e. You seem to be using those invented definitions as justification to change rules. I'm not following the justification.

First of all, just as a reminder, in 5E, "Antimagic" doesn't exist outside the Antimagic Field spell, which is very specifically defined. It does not say anything like you are asserting. If the species itself was affected by the spell, it would say so. Every race in the game was created by higher powers, and it doesn't make them inherently affected by Antimagic Field. (hundreds of millions of years of natural evolution isn't a thing in D&D worlds.) I brought that up because you are asserting that because lineage provides spells, the lineage itself would probably be vulnerable to Antimagic Field. So elves, gnomes, tieflings, and any species that can cast a spell because of their species (or any race that was divinely/magically/supernaturally created, which is all of them) is affected by Antimagic Field? What does that even look like? Do they just disappear like summoned creatures? Because that makes no sense. We already know that spells can't be cast. That's not what is being discussed here.

You say your suggestions are to get rid of racism. Are you thinking that the very existence of variant species itself is a source of racism? If there are high elves, wood elves, sea elves, and drow, and they can breed with one another because they are all elves, are the rules are racist? Is being different from each other enough reason to assume they are racist against each other? Do you think the words "subrace/subspecies" or "lineage" are racist? I really don't get what source of racism you are referring to.

Or is it that you want something more simplistic with less variation? For instance, there being only one type of Dwarf with no species variations? Is that right? Because it also sounds like you also want Culture to absorb mechanical physical and magical variations. So, a human that takes the "sea elf" or "aquatic" Culture gets waterbreathing that is dispellable? That's never been what Culture means. I also don't want a Terrain/Environment entry where every player chooses between a land humanoid, or a waterbreathing sea humanoid, or a winged sky humanoid.

The D&D fantasy game has all kinds of creatures that are biological variants of each other. You see it in the Monster Manual, and you see it in the Players Handbook. For example, the existence of Dragonborn, and there being multiple variations for every base dragon-type, and different ways to portray even the same dragon-type, does not make dragonborn racist.

If the natural language used to describe something doesn't quite match the rules as written, it is usually the problem of the natural language being used, and it may need an editing pass. If the printed game rules are causing narrative conflicts compared to your preferred house rules, and is the reason why you want to make changes to the game, why do you think the problem is with the rules as written? Because I'm not seeing suggestions to make things better. I'm only seeing suggestions to make the rules as written fit your house rules better. It's fine to want that, but I won't be accepting non-factual facts as good enough reasons to win me over to support it.
Antimagic exists as a spell, but it also exists sporadically as "zones". Any species with innate spell casting can have its features negated by antimagic, zone or spell, including psionic features.

The existence of a "subrace" in the Human species or in a species that is too humanlike, is inherently racist.

I realize that prehistoric hominid species existed. But reallife racists misused the concept to "other" ethnic groups and to dehumanize them, by pseudoscientifically referring to them as if separate "biological branches" of the human species. D&D is rife with this kind of racism. 2024 must eliminate every trace of it, including the overtly and highly racist D&D Elf traditions. I can hardly read a paragraph about elves from earlier editions or fan sites without groaning because of its racist extremism. Even the fantasy racism which is problematic anyway tends to be made worse by incorporating reallife racist tropes into the setting narratives about "subraces".
 

I mean... as Homo neanderthalensis was a completely different species to Homo sapiens, adding a playable neanderthal species would be like a playable elf, dwarf, or orc.

Rather than just being a human subspecies.

Apparently my attempt to deflect the irl taxonomy failed. :)

If they were still alive and interbreeding with us naturally across their range would Neanderthals be considered a separate species from us today? Separate sub-species? (In Ornithology with overlapping ranges does it depend on how robust the hybrids are? How do they speculate that would have been? How does it work if they're more robust than the one but not the other? Thinking of the two main kinds of chickadees).

If we had an AI trained on how speciation was determined by mammalogists up through the year 2000 (except for homo sapiens) and sent one back to 5,000BC (?) would it say we had a bunch of subspecies of Homo sapiens back then? Would that answer be an emphatic no by the same algorithm today? If we did the same but the rules by ornithologists would.we have a bunch of species back then (thinking of the lorikeets across various islands) and emphatically not today?

I have no idea. But it feels like between the fields the taxonomic levels aren't all that consistently used and a lot of species and sub-species are kind of ad-hoc and messy (reflecting the difficulty of categorizing things that are or were more continuous). Note: No formal phylogenetics training, have skimmed some papers on the avian kind. Do know about the statistical sides of clustering and other multivariate methods.
 
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It's real simple. These ones breath water. These ones run faster. These ones see better.

That's it.

Nothing racist about it.
 


Aren't they spitting out:
  • A bunch of books with small adventures that can be spliced into lots of places (like Yawning Portal)
  • A bunch of "setting books" that don't have a lot of depth but give them an excuse to provide races, subclasses, and spells that people on Beyond can plug into their own campaigns if they fit (like the MtG ones)
The yawning portal and the ghosts of saltmarsh had bits plugged right into my world. Just the way I like it…
 

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