Level Up (A5E) Changes to race (species?)

Ruin Explorer said:

I think all this discussion is extremely premature, because WotC is working on material which does this.

My understanding is that Level Up wants to remain substantially compatible with 5E, yes? That all WotC material should essentially remain usable. Given WotC are working in exactly this design space, I think it's an outright bad idea to even start working on stuff here, until what WotC is doing becomes clear.

There is not much worse, for my money, when you get a third-party product which covers the same ground as an official one, but does it differently, and often both have hard-incompatible or significantly incompatible approaches (which is extremely likely to be the case here), so you have to pick one, and they probably both have serious weaknesses or things you wish the other had. Whereas if you just wait for the official material, you can work from there, and do a better job - support whatever areas it is weak on, expand areas where more material would be good, and so on.

Chucking around ideas is fine, but locking yourself into them or getting a really fixed idea of what Level Up "should" do in this space at this point seems like a very bad plan.

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Eh. There’s never a good time. If you wait, it’ll be bad timing for another reason. The best time is the time you actually just do it.

clearstream said:

Does this mean literally no ability score adjustments, or is it intended to imply those adjustments shift into point buy? If so, how? And what happens if one is rolling? Or using some other system that might be introduced in Level Up?

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I think forcing point buy is a mistake, I know many people around here like it, bit rolling stats is a great joy for many players, and it's the official default for the 5e we have. I know it's just an anecdote, but none of my players will even touch point buy, and the array is even worse.

Crimson Longinus said:

Tying mechanical benefits to a culture is frankly a terrible idea. Once you try to do that with human cultures or with non-human cultures that resemble real world cultures it gets super unfortunate really fast.

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That's why you go the WotC route and don't do it with human cultures. Let people make up those at their home games, and give them the tools to do it.

Micah Sweet said:

That's why you go the WotC route and don't do it with human cultures. Let people make up those at their home games, and give them the tools to do it.

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So it will only be racist in their home games? I guess that is better than that it being in the published stuff but it still seems far from ideal to me...

I'd like three things to influence my character before I even get to class:

Ancestry (or race or something).....an elf should be different than a human, somehow.
Background.....what I did before I was a fighter or a whatever should give me some skills or whatnot
Culture/nationality.....where I'm from should matter (languages, skills, etc).

So, an elven blacksmith from Breland should be different than a human farmer from Kaarnath.

Crimson Longinus said:

So it will only be racist in their home games? I guess that is better than that it being in the published stuff but it still seems far from ideal to me...

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I think you're overstating the subject. By that metric, describing a culture at all is potentially racist. But, this ground has been trod.

Micah Sweet said:

I think you're overstating the subject. By that metric, describing a culture at all is potentially racist. But, this ground has been trod.

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No. If you start to assign stat bonuses to cultures then that is really problematic. It is utterly terrible idea.

Crimson Longinus said:

No. If you start to assign stat bonuses to cultures then that is really problematic. It is utterly terrible idea.

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We do this with nonhuman cultures already. In fact, virtually every RPG with races does this. Is that an utterly terrible idea? For human cultures, I agree it has more potential for offense, which is why I suggest you let people do that in their own games.

Micah Sweet said:

We do this with nonhuman cultures already. In fact, virtually every RPG with races does this. Is that an utterly terrible idea? For human cultures, I agree it has more potential for offense, which is why I suggest you let people do that in their own games.

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I mean subraces are really questionable concept. They are basically just cultures for non-humans with mechanical bonuses tied to them. But different species having different abilities is definitely far less problematic than different cultures having them.

You can make a game crunchier while making it less complex. You don't need a full list of "species, culture, background, class".

First, culture is problematic because, if I'm not mistaken, this product isn't intended to be associated with any given setting. It could barely even theoretically wink wink nudge that it follows the same FR default as 5e, given the licensing. I would avoid it altogether, personally.

Second, background can be folded into class. Low-level class options can give a range of abilities and skills across the three pillars that help flesh out who the character is, who they were before, and where they came from. Having a few choices that class agnostic (or mostly class agnostic) can contribute to the idea that any character could theoretically come from any background, but you also don't need to make options available like a barbarian librarian (as fun as it is to say out loud).

Species (PF already took Ancestry, which is probably the best term to use here; something like Lineage, Heritage, and Origin might also work) are where you can place the physical attributes of the given race. We can quibble over realism but this can and should include the "mental" ability scores as well; I think it's okay to say that gnomes have superior long-term memory (+Int) or that Dragonborn and Tieflings have inherited their draconic/infernal ancestors' inherent force of personality (+Cha).

On the other hand, I would avoid racial abilities that more clearly cultural in nature; weapon & armor proficiencies and most (but not all) skill bonuses being the biggest offenders. You can afford to have wiggle-room about this; something like a dwarf's Stonecunning could certainly be an inherent dwarfish instinct, even in a city dwarf raised miles away from the nearest mountains. But don't be coy about it. If it's an ability tied one's Ancestry, then it is an inherent and immutable of being a <race>.