D&D General 5E species with further choices and differences

[Remathilis]

Everyone seems to think it's this  brilliant idea to separate "race" from "background" and "culture"-- but then, nobody wonders why all of these supposedly nonhuman peoples all have the exact same backgrounds, expressed the exact same way, as humans.

That's why it makes them less unique.

What would work is to clearly define it as a macro to micro level.

I am a dwarf (species). I grew up in Waterdeep (culture). I am a blacksmith (background). The first defines my biological abilities (size, speed, senses), the second defines the world I grew up in (religion, language, proficiencies) and the third my background or profession.

Swapping any changes important elements. Swap dwarf to elf and my bio traits change. Change blacksmith to sage and my skills and feat changes. Swap Waterdeep to Shield Dwarf (Mythral Hall) and your language options change (from a cosmopolitan blend to the languages of mountain dwellers), religions change (from Gods of commerce to dwarf gods) you get some different tools or skills or maybe the ability to cast a cantrip. You can do that for multiple regions, like Baldur's Gate, Icewind Dale, Cormyr, etc.

So a dwarf from Waterdeep is different from a dwarf from Mythral Hall. A human and a dwarf who both live in Baldur's Gate have similar cultural traits but not biological. But you have to tie the cultures to specific places: you can't have a generic "city dweller" that applies to all cities because Waterdeep, Baldur's Gate and Neverwinter don't have the same culture.

Which means you'd have to have a default setting in the PHB OR You'd have to have a fourth book to add them OR the characters using just the PHB would be incomplete.

 

[DammitVictor]

And more unique as individuals.

Are they, though? Hard to stand out from the crowd when there's no crowd to stand out from.

One snowflake is a unique and precious individual; a billion snowflakes is just a whiteout with no depth or detail or individuality whatsoever. You can get buried in them and still never tell them apart.

Not like all the other dwarves means you're not actually playing a dwarf; your character has to be just like all the other dwarves in at least some ways in order for all the ways they're not to matter.

And it would be fine, except that the Venn diagram of people complaining about this and the people making it worse is a perfect circle.

 

[Corinnguard]

Not like all the other dwarves means you're not actually playing a dwarf; your character has to be just like all the other dwarves in at least some ways in order for all the ways they're not to matter.

In terms of heritage, a Dwarf born to Dwarf parents is going to have the same innate traits (size, age, speed, Darkvision) as any other Dwarf. But where they will differ is if they are from a Mountain Dwarf, Hill Dwarf or Deep Dwarf culture because each Dwarven culture has a different set of norms and beliefs to go by. A Dwarf can also be differently culturally if they were raised in another heritage's culture. A Dwarf growing up in a Human culture isn't going to have the same traits as a Dwarf who grew up in a Dwarven culture. They're going to have the learned traits of a human. Will this Dwarf still see themselves a Dwarf even if they weren't culturally raised as a Dwarf? Some people are going to say yes, and some are going to say no.

A bit RL, don't you think?

 

[Remathilis]

Are they, though? Hard to stand out from the crowd when there's no crowd to stand out from.

One snowflake is a unique and precious individual; a billion snowflakes is just a whiteout with no depth or detail or individuality whatsoever. You can get buried in them and still never tell them apart.

Not like all the other dwarves means you're not actually playing a dwarf; your character has to be just like all the other dwarves in at least some ways in order for all the ways they're not to matter.

And it would be fine, except that the Venn diagram of people complaining about this and the people making it worse is a perfect circle.

Maybe we can go further and make all dwarf PCs the same class. Like a dwarf class you have to take. Same with an elf and halfling class. That works for you?

 

[Remathilis]

In terms of heritage, a Dwarf born to Dwarf parents is going to have the same innate traits (size, age, speed, Darkvision) as any other Dwarf. But where they will differ is if they are from a Mountain Dwarf, Hill Dwarf or Deep Dwarf culture because each Dwarven culture has a different set of norms and beliefs to go by. A Dwarf can also be differently culturally if they were raised in another heritage's culture. A Dwarf growing up in a Human culture isn't going to have the same traits as a Dwarf who grew up in a Dwarven culture. They're going to have the learned traits of a human. Will this Dwarf still see themselves a Dwarf even if they weren't culturally raised as a Dwarf? Some people are going to say yes, and some are going to say no.

A bit RL, don't you think?

Close. We're still using "dwarf" as a culture though. There is no "dwarf" culture. There is Mythral Hall or the Great Rift of other lands with high dwarf populations that have cultures that people might regard as "dwarven" but other species who grew up in Mythral Hall would have those same cultural traits. A Goliath might be an excellent Smith or a human a cleric of Moradin, but that's because that's the culture of Mythral Hall, not "of the dwarves"

 

[DammitVictor]

What would work is to clearly define it as a macro to micro level.

No, that is exactly what doesn't work. It is this exact fungibility, that everyone is striving for, that separates all of the "lego bricks" of your character from each other and the shape they're supposed to be representing.

You are a reducing a "dwarven Waterdhavian blacksmith" into 1) a dwarf, 2) from Waterdeep, 3) who works iron.

Meaning his dwarven-ness has no bearing on his upbringing in Waterdeep and the way he works iron, his upbringing in Waterdeep doesn't inform his identity as a dwarf or his career as blacksmith, and his blacksmithing doesn't relate to being a dwarf or being from Waterdeep.

This is what makes all of those decision points meaningless.

You've reduced "being a dwarf" to nothing but "size, speed, and senses" by removing everything else from it. There are no dwarven traditions, no dwarven identities, literally nothing but what you have (narrowly and dogmatically) defined as "biological"-- I'll bet you're explicitly and deliberately excluding the  possibility of psychological or magical differences-- and any concept that growing up as a dwarf in Waterdeep is different than being an elf or a halfling in Waterdeep or that there's any difference in blacksmithing between dwarves and elves and/or between Waterdhavians and Dalish.

There are no physiological or  spiritual reasons why dwarves favor axes and hammers, and heavy armor? There are no cosmological reasons why dwarves worship dwarven gods, even when living among humans? There's no sociological or cultural pressure to retain their ancestral language, even if only for liturgical purposes?

You think you're adding detail, but you're effectively erasing it-- by dividing this axis of identity into multiple different, unrelated choices, you're trivializing all of them. You are, ironically and paradoxically, making them even less diverse than the human complexity you're trying to emulate.

And then-- generally speaking, not you in particular-- complaining that they're trivial.

You're right that it's weak tea, so stop pouring water into it.

Which means you'd have to have a default setting in the PHB OR You'd have to have a fourth book to add them OR the characters using just the PHB would be incomplete.

Orrrrrr... ?

You can leave the rules-- the  definitions-- simple and broad and note that while sometimes unique individuals bend/break the rules, that's only a meaningful decision when the rules are actually considered valid. Your special, wonderful player characters can defy some of the rules, some of the time, as long as you're aware that you can't just ignore them. Even the rules you don't follow are part of who your character is.

Your note about "default settings"? I couldn't agree with you more. D&D has always had a setting implied by its rules-- whether it was explicit or not-- and I wish the game would do a much better job of pointing them out, and allowing those implied setting details to vary between published (and homebrew!) settings.

 

[DammitVictor]

But where they will differ is if they are from a Mountain Dwarf, Hill Dwarf or Deep Dwarf culture because each Dwarven culture has a different set of norms and beliefs to go by.

Fair enough! It's fuzzy because subraces blur the line between learned and innate traits-- mechanically and narratively-- but if the game had separate cultures/backgrounds for nonhuman PCs (including the 'raised by aliens' that everyone keeps bringing up) that would be fantastic. The PHBRs in AD&D even had something like that with the 'sundered dwarf' subrace.

But nobody's doing that. The difference between a Hill Dwarf and Mountain Dwarf in 5e is whether your character needs Medium Armor Proficiency or already has it (or Unarmored Defense) and needs more HP instead.

I think most of us would agree that's neither cultural nor biological-- a purely mechanical abstraction-- and I'm not willing to speculate about how many people would agree that's a tremendous missed opportunity.

I'm not familiar enough with A5E to say they handled this specific issue better-- but it certainly handles this kind of issue better with other heritages.

They're going to have the learned traits of a human.

I could agree with this, but the lines between "learned", "acquired", and "innate" traits are blurrier in real-life humans than you're accounting for, much less beings that are (by definition)  nonhuman in a world with universally acknowledged non-biological non-material developmental pressures.

There's a kind of diversity in accepting (promoting!) that things don't always fit into their tidy little boxes. But there is also a vital, necessary kind of diversity in acknowledging and celebrating that different things are different, not merely statistical distributions across all-inclusive natural spectrums of variation.

The human species in itself is not as uniform as you are trying to impose upon near-human (and not-so-near human) fantasy races.

A bit RL, don't you think?

I do not want to speak to real-life issues of cultural identity and nature/nurture that I don't have the expertise or experience to speak on. I'm a different kind of minority and a different kind of statisical outlier.

I will say that real-life humans that wrestle with these issues are a small (but valid!) minority of the  billions of humans that define the norms they fall between. In a dwarf-centric campaign, your dwarf might be one of the dozen or so dwarves that exist in the entire universe; even I would concede that there's a more compelling place for an outlier dwarf in such a campaign than in most games, where your dwarf is the only dwarf and the dwarven norms they're defying are a dead unicorn.

Maybe we can go further and make all dwarf PCs the same class. Like a dwarf class you have to take. Same with an elf and halfling class. That works for you?

You jest, but the answer to your question is 'yes'. It's too limiting and far from the ideal solution, but race-as-class is one of the myriad ways that Moldvay/Cook and Mentzer and Allston were better than Advanced D&D and every edition (except Fourth!) has made it worse since.

Fourth Edition did an  amazing job making the different player races substantially different, narratively and mechanically. The only other times these rules have been used to good effect have been in D&D offshoots-- notably PF1 and A5E and certain OSR games.

Racial archetypes, paragon classes, and scaling racial options are all part of what I'd like to see. Class restrictions were a decent idea, poorly implemented, but every fantasy ancestry should have a different slice of the game's myriad character options available to them.

I'm not particular about which slices should be available to which ancestries-- the important thing is that different things are different, and are allowed to maintain their own (different) reasons for being so.

There is Mythral Hall or the Great Rift of other lands with high dwarf populations that have cultures that people might regard as "dwarven" but other species who grew up in Mythral Hall would have those same cultural traits.

This is a very postmodern and materialist take on culture-- and 'nature'-- that I don't think fits well in a fantasy setting. And, again, imposes more psychological/spiritual uniformity across magical 'fantasy races' than exists within the supposedly materialist and determinist traits of our singular human species.

The one defining trait of all nonhuman fantasy ancestries is that they're not human. Forcing them into human homes and human schools shouldn't give them human personalities any more than it gives them long legs and poor night vision.