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

[CreamCloud0]

'Biological essentialism' is a fallacy of attributing behavioral differences between human ethnic groups-- usually closely juxtaposed and genetically intermixed-- to biological causes. It's a last ditch effort to cling onto a vestigial form of racist pseudoscience.

I hate to keep banging this drum, but it's completely irrelevant and completely missing the point to invoke it when talking about different species of intelligent people that were created by different creator deities in a world with objective, tangible spiritual forces.

I cannot fathom the pervasive misapprehension by which you think it's a legitimate objection to fictional peoples who have, both self-evidently and tautologically, a biologically and spiritually independent and separate essence from humanity.

They are different from humans because they are literally not human; how can you possibly argue that this is some kind of design flaw when it is literally the core premise of the design?

And if nonhuman ancestries are not permitted to be  essentially different from humans-- only culturally different with rubber foreheads-- why even have them at all? What is the point of having such a variety, a diversity, of defined humanoid species if any definition must be rejected as creatively limiting and morally suspect?

I do not understand what your objective is; I don't think you really do, either.

What do you want a 'dwarf', or any other nonhuman person, to be in your games? What is your purpose in having nonhuman peoples at all, if they're just normal human cultural variations with darkvision?

yes other species are biologically different from human, a dwarf is far more hardy than a human, can see in the dark, resists poisons and is sensitive to the tremmors in the earth, but a predisposition to quaffing ale, wielding hammers and desiring gold are not biological traits, nor are particularly interesting traits in and of themselves.

 

[DammitVictor]

... but a predisposition to quaffing ale, wielding hammers and desiring gold are not biological traits,

They're not? Why do you think they're not?

I'll admit that proficiency with given weapons should be a matter of training in most cases-- in most cases-- but taste and tolerance for ale or other spirits is certainly biochemical and neurological. (Do you think it might have something to do with poison resistance?) Greed for gold might be purely cultural, but territorialism and industriousness and risk/change aversion all have known neurological factors with known biological causes in numerous real species, including humans.

In addition to a misplaced fixation on physical biology in a world defined and driven by magic, you're also denying the role biology itself plays in human and nonhuman cognition in the real world... all to justify taking the problem you're trying to fix and keep making it worse.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

i think you could probably do pretty well in covering the broad strokes of things with a decent group of archtypical culture entries and then make like 2~4 specific species-culture entries for each species that highlight the things unique to them and their ways,

Oh, most certainly.

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.

It is an improvement over the idea that because you're an elf, you 100% always have one specific culture and never anything else.

Yes, this makes culture less unique. That is completely intentional, and as long as it is done knowingly and judiciously, it won't ruin anything. It will instead enhance, because now you can have an elf who grew up in Darrowdelve and thus is a hard-working hard-drinking swearing sweaty miner, and a dwarf who grew up in one of the surviving cities of lost Cendriane and thus has an ultra refined palate (meaning: super picky and doesn't like spicy food), an eye for quality goods, and a lot of poetry and song. And you can even have a person whose mother and father come from two different culture strongly associated with different particular species, e.g. a dwarf father from Darrowdelve culture and an elf mother from Cendriane Exile culture.

This recognizes the complexity and texture of the cultural space. It, of course, requires more care and subtlety than "you're an elf, you speak elf speak, you eat elf food, you always have more in common with other elves than anyone who isn't an elf, you can't be an elf and not have elf culture, and understanding the ways of non-elves is beyond you"--which is what comes from the idea that race/species IS culture.

IRL societies are not ethnostates, and trying to manufacture an ethnostate always requires dictatorial, oppressive policies. Some dragonborn will be raised by orcs, and learn those orcs' ways. Some elves will emigrate to, and assimilate into, a human-dominant society. Having mechanics that can reflect this is more interesting than mechanics which deny that such a possibility could ever occur.

And if you don't want to bother with all that? Then just roll with the default. Every high elf is a Cendriane Exile. Every Dragonborn is a Scion of Arhosia. Every Tiefling is Turathi. Every human is Nerathi. Etc. It costs you precisely nothing in terms of keeping things simple, unless you consider having to speak the sentence "Please stick to default/expected culture" as being a cost, which I do not. But having this space open presents a world of possibilities and embraces the much more realistic situation, and I'm actually using that word intentionally because this is how reality works, where a person's phenotype is not particularly indicative of their culture and vice versa.

 

[Remathilis]

'Biological essentialism' is a fallacy of attributing behavioral differences between human ethnic groups-- usually closely juxtaposed and genetically intermixed-- to biological causes. It's a last ditch effort to cling onto a vestigial form of racist pseudoscience.

Well yes, biology shouldn't have any affect on what kind of person you are. Your intelligence, aptitudes, interests, gender role, or culture is not a factor of biology. The same is, in theory, true of other sapient beings.

I hate to keep banging this drum, but it's completely irrelevant and completely missing the point to invoke it when talking about different species of intelligent people that were created by different creator deities in a world with objective, tangible spiritual forces.

So? There is nothing in the lore of that says that they have any differences in intellectual capacity or development. Its not like dwarves cannot understand the concept or love or elves reproduce by budding. Most of your Tolkien-based races are basically humans already, and I don't see too much going on with dragonborn or tieflings to make them utterly alien.

I cannot fathom the pervasive misapprehension by which you think it's a legitimate objection to fictional peoples who have, both self-evidently and tautologically, a biologically and spiritually independent and separate essence from humanity.

We have no idea what another species of sentient life would be like. We infer everything based on how a human would work with some twist. If we ever meet aliens from another world, we can determine what a truly alien mindset is. Until then, they are ALL humans in funny hats.

They are different from humans because they are literally not human; how can you possibly argue that this is some kind of design flaw when it is literally the core premise of the design?

We cannot know if a mushroom feels pain, a tree understands love, or if the dog actually understand what death is. We can only know the limits of consciousness based on the framework of human capability. The notion of a sentient species that is unrelated to primate evolution can only be inferred by what we know of human capability. We cannot know what a dwarf would actually be like, so we give them a bunch of stereotypical traits a human could have and call that their species traits.

There is nothing inherently dwarven about a dwarf: I can play a human who works mines, swings an axe, is grumpy and loves gold and ale and is played 100% like I would play a dwarf but has the stats of a human. And guess what? That human is 100% within the parameters of a real human.

And if nonhuman ancestries are not permitted to be  essentially different from humans-- only culturally different with rubber foreheads-- why even have them at all? What is the point of having such a variety, a diversity, of defined humanoid species if any definition must be rejected as creatively limiting and morally suspect?

Because people like wearing funny hats. D&D wouldn't create 500 different unique species and subspecies if there wasn't enjoyment from it. And 99% of them are played like humans in funny hats. As are every sci-fi and fantasy race you've ever seen, read, or played. Its all cosplay because we cannot understand anything other than human consciousness.

I do not understand what your objective is; I don't think you really do, either.

My objection is to the notion there is only One True Way to play a dwarf.

What do you want a 'dwarf', or any other nonhuman person, to be in your games? What is your purpose in having nonhuman peoples at all, if they're just normal human cultural variations with darkvision?

At this point, I'm prone to be dismissive of your question and say "I want a cool hat". But I will attempt one more good-faith discussion.

I don't want "dwarf" to mean just one thing. I want a dwarf to be able to be all about axes and Moradin if you want, but I want the option to NOT be that if I choose. A dwarf that grows up in the jungles of Chult or the heart of Waterdeep isn't the same as one who lives in the heart of Mythral Hall. I certainly don't want things like "Dwarves are usually Lawful Good" or "Dwarves are all proficient with hammers" in the PHB. And I'm fairly neutral on the idea we need a mechanically separate culture element like PF, LU or ToV use. To me, the fact that 5.24 gives me just enough species traits to be interesting without boxing me into " the fighter race" or "the cleric race" is fine enough. But I don't want to go back to monoculture dwarves any more than I want to go back to racial limitations on classes or level limits or humanoid types having typical alignments.

Anything else, agree to disagree.

 

[DammitVictor]

It is an improvement over the idea that because you're an elf, you 100% always have one specific culture and never anything else.

I'll grant you that much, I suppose. I'm not trying to argue in favor of racial monocultures, just against the idea that dividing race and culture-- like race and class-- and then assigning almost every possible variable to "culture" is good world or game design. Translating the reality of a world in which every person you meet is a member of the same species into the fantasy of a world where species is the least significant aspect of a person's identity is... a choice, and people keep presenting it as the only solution to the problems it  caused.

It will instead enhance, because now you can have an elf who grew up in Darrowdelve and thus is a hard-working hard-drinking swearing sweaty miner, and a dwarf who grew up in one of the surviving cities of lost Cendriane and thus has an ultra refined palate (meaning: super picky and doesn't like spicy food), an eye for quality goods, and a lot of poetry and song.

And you can even have a person whose mother and father come from two different culture strongly associated with different particular species, e.g. a dwarf father from Darrowdelve culture and an elf mother from Cendriane Exile culture.

Why does everyone keep holding these up as good things? It's possible to do them without explicit mechanical support... but  with explicit mechanical support, all it means is that there are no defined baselines for these corner cases to contrast with. There are no coherent cultures for your interstitial identity to be caught between... and because these 'creative souls' can't even imagine a world in which other people's (and peoples') minds think  differently than their own, all of the 'diverse' cultures and peoples they're throwing in the blender are just empty, disconnected mechanical perks.

This recognizes the complexity and texture of the cultural space. It, of course, requires more care and subtlety than ...

Seriously, honestly, do you think that the current system of divorcing heritage from culture offers any complexity and texture, displays any care or subtlety, whatsoever?

That resolving the conflict between nature and nurture by denying nature even exists is nuanced and says something meaningful about either?

IRL societies are not ethnostates, and trying to manufacture an ethnostate always requires dictatorial, oppressive policies.

In real life, other cultures and governments are composed of other human beings and are somehow still more different than you're willing to acknowledge. What you've said is true enough, but it has no bearing on this argument.

I'm not talking about social conformity being applied by cultural authorities. I was never talking about that.

I am talking about the fact,  obvious to the point of  tautological, that social behaviors that stem from the human brain will be different in people that do not have human brains, and behaviors that stem from the human soul-- in settings for which the existence of such is a given-- will be different in beings that do not have human souls.

Being raised amongst a different people might alter the expression of social behavior-- but it still won't make the dwarf or the dragonborn think  or feel or act like their human foster siblings because they're not just shaped differently on the outside.

I'm not saying these questions shouldn't be asked and the game rules shouldn't support exploring them. I'm saying that the solution that people keep trying to impose on those questions is vapid and causes far more problems than it purportedly solves.

 

[DammitVictor]

Well yes, biology shouldn't have any affect on what kind of person you are. Your intelligence, aptitudes, interests, gender role, or culture is not a factor of biology. The same is, in theory, true of other sapient beings.

I don't know how to respond to a factual assertion that is this blatantly and thoroughly untrue. All of those things are powerfully influenced by the biology of the brain, up to and including the biology of the brain providing the necessary requirements for a person to exhibit  any of these attributes.

Other non-sapient (or debatably sapient) real world organisms don't display these qualities-- or display them in ways we don't understand-- entirely because the physical structure of their brains does not support human cognitive behavior. There are biological differences within the structures of human brains that (partially) account for these differences.

So? There is nothing in the lore of that says that they have any differences in intellectual capacity or development.

That's debatable. A number of their legacy racial features from previous editions are purely cognitive-- you can argue that mining and  dungeoneering as proficiencies are learned skills, but "stone sense" is an intellectual capacity that isn't displayed even by other ancestries that live in underground constructions.

Also, they have a WIS bonus in some editions of D&D and a CHA penalty in most. (Ironically, not in the ones where Dwarf is a class.) Those are relatively significant differences in cognitive behavior and development.

(Not that I'm  praising the mechanic; merely pointing out that it's been part of the game for a long time. I don't like racial mods.)

Its not like dwarves cannot understand the concept or love or elves reproduce by budding. Most of your Tolkien-based races are basically humans already, and I don't see too much going on with dragonborn or tieflings to make them utterly alien.

Isn't that the problem, the exact problem, this thread is asking to fix? The Tolkien races were also a lot less human in Tolkien's work and the process of them being aggressively humanized started i AD&D-- when Gygax established separate race and class and then decided one of them didn't matter.

Second Edition made them more human-- 99% of races can be Clerics, Fighters, and Thieves and 90% of them  only those classes.

Third Edition made them more human, by giving them unlimited access to every "base" character class and very few racial prestige classes to choose from.

Fifth Edition made them more human  again by removing all race-exclusive mechanics, and then by removing ability score mods. (A good change, but part of the problem.)

Fourth Edition made it a little better, but then those changes got walked back. Several D&D offshoots have done some very clever things. But other than that, D&D has been making nonhuman PCs less special and different for going on fifty years.

Of course they're barely even rubber forehead aliens anymore. The D&D fandom won't countenance any mechanical or narrative restriction that might say otherwise.

We have no idea what another species of sentient life would be like. We infer everything based on how a human would work with some twist.

Respectfully? You're not even doing  that; you're basing how you think nonhuman minds must work in a fantasy game on a staggering level of denial of how human minds work.

You're not wrong about us making it up as we go along, but you're being rigidly dogmatic about how we make it up as we go along-- based on axioms that are not even true in real life.

We cannot know what a dwarf would actually be like, so we give them a bunch of stereotypical traits a human could have and call that their species traits.

But, at least, that's a  baseline; we can start at that point and say that a dwarf is at least this much different from the average human, that they're at most this much different from the most exceptional human.

I don't want them to conform perfectly to the stereotypes-- I want the stereotypes to be true enough that conformity and nonconformity are meaningful choices and people know what to expect so that it's possible for them to be surprised.

Because people like wearing funny hats.

Sure, fine. But people-- not you-- are trying to have it both ways. They want their funny hat to be unique and different, but then they want it to be able to do what everyone else's funny hat does, and then they complain that everyone else is infringing on their funny hat.

You don't (seem to) want nonhuman fantasy races to be different from human cultures and peoples. I hate that, you have no idea how much I hate that, but at least you're not clamoring for mechanics to make them shiny and new and then whining until you can apply them to your other funny hats.

My objection is to the notion there is only One True Way to play a dwarf.

Which is fair... and I guess I can see how you're getting that from what I'm saying. I'm not saying there's only One True Way, and I don't want there to be One True Way.

Like I said earlier (in this post, I think: it's been a long day) I don't want all the stereotypes to be true; I want them to be true enough that players can make meaningful decisions whether to play into or against them. And I want player races to be defined objects within the game world, not just abstractions for game objects that may or may not be related.

Narrative consistency is a load-bearing pillar of the kind of roleplaying I enjoy and I hate the fact that the developers and the new fans of the game I grew up with are actively and scornfully dismissing the very concept.

At this point, I'm prone to be dismissive of your question and say "I want a cool hat". But I will attempt one more good-faith discussion.

You'll forgive me for my first response being, "yes, once would be a good start". You  started this interaction by belittling my preferences and telling me it was a good thing nobody cared about them anymore. So... yeah. You don't get to pretend you've been taking the high road all this time.

But yeah, if you want to try taking the high road  now, I'll try to keep up.

I don't want "dwarf" to mean just one thing. I want a dwarf to be able to be all about axes and Moradin if you want, but I want the option to NOT be that if I choose.

I think we can agree here. The problem isn't that I want dwarves-- or any other race-- to be just one thing, it's that I want them to be at least one thing. Axes and Moradin, sure, but I want the Chultan jungle dwarf to have identifiable mechanical and narrative traits in common with the Mithril Hall dwarf.

And yeah, they do have to be a little less subtle than the traits almost all humans have in common, because most humans simultaneously do not recognize that they have traits in common while also being incapable or unwilling to believe that other humans don't share them.

I don't like people very much.

I certainly don't want things like "Dwarves are usually Lawful Good" or "Dwarves are all proficient with hammers" in the PHB.

This, yeah. I want most dwarves to have some identifiable personality traits in common-- but alignment is a mess of hypocrisy. Hobgoblins are Lawful Evil and "cowardly" for the exact same behaviors that make Elves "clever" and Chaotic Good.

Like, I would be very happy if dwarves and other playable ancestries came with a list of two or three things that are true-- yes, all dwarves, and you need a very good reason if yours isn't-- and a list of like eight or nine things everyone (including other dwarves) believes but only two or three of them actually have to be true.

Point of the exercise isn't to force people to play 'to type', it's to have an actual type for them to play or against. Rules have to be rules for someone to be an exception to them.

And I'm fairly neutral on the idea we need a mechanically separate culture element like PF, LU or ToV use.

I don't mind the concept. It's actually pretty great... except when it's being used the way it's being used here, to make ancestry as a vestigial of a mechanic as alignment.

I didn't start getting salty about Backgrounds until idiots started whining that it was unrealistic and insensitive for what species your parents were to modify your ability scores, so we had to make sure those bonuses came from what your parents did for a living instead. Because that makes complete sense, doesn't limit character options, and isn't offensive to people whose parents were actually criminals and peasants, the way species was offensive to people whose parents were tortles and gnomes.

But a couple of skill picks and a minor social ribbon feature to represent having a normal job before becoming a tomb raider? That's good stuff.

To me, the fact that 5.24 gives me just enough species traits to be interesting without boxing me into " the fighter race" or "the cleric race" is fine enough.

I don't mind the way they're set up in 14/24 (except the Hill/Mountain Dwarf), I just don't think "race" has carried enough weight in the official rules since AD&D, and I resent people trying to keep stripping out more and more of it.

I popped into this thread to say A5E did a really good job with racial abilities, in a way that's compatible with the 21st century paradigm, even if they did also saddle the system with this nonsense.

But I don't want to go back to monoculture dwarves any more than I want to go back to racial limitations on classes or level limits or humanoid types having typical alignments.

Well, for what it's worth, I only want  one of those things, and I think the other two are as bad as you do. And I don't want the class restrictions to be nearly as restrictive (or as uniform) as they were in AD&D. Just enough to say "these are not human people; their capabilities are different".

Anything else, agree to disagree.

You're supposed to say that before the argument; it's much more effective that way.

 

[Corinnguard]

I popped into this thread to say A5E did a really good job with racial abilities, in a way that's compatible with the 21st century paradigm, even if they did also saddle the system with this nonsense.

Which 21st century paradigm? And how is it compatible with racial abilities in A5e?

 

[DammitVictor]

Which 21st century paradigm? And how is it compatible with racial abilities in A5e?

Separate race and class, without the ability for one to limit/influence the other. All Wizards editions of D&D, Pathfinder and Starfinder, etc, many other newer fantasy games.

The A5E system allows race to have more design space and more meaningful abilities after 1st level, making race matter more as a design element without imposing old limits.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

...of which, things like Elven Accuracy are so overpowered that they become must-buys for any character that might possibly use them.

Not really. Its at the high end, but anyone taking it because they feel obliged is overvaluing it.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

To OP, I think that there are things on the dmsguild for what you want.