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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jkason" data-source="post: 5953095" data-attributes="member: 2710">Hopefully I'm not spamming the thread too much. I guess this is the first big 'judge-y' thing we've had since I came on board, and since I've not been super-productive in other areas, I wanted to be proactive in this. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />So, as part of considering races, I thought I'd try to do some broad categorizing of those in the book. I didn't edit out already-included or -excluded races, since I thought having them might actually be useful for comparison (see my final thoughts below). While there are various theories on the value of races as 'variations on a theme,' it seemed at least mildly useful to try to identify the major themes in playable races. There seem to be three, at least as I see them. Others' categorization may vary:Half-X / X-blooded. Mind you, there's a lot of variety in what's being mixed with humans, but the trend in "race derived from humans hooking up with another race" is kind of undeniable:  Aasimar (Celestial), Dhampir (vampire), Ifrits (fire elemental), Oreads (earth elemental), Sylphs (air elemental), Tieflings (fiend), Undines (water elemental), Changelings (Hag), Sulis (genie), Dark X. For a value of dark, I suppose. There's a bit of a mix of 'evil,' 'underground,' and 'shadow plane,' but all of them seem to be versions of a core race that for whatever reason shun the light:Drow (Elf), Fetchling (Human), Duergar (Dwarf), Svirfneblin (gnomes)Animal-folk. Some have more creative names than others, but there's as much a trend toward "humanoid animal" races as any of the others: Catfolk, Ratfolk, Tengus (crowfolk), Gripplis (frogfolk), Kitsune (foxfolk), Nagaji (nagafolk), Vanaras (monkeyfolk)Standard Monster Races. It's probably natural that the other monstrous humanoids would wind up thrown into the mix. Fantasy fiction is rife with 'creature trying to prove his race isn't innately evil' bits:Goblins, Hobgoblins, Kobolds, Orcs, MerfolkAnd the rest.... I found a handful of races that probably evoke fantasy archetypes of various stripes, but didn't fit into any kind of trend. As I think I mentioned earlier, this may be a strike for OR against inclusion, but from my perspective, these are the "don't fit a trend" races from the book:Gillmen, Samsarans, Strix, Vishkanyas, Wayangs**************************I didn't include the random examples in the race builder section. There's some interesting stuff in there, but the 'races' seem more like either examples of how the system works or odd experiments; neither is developed enough that I think we should spend a lot of time considering it.Like I said, hopefully this doesn't just seem spammy. I just thought it might help in future discussions. Specifically, if we decide we want to include a specific representative from a certain category, it might be helpful to compare it to others in the same category: is the race 'better' than others in an attributable way? Why this race and not another being excluded? ... that sort of thing.</blockquote>

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