clearstream
(He, Him)
There has been a lot of discussion on this lately. I assayed rules for my homebrew campaign and doing so seemed to bring a few things to light. Those rules are here Archipelago Character Generation - The Homebrewery. I left in notes in square brackets that affected my design thinking.
Class-based ASIs
I noticed that +2/+1 floating fails my goals on a few counts. First, I disliked it for MAD characters who sometimes wanted +1/+1/+1. Second, for me, it felt better to say that a halfling fighter might have more strength than a goliath wizard, than that halflings generically might: it just seems to make sense to me that practice results in a stat bump; something that also happens throughout a character's career. The letters in square brackets roughly rank classes according to how strong they seem in my campaigns (also influenced by internet research). I gave monk and ranger half an ASI more than the other classes because of the combination of low rank and MAD class features: it felt good to be able to do that.
Non-ASI Races
What I found even more interesting, is that without the crutch of ASIs to lean on I felt forced to be more rigorous with race trait design. It opened up races to being considered for every class, and once that happened I had to revisit racial traits to matter more to every class, and yet still speak to a specific feeling in play. In square brackets is one word describing the essence of each race in my campaign - sea orcs should feel hardy, copper elves should feel versatile, islanders (half-orc, half-elf) should feel blessed.
You can see that copper elves were based on wood elves, yet obviously something like Mask of the Wild was just too narrow to meet my design goals. Fantastic for stealthy classes, but useless for anyone who doesn't lean heavily into stealth. I adjusted each trait until it felt like I could build characters around them in a swathe of classes. I was not trying to make each race great for every single class, but certainly for a good number of classes. And I wanted choice of race to influence in a small way how I was going to play the class.
Undoing Negative Tropes
I found littered all through race descriptions - including fluff for traits - loaded language. An orc would never be allowed an adroit or skillful attack - orcs must be savage! Elves were always better than thou: refined, graceful, lithe limbs and long lives. I unwound all of that, but not with a goal of making them all the same or even getting rid of sinister, evil beings. Rather it felt very much to me that some races stand in for real human stereotypes. Fantasy narratives are heavily loaded with symbolism, and these races symbolised negative stereotypes. Worse than that - going beyond specific negative stereotypes they also symbolised a framework for racism, i.e. that some races just are better than others. That may be unproblematic where species differentiation is crystal clear - a mouse is not as strong or intelligent as a human - but where a race can be read as (symbolically) a real-world human stereotype, then it feels very problematic. Orcs, elves, yuan-ti, dwarves... we can find many examples of problematic loading on these races. I attempted to recast every aspect of each race in a positive light, without making them all the same. Not better, not worse: diverse.
There are some grey areas. Aarakocra seem to me alien - six limbs, flight - so they don't seem to me to fall into the same analytical space as say orcs. To my mind the most problematic races stand out as those that humans can interbreed with or become.
Doing the Design
It felt much harder to design good races without ASIs, but far more satisfying to do so. And I really loved the ability to pair any race with any class: that feels very liberating. I have done some mild playtesting with a friend (a game designer, also) and we both noticed this. I used detect balance to balance the three races fairly closely. Tweaks are still needed.
Doing this work left me with a lot of questions. Are racial traits for human-like races ever going to be a good idea? Or do they trap us into a belief framework for racism? I don't know the answer to that.
Class-based ASIs
I noticed that +2/+1 floating fails my goals on a few counts. First, I disliked it for MAD characters who sometimes wanted +1/+1/+1. Second, for me, it felt better to say that a halfling fighter might have more strength than a goliath wizard, than that halflings generically might: it just seems to make sense to me that practice results in a stat bump; something that also happens throughout a character's career. The letters in square brackets roughly rank classes according to how strong they seem in my campaigns (also influenced by internet research). I gave monk and ranger half an ASI more than the other classes because of the combination of low rank and MAD class features: it felt good to be able to do that.
Non-ASI Races
What I found even more interesting, is that without the crutch of ASIs to lean on I felt forced to be more rigorous with race trait design. It opened up races to being considered for every class, and once that happened I had to revisit racial traits to matter more to every class, and yet still speak to a specific feeling in play. In square brackets is one word describing the essence of each race in my campaign - sea orcs should feel hardy, copper elves should feel versatile, islanders (half-orc, half-elf) should feel blessed.
You can see that copper elves were based on wood elves, yet obviously something like Mask of the Wild was just too narrow to meet my design goals. Fantastic for stealthy classes, but useless for anyone who doesn't lean heavily into stealth. I adjusted each trait until it felt like I could build characters around them in a swathe of classes. I was not trying to make each race great for every single class, but certainly for a good number of classes. And I wanted choice of race to influence in a small way how I was going to play the class.
Undoing Negative Tropes
I found littered all through race descriptions - including fluff for traits - loaded language. An orc would never be allowed an adroit or skillful attack - orcs must be savage! Elves were always better than thou: refined, graceful, lithe limbs and long lives. I unwound all of that, but not with a goal of making them all the same or even getting rid of sinister, evil beings. Rather it felt very much to me that some races stand in for real human stereotypes. Fantasy narratives are heavily loaded with symbolism, and these races symbolised negative stereotypes. Worse than that - going beyond specific negative stereotypes they also symbolised a framework for racism, i.e. that some races just are better than others. That may be unproblematic where species differentiation is crystal clear - a mouse is not as strong or intelligent as a human - but where a race can be read as (symbolically) a real-world human stereotype, then it feels very problematic. Orcs, elves, yuan-ti, dwarves... we can find many examples of problematic loading on these races. I attempted to recast every aspect of each race in a positive light, without making them all the same. Not better, not worse: diverse.
There are some grey areas. Aarakocra seem to me alien - six limbs, flight - so they don't seem to me to fall into the same analytical space as say orcs. To my mind the most problematic races stand out as those that humans can interbreed with or become.
Doing the Design
It felt much harder to design good races without ASIs, but far more satisfying to do so. And I really loved the ability to pair any race with any class: that feels very liberating. I have done some mild playtesting with a friend (a game designer, also) and we both noticed this. I used detect balance to balance the three races fairly closely. Tweaks are still needed.
Doing this work left me with a lot of questions. Are racial traits for human-like races ever going to be a good idea? Or do they trap us into a belief framework for racism? I don't know the answer to that.
