Creatures and Cultures: divvying it up a bit more

[Primitive Screwhead]

In preparation for a playtest tomorrow evening and explaining the a new set of players how to make characters, I realized that OLD/NOW/NEW commits racial stereotyping as is found in virtually every other game, and due to the smaller scale in stats the mechanical difference between three different Sylvan Elf berserkers is going to be limited at best. Mostly just the skill and trick choices. So what if you want to have a Sylvan Elf Berserker team? Everyone is the same?

For those who paid attention to my posts back in the later days of 3e, I posited a drastic set of house rules that broke the DnD Racial stereotyping into two parts; Blood and Culture. This enabled for half-breed mixes of all sorts and expanded the width of character options without significantly adding piles of new racial descriptions. For instance there was only one 'Elf' blood but a bunch of elvish cultures. Anyway, you can search for those posts if you want. Moving on..

So looking at OLD the small scale and preset stat changes limits the roleplaying options within each race. I mean, what if you wanted to play a naturally strong Small folk Assassin? Well, as written you would have to take the Man at Arms career to boost your STR up some, making you less of an Assassin and more of a sword-swinger.
The choice is to play a skilled Assassin with a STR of 2, or play a less skilled Assassin with a higher STR
{Hmm, just noticed that Small folk make really great Assassins...}

What if you broke the racial mechanic into half?

Body Type has the base stats starting at 2s, each type bumps up 3 stats to 3s
- Strong : STR, AGI, END
- Smart : INT, WIL and either two skills or +1 MAG
- Slick...er, Charming: CHA, LUCK and either two skills or +1 MAG
- Slinky... er, Fast: AGI, END, LUCK, can change directions during a charge

Then the racial selections add 6 points based on their key attributes and provide racial traits.
{or 5 points and a real good racial trait}

Fx, Small folk have +2 AGI, +2 INT, and +2 LUCK, and darkvision.
While not an exact match, a Charming Small-folk has results close to the current template.

This allows for the racial stereotypes to always show through, Ogres are always pretty strong but some can be brighter than others. And if also makes creating new races relatively easy as you keep to the 5 to 6 point spread.

Thoughts? I can post the listing of races as I have them set up for tommorrow if you want.

 

[Morrus]

The topic of race can always be made more and more detailed, and I think there's plenty of room for exploration of such things in the future. For the moment, I've opted for keeping things pretty simple - races are easy modular additions, and in theory folks could produce books full of hundreds of 'em. So I definitely encourage you delving into the concept! The core book will likely remain fairly basic in that regard, but as a fan creation, or even part of an (official or third party) sourcebook later on, this sort of thing is great.

 

[Korth]

i have been working on something similar to this with my group. we had some house rules that was very much the same way but you also had a list to traits that could be be bought in place of attribute points. this way you could be a half bread and pull traits from 2 or even 3 races but the race base attributes were average together for the half breads. this was something we used in the D6 style system. this way even playing a modern day game with just humans as the only race every character was very different. i have started to build the same thing for the OLD and NEW games to move this style over to it. but with attributes that are not weight the same and skills and magic that vary greatly its not easy.

 

[Atom Mlatom]

In preparation for a playtest tomorrow evening and explaining the a new set of players how to make characters, I realized that OLD/NOW/NEW commits racial stereotyping as is found in virtually every other game, and due to the smaller scale in stats the mechanical difference between three different Sylvan Elf berserkers is going to be limited at best. Mostly just the skill and trick choices. So what if you want to have a Sylvan Elf Berserker team? Everyone is the same?

(Emphasis mine.)

I think W.O.I.N. is actually more flexible than that as a system... even though I ran into similar problems with playtesting character creation, myself. But I think the problem is not the root race stats, it is just that we have a limited pool of Traditions / Careers to choose from in the playtest document. I am assuming there will be more to choose from in the final copy, and of course it is relatively easy to develop new homebrew Traditions with rules provided in the same playtest doc.

So, I kind of think the racial stereotyping that W.O.I.N. does is okay:

1. There isn't as wide a range of Attribute integers as there are in games like d20. 1-9 in W.O.I.N. is closer to 1-18 in D&D.
2. The racial stats are starting stats, i.e., what that character can be expected to get out of their heritage from birth. Not developed yet. Even a Starting Tradition adds character to these stats.
3. If cultures are really that different between members of a race, we can always make varietal race blocks, ala Grand Elves vs Sylvan Elves. I'm sure plenty of Dark Elf varieties will crop up as more players start making their own content.

Don't get me wrong, I found your proposal to be seductive and interesting. But I also think it may be an over-complicated response to a symptom, rather than addressing the root cause: we need more Traditions for players to choose from!

 

[wallace521]

(Emphasis mine.)

I think W.O.I.N. is actually more flexible than that as a system... even though I ran into similar problems with playtesting character creation, myself. But I think the problem is not the root race stats, it is just that we have a limited pool of Traditions / Careers to choose from in the playtest document. I am assuming there will be more to choose from in the final copy, and of course it is relatively easy to develop new homebrew Traditions with rules provided in the same playtest doc.

So, I kind of think the racial stereotyping that W.O.I.N. does is okay:

1. There isn't as wide a range of Attribute integers as there are in games like d20. 1-9 in W.O.I.N. is closer to 1-18 in D&D.
2. The racial stats are starting stats, i.e., what that character can be expected to get out of their heritage from birth. Not developed yet. Even a Starting Tradition adds character to these stats.
3. If cultures are really that different between members of a race, we can always make varietal race blocks, ala Grand Elves vs Sylvan Elves. I'm sure plenty of Dark Elf varieties will crop up as more players start making their own content.

Don't get me wrong, I found your proposal to be seductive and interesting. But I also think it may be an over-complicated response to a symptom, rather than addressing the root cause: we need more Traditions for players to choose from!

What he said.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

. But I also think it may be an over-complicated response to a symptom, rather than addressing the root cause: we need more Traditions for players to choose from!

Well yes and no. For a non-Orc to start as a Berserker, they have to take Barbarian III to qualify, and it makes sense to take a Starter that adds STR to swing that heavy axe around better.. which means Primitive or Farmhand.

So even when more traditions are available, your Sylvan Elf Berserker starting characters are going to be very cookie cutter, outside of skills and weapon choices.

But perhaps you are right, and in last nights game I ended up having the players use the races as written due to an unexpected level of information overload. {Three chose to play as spellcasters}. Maybe a better answer would be to turn the sub-races into starting careers, each with the added benefit of being 'full blooded' in that race, and tweak the races and starting careers to be more equal in respect to stat adds.

That way we could have the Elf raised by a Dwarven clan as [Elf] + [Mountain Dwarf], and can easily add varieties of dark elves [D.E. Warrior][D.E. Matron][D.E. Noble], etc... along with varieties of the other races.

 

[Morrus]

It depends what you mean by "a Sylvan Elf Berserker". There are many ways to build that as a character concept. There's a danger in being tied down to tradition names; they're there for convenience and to make it easier to refer to them. An assassin doesn't *have* to have taken the assassin tradition.

 

[Primitive Screwhead]

Correct, and I meant a character with a berserker rage capability, of which the only (current) method is to take the tradition.

Now if Berserker Rage was a combat trick.. that is a different story

 

[Atom Mlatom]

So even when more traditions are available, your Sylvan Elf Berserker starting characters are going to be very cookie cutter, outside of skills and weapon choices.

I hadn't thought of that.. (Hmmmmmm.) [MENTION=1]Morrus[/MENTION] makes a good point though, that Tradition names don't have to be so restrictive (I actually had to do quite a lot of liberating of Tradition names with my first playtest group). I guess in the particularly strange instance that you have a group of starting Sylvan Elf Berserkers, it would probably be most pragmatic to turn the Berserker ability into a Combat Trick for your homebrew campaign, as you suggest.

Maybe a better answer would be to turn the sub-races into starting careers, each with the added benefit of being 'full blooded' in that race, and tweak the races and starting careers to be more equal in respect to stat adds.

I really like this idea. Will look into developing it on my end - and report if results are particularly bad or good.