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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 8454381" data-attributes="member: 6779196">I’m glad you asked! For me it’s about what race is, as a game construct, in the type of old-school play I’m using “troupe play” as a shorthand for, as opposed to the style of play that has come to be sort of the default mode of play these days.To illustrate what I mean, take a typical modern D&D game. An adventure or series of adventures focused on the exploits of a regular cast of characters, often with some sort of overarching narrative structure. PCs are typically exceptional individuals, so what is true of a given PC doesn’t really tell us anything about a typical person in the setting. In this mode of play, I don’t see race mechanics as representative of the typical member of a given lineage, any more than class mechanics are representative of the typical member of a given profession. These game mechanics give the players rules for how to express their individual character, they don’t inform us about the setting.Contrast this with old school “troupe play” where the campaign is not a series of interconnected adventures but a shared play space. The game doesn’t focus on a regular cast of characters, the characters and even the players may be different from one play session to the next. In this style of play, players don’t so much create characters, as an author might. They generate characters through procedural mechanics that are indeed reflective of what a typical person in the setting looks like. 10-11 being the average ability score is not an arbitrary fact, it’s a direct result of the procedure for generating ability scores. In this paradigm, racial mechanics (and for that matter, class mechanics) don’t just inform you of what your unique elf character can do, they set the parameters for the procedural engine to simulate picking a random person from a representative sample of the general elf population.Does that make sense?</blockquote>

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