D&D General How elder scroll does species

[Scott Christian]

It's impossible to do without a specific setting, aka quasi-medieval setting. I mean, if you have cultures that rarely travel away from home, like many people long ago - then sure, they are going to learn specific skills inherent to their region. They'll even develop various genetic flavors, a la, "Look at me, I'm not allergic to milk!"

But in a D&D setting, it makes zero sense.

 

[MGibster]

I am trying to see if the way that the elder scrolls games does their species is a better or worse model then the current or previous editions of dungeons and dragons.

I've never noticed a difference between species in Elder Scrolls. The game plays pretty much the exact same way no matter which species you pick.

Culture is a better model to vary humans as it avoids bioessentialism veering into racism. Humans with a Agrarian culture or a Seafaring culture might hail from anywhere, even if Humans with a Desert Nomad culture have a much more obvious analogue.

D&D does a fairly bad job of it because most players pick the background that bests suits the ability scores they want to increase based on their class. In the future, I suspect we'll just switch to floating ASIs disconnected from species or background.

 

[Tonguez]

I've never noticed a difference between species in Elder Scrolls. The game plays pretty much the exact same way no matter which species you pick.

D&D does a fairly bad job of it because most players pick the background that bests suits the ability scores they want to increase based on their class. In the future, I suspect we'll just switch to floating ASIs disconnected from species or background.

yeah 2014 Backgrounds were better, 2025 Backgrounds are junk (it was my biggest issue with 5.5e)

 

[Shades of Eternity]

After all this stewing, all that I ended up doing is making a whole slew of 2014 backgrounds for my rpg, and I don't think it was a bad thing.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Some older eddtion of D&D had diffrent variations of Humans in some of the supplements, But honestly I think its a bad idea.

The only idea in this direction that I've ever been okay with is, well, one I came up with myself, but because I was trying to build a pattern of sorts.

That is, for the heartbreaker that exists in my head, Humans (aka "Wanderfolk") would have three variants, unlike other races which I tried to always give four variants to:

1. Earthfast. This is literally every human you've ever met in your entire life. All humans on Earth, at any point in Earth's history, have been Earthfast humans.
2. Starbound. This is for humans Weirded™ by the eldritch strangeness of The Great Dark Beyond (read: Outer Space, except messed with by the Far Realm). Think Gallifreyans, Kryptonians, Slann/Elan, Kalashtar, etc. All the "alien, but look 100% human" things.
3. Dual-Bloodline. This is your catch-all for all the zillion different types of "one of my parents was human, the other was Some Other Thing". Easy to add new bloodline options later, early focus would be stuff like tieflings, aasimar, half-elf/half-orc, etc.

I literally couldn't come up with anything else that fit, that made sense, that avoided any overtones of racism while still expressing a clear and meaningful distinction. So I just...stopped. If you try something for hours and hours and make no progress, that might be a sign to throw in the towel.

 

[Laurefindel]

I'm in a minority here, but characters having abilities and differences based on their home or adopted region is my preferred way of dealing with "species".

Games like Legend of the Five Rings, 7th Sea, and The One Ring do it well, but they also have a much narrower scope, deal with a single well-defined world or meta-region, and all have systems where having a head-start in X at character creation based on clan/culture/home region isn't a bid deal because other characters will catch up by mid-levels (or game equivalent).

D&D tries to be uniform across several settings, has a class structure that encourages niche protection, has limited (and competing) opportunities for ASI and universal feats, and has a static skills system; none of those are favourable for integrating regionalisms in character creation. D&D deals with species the best it can, IMO, but i'd be open to setting specific variations on species. Some of those could be region-based.