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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 3959247" data-attributes="member: 2067">But there is a point of specificity. A nation of the accursed who messed with Things Man Was Not Meant To Mess With is fine. It's "somewhat similar" without being specifically about one specific race, one specific empire, and a specific version of Things Man Was Not Meant To Mess With. "Orcs Hate Elves" isn't very specific. It doesn't say why, for instance. It doesn't say if elves hate orcs back, or if they're ambivalent. It doesn't say what form this hatred takes in Orc culture (do they burn effigies? do they have elf sacrifices?), or if it is recent or ancient, or much, really, beyond an instinctive emotion for one race against another. It leaves a lot of room for individual interpretation. In my campaign, it can be because elves, given the chance, will eat the flesh of orcs. In yours, it can be because orcs are corrupted versions of elves. It doesn't matter for the mechanics.Similarly, a "tieflings are a cursed race from a fallen empire" isn't very specific. It doesn't say what the Empire's name was, who it's enemies were, the years it existed, why it fell, who cursed them, or if the curse takes a specific form or varies from tiefling to tiefling. Of course, that's still more specific than "tieflings are humans who are tainted with evil," which doesn't tell us if they have an empire, if they're just unlucky, if they live next to a hellmouth, if their race is cursed, if they're just distantly related to a succubus, etc. Still, "Tieflings are a cursed race from a fallen empire" is fine in a way that "Devils cursed the Empire of Bael Turath's nobles, who were fighting with the dragonborn empire, after the nobles dealt with them in order to secure their victory over their military enemies, resulting in an inherited curse that causes them to have red skin, horns, and a tail" isn't. Likewise, when Tolkein's cosmology and inspiration for the orc/elf conflict is distilled down to it's base essence, it becomes a lot more portable, more easily adaptable to a large variety of settings. And a lot of that depends on where they stick the "design weight." It sounds like they'd stick it in the more developed aspects of the setting rather than the lesser because otherwise the development doesn't have much of a purpose. In addition, they seem to want to provide a lot of the new crunch "in situ," ready to roll right out, which mandates a fairly developed setting. Other game elements like "Golden Wyvern Adept" show that the team is definitely thinking in terms of putting a lot of interdependence in fluff and crunch already. It's a reasonable fear that if the "Points of Light" setting is too fleshed out that DMing a homebrew may become much more onerous in this edition than it was in the last. If WotC is smart, they will place much more design weight on the generalities of the race than the specificities of that race in their setting, but they have a difficult balancing act, because they still need to provide enough of a motivating setting to use right out of the gate.</blockquote>

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