D&D 5E I don't like Dragonborn: Please stay away from D&D Next.

[mlund]

Dragonborn don't equal bloat. They equal a race you don't want to see.

No, Dragonborn, Deva, Tiefling, Assimar, Goliaths, and Warforged are bloat (and that's not even starting in on Revenants, Tri-Keen, and Shifters). That may be entertaining and profitable bloat, but they are bloat and we already have a terrifically ugly example in the Forgotten Realms of what the company is capable of doing to established world settings just to try and shoe-horn in marketable bloat into game settings whose design didn't originally include them.

No more world-sundering cataclysms and dropped continent impacts to fit Dragonborn into the Core, thank you. Put them into the PHB in a module section noting that these races do not appear / are not germane to all published campaign settings but may be right for the game you and your players may want to run. Make sure the core mechanics can integrate them cleanly without any muss or fuss. People that want to play them get what they want. People that want to play core + module to use an established traditional setting (like Greyhawk) with minimal redaction get what they want.

(Well, actually, I guess I'd shove the Warforged into an Ebberon Module entirely, just like the Tinker Gnomes and Kender would go into the Krynn Module.)

- Marty Lund

 

[nnms]

So would wu-jen/Ninja multi-class Kenku be out of the question as well?

Are all Kenku part of a monolithic wu-jen/ninja culture? Is it a Kenku who happens to be wu-jen/Ninja multiclass, or are all Kenku everywhere like that?

Kenku wu-jen/ninja character sounds pretty cool.

Kenku wu-jen/ninja caricature culture sounds terrible.

 

[Serendipity]

No, Dragonborn, Deva, Tiefling, Assimar, Goliaths, and Warforged are bloat (and that's not even starting in on Revenants, Tri-Keen, and Shifters).

Maybe for you. For some of us, another bloody showing of elves and dwarves are bloaty as the day is long. Though I'll give you that one on Goliaths. Which, really, only serves to prove the point that the point of bloat is not defined by your and only your preferences and wants.

Do many people really need this pointed out to them?

 

[slobster]

How about instead we don't make caricatures of the history of foreign cultures as aliens or reptilians?

I get where you're coming from, and I agree with you in principle. But there is a limit on the amount of racial fluff that can realistically be included in a rulebook like the player's handbook. Space is the biggest issue, but you also don't want to strictly define cultures and racial relations in what is primarily a resource for mechanical character creation and world-building.

Rooting an unfamiliar, fictional culture in known real-world analogues is a concise way to strongly differentiate a race without needing to write pages and pages of lore that most GMs will ignore anyway.

It would be great if they then expand the backstory of the race beyond simple stereotypes, but in my view that's more properly a job for racial handbooks, campaign settings, and Dragon articles.

 

[mlund]

Do many people really need this pointed out to them?

No, not really. That should be a sign that you might be missing something in the communication ...

The point we seem to be talking past one another one is what is core to the Dungeons and Dragons brand identity?

If you start botching / conflicting with established continuities and franchise settings like Forgotten Realms, City of Greyhawk, Ebberon, Castle Ravenloft, and Dragonlance to the point where you need to do massive redaction instead of just overlaying an additive module I think something's wrong with your definition of "core."

You can try in vain to misuse the word "bloat" (To cause to swell up or inflate from its previous size) and try to adopt it against Humans, Elves, and Dwarves but it's a losing battle. Try using the established continuity of Krynn, Oerth, or the Realms without Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Halfings, Half-Elves or even Gnomes and Half-Orcs without causing massive continuity nightmares. Good luck with that.

Those races can't be easily written off as "bloat" because A.) they've been playable for over two decades in the core and b.) core brand identity and existing IP works the company still wants to generate revenues are inextricably linked to them.

Dragonborn? Goliaths? Planescape, Krynn, and Ebberon-originated races? Not so much.

- Marty Lund

 

[Serendipity]

Your missing the part about what is core to the Dungeons and Dragons brand identity.

Um, okay guy. Meanwhile the rest of the thread seems to be about the irrationalities of some people regarding what should be in the players handbook.

But please, carry on if it'll make you feel better.

 

[Incenjucar]

Being old doesn't make something take up less space.

If there is bloat, I argue that it comes from redundancy. When you have something that is only a slight variation of another thing instead of a dramatically new thing, I would call that bloat. Not just that something hasn't been properly modified into some sort of elf.

 

[nightwyrm]

No, not really. That should be a sign that you might be missing something in the communication ...

The point we seem to be talking past one another one is what is core to the Dungeons and Dragons brand identity?

If you start botching / conflicting with established continuities and franchise settings like Forgotten Realms, City of Greyhawk, Ebberon, Castle Ravenloft, and Dragonlance to the point where you need to do massive redaction instead of just overlaying an additive module I think something's wrong with your definition of "core."

You can try in vain to misuse the word "bloat" (To cause to swell up or inflate from its previous size) and try to adopt it against Humans, Elves, and Dwarves but it's a losing battle. Try using the established continuity of Krynn, Oerth, or the Realms without Humans, Elves, Dwarves, Halfings, Half-Elves or even Gnomes and Half-Orcs without causing massive continuity nightmares. Good luck with that.

Those races can't be easily written off as "bloat" because A.) they've been playable for over two decades in the core and b.) core brand identity and existing IP works the company still wants to generate revenues are inextricably linked to them.

Dragonborn? Goliaths? Planescape, Krynn, and Ebberon-originated races? Not so much.

- Marty Lund

DL has Kenders. We need to include kender in the PHB to affirm our traditional roots!!

 

[AngryMojo]

Planescape, Krynn, and Ebberon-originated races? Not so much.

Considering the number of novels, video games and other products with the D&D label on them that have featured these settings, not to mention how long they've been around, I have a hard time buying into these arguments. If we're talking about brand identity, D&D has grown far beyond the group of races and classes that were around in the original set.

 

[mlund]

DL has Kenders. We need to include kender in the PHB to affirm our traditional roots!!

Or, rather, we need to include Kender to sponsor "diversity" in the PHB because regular Halflings are boring, Greyhawk-be-hanged and all that.

Considering the number of novels, video games and other products with the D&D label on them that have featured these settings, not to mention how long they've been around, I have a hard time buying into these arguments. If we're talking about brand identity, D&D has grown far beyond the group of races and classes that were around in the original set.

As I've already noted, setting-specific races need to be in the settings modules. You can crib from them for home-brew all you want, but to the greatest extent possible CORE needs to present a common framework and common features so implementing various settings is almost entirely additive and involves as little redaction from the core as is practical.

The PHB should include Core as well as expansion modules for popular races and whatnot that aren't hyper-specific to a setting like Warforged, Kender, and Tinker-gnomes are.

- Marty Lund