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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8110713" data-attributes="member: 6801228">You never used that exact phrase, but I do believe it was you who said that it would be nearly impossible to distinguish a dwarf fighter from a human fighter. Which would be so small of an impact to be like zero, if you want me to be more pedantic about the numbers. I mean if the impact is so small as to not be noticeable at the table, how else am I supposed to interpret that? By the way, I still disagree with that. I feel like race has a much bigger impact than that. It isn't more important than class, but I feel like it is certainly noticeable.I guess I'm getting confused as to your actual point then. Are you trying to say that if the game had not included Tolkien-Style specifically it wouldn't have mattered much? I can agree with that. Tolkien barely has an impact on some of the races, and even the closest parrallels clearly have some big differences from Tolkien's source material. But, if you are trying to say that if the game had not included any demi-humans it would not have mattered, I have to disagree with you. That would have made for a massive change to DnD as a product, to have been only about humans. So, if your point is "no demihumans and it would have been fine" I disagree, that is too deeply tied into the game to have been taken out with no impact. If it is "no Tolkien-style demihumans specifically, but they were replaced with something else" then I can agree with you, that was a far more modest impact.Sure, it did DnD well in some respects. But it is not the same as playing DnD. I don't think that is a very controversial position to take, right? In the end, it works because it was a movie, not because it showed exactly how DnD works. And, going back to what I thought your position was (ie no demihumans at all) the very fact that whether or not someone could play something other than human being a point of conflict between a DM and a Player (even one like Cass) shows that the ability to play something other than human is an expected norm of the culture.  But the comparison to Tunnels and Trolls misses the point. Look back at the original claim. Game with only one race option vs game with multiple race options (let us say 6) Tunnels and Trolls vs DnD was more game with 6 options vs game with 12 options. And yes, more is not always better. I have a friend who was desigining a game a while back, last I saw character creation he had almost 20 race options for the core rules. Far too many. But, his game could not possibly work (as an mythic japan setting standing in an opposition to the LoTFR style) with only humans. And maybe Tunnels and Trolls more races hit too many, or maybe the increase from 6 to 8 ( mere 33% increase) was not big enough to make a difference between the two. I mean, 1 to 6 is a 600% increase, that is a far larger leap.Yes. Just as a basic first thought, the elf has access to longbows and longswords, giving him far better martial ability if he runs out of spell to use. And yes, obviously it is a bigger difference to be a fighter instead. But being an elf matters, the game has revolved around you making two choices for your character. Race and Class. I have no idea why you want to deny that Race is a factor, and say that all that matters is the class.Okay, again, is your whole problem the idea that the races had to come from Tolkien? I can agree that they didn't need to come from Tolkien. And yes, you can take out elves and it is less impactful than taking out clerics (who didn't exist in the early days, while elves did).But I don't think you could get rid of race entirely with no impact. The game is thought about, played, marketed, and designed with the idea that you can choose a class and a race. And that race has a mechanical impact that is important to making the game DnD. Could it have been any number of other races instead of Tolkien-style races? Sure. It could have been. But a DnD without multiple different races just does not feel like DnD to me.------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------I don't think it goes against the logic of the DM and players being equal at all. If I, as a player, came to the DM and told them that a current scene we were going through made me uncomfortable and was ruining my enjoyment of the game, I would expect them to take it seriously and hopefully work to address the problem. If a DM came to us as players, and told us that these rules for changing racial ability modifiers made them uncomfortable, and ruined the fun of running the game for them, then I would try and treat that with the same respect. The issue I tend to have is that the people claiming they will "never allow something at their table" seem to be more concerned with aspects that I don't feel would actually ruin running the game for them. A lot of times it is more of a "I don't like it and I think it is stupid" and less of an impact on their ability to run the game. Especially in this case when the effect is so far in the background of the game. I don't tend to bat an eye at a certain race being good at certain things. I've seen halflings with 12 or 14 strength attempting and succeeding feat of strength. It happens. It would be more strange to me to see a wizard do it, but even then, it is simply odd, not bad. We did have a guy who rolled an amazing stat array and had a wizard whose lowest stat was his 14 charisma, it happens. Are you really going to be that distraught as a DM if the Dwarf wizard tells you his save DC is 15 instead of 14? Or that he has a +7 to hit, instead of a +6? I often don't give much thought to my players actually modifiers, so I struggle to see how as a DM this would bother me. Meanwhile, as a player, I have seen the impact and I can see the good. And the player is far more immersed in his sheet and studying it every single session, making it a more obvious impact to them</blockquote>

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