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Message: <blockquote data-quote="(Psi)SeveredHead" data-source="post: 5801619" data-attributes="member: 1165">It's hard to ensure differences that aren't stereotypes or even "enforced behavior".Thri-kreen of Athas has great RP rules for playing a thri-kreen, but anyone who actually follows them all is in trouble. For instance, thri-kreen instinctively try to dominate the "pack" (eg party), despite being generally less intelligent than sentient mammals. This means a thri-kreen PC joining a group should try to intimidate the other PCs (until defeated, fortunately this only happens once) but, worse, would want to challenge them to an unarmed duel. Other common adventuring tasks like buying equipment is nearly impossible for a thri-kreen due to their need to treat shopping like hunting. Whoever asks first is the hunter, so a thri-kreen personal shopper needs a high Initiative score (not something you could easily modify in 2e!). A thri-kreen might not understand the concept of "herding" or farming and might see animals in a pen as "fast food", causing the same kinds of problems that a kender handler would cause. I found the way to deal with them was to pick the non-troublesome character traits and only use them.The last time I got to play a thri-kreen, the campaign only lasted one session. I made the mistake of letting other players know I was playing a thri-kreen before campaign start, so the other two players decided to also be weird - a warforged and a were-ape. The warforged couldn't understand human concepts like money either, so our social character was the were-ape. It's not easy pointing out all the problems this caused us. This, plus some really stupid combat RPing (eg the were-ape was a Book of Nine Swords character with something like Healing Strike, which he refused to ever use, resulting in PCs who were too scared to fight) is why the campaign only lasted one session.Come to think of it, I think that kendler mention, and any mentions of tinker gnomes, support my points. For those who aren't familiar with kender, they're the replacement for halflings in the Dragonlance setting. They're the same height, but have minds more like children than adults (an adult hobbit, by contrast, is probably responsible, compare Pippin to Samwise, for instance). They're proportioned like children, so it's easier to mistake an "adult" kender for a child than a hobbit. Most kender were handlers, basically thieves without backstab (so they're less useful to the party to boot). They would constantly "pick up" whatever interesting thing they saw, so they weren't likely to steal in order to get rich or to fence something, or even to pull off a Leverage-like plot-relevant theft, but simply because "that ring looked pretty". Needless to say, any party with a kender in it would be constantly in trouble with the law from angry humans who weren't happy that their wedding ring was "stolen", their magic dust vanished and was then used in some unauthorized fashion, etc. Kender were portrayed as being chaotic neutral stupid, with attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity, exactly the kind of person you want with you on a dungeon crawl.I think I'll leave gnomes away, as what's wrong with them should be fairly obvious.I guess my point is, if you want the other races to act differently than humans, you need to ensure the differences don't cause problems in-game.If we're using LotR as a guide, many of the races don't seem that different. Hobbits are rural British, they're more like pygmies than a distinct species. The "wild" elves of Mirkwood actually aped humans, being quite different than the elves of Rivendell. I'm not sure if dwarves were that different, other than tending toward greed.</blockquote>

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