Mixing Races....and why DM's shouldn't allow it

[Darklone]

I like ghelflings (halfling elves, considering that most elf races are hardly taller than halflings...). And halfelf/halforc (Kalamar). Half-hobgoblins (like Klingons).

 

[Nyaricus]

There is a reason that a Man and a female HORSE can't breed? Not the same thing....prob with the whole mateing...

Then where in the hell did centaurs come from?



cheers,
--N

 

[Griffith Dragonlake]

ISome "half" are really too off for me. Half-lycanthrope for example to me makes no sense at all: lycanthropy is already something that can affect any race, it's a STATUS, either you are a lycanthrope or you're not!! It's like saying, "I'm half ill", "I'm half allergic to peanuts" or "I'm half pregnant"

This reminds me of something Stephen Fry once said:

‘I’m only half-gay. Unfortunately the half of me that’s gay is the lower half….

 

[Umbran]

Inthe end, the tgame is a work of fiction. Fiction with magic, even. Real-world arguments about compatibility may apply to a particular game, if the DM wants to use some pseudoscience explanations, but they don't work well in general. In a world with centaurs, fauns, and half-orcs, it is difficult to give good reason why other mixes aren't at least possible.

What matters is what fits into a particular campaign world, and what the players and DMs have fun with. I hardly think anyone playing half-kobold/half-halfling is going to have world-shattering powers due to their race. So, it probably doesn't break the game in a rules-sense. Beyond that, I'm mostly going to care about whether it makes a good story or not.

 

[Kae'Yoss]

And halfelf/halforc (Kalamar)

No. Just... no. No. No.

 

[an_idol_mind]

I could go either way, personally. Mixing races in order to get some sort of wicked advantage is a pain in the butt. But some players want to mix races simply out of imagination and a desire to throw something weird and new into the traditional fantasy setting. That I can deal with.

 

[Malhost Zormaeril]

Hmm. How 'bout half owl, half bear:

 

[Banshee16]

I think in a world where you have talking swords, and guys in robes and funny hats who can wave their hands, throw a bit of bat guano in the air, and mutter some cryptic words and blow up an army of trained soldiers in armor, or turn the biggest, toughest dude on the block into a toad, the genetics of crossbreeding should really be the least of our concerns as DMs.

I do put some limits, but even major ones like half-dragon/weretigers or something, I'd allow....half-dragons happen not because someone had relations with a 50' long reptile, but because that reptile could use magic to assume human form, in which those relations are possible. The child could, theoretically, become a lycanthrope, through infection by a virus. It's like saying that a half-dragon can't catch pneumonia.

Some others, like half-illithids, I don't allow, because they don't jive with my perception of how illithids are born in the first place (ie. implantation of a tadpole in a helpless prisoner).

In any case, I find most of my players never select these kinds of characters anyways. Maybe my players are boring, but most of them are playing humans, elves, and dwarves. That's it. One of them kept trying new races, but even there, it was things like ghost elves, dryads, illumians, etc....no half-breeds.

Banshee

 

[Lanefan]

Why does everything have to be "half", is my question? If 3 of my grandparents are Human and the other one is an Elf, that makes me 1/4 Elf. And if I have kids with a Human they'll be 1/8 Elf.....

Once, long ago, I sat down with the 1e monster books and tried to figure out just what could breed with what. I ended up with a great big chart with lines connecting different races and species...looked like a plate of spaghetti by the time I was done...and spawned what I call my "taints table": what might be in your genetic background. It turned out to be a rather fascinating exercise. I went in sort of expecting Humans to be the genetic nexus point that everything linked to or went through, and was surprised when it turned out instead to be Orcs....they're the link between the "Giant" branch (includes pretty much everything from Gnomes and Dwarves up to Bugbears, Ogres, and Giants) and the "Human" branch (includes Elves, Hobbits, the various woodland critters, and so on).

What prompted this was my wondering what the chances would be of having a character descended from a deity, or demon, or whatever; it just took off from there.

Result of all this is you now roll for taint during char-gen, to see what might be lurking in your family tree; the odds are very low of getting anything significant enough to change the general makeup of your character, but it can happen...

On my chart, Hobbits and Kobolds are separated by several steps (I don't have the chart in front of me, but I know it'd have to go at least Hobbit==>(Human?==>)Orc==> various steps to get to Kobold) so a straight Hobbold would probably be impossible.

Lane-"pure Human"-fan

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

If a player can convince me that a certain combination of races would be fun for all involved rather than cheesy, then I am willing to give it a try.

Of course, this also gives me the implicit permission to put all sorts of nasty hooks into his background... which might or might not be fun for the player, but they certainly won't be for the character...


"I didn't want to find out that instead of getting my powers from a transcendant scientist-mentor, I was grown from the DNA of Aryan super-atheletes and Hitler's personal sex midgets!

I didn't even know Hitler had personal sex midgets!"


(A geek point if you know where this quote comes from...)