D&D 5E MTOF: Elves are gender-swapping reincarnates and I am on board with it
Yaarel
He Mage
What is the cost to me?
The part of D&D tradition that I care about now lacks support. The inflexibility of core rule mechanics, the baking-in of core rule flavor, and the lack of customizability generally, require me to rewrite the 5e rules. Because of this and other issues, the necessary amount of rewrite is formidable. Currently, I have aborted a strong effort to rewrite. But it isnt worth it. D&D is no longer fun for my play style. And the effort required to make it fun is no longer appealing.
I have lost D&D.
Because of failing to allow for personal preferences, the 5e designers have murdered 20 years of a game that I once loved.
You write that as if performance were the only relevant way one interacts with poetry and song. Half-elves exceed both sides of their ancestry in performance for an audience; but who *composes* poetry and song, and in what language? The default human is unable to compose poetry and song in Elvish.
5E doesn't have rules for poetry composition... perhaps because that's not a murder-hobo activity.
So you say. I've seen people play Wood Elf druid, monk and rogue.
Frelf flavor, however, might be vividly chromatic, as speculated above.
Yaarel
He Mage
There is a poster who sometimes shows up as Shemeskha.
From what I understand she contributed to the writing of the Planescape setting.
When 4e chose to fail to support that tradition, she felt totally shut out by the game that she loved.
That kind of pain, I now relate to.
I want from D&D different things than she does. But.
There is every reason for the D&D 5e designers to make room for personal preferences and to make *room* for ‘individual creativity’.
Support more variants in the D&D tradition. Add more customizability. For the player to personalize character concepts. For the DM to homebrew worlds. Bake in less unwanted flavor into the core mechanics.
From what I understand she contributed to the writing of the Planescape setting.
When 4e chose to fail to support that tradition, she felt totally shut out by the game that she loved.
That kind of pain, I now relate to.
I want from D&D different things than she does. But.
There is every reason for the D&D 5e designers to make room for personal preferences and to make *room* for ‘individual creativity’.
Support more variants in the D&D tradition. Add more customizability. For the player to personalize character concepts. For the DM to homebrew worlds. Bake in less unwanted flavor into the core mechanics.
That is some hyperbole, there!
I get how including something in the core rules might change how you view or use things. But I have to say, this is something that apparently only in SOME elves- as I mentioned, sort of like Driders, it isn’t the default for all. So the core rules do still support the older fluff.
Besides, I’ve been playing for 39 years, and have encountered numerous DMs and plaupyed in innumerable campaigns in which even harder-coded in stuff was disallowed: no Half-Orcs, no Halflings, no Gnomes, no Monks, no Paladins, no full casters...the list goes on. This is easily fixed by not using it.
To ragequit D&D over an optional rule seems...extreme.*
*full disclosure: I don’t play 5th. Not because of optional rules here and there, but because I dislike the new ruleset as a whole.
On one hand, tip of the hat for giving a direct answer to a question.
On another hand, what you call failing to allow for personal preferences, I call allowing for personal preferences which many people hold; many people who aren't you.
On a third hand, the 5E DMG has a section for creating new PC-playable races. You could use that section to create whatever kind of elf you prefer, and allow that kind of elf for your players, and not allow the elf as written in PHB. You could do that without changing ANY other part of the game. Create a new race or two, ban one of the basic races, done. You can then either extend that ban to any of the elf variants in the *optional* books such as Sword Coast, Volo, and Mordenkainen, or you can ban those books wholesale from your table.
On a fourth hand, have the 5E designers erased your memories of those 20 years? "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain"? You can only pull off that level of self-absorbed drama if you're Rutger Hauer on a crenellated rooftop. Or perhaps if you were a half-elf with Expertise in Performance.
Yaarel
He Mage
Perhaps, veteran players are less sensitive to the issue, because they already have their *book* of custom worlds and house rules. They inherited these worlds from previous editions that *did* strongly support personalization and customization for both the DM and the player. Some of these veterans might forget how difficult and time consuming it can be to put a book like this together.
Perhaps new players never played an earlier edition, and are less aware of the D&D culture of homebrew and customization, and appreciate less the art and the joy of these media for personal creativity.
D&D 5e does everything it can in the Players Handbook to make customization difficult and scarce. Class archetypes delay to level 3, feats are painful choices until the highest levels, feats are mostly absent at level 1 character creation, ability scores are inflexible, subraces conform strictly to base race traits, race traits are unswappable. Even spell research and magical item creation remains without support. And so on.
There is too little room for customization. Dealing with the baked-in setting assumptions is a perpetual aggravation.
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Yaarel
He Mage
To transform the D&D gaming tradition into a new kind of game about conformity and conformity, does have its supporters.
Arguably, a game about conformism is no longer D&D. Not the kind of D&D that I love, anyway.
Lanefan
Victoria Rules
If you think 5e is inflexible try kitbashing 3e or 4e.
5e was intentionally designed to be malleable enough such that any DM worth her salt could kitbash and-or tweak it into being a system she wanted to run, without knock-on effects wrecking the rest of the game. From everything I can see they've largely succeeded at that, in a broad sense.
What play style are you looking for it to support, that it doesn't or can't?
Personal preferences in...what?
If you're looking for 3e-grade character customization, no you won't get that out of the box. However, this would be trivially easy to work in without mechanical repercussions and not much harder to work in with some mechanical effects.
If you're looking for the steep power curve offered by 3e and 4e, you won't find that either...but in 5e (and 0-1-2e) that's a feature, not a bug; and would be mighty hard to achieve using the 5e chassis. Probably have to start by concatenating every two levels into one and put the game on a 1-10 path, then designing your own system (and monsters!) for what happens beyond 10th.
Anything to do with lore or flavour or fluff is, of course, yours to keep or ignore or change as you wish. There's nothing forcing you to adhere to "official canon" and never has been*. That hasn't changed since 1974.
* - unless you're doing RPGA or AL organized play, where you're stuck with the system and lore as written - bleah.
Lan-"no system is perfect for everyone; the trick is to make it as perfect - or perfectable - for as many people as you can, and then hope for the best"-efan
