Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="DammitVictor" data-source="post: 9282177" data-attributes="member: 6750908">"They were both poisoned. I spent the last few years building up an immunity to iocane powder."I understand the impulse to have rules to distinguish between these aspects, but I think it is both seriously overrated as a worldbuilding priority and mechanically they lead to overcomplicated and implausible characters that slow down gameplay and stretch everyone's suspension of disbelief. "But what if a little halfling baby was raised by a tribe of bugbears?" It's possible... and if there are enough halfling communities living shoulder-to-shoulder with enough bugbear communities, it's even inevitable. But does it happen often enough that we need to have rules for it, especially when the existence of those rules means they're going to apply to half of our player characters?Feel like you can draw a straight line from race-as-class (Classic) -> race-and-class with restrictions (AD&D) ->  any-race-any-class w/ "favored class" (3.X) -> any-race-any-class with no restrictions (PF 1/2 and D&D 4/5).Likewise, from fixed ability bonuses and penalties to flex bonuses/no penalties (4e, 5e subraces, PF2) to the free +2/+1 bonuses in Tasha's.And all of these changes, as much as they expand player choices... also reduce the significance of those choices. "Race", or "ancestry" or "lineage" or whatever you want to call it, is less and less of a character's identity and it becomes harder and harder to differentiate between characters of different races... while subraces of the most popular races are constantly proliferating with minor differences that should (IMO) be represented as options available to all members of their respective, more diverse, races.I really wish more people would understand this. Really understand it, internalize it. We make these basically arbitrary design decisions, either based on older decisions made by older designers or just our own personal assumptions... and we get so dogmatic about them, as if the thing we just made up was the only possible answer we could have just made up.I am working on a Spelljammer and Classic TSR/Early WotC mashup; I've been combining a lot of races/species to build connective tissue between unrelated settings. Instead of trying to fold gnomes and halflings into a common ancestor-- I mean, Hell, they didn't even get two separate PHBR books-- I combined them with two different aliens. I combined gnomes with fraal and halflings with dromites (called "hin"); they're both small, cheerful, telepathic (via ghostwise/whispergnome) like their classical counterparts, but now they feel like very different ancestries.(For the record? Weren/bugbear, warforged/android as mechalus, t'sa/kobold, and destrachan/wyvaran as sesheyan. The Star Frontiers aliens already got SJ conversions, so I mostly just pulled in some Pathfinder stuff and called it a day.)In my Shroompunk setting, all "humans" are actually planetouched: aasimar, tiefling/fetchling, earth/fire/metal/water/wood genasi, or ganzi. They're all human, they recognize each other as human, and their planar subtype isn't really genetic so every human community and most human households are mixed.If people don't want there to be essential differences between human and nonhuman (N)PCs, there should not be human and nonhuman (N)PCs. It is absolutely pointless, a waste of paper and ink and creative labor, to populate an entire fantasy world with "nonhuman people" that are just like humans in all of their thoughts, feelings, and capabilities.There are plenty of fantasy settings that don't have D&D's proliferation of intelligent nonhuman peoples and plenty of other fantasy games that don't have rules for them... D&D does not have to have all of these different people just to check off some box.</blockquote>

Verification