D&D General No More "Humans in Funny Hats": Racial Mechanics Should Determine Racial Cultures

[Bolares]

Being serious now... I find it really hard to create "inhuman" lineages and cultures, because well, I'm human. So What I try to do is look at the lineage and the kind of story I'm trying to tell with it and ask myself, how would a human culture behave under this set of features and characteristics. How would a culture be different if everyone lived for hundreds of years... how would it be different if everyone had a cantrip, how would people behave if there were no genders?

Every lineage is humans with some differences IMHO, so instead of pretending they are not I try to embrace it and start from that assumption.

 

[Ixal]

Why the hate for ASI? Its just common sense that different creatures with, sometimes vastly, different biology would have different attributes.
ASI should stay and penalties should come back. And those should be part of their culture too.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Why the hate for ASI? Its just common sense that different creatures with, sometimes vastly, different biology would have different attributes.
ASI should stay and penalties should come back. And those should be part of their culture too.

It's not so much hate, it's that it's very .... contentious. And it seems to derail threads a lot, because then the conversation shifts into real-world stuff.

And, for some reason, orcs. So it's probably best to avoid it, especially on the second page, given that it will probably pop up again and kill the thread at some point later.

 

[Krachek]

Eh, I think we need to go GALAXY BRAINED on this one.

I like the direction @AcererakTriple6 is going, but it needs to go farther.
Problem 1: Too many races are humans in funny hats.
Problem 2: Tasha's and the evolution of D&D when it comes to race/ancestry/lineage has turned race into a choose your own adventure / mix & match at the yogurt stand, not a meaningful choice.

Snarf's Superior Solution: Swerve hard into differentiation both in crunch AND lore. Get rid of 'default' races in the PHB. All races should be campaign- or setting-specific. Get rid of ASIs for races completely (as that seems to be the alpha and the omega of complaints) and differentiate all races by abilities and/or gated racial feats. Races should have a rich tapestry of culture and fluff to pull upon (or to play against, as need be, but will still help place them in the world).

Also? No more dead-eyed elves. The whole lot of 'em. What we do is we take them all, the wood, the grey, the high (it's 4:20 somewhere), the sea, the sun, the valley, the wild, the desert, the dessert (twice as sweet), the jungle, the whatever elves. We say they're all space elves and send them to space. BUT ELVES CAN'T LIVE IN A VACUUM!* Problem solved, you're welcome.


*Contrary to the existence of the 3.5e supplement, "Elves, Elves, Elves, and Even More Elves!" which contained the non-canon Hoover Elves. ....boy, they sucked. I'll show myself out now.

For the space vacuum we got SpaceX, but it won’t solve the problem.
A DM could try to emulate more flavorful race by forcing a match between Class-sub class and race.
for example
you want to play a fighter battle master, you play an half orc,
a paladin oath of ancient your must play an elf eladrin or any gnome.
and so on.
Just need a list of Race-Class match. Some subclass may be accessible by more or fewer race.
With the actual rules, it is the best shot.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I'm going to poke holes in your examples a bit.

The reason those three races so that is because they have a unique innate fantastical quality to them. They are shapechangers, living golems and innately psionic people. They have an obvious hook. The farther you get from human, the easier the hook. Aarakroca and tabaxi are easier to design a culture around than halflings or gnomes because the former have a unique element (mimicking an animal's behavior) and the latter not much beyond "short and quirky".

That magical element is much more interesting if expanded on; when eladrin were a Core race, there was a lot of discussion about what things would look like if you had a race that could teleport every 5 minutes. Would they need ladders and stairs? What would thier prisons look like? The obvious magical hook is easier to create something unique, compared to the rather stock blandness of dwarves, elves and orcs.

Second, I noticed you left out the fourth Eberron race: shifter. My guess is that their culture isn't as focused on their shifting and for the most part could be replicated with another race that is rural/tribal, has a reputation for violence and infatuation with the moon.

The last reason why these three races so this is they are tied to a specific setting, rather than being generic enough to go on any setting. Warforged culture works because the Last War, the Cannith creation forges, the Lord of Blades, the Treaty of Thronehold, etc. Strip all that out and your get "generic robot" PC race. As a better example, read the fluff on 4e's tieflings and dragonborn built for Nerath vs the generic muck in the 5e PHB.

So I think your idea is an interesting one, but for it to work, you'd need a fixed default setting to make the races work and/or clear fantastic hooks to base the cultures around. Attempts to do the opposite (generic elves suitable for any setting or homebrew) would create races no better than humans in masks.

SO this! You need a proper setting to differentiate the standard races. They have to have histories and relationships with each other. Once a setting has been established, even different cultures from the same race (even humans) are easily differentiated, because they already have narrative weight. Actual mechanical differences, of course, make this process even easier.
This is why, as has been said in other threads, D&D needs a new default setting that using modern assumptions. Much harder to complain when its built from the ground up.

 

[D1Tremere]

I think a lot of the discussion and debate melt away with specific framing of the intent behind Ancestry instead of race. For example, I think the intent is not to remove common tropes entirely but instead to differentiate player characters from those tropes. There is also a desire to move away from tropes that are tied to real world prejudice, such as we see with the Vistani.

I think of it like this. A hill giant may be dumb but incredibly strong compared to an elf when we look at stats, but that doesn't always have to be the case. Whenever you have a species that is more defined by sociocultural forces than biology you get a lot of variance. A hill giant may be medium instead of large due to magical intervention, or simply having an ancestor who was from a shorter lineage. They may be smart due to living in a group that favors reading and learning, but not physically gifted.

The question of how to keep everything from appearing as "humans in funny hats" is a framing problem. Any species driven by culture is highly fluid. That is why there are so many differences in appearance and talents within humans. In other words, they really are just humans. Or, humans are capable of great diversity. This only increases when you add more lineages into the mix, and add magic. One dead giveaway is that, in D&D, humans can reproduce (in theory) with any other "species". In fact, we have seen that pretty much all of the different "species" in D&D are capable of true reproduction with one another over the years. This would mean that they are not separate species at all, but different members of the same clade.

I know we can't really turn to human evolution in a fantasy game like this, and that magic makes it even more explainable, but that is precisely the point. A village of Halfliings in D&D can still be a village of typical halflings, or not as the DM sees fit. A player character can come from such a village, and be vastly different or not. It reminds me of the Adams family or the Munsters.

 

[Undrave]

The same applies to an extent for fantasy races in D&D, especially with the recent removal of racial ability score modifiers and cultural proficiencies in racial stats. If it looks and acts more or less like a human, it may as well be a human.

Can I just put this as an aside:

WHY does everything ALWAYS have to justify its existence with you people?! Justify this class, justify this race... Why can't something just be cool and fun mechanics with a nice name on top and a little fluff?! Why is everything always this whole song and dance?! It gets exhausting!

Anyway...

Elves and their relatives do not sleep. They trance. That means they probably don't have bedrooms and beds (trance chairs maybe?), and like the Minbari of Babylon 5, they probably see 'laying down' as a thing dead people do. They're probably creeped out by other folks sleeping and the concept of dreams must sound insane to them. They probably have a way different daily schedule compared to races that need lengthy sleep and coupled with darkvision might have activities that goes on 24/7 in different shifts. This also means you can walk into a Elven settlement at any time of the day or night and find random activities going on that you wouldn't associate with that specific time: day drinking revellers, kids playing in the street at night, classes etc. No proper bedroom and beds would probably also impact reproductive "activity" (Elven Kama Sutra?) compared to what we normally do.

This 24/7 culture, added to their long lives, might blend into a loose sense of scheduling where things happen when they need to happen, not because of a traditional schedule. They probably find the concept of specific meals for specific time of days to be quite funny. Pancakes were not invented by Elves. Add their mystical connection to nature and they probably always harvest at the perfect time without needing to really schedule it. I can see an Elf farmer getting up from a discussion at 1 AM and going "Well, time to harvest the apples!" simply because they 'heard' them be ready.

 

[tommybahama]

What do you guys think? Do you think D&D is up for changes to racial cultures like this?

It would be bad for the growth of the hobby. New players can understand a dwarf or an elf. They won't get the nuanced stuff you propose.

But if you think your ideas have merit then start publishing stuff. Do the groundwork to show it can work and that players will accept it. Earn your million dollar Kickstarter and change the hobby that way.

 

[Scribe]

I think the issue (or one of many) is that yes, this could be done, but there is a segment of the population that actually wants 'humans with funny heads'.

This was brought up in the other thread before we even got to page 2.

There are multiple levers that can be used, from mechanical/crunch, to lore/fluff, and yes Age, ASI, and special rules play a part, but people have to buy in.

 

[Remathilis]

WHY does everything ALWAYS have to justify its existence with you people?! Justify this class, justify this race... Why can't something just be cool and fun mechanics with a nice name on top and a little fluff?! Why is everything always this whole song and dance?! It gets exhausting!

ENworld in particular has a climate that rejects expansion and thrives on limitation. For some reason, "kitchen sink" is looked down on and "carefully curated" is highly praised as peak DMing. Thus, every option must justify it's inclusion into the walled garden or into the rubbish bin it goes.