NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="doctorbadwolf" data-source="post: 8386102" data-attributes="member: 6704184">Maybe,  but I think there really is a disagreement at the core of this that genuinely matters.If mostly human is fine, then we are already there. Halflings aren't prone to greed, or hubris, but are prone to complacency and a certain smugness about their way of life. Cool. We can explore how being small impacts their material culture, how curiosity and very little fear means they don't tend to have cultural/social norms centered on fear of outsiders or on fear of embarrassment, etc. We can talk about what effect being a little more lucky, in the sense that the worst possible outcome happens to them meaningfully less often, impacts social norms around taking risks. We can and should discuss and write about the sort of cultural heroes that might arise in halfling societies. Making them prone to legally mandating happiness, or being especially afraid of giants, or the like, or making them lack the capacity to understand some basic aspect of human interaction to push roleplay toward something different from a human makes them into a new thing, and removes the thing that used to have the name Halfling. This is why I say that your stance is more exclusionary than my stance, because my stance explicitly validates the preference for races that are alien, and yours says "that's not good enough, you should have to homebrew in order to have any trace of your preference validated at all". Do you really not see the problem with that?It very much is. If your position was, "make the races that are clearly not human or biologically very different from human feel less human", I'd be all for it. If it was simply, "Lets brew up some cultural touchstones shared by many cultures made up of a given race that are based on their mechanics." I'd likewise be all for that. Hell, I'm all for dropping the thing we will never agree on and just focusing on those two endeavors, if you'd like.The universality is the entirety of the objection. If no compromise is possible on that, there is no path forward. I would like to understand why you have a problem with there being races in the game that don't match your preferences, though? For instance, I think the game would be meaningfully better if the Cleric was removed and the Monk was expanded to cover things like the 4e Invoker and Avenger and allowed to wear armor like the Barbarian, and if the Fighter was replaced by at least 2 classes with literally any level of actual story in the base class. But like...a bunch of people love those two classes, and prefer them how they are, so, even if I got rich enough to buy hasbro and become the boss of DnD, I wouldn't force those two classes out of the game. I'd just work to design the monk to cover a  bit more ground, and try out some revisions of the fighter that optionally add more spice to the base class. But seriously, the cleric...ugh. It's fine, I think we probably would be best to just drop the whole "universal vs not universal" argument. It's not like either of us will ever be the boss of dnd.If you really wanna know PM me, I don't think rehashing it will help us avoid umbran's further disapproval.This is the crux of what I am astonished by. Having plenty of races with default lore that matches your preference isn't good enough, it has to be all of them. Why?Okay, so, we can do that without removing human-like halflings and dwarves from the game, or making large swathes of the player base homebrew in order to play the way they prefer. They're publishing new settings again, and they listen to feedback on social media. We can advocate for this approach in new settings.I never thought otherwise. I certainly don't think we need to stop interacting in order to untangle our horns, to borrow umbran's analogy. I'm never going to support reinventing things that people love the way they are, in their default presentation, but I'm all for variants in supplimentals, and with simply doing more with all of DnD's playable folk.</blockquote>

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