Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Set" data-source="post: 4154917" data-attributes="member: 41584">In Raymond Feists Midkemia books, there's one scene in the middle where some people are visiting the elven forest, which is all Lothlorien-lite and full of beautiful ageless graceful people living in trees, and a dark elf wanders into the forest, steps up to the elven queen and 'returns.'  They welcome him, and bang, he's an elf.  The whole 'dark' thing was just a cultural choice, and he chose to walk away from that and go back to being a plain old elf, and I kinda liked that.The Briton 'barbarian chief' learns to use iron weapons and hangs around with the Romans for awhile and becomes Romanized.  The kid of the explorers gets orphaned in the jungle and raised by apes and becomes Tarzan.  No racial adjustments necessary.Some elves are cranky and live underground, other elves are snooty and live in mountains, other elves are a bit standoffish and live in the deeper parts of the forest, and yet other elves have gotten so blase about living near humans that they are responsible for the couple thousand half-elves running around...Where the sub-races *really* become an issue, is when they assign cultural-specific traits as 'racial' traits.  Elves aren't *born* with a familiarity with bows and swords, and if it's an Aerenal Elf from Eberron, it might be scimitars, and if it's a deep woods elf who isn't big on the metalworking, it might be spears and bows, etc, etc.  Dwarves aren't *born* hating goblinoids, and a city-dwelling dwarf, raised by merchant parents in a human city, might have never *seen* a goblinoid, let alone spent years studying how to best bonk them with a warhammer.All of these cultural specific things, IMO, should not be racial traits, but *options,* that could be swapped out.  Sort of like a free 'Regional Feat,' a la the Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting, with a few specific variants.  'Jungle Dwarves' from Chult might not know bupkiss about stonecunning or craft (metalworking), but might have other 'racial' familiarities, such as with Survival or Climb or Knowledge (nature).It would ultimately be as easy as adding a single sentence to the PHB saying 'asterisked racial traits are not inborn, but may vary with region, culture, etc.' and then asterisking certain 'racial' abilities.  The PHB wouldn't have to list these sorts of optional variants, that's a setting-specific thing, and could be detailed in whatever setting books come out.</blockquote>

Verification