Should races have mechanical effects?

[Minigiant]

Their aren't enough mechanics for races. Races should carry a lot of genetic baggage. Races should have a lot of physical and mental mechanics attached to it. Not so much cultural though.

Races control major aspects of a character: size, base speed, base attributes, resistances. A fighter is skilled with weapons and armor but a dwarf fighter doesn't fall down nor gets poisoned. But they are slow and aren't outrunning anyone. Elf fighters don't get charmed and have good senses so they can support the party in ambushes and scouting missions. Halfling fighters are small and rarely get scared so might take an AC based strategy over a damage based one. Dragonborn fighters aren't afraid of swarms of mooks because of their breath weapon.

 

[Rampant]

But then you have to make a caster, a healer, a fighter, and a skill monkey for every race you want to be playable... please stop giving me ideas, i don't have time for my old projects as it is.

On a more practical note, yes there needs to be a mechanical aspect to races otherwise it's not a character creation decision. It becomes just another thing like alignment, or deity for non-divinve classes, that most players ignore especially the ones that you are complaining about, I.e. those most likely to treat race as little more than a number.

The secret to getting rollplayers to roleplay isn't to reduce the mechanical impact of something like race, but to increase it. In 3e for instance most players I know played neutral because it meant they didn't need to worry about all the nastiness of the various alignment spells.

That is until There started being actual benefits to playing good or evil characters (BoVD/BoED), then people in my groups actually considered their alignments and played them in order to keep their cool abilities.

It's the same with races, the players won't bother if there isn't a mechanical advantage, and so the PCs they create won't even make token nods to racial identity, and the GM has lost a tool for making them think about their character's identity and place in the gameworld. Sure it's not one hundred percent effective, but it's better than nothing, which is essentially the suggestion here.

 

[LurkAway]

As mentioned or hinted at in the other thread, I'd first like to see races deconstructed as a synergy of:

1. Non-human morphology/genetics
2. Cultural/environmental traits

So a typical mountain dwarf has genetic hardiness and a culture of stonework. An orphaned dwarf growing up on a human farm will only have the genetic stamina (but maybe a propensity for blacksmithing) . A human raised by mountain dwarves would have only human endurance and could learn dwarven stonework (but may find it difficult to keep pace with the hardy dwarven craftsmen).

So then the racial mechanic rules are a synergy of racial genetics/morphology + racial culture, and the latter can somehow be teased out for customization/modular purposes.

I'm not insisting that the rules would need to model all those corner cases, but I think it would help to try a disciplinary approach and taking a critical eye at what it means to be non-human.

And, please no racial aspects that seem forced or contrived, as if they only exist to fill in a slot that needs filling.

 

[SKyOdin]

I for one would like to see races other than funny-looking humans. The list of possible race variation is limited enough as is. Completely dropping mechanical variation would make every race essentially human, killing any possibility of more interesting races.

I think the 4E approach of increasing the power and mechanical variation of race is a much better way to go. In 4E, we can play fire-breathing Dragonborn and Eladrin that can teleport, which makes the races much more interesting.

If you take the mechanical distinctiveness of race away would mean taking all of the flavor of the races away as a whole, all in the name of clamping down of some fringe min-maxing. It just doesn't seem worth it.

 

[Nivenus]

As mentioned or hinted at in the other thread, I'd first like to see races deconstructed as a synergy of:

1. Non-human morphology/genetics
2. Cultural/environmental traits

So a typical mountain dwarf has genetic hardiness and a culture of stonework. An orphaned dwarf growing up on a human farm will only have the genetic stamina (but maybe a propensity for blacksmithing) . A human raised by mountain dwarves would have only human endurance and could learn dwarven stonework (but may find it difficult to keep pace with the hardy dwarven craftsmen).

So then the racial mechanic rules are a synergy of racial genetics/morphology + racial culture, and the latter can somehow be teased out for customization/modular purposes.

That sounds reasonable to me (and in fact, what I've wanted to see for awhile). The physiological aspects of a race would serve as the base modifiers of the race, with the cultural ones being optional add-ons through feats, prestige classes, whatever later on.

One thing that we'd ideally see in this, I think, is the removal of skill bonuses or preferred classes from a race's base features. So elves wouldn't get a Nature skill bonus and dwarves wouldn't automatically be better at dungeoneering. Instead, those would be characters of various elven and dwarven cultures.

Actually, on the whole, I wouldn't mind seeing some kind of "origin" background as an option for player creation, which could probably incorporate a lot of what you're talking about for cultural characteristics of a race. Think origins in Dragon Age, although probably without the part of actually playing through a prologue to the campaign (since it would focus only on one player). In theory, you could be a wild elf, a high elf, or one who lives predominantly among humans, for example.

And, please no racial aspects that seem forced or contrived, as if they only exist to fill in a slot that needs filling.

While this would be nice, it's kind of hard to avoid if races do have a mechanical impact, since players will want them to be balanced. Still, I agree that features should predominantly make sense and exist because the lore dictates they do, rather than because "oh, halflings need a special racial power so let's do X."

 

[Ainamacar]

I'd prefer if the races only covered the most fundamental inherent attributes for that type of creature. Dwarves are stout and have darkvision, halflings are nimble and small, etc. Everything that could be chalked up to culture or other forms of nurture (including advancements of fundamental abilities) I'd put into themes/backgrounds/subclasses/whatever. Race will thus have a muted effect for those who aren't interested, but could have one closer to background/multiclassing for those who are, and for anyone who wants to inhabit an archetype an effect equivalent to what we would normally consider a full class.

This separation also reduces the headaches associated with "raised by <race>" scenarios. An elf raised in the dwarven community might choose "Dwarf" as a background, gain some abilities like stonecunning, but be unable to take some "Stand your ground" ability because that requires the inherent dwarven stoutness.

 

[TwinBahamut]

I am totally fine with removing the mechanical separation between humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, and the various other races that are basically just re-skinned humans in the first place. The differences between them are mostly cosmetic anyways.

However, I don't want the choice of race to stop meaning something. I just want the trivial differences between humans, elves, and dwarves to stop defining it. If anything, i want the choice between races to matter more than it already does.

I want all kinds of wild and crazy racial options to be available in the game. I want 10' tall minotaurs, intelligent animals, shapeshifting werecreatures, flying winged humanoids, angels, demons, dragons, trolls, and giants to all be viable options. I want racial choices to open up the game for people, rather than restrict them to boring Tolkien-esque fantasy tropes.

 

[mmadsen]

What if 5E offers races, but no mechanical impact of race?

By this, I mean that choosing a race would be strictly a roleplaying decision. No stat modifiers, no skill bonuses, no racial bonuses to hitting stuff with certain weapons.

This is an interesting question, because almost everyone agrees that the various races should differ, but making each race into an equally "priced" portfolio of powers turns the choice of race into a question with a "right" answer.

I can imagine taking away the racial ability bonuses and penalties and replacing them with strong suggestions of which abilities should be high and low for each race. Other racial abilities seem rather closely tied to race though.

 

[Mark CMG]

Should races have mechanical effects?

I think if there are going to be a variety of playable sentient species in a roleplaying game, they should be significantly different from the baseline, humans if that is the case.

 

[Belphanior]

Races have had mechanical effects since about forever. Either because they were their entire own class, or because they give infravision, can't be Raised, give different thief ability %-adjustments, and so on.

I see no reason to change that.

I do see reasons to expand it though. Races give a lot straight out of the gate but matter less and less as the levels go by. I'd like to see that changed, maybe some sort of system along the lines of automatically gaining racial bonus feats every now and then. Just like a human wizard and a human thief feel different in play, so should a human thief and a halfling thief feel different, IMHO.