Style vs System - Scarred Lands

[Andor]

I recently read through the Burok Torm book and was very impressed. I expected to come out of it wanting to play a dwarf, but instead I find all my sympathies lying with their enemies the Dark elves of Dier Drendal. I'd love to play one of these guys, the reasons that they are what they are very cool, and completely not their fault. And in theory their use of tattoo magic is their edge against the dwarven mastery of rune magic. Stylistically this seems very cool, but in system it makes a good deal less sense.

Here the problem is two fold. First Tattoo magics big advantage for the individual (It can't be stolen.) is an equally sized drawback for the society you come from, IE your Tattoos can't be passed on when you fall. Therefore over the long term the dwarves will tend to accumulate magic while the elves are bleeding it off person by person.

Secondly, Dark elves are perhaps the least suited race in the scarred lands to use Tattoo magic. There are two important stats with Tattoo magic. First and by far the most important is Con, and the dark elves have a con penalty. According to the book almost all elves have a magic tattoo which seems off when you consider that an elf needs a rolled 14 to even be allowed a single tattoo, and that is what, the 35th percentile? So 65 percent of all elves can't possibly have a magic tattoo. Those that can have tattoo must have fewer and weaker tattoos than members of just about any other race, especially dwarves! The second important stat for tattoos is Wis, the only mental stat the elves don't get a bonus to.

So the question remains, Why do the elves specialize in a form of magic they suck at?

And compounding this is the Tattooed adept prestige class.
Tattoos are magic items, they can't be stolen, but they all have some kind of debilitating side effect, and must be paid for just like any magic item. Furthermore they must be bought and cannot be found or stolen. So here we have a prestige class that specializes in using a class of magic items. They have some minor benefits from their tattoos, but they don't get them for free and they can't make them themselves.

So this is essentially a like a class that specializes in using wondrous items, but has no built in way to aquire them. In exchange for the ability to have a few more of these tattoos the Tattooed adept (Described as being a martial spellcaster) gets 1/2 spellcasting progression (Every odd level) and for some reason a BAB prgression that is worse than a wizard.

And these characters are supposed to be able to go toe to toe with a Dwarven runecaster, a class with full spellcasting progression and abilities that allow them to hang spells and cast multiple hung spells in the same round as well using them for defense or burning off spells for healing.

So in the story and flavor text it all sounds incredibly cool, but as soon as you look at the meat and bones of how the system works, the dark elves turn out to be a paper tiger. It's a pet peeve of mine when game designers set up a scenario that just doesn't work within the limits of the game system.

So how does everybody else feels about this, Would you rather see game companies produce cool stories that require house rules to prop them up, or would you rather see things flow from the inherent logic of the world the rules portray?

-Andor

 

[KidCthulhu]

Substance drives style. Just as an artist needs to understand technique or a skater needs to master the basics, style without substance shows. That said, I have generally felt that the Scarred Lands materials has a lot of substance. It's a well designed world, with lots of adventure hooks.

I haven't read the book you refer to, and I hope that the setting isn't going to degrade into wacky, bad Forgotten Realm-y problems. That monstrosity is my prime example of style driving substance. Yuck.

That said, the elves of the Scarred Lands have a very tragic history, and if you view their low con as part of that history of disease and suffering, taking a further con loss to master a powerful magic isn't so strange.

 

[Andor]

That said, the elves of the Scarred Lands have a very tragic history, and if you view their low con as part of that history of disease and suffering, taking a further con loss to master a powerful magic isn't so strange.

Actually that would be cool. Unfortunately in this case it's more a matter of their low con making them inherently bad at the form of magic they choose to specialize in.

 

[jollyninja]

when looked at from the point of view of an outsider, tradition often makes no sense. look at the use of tatoo magic in the same light that you would the running of the bulls. it makes no sense but people do it because it has allways been done, combine that with the disease filled sickly past and you have yourself a long standing tradition of the elves. as for all of them having at least one when only 35% of them can technically have one. that's poor game design and lack of continuity based readings. what you could do is use the elf in the MM that does not have the con- as your scarred lands dark elf as far as stat modifiers go, leaving the rest of the dark elf as is (magical abilities ect). it's a crappy fix but a fix none the less.

 

[Nightfall]

Well even though I'm no expert on dark elves nor on Burok Torn, I do think the reason that the authors wanted this was simple. In order to make dark elves different but at the same time as powerful the drow of other worlds, they changed their specialization to fit more with a cultural heritage than just make them evil spell powered elves.

As for why the Con loss, it may just reflect their own deity's encounter with Chern, as some one mentioned. The reason for specialization may be the same, as Chern was know to destroy things with his wasting touch, even magic items. So perhaps they felt that making a living weapon was FAR more effective than a non living one. (Even though I'm sure the Nathalites are becoming more prominant)

Just my opinions and thoughts on this.

 

[Andor]

Oh I agree, stylistically it's very cool. My problem with it is that the game mechanics make it seem like someone is trying to write a game supplement describing the oompa-loompas as a race of professional basketball players.

This is especially dumb as Swords and Sorcery designed both the tattoo magic and the dark elves. The dark elves of Dier Drendal are not the same as drow, if they wanted to have them specialize in tattoo magic why not give the a str penalty instead on con? Why not a footnote about how the form of tattoo magic the elves use is driven by will instead of con? Sure I can house rule either one of those. If I run a scarred lands game I probably will.

My point is that if you are going to put a cool story line into a product, something that S&SS excels at, you should have the mechanics back up the story.

I don't mean to imply S&SS did a bad job, so far I've been uniformly impressed by all the scarred lands stuff. Even within this same book the dwarves make perfect sense both within the world, and as portrayed in the rules. That's why the dark elves stand out as especially jarring.

And as I say, it's a pet peeve of mine to see things like this. I was just curious to see if I was the only one.