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<blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 5449909" data-attributes="member: 3887">I meant to ask: why does the story get lost because of the PC's race/species?I can understand the story getting lost if a particular PC has an outsize, scene-stealing personality, or if their race confers game balancing-upsetting abilities (mechanical scene-stealing). But how does race/species alone detract from the game narrative? How does race/species actually impact the campaign?Does your character spend a lot of time thinking about the racial makeup of the party? &quot;Grod the Goliath is an okay adventuring companion... but what if he married my sister? What if they had kids??! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile&nbsp; &nbsp; :)"&nbsp; data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />I was thinking about this last night playing my new addiction: the PS3 version of Mass Effect 2. It has no shortage of weird alien characters with extraordinarily melodramatic --ie special-- background stories, which you have to deal with personally if you want to unlock their best abilities.But Mass Effect tells a great story. In part because, for all their weird alien melodrama, the characters are also immediately recognizable types, or subversion of types, and their stories are, at their core, good human drama. Which is exactly the way I've seen oddball PCs play out in D&amp;D campaigns. A PC might have a tail, live to be 1,000, or lay eggs, but in the end they're just people, which the same potential for interesting stories to be told involving them.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Mallus, post: 5449909, member: 3887"] I meant to ask: why does the story get lost because of the PC's race/species? I can understand the story getting lost if a particular PC has an outsize, scene-stealing personality, or if their race confers game balancing-upsetting abilities (mechanical scene-stealing). But how does race/species alone detract from the game narrative? How does race/species actually impact the campaign? Does your character spend a lot of time thinking about the racial makeup of the party? "Grod the Goliath is an okay adventuring companion... but what if he married my sister? What if they had [i]kids[/i]??! :) I was thinking about this last night playing my new addiction: the PS3 version of Mass Effect 2. It has no shortage of weird alien characters with extraordinarily melodramatic --ie special-- background stories, which you have to deal with personally if you want to unlock their best abilities. But Mass Effect tells a great story. In part because, for all their weird alien melodrama, the characters are also immediately recognizable types, or subversion of types, and their stories are, at their core, good human drama. Which is exactly the way I've seen oddball PCs play out in D&D campaigns. A PC might have a tail, live to be 1,000, or lay eggs, but in the end they're just people, which the same potential for interesting stories to be told involving them. [/QUOTE]

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