D&D General The Importance of Page 33

[S'mon]

I guess I just...don't understand something very fundamental to other people's view of the game and of stories.

In the CoS thread, someone talked about how their run of CoS was aided by the players leaning in to the theme of despair and gothic/slavic horror by...not playing certain races. To me, the statement reads exactly as reasonable and comprehensible as, "my players helped by only eating spicy food on wednesdays." I just can't fathom how a tabaxi would every possibly change the tone of the story in literally any way.

Like, I ask players to keep their character personalities, alignments, goals, and attitudes toward cooperation with a group of trusted allies, within the themes and goals of the campaign, but...a tabaxi can have any personality, alignment, goals, or attitude toward cooperation and trust.

What am I missing? Is there some sort of emotional shorthand by association that everyone else here has for each race that I just don't have? Like, you see a tabaxi or a tortle or a grung or a gnoll or whatever and just, see something that is outside the text yet fully real for you, that I just don't see?

A six foot tall humanoid cat walks into a bar.

Does not the beginning of a tail of dramatic horror make.

I did not mean to write 'tail'.

You see how it goes.

 

[clearstream]

Nitpicking isn’t ever a meaningful reply.

Well, that was not my intent. You might re-read what you wrote. Like the Earth, the imagined world has one sentient race. They fly. Were there another sentient race, that would have all kinds of Implications. Equally if one just somehow arrived from elsewhere.

Or say that was the set up. A first-contact situation. I don't see that playing out the same if it's in fact the n-th contact.

Creating theme is about making choices. What is left out makes room for - casts into the foreground - what is kept in.

 

[Dire Bare]

I guess I just...don't understand something very fundamental to other people's view of the game and of stories.

In the CoS thread, someone talked about how their run of CoS was aided by the players leaning in to the theme of despair and gothic/slavic horror by...not playing certain races. To me, the statement reads exactly as reasonable and comprehensible as, "my players helped by only eating spicy food on wednesdays." I just can't fathom how a tabaxi would every possibly change the tone of the story in literally any way.

Like, I ask players to keep their character personalities, alignments, goals, and attitudes toward cooperation with a group of trusted allies, within the themes and goals of the campaign, but...a tabaxi can have any personality, alignment, goals, or attitude toward cooperation and trust.

What am I missing? Is there some sort of emotional shorthand by association that everyone else here has for each race that I just don't have? Like, you see a tabaxi or a tortle or a grung or a gnoll or whatever and just, see something that is outside the text yet fully real for you, that I just don't see?

I do think that some DM's, with less-developed world-building skills, create their worlds through the exclusion of certain races and/or classes. When DM's restrict player options and cannot clearly articulate to me why they are doing so . . . . I'm probably not going to play in that campaign for long. But certain genre themes and tones ARE supported by restricting options.

Gothic Horror is an established genre, and other posters have covered it well here, it is about humans facing the monstrous, often monstrous evil masquerading as human. Can you run a Gothic Horror Fantasy campaign with a Tabaxi character? Sure you can, but it does detract somewhat from the intended tone of the campaign. Heck, I think a more strict Gothic Horror campaign would restrict players to human only . . . no elves, dwarves, etc. Ravenloft gets away with it because it is really a blend of two genres, D&D style epic fantasy and Gothic Horror . . . and really, most folks don't play elves, dwarves, and halflings as truly non-human or alien characters . . . they aren't really presented that way in the game itself anyway.

And then there are story-centric campaigns, like the all elven historical campaign mentioned above. I can totally see that kind of game being fun! Or all all wizard campaign set in a School of Magic (like the institution, not collection of spells).

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Can you run a Gothic Horror Fantasy campaign with a Tabaxi character? Sure you can, but it does detract somewhat from the intended tone of the campaign.

This is the crux of what I don’t understand.

How? How does it detract from the intended tone of the campaign? Gothic Horror doesn’t, as far as I can tell, rely at all on the people who are familiar with eachother being human. But also, if we used a Earth based gothic horror story as an example, there is an American Cowboy in Dracula! Gothic horror doesn’t require no foreigners. It literally just requires that none of the protagonists are the same type of thing as what is trying to kill them, at most.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Well, that was not my intent. You might re-read what you wrote. Like the Earth, the imagined world has one sentient race. They fly. Were there another sentient race, that would have all kinds of Implications. Equally if one just somehow arrived from elsewhere.

Or say that was the set up. A first-contact situation. I don't see that playing out the same if it's in fact the n-th contact.

Creating theme is about making choices. What is left out makes room for - casts into the foreground - what is kept in.

Literally the only example I’ve ever heard that makes any sense at all is first contact.

The question remains. The question I asked in the post you replied to while completely ignoring, which is, to reword it, “how does there being one race establish the tone?” What difference does it actually make? How is “there is only one sentient race” a tone?”

 

[doctorbadwolf]

A six foot tall humanoid cat walks into a bar.

Does not the beginning of a tail of dramatic horror make.

I did not mean to write 'tail'.

You see how it goes.

That seems like a completely unsupportable claim, to me. How does the tabaxi change the themes and events of the story?

 

[Hussar]

Umm, since when has Mystara been a setting defined by exclusion of races. Practically every single Mystara supplement added races for the players to play. The only reason there aren't dragonborn and tieflings in Mystara is because they hadn't been written yet. It has nothing whatsoever to do with setting fidelity.

 

[Azuresun]

Thinking about it, my decision to include something unusual that a player wants would depend a lot on how they present it. If they're making a good-faith effort to explain why this unique creature is here, and also to tie it into the lore of the campaign world (for example, a warforged in Theros that's an intelligent automaton of bronze, like the legend of Talos), then I'd probably allow it. If they just drop it in in a way that says they didn't pay any attention to the campaign setting pitch, then no.

 

[cbwjm]

I don't know that Dark Sun is defined by its exclusions. It only excluded one race in 2E - gnomes. In 4E it had all the PHB races.

I don't think that it is just the excluded PC races that defined it, but also all of the races common to other settings that simply didn't exist. Orcs and goblins, common enemies in other settings, were non-existent in Dark Sun. It may not have been the main defining point of the setting but it was definitely one of them.

 

[cbwjm]

Thinking about it, my decision to include something unusual that a player wants would depend a lot on how they present it. If they're making a good-faith effort to explain why this unique creature is here, and also to tie it into the lore of the campaign world (for example, a warforged in Theros that's an intelligent automaton of bronze, like the legend of Talos), then I'd probably allow it. If they just drop it in in a way that says they didn't pay any attention to the campaign setting pitch, then no.

I know you're just using this as an example, but this is one of the brilliant things about Theros, any of the races in the setting can essentially be a warforged by choosing the anvilwrought supernatural gift and turning themselves into an automaton. The supernatural gifts are some of the coolest additions to the game and I'm thinking of wholesale converting a bunch of 4e themes/2e kits into something like them.