D&D General The Importance of Page 33

[Rdm]

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[The Glen]

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.

Mystara was quite exclusive of a lot of races because it had its start in BECMI rather than AD&D. Since orcs and other humanoids were descended from beastmen, they couldn't interbreed with humans or demihumans, so no half-orcs. Interbreeding in-game was already quite difficult and according to the books, with half races being handled differently, thus no half-elves. Mystara replaced a lot of creatures that were available in Realms or Greyhawk with their own. It has 5 reptilian humanoid races already, Dragonborn are superfluous. Tieflings would only be available as extraplanar since interbreeding requires a divine act and the Immortals keep out outer planar creatures. It might have a lot of playable races from the crucibles, but they were already established races.

 

[S'mon]

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

It's a cat.

 

[Neonchameleon]

Interesting line of thought. So in our hypothetical no-spell-casters campaign, I can reskin my wizard character as a martial and use my spells mechanically as written?

Here's my simple question: WTF are you doing using (non-4e) D&D for a no-casters campaign. About 40% of every single non-4e PHB is spells. About two thirds of classes are casters.

On the other hand I have played a bard as a pure charlatan who didn't actually have any spells, but was capable of coincidental trickery. This isn't "I reskinned fireball" but "I was very careful and detailed in the spells I picked".

I do not think that this is a question of a map filled to the maximum but rather a question of continuity. Refusing to add more races can be justified in many ways, the gods are not the least of them. Especially in a world with only one pantheon. The gods are perfectly able and willing to prevent planar travel for a large size population or a single person if it suits their fancy.

If you can use gods as an excuse to not allow races then you can certainly use them as an excuse to allow races. Which means that the continuity argument vanishes in a puff of smoke.

I suspect that a very large part of this problem is that all of the "official" settings for the past twenty years have been fantasy kitchen sinks, with even the more Arthurian/Tolkiensque Dragonlance and the Gothic Ravenloft being outsourced to third-parties. As much as I bitch about Dragonborn and Tieflings in Dark Sun-- and the sidebar about Divine classes-- it seems like there's a lot less pressure to turn a strongly thematic setting into a kitchen sink than there is to make the existing kitchen sinks broader.

But... my problem here is the same as my problem with the Radiant Triangle in Spelljammer: when a setting already has so little identity, those minor exclusions are the only thing that differentiates one from another, the only things those settings have left. When you drink out of the kitchen sink, the only flavor you taste is dishwater; mixing the dishwater out of a dozen different kitchen sinks isn't going to make it taste better.

Of course, it's also those little exclusions and those little incompatibilities that made AD&D's classic campaign settings exclusive, and led to their ultimate commercial failure. I can understand WotC's desire to avoid making those same mistakes all over again... but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

And my problem with this argument is that D&D races are in general not that flavourful. They are light stereotypes that provide a little background colour - and most fantasy worlds are too homogenous anyway because there are only a few minds working on them. Humans of any culture are far more diverse than just about any fantasy setting even with the range of fantasy races.

The only race I can think of that has a serious impact on the themes of the setting for good or ill is the Warforged of Eberron. The Last War lasted about 100 years and ended only a couple of years ago. But Warforged are new; the oldest playable warforged types are 1d12 years old for the simplest types (fighters and barbarians) to 1d4 years old for the most complex (wizards, artificers). Also from memory there was a ban on new warforged two years ago -so roll a 1 and you're illegal.

Does mass production of warforged in little more than the past decade say a lot about Eberron on its own? Definitely. And it does so in ways that the normal kitchen sink melange of elves (of all types), dwarves, orcs, gnomes, halflings, etc. don't.

But does this mean that I can't play a warforged in another setting? Of course not. A warforged is essentially an android made via magic. I've played a warforged made centuries ago by a mad wizard and trapped for most of that time. Did it disrupt the setting much? No. Mad wizards are a thing and adventurers are weird. There may have been other warforged in the setting but I'm not aware of any.

And likewise small communities and far away communities disrupt very few settings and add a tiny amount of spice. You don't get a stronger setting by excluding things - you get one by picking things to focus on.

 

[Neonchameleon]

It's a cat.

Shouldn't have left the plot on the edge of the table?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It's a cat.

I figure it oughta be pretty obvious that if “it’s a cat” was enough of an explanation, I wouldn’t have needed to ask the question.

If you don’t want actually articulate whatever it is, that’s all well and good, but if the intent was to make clear that which I have indicated is unclear, that ain’t gonna do it.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Personally, I played in a great horror campaign where we played monsters who were stuck in the realm of monsters who were completely alien to us. It was tense and terrifying. You don't need to play all humans to do horror.

You just need to clearly establish an Other that is Unknown. We constantly had things coming at us from unexpected directions, like the time my character was possessed by a hostile spirit while we were trying to rest in a broken down shack. We were already beaten and broken and then that happened and we were literally at our wits end. Hearts hammering in our chests and ready to tear our hair out.

Frankly, even if the Tabaxi is played for comic relief (which it doesn't have to be), it will only highlight the horror when Strahd plays cat-and-mouse with it (and the cat is the mouse).

 

[Dire Bare]

Personally, I played in a great horror campaign where we played monsters who were stuck in the realm of monsters who were completely alien to us. It was tense and terrifying. You don't need to play all humans to do horror.

You just need to clearly establish an Other that is Unknown. We constantly had things coming at us from unexpected directions, like the time my character was possessed by a hostile spirit while we were trying to rest in a broken down shack. We were already beaten and broken and then that happened and we were literally at our wits end. Hearts hammering in our chests and ready to tear our hair out.

Frankly, even if the Tabaxi is played for comic relief (which it doesn't have to be), it will only highlight the horror when Strahd plays cat-and-mouse with it (and the cat is the mouse).

Gothic horror, which Ravenloft mixes with epic fantasy D&D style, is a more specific genre than just horror.

Genre is something that, if you want, you can bend. So, you want to run a Ravenloft campaign strong in the gothic horror genre . . . but want to allow a PC to play a tabaxi? It can work, but it does stretch the genre. However, nothing wrong with trying to maintain a tight genre feel, as long as you can convince your players to go along with it.

 

[Dire Bare]

Mystara was quite exclusive of a lot of races because it had its start in BECMI rather than AD&D. Since orcs and other humanoids were descended from beastmen, they couldn't interbreed with humans or demihumans, so no half-orcs. Interbreeding in-game was already quite difficult and according to the books, with half races being handled differently, thus no half-elves. Mystara replaced a lot of creatures that were available in Realms or Greyhawk with their own. It has 5 reptilian humanoid races already, Dragonborn are superfluous. Tieflings would only be available as extraplanar since interbreeding requires a divine act and the Immortals keep out outer planar creatures. It might have a lot of playable races from the crucibles, but they were already established races.

Mystara is interesting because it used the BECMI D&D ruleset that co-existed with AD&D . . . two similar-but-different rulesets that effectively did the same thing. I'm still a bit salty over that decades later. A lot of what makes Mystara "unique" comes from the BECMI rules, particularly race-as-class. The designers at one point decided that Mystara didn't have half-elves, mostly because that would have required a new race-class to be designed. Easier to say, "Nope, not in this setting". Problem was, the setting wasn't different enough from other D&D settings for that moratorium to make sense from a story perspective. And it was a design choice they later broke with the Yavi, a dark-skinned half-elven race inhabiting the Serpent Peninsula . . . although I don't recall any rules created for player options.

If you plan on running a Mystara campaign running the BECMI rules, then sticking with the existing race/class list makes sense . . . as again, designing a half-elf class would be a pain. But if you plan on running a Mystara campaign using the 5E rules . . . then it makes no sense to me to restrict half-elves. Or orcs, tieflings, dragonborn, etc. Mystara had a restricted list of races back in the day, sure, but it wasn't to maintain a genre theme or tone, it was simply an artifact of the rules. And they kept adding to that list of races to the point where Mystara has one of the most diverse arrays of sentient creatures in all of the D&D multiverse, which is why some of us feel adding a few more to the mix just doesn't break the tone and feel of a Mystara campaign.

 

[The Mirrorball Man]

I figure it oughta be pretty obvious that if “it’s a cat” was enough of an explanation, I wouldn’t have needed to ask the question.

If you don’t want actually articulate whatever it is, that’s all well and good, but if the intent was to make clear that which I have indicated is unclear, that ain’t gonna do it.

There's an inherent silliness in talking animals. I guess we all perceive the limit in a different way, but most people would agree that if one of the main characters of "Dracula" were a Carebear or Donald Duck, it would change the tone of the novel quite significantly. Some people have the same reaction when it comes to Tabaxi or other exotic D&D species. And yes, the protagonists of a story play an important part in setting the tone. If the main characters of Kafka's "The Metamorphosis" were a Halfling to begin with, his eventual transformation would feel less dramatic.