D&D General What is the purpose of race/heritage?

[Celebrim]

Frankly?

It would make more sense if the heritage determined what class status or geographical location or circumstances the person finds themselves in.

But biologically? I don't think it should matter.

Fundamentally no difference between a chimpanzee, a turtle and a banana?

 

[Reynard]

Fundamentally no difference between a chimpanzee, a turtle and a banana?

Great, now I have to allow the chimurtana...

 

[Charlaquin]

The half-orc and halfling threads -- particularly some specific responses in those threads -- have me thinking about what the purpose of having a menageries of PC races or heritages is in the game. Why 3 (elf, dwarf, halfling) or 6 (elf, dwarf, halfling, half-elf, half-orc, gnome) or 30 (I think that's the current number, if you include MotM)?

Is it having vibrant diversity among the player characters? Is it to have a diverse list of special abilities available to the players? Is it for story/fiction? Or is it for the "game stuff"? And how do those answers relate to the proliferation of races (that every edition has seen, btw)?

All of the above, though I think it’s more about the fantasy of being some sort of magical creature than about the special powers and game mechanics. I would bet that even if race had no mechanical impact whatsoever, you’d still get tons of players wanting to play an elf, or a goblin, or a cat-person, or whatever.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I think the primary value is that people like having 'choose one from column A, one from column B and order column C from most- to least- preferable' selection schema; and that is true for mechanical reasons, story/theme reasons, and sometimes even no reason at all. D&D 5e's backgrounds are a good example-- they added a third main 'pick one' slot alongside race and class, and people have glommed onto it pretty well (perhaps not as thoroughly as selections which have greater impact on either mechanics or in the personality of the character you play, and that makes sense).

I have to wonder how much these reasons are going to change with recent (and presumably future) changes to the way 5E handles races.

With floating ASIs and Custom Lineage, there is rarely a mechanical benefit to picking any race over CL. WotC also seems to be de-emphasizing races as cultures which really undercuts the idea of playing a race for lore/ RP reasons. There are really no stories, personalities or viewpoints that fit race x better than any other race in the game. Races may essentially become just a cosmetic choice.

I think this gets overblown by both advocates and detractors of the decision. They have deemphasized how much they are going to publish races as having monolithic cultures and personalities. That's it. People are still going to play Tolkieny haflings and warcrafty orcs and haughty or woodsy of cookie-baking/nordic toy-making elves as personal preference permits and goodness if reddit art is any indication then WotC already doesn't get a say in how people interpret tieflings.

Like any 'why does anything exist' question, I think this is going to have a very complicated answer.
Tolkien is a big part of this. While lots of fantasy had non-human characters they were rarely protagonists in their own right. This is one of those as old as dirt tropes that probably goes back to Greek myth with its nymphs, satyrs, centaurs, cyclops and harpies. Yes, you did have non-human races around, but they were supporting characters and monsters in the stories of the heroes. Tolkien is the one that really popularized fantasy beings as separate but equal races to man, worthy of having their own protagonists and stories told. And so between Tolkien, all the Tolkien imitators, and European myth whether Greek or Germanic, fantasy has ended up with the expectation of a lot of fantastic races living in enchanted corners of the world. So D&D has races to draw on that well of mythic story telling, and in turn D&D helped promote the resulting archetypes into stock fantasy figures of a shared consensus fantasy common to all of gaming and for a while most fantasy literature.

Agreed. Also, while I bet if Tolkien had not been as big a deal and Gary could have made his humanocentric pulp/myth/S&S-themed version of D&D, people would still have pretty quickly started asking, 'so, can I play as one of these supporting cast centaurs?' and the like.

I think the second thing to consider is just how limited the character building options in early D&D actually were. Pretty much the game started with everyone being a man-of-arms and grew from that as players began to show a desire to diversify, differentiate, and fulfill new roles. As class roles began to fill out, race became a really important lever to pull if you wanted to differentiate your character from other PCs. It's this nicely visible short cut to getting characterization and differentiating your fighter from your neighbor's fighter. Race, class, and alignment became the very early ways to tie mechanical chargen to to character. How do I roleplay this character? Well, he's a lawful neutral, elven, magic-user. That's a real starting point, and it's likely to give you a character that is different than any other character in the party without having to go deep into method acting and developing quirks, characteristic patterns of speech, backstory, and otherwise doing a lot of heavy lifting that was often tangential to the player's primary aesthetics of play.

It certainly helped move the game from a roguelike treasure hunt. "My fighter level 4 has boots of flying, while yours has a sword which shoots fire 3/day" works when the treasure and advancement are the point. Once you are playing a full-fledged character, you need some kind of hooks to hang things on. Especially relatively neutral things, such that everyone doesn't always choose option #3. As much as race has had mechanical difference in most editions, each edition has places where the optimal choice isn't obvious (ex: in AD&D, single class fighters in games where you weren't going to hit the level limit anyways could pick elves for better dex but worse con, dwarves for better magic and poison saves but negatives to speed and using magic items, humans to avoid the lows/highs of other choices, and so on), and that's where I've tended to see a lot of picking a different race each time.

 

[Charlaquin]

I think the primary value is that people like having 'choose one from column A, one from column B and order column C from most- to least- preferable' selection schema; and that is true for mechanical reasons, story/theme reasons, and sometimes even no reason at all. D&D 5e's backgrounds are a good example-- they added a third main 'pick one' slot alongside race and class, and people have glommed onto it pretty well (perhaps not as thoroughly as selections which have greater impact on either mechanics or in the personality of the character you play, and that makes sense).

Very true. And backgrounds were incredibly popular as a concept when they were introduced during the open playtest.

 

[CreamCloud0]

I do personally wish that species/lineage and backgrounds were a slightly bigger slice of the character creation pie, compared to class they’re very much an afterthought, but they do serve to help anchor your character in the world, with an established culture, natural strengths and weaknesses, allies and enemies, yes there’s also the mechanical components which are more important to some people than others

 

[Crimson Longinus]

This is an excellent question, and I've been saying for a while that WotC designers should seriously ask themselves this.

The current direction seems to be having bazillion vaguely defined species with massive thematic overlap, with handful of ribbony rules which may or may not actually properly reflect the fiction.

I would actually want species to be more significant chunk of character customisation. We don't need that many of them, but they should actually matter. Give each a solid thematic identity, avoid overlap, and have meaty rules that actually mean something. I don't want a three feet tall humanoid, an eight feet tall humanoid, a robot and a lizard person all play pretty much the same.

But this is basically the opposite of the current direction. I think with the current paradigm it would be more honest and coherent to just remove the species as mechanical concept. Just have a list of "origin traits" and let players choose a set number of them and fluff it however they want.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

The half-orc and halfling threads -- particularly some specific responses in those threads -- have me thinking about what the purpose of having a menageries of PC races or heritages is in the game. Why 3 (elf, dwarf, halfling) or 6 (elf, dwarf, halfling, half-elf, half-orc, gnome) or 30 (I think that's the current number, if you include MotM)?

Is it having vibrant diversity among the player characters? Is it to have a diverse list of special abilities available to the players? Is it for story/fiction? Or is it for the "game stuff"? And how do those answers relate to the proliferation of races (that every edition has seen, btw)?

In my experience as a GM, it is (unsurprisingly) a mix of reasons. Not just either or, but sometimes both. I know some "power gamers" that pick a race based on the mechanical benefits, but then use that mechanical choice to create a compelling character with a cool personal story.

What do you think? Why do you like -- or not -- a variety of choices?

NOTE: I am not really talking about "culture" in this post, though some people will consider culture and race/heritage interchangeable. I think that is better left to a different discussion, so as not to muddy the waters.

There is a part of me that would want the 'make your own race' thing to be more a thing...

 

[payn]

There is a part of me that would want the 'make your own race' thing to be more a thing...

Paizo sort of did this in PF1. They were able to take mechanical parts and assign point values to them. GM sets the point value and you build to it.

 

[Corinnguard]

Pathfinder 1st edition made use of Alternate Racial Traits. If there was a trait you didn't like your character having for a number of reasons, you could swap it out for a trait of equal value.