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What is the purpose of race/heritage?
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<blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 8688766" data-attributes="member: 4937"><p>Like any 'why does anything exist' question, I think this is going to have a very complicated answer.</p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>And I think the third thing, the one that is least interesting to me but which is often most interesting to many players, is the fact that mechanical diversity gives you build options where you can try to optimize and squeeze the most power out of your character, letting you win, letting you exert narrative force, etc. There are definitely players that love acquiring and displaying system mastery, and like there are players that enjoy the 'lonely fun' of chargen and just cranking out character designs as much as GMs like world building, rulesmithing, and adventure writing.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Celebrim, post: 8688766, member: 4937"] 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. 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. And I think the third thing, the one that is least interesting to me but which is often most interesting to many players, is the fact that mechanical diversity gives you build options where you can try to optimize and squeeze the most power out of your character, letting you win, letting you exert narrative force, etc. There are definitely players that love acquiring and displaying system mastery, and like there are players that enjoy the 'lonely fun' of chargen and just cranking out character designs as much as GMs like world building, rulesmithing, and adventure writing. [/QUOTE]
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