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General Tabletop Discussion
*Dungeons & Dragons
what would a good orc culture be like?
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<blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8768453" data-attributes="member: 6790260"><p>I mean, I usually don't give mechanics to culture, so there's no combinatorics explosion...but even if you do, it's not like it's that big a deal. Level Up did it and people seem quite happy with that, having explicitly said that that shift (to a separated physiology and culture model, as opposed to a package deal where physiology and culture are always combined.)</p><p></p><p>For example, let's say culture gives you one skill proficiency (usually mental), a language, a cultural feature of some kind and a list of options for your starting feat (mostly stuff you could be trained to learn.) Race gives you physiological traits, which may rarely include physical skills (e.g. elves have great eyesight so they get Perception proficiency, while orcs might get their choice of Acrobatics or Athletics), but also includes things like orcish blood rage, dragonborn breath weapon, elven trance, etc., and another set of options for your starting feat. Finally, background gives you some other feature, a tool prof, perhaps a language (maybe including specialty languages like Druidic or Thieves' Cant), two skills as default, and another set of choices for your first-level feat.</p><p></p><p>This shouldn't lead to nasty combinatoric explosion. If the features don't meaningfully interact and just do basic or fluffy/ribbon-y stuff, this setup should be just fine, and gives players a lot of control over where their characters come from. Keeping the culture aspect light-touch would enable DMs to quickly invent new ones for a homebrew game, which would help with world building <em>and</em> increasing player participation and investment. Sounds like a major win in my book.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="EzekielRaiden, post: 8768453, member: 6790260"] I mean, I usually don't give mechanics to culture, so there's no combinatorics explosion...but even if you do, it's not like it's that big a deal. Level Up did it and people seem quite happy with that, having explicitly said that that shift (to a separated physiology and culture model, as opposed to a package deal where physiology and culture are always combined.) For example, let's say culture gives you one skill proficiency (usually mental), a language, a cultural feature of some kind and a list of options for your starting feat (mostly stuff you could be trained to learn.) Race gives you physiological traits, which may rarely include physical skills (e.g. elves have great eyesight so they get Perception proficiency, while orcs might get their choice of Acrobatics or Athletics), but also includes things like orcish blood rage, dragonborn breath weapon, elven trance, etc., and another set of options for your starting feat. Finally, background gives you some other feature, a tool prof, perhaps a language (maybe including specialty languages like Druidic or Thieves' Cant), two skills as default, and another set of choices for your first-level feat. This shouldn't lead to nasty combinatoric explosion. If the features don't meaningfully interact and just do basic or fluffy/ribbon-y stuff, this setup should be just fine, and gives players a lot of control over where their characters come from. Keeping the culture aspect light-touch would enable DMs to quickly invent new ones for a homebrew game, which would help with world building [I]and[/I] increasing player participation and investment. Sounds like a major win in my book. [/QUOTE]
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