[5E] Towards a new, better campaign setting.

[Avoraciopoctules]

I mean... A city (especially a major one) still does need an underlying reason to have built itself around the bones of a dead monster (the water is especially pure or something) or the grand canyon or what have you. Just curious...

Hmm. The Fossilopolis board of tourism's big selling points regarding the natural environment.

1. Check out these crazy houses. You can live in a giant skull or an apartment complex built around an upright ribcage. Gnarly.
2. If Fossilopilis gets raided by mischievous hyena men hoping to gnaw on the architecture, the necromancers can animate it to bite back or maybe just flex a bit and squash them.
3. Bubbling pits of death-magic infused bile (glowing green, of course) are great for all sorts of magic potions, most toxic at some level.
4. Maybe you'll get magic powers from inhaling air infused with decomposed monster goop. Who knows. There's certainly a higher percentage of cool mutations here than in generic grasslands.
5. There is so little native life here that authorities are inclined to be pretty accommodating when it comes to the disposal of hazardous materials.

Taking points 3-5 into consideration, you don't have to be undead to live there, but it helps.

This reminds me of an SA article:
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/sk ... istory.php

[Midnight_v]

Hmm...
How about: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/M ... rayerBadly

or some Variant Thereof ...
Really cause if they have all this power its either, the want you to worship for sheer wankery... which makes Clash of the titans "damn the gods" scenario or they're getting something out of it.

Can someone please explain the benifits of having distant Gods that can't be intereacted wtih at all?

Frankly I was for a moment advocating "The Marvel Way" because while people object to getting their powers from "some dude" ...
Galactus. Galactus works in a lot of ways.
He's face stabable, he near omnipotent he powers up dudes.
Though Infinity is ostensibly NOT reachable.
Which means there's Tiers of Godhood and I think that works. Maybe not just marvel lets take comic stuff in general.
You get a tier like:
Embodiments: Who just can't be facestabbed cause you can't kill dreams, or water, or night
Then you get Gods: Really powerful peeps who have learned the trick of gaining power through worship.
Then you get Enitities: WHo are really badass but don't "Need" no stiking worship. Like Galactus, Marit Lage, Maybe Cthulhu, or Dracula...

Dracula is actually a really cool god. Or actually that should read "fuck vecna" essentially. However, the best way I see to handle that is to NOT make dracula a god but a master vampire in the rifts sense.

... and there goes the plug... in many ways I think rifts has the best cosmology for vamprisim and gods in many ways.
I'm ultimately reminded of the tome where it says something to the effect of the more people know you the more likely you are to get wished back or res'ed

[Eikre]

The benefit of having distant gods is that most people are already pretty used to living in a world (which is to say, this one) where gods seem to do fuck all. It achieves two things from a story perspective: First, it firmly puts aside the notion that the 18th level cleric you're playing is just a sanctimonious twat and was never competent at the slightest, drawing the full measure of his ability from cosmic nepotism. Second, it lets you stab other members of your church in the face when they commit heresy (or you schism), and it lets you befriend members of an opposed faith because it turns out that hey they're not so bad.

Neither of these effects are impossible to produce under a cosmology where the gods are real and tangible, but they are very expeditiously implied under the cosmology where gods aren't.

The trope you invoke is already the default under most people's assumptions, and it's most explicit in settings like Planescape or Discworld where the belief-as-power motif is at its strongest.

Okay so here's the deal, Clerics are cooperative agents who bask in the same distributed web of belief-mojo, which is somehow distinguished from basking in their own personal voodoo because... I don't know, some sort of cosmic economy of scale or something, suffice it to say that the phenomenon of offering your personal power to the collective and then receiving spells is not necessarily any better than channeling your own spirit, but it is a different technique. We're touching on the shaman/cleric distinction from a few pages back.

Whatever creature sits at the center of this web is the godhead and they tend to be badasses, etc, etc, who cares gods are boring. Dracula isn't really a god, that's silly, he needs to sit in a disappearing castle somewhere and the PCs need to be able to go find him with whips and holy water at an entirely different level of power than the one where they subvert Ragnarok by preemptively slaying Tyr to invalidate the prophecies.

Yes, I know, IT WAS NOT BY HIS HAND THAT HE WAS ONCE AGAIN GIVEN FLESH. So the dude has a little cult going, and so do all the major Demon-lords and every Saint or Cultus Confirmed martyr. But fuck those guys, I'm tapping that Throne idea from earlier. It's the barrier to entry for attaining the flavor that we're actually talking about here. Spider-throne, Sea-throne, Forge-throne, whatever, these are the seats of power that make the creation of divine power-webs efficient. They probably correspond with some ancillary mechanical benefit like domains or whatever it is you get for free at character creation by choosing a philosophical inclination.

Thrones of power are created independent of worship directed at particular individual. Yes, if you dig Lolth then you're probably contributing to the coalescence of a spider throne, but if you hate Lolth, that also empowers the symbol of the arachnid. When you believe in the myths of Yahweh then you implicitly believe in the myths of Satan: Gods will have their foils because that's what gives them any meaning at all. Enjoy engineering the very source of your dismay even as you work to fight it!

[houstonderek]

Really, in this discussion of gods to include, how could you leave out Ereshkigal?

Not famous enough. There are already two "sexy Black ladies" in Frank's chart (Lolth and Loviatar). I agree she's awesome, though. Better yet, she comes with one (1) free Namtar, who I have huge hots for due to him being portrayed in the adaptations I read as a crazyawesome goth from back when goths weren't lame.

Hmmm, I cannot remember a time when Goths weren't lame. Unless you're talking AD 500 or so...

[Lago PARANOIA]

So, Josh (and others) brought this up in another thread but he raises such a good point that I think it's time to resurrect this thread.

We need a new fantasy race paradigm. The default races we get are, quite frankly, pretty lame. With all of the wild and crazy crap that keeps popping up in fantasy sticking to the human/dwarf/elf/halfling/orc paradigm has been done to death. I mean no one is serious about not keeping at least those five because they have so much inertia, but the default campaign setting of 5E D&D should at least start leaning towards weaning people off of them.

I think that this was FrankTrollman's idea now, from several years back, but he always comes up with the good stuff so I don't feel bad about stealing from him. The idea was: can anyone think of anything really wrong with compressing all of the standard D&D races into like two or three, making them all subtribes? All subtribes could interbreed with everyone from the same branch. For example, you would have something like:

Human: Elves, Tieflings, Devas (better name than Assimar).
Halfling: Dwarves, Goblins, Gnomes
Shifters: Felinoids, Canids, Lizardmen, Orcs, Fishmen, Minotaurs/Centaurs. You're going to need some A Wizard Did It for this one; maybe they all have a unique totem and crossbreeds would just spit out someone of the same totem rather than half-and-half?

And the subraces would just have minor stat differences from the 'main' races.

Honestly, that should be enough to start a new edition with but the important thing is that you have enough conceptual space to put in things people haven't, you know, actually seen. Once you've established that elves are just humans who lived in the wild for the past one thousand years rather than their own separate species with their own biology you don't really need to put in things about population dynamics and eating habits and whatever. They're just snooty hippie humans.

[CapnTthePirateG]

How about bug dudes? Prak Anima suggested over in the other thread that the Worm that Walks should be playable. He a shifter or what?

Also, warforged. People like em.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Bug dudes are different enough from the other manimal races that they should be their own separate thing from shifters if you want to include them. In xenofiction/funny animal stories you never really see much of, say, a bipedal beetle talking to their bear and tiger friends unless it's done as a gag or said beetle is so mammal-ized that they're just a human with some wings and antennae.

The Worm That Walks wouldn't be of the bug races, though. The monster gets its memetic power by being creepy yet immensely powerful. If you could do something like encounter Worm That Walks commoners that would completely kill their cool.

[CapnTthePirateG]

Well, you wouldn't need to necessarily have that if you came up with a template system that wasn't ass or made it a PrC.

As an aside, this could work for lich too.

[Username17]

So, Josh (and others) brought this up in another thread but he raises such a good point that I think it's time to resurrect this thread.

We need a new fantasy race paradigm. The default races we get are, quite frankly, pretty lame. With all of the wild and crazy crap that keeps popping up in fantasy sticking to the human/dwarf/elf/halfling/orc paradigm has been done to death. I mean no one is serious about not keeping at least those five because they have so much inertia, but the default campaign setting of 5E D&D should at least start leaning towards weaning people off of them.

I think that this was FrankTrollman's idea now, from several years back, but he always comes up with the good stuff so I don't feel bad about stealing from him. The idea was: can anyone think of anything really wrong with compressing all of the standard D&D races into like two or three, making them all subtribes? All subtribes could interbreed with everyone from the same branch. For example, you would have something like:

Human: Elves, Tieflings, Devas (better name than Assimar).
Halfling: Dwarves, Goblins, Gnomes
Shifters: Felinoids, Canids, Lizardmen, Orcs, Fishmen, Minotaurs/Centaurs. You're going to need some A Wizard Did It for this one; maybe they all have a unique totem and crossbreeds would just spit out someone of the same totem rather than half-and-half?

And the subraces would just have minor stat differences from the 'main' races.

Honestly, that should be enough to start a new edition with but the important thing is that you have enough conceptual space to put in things people haven't, you know, actually seen. Once you've established that elves are just humans who lived in the wild for the past one thousand years rather than their own separate species with their own biology you don't really need to put in things about population dynamics and eating habits and whatever. They're just snooty hippie humans.

That's similar to what I'm doing for Heartbreaker: Asymmetric Threat. A couple of things though:

No one gives a fuck about halflings outside of the extremely nitch group of people who want to rip off Tolkien but are prevented by copyright lawsuits from doing so. People outside that circle know Dwarves and Elves. You can have a Dwarf type called "halfling" that is more like a human and lives mostly above ground. But the general type would be "Dwarf". And you can throw in Azers, Gnomes, and Duergar.

Secondly, you have a fuck tonne of Elves. It doesn't make any sense to not have "elf" be one of your main types. Like seriously, none at all. It doesn't matter how fucking sick you are of elves, "Elf" is the fucking natural English word for "magical humanoid". If you don't put something called an "Elf" front ad center, people will call every fucking thing an Elf. I am not joking. The Mbari in Babylon 5 are called Elves by real people. The Navi are called elves too. You are required by law to have one of your main categories of forehead aliens be called "Elf". That law is actual natural English word usage and it is way bigger than whatever your personal race choices are.

Then you're going to want Goblins. You can make Orcs be a type of human or a type of Elf. Orcs stand on their own without needing to be a whole category. They don't even need to be the same as Goblins.

But you could have something like:

• Humans: Tieflings, Orcs, Daeva
  Elves: Drow, Eladrin, Wood Elves (need a catchy name)
  Dwarves: Gnomes, Halflings, Duergar
  Goblins: Hobs, Bugbears, Forestkith (needs a better name)

Then you put out a couple of iconic 4-person parties. You have the Human Cleric, the Elvish Wizard, the Dwarven Fighter, and the Goblin Rogue; but you also have the Tiefling Rogue, the Drow Cleric, the Gnome Wizard and the Hob Fighter.

But yes, on top of that you want to put in a small smattering of apeshit races. Gnolls, Warforged, Lizardfolk, Kobolds, that sort of thing.

-Username17

[fectin]

Wood elves: Fae, Un/Seelie, fauns, slyphs, Alberoni
Forestkith: trolls, wosen, satyrs, Pucks, Walds

[Lago PARANOIA]

But yes, on top of that you want to put in a small smattering of apeshit races. Gnolls, Warforged, Lizardfolk, Kobolds, that sort of thing.

-Username17

1) While I agree that 'is really short' and 'elf' are big enough categories to stand on their own, I'm not so sure about goblins. I personally think that the caste-like racial hierarchy of goblinoids (back when orcs were one) is interesting but I don't know if it's enough of a difference.

I'm not saying take them out, it's just that that need to be jazzed up a bit to be their own niche. What kind of jazzing up would be appropriate you think? Nothing really comes to mind other than making them a plant-based species, but then they'd start running up against treants and myconoids.

2) The other thing is... have you played Breath of Fire? Especially the 2nd and 4th ones? I know Petting Zoo People are kind of lame at face value, but that game went so far into it that it actually gave that series a pretty distinctive feel and look. It's why I suggested having a universal 'furry' race.

3) Finally, half-human hybrids. I know the implementation in D&D has been universally lame (though half-orcs, half-dwarves (muls), and half-elves are the rockstars of the 4E character optimization boards) and I also know that they really irk you as a biologist but they're so firmly entrenched in pop culture that something needs to be done about them anyway. What do I think is the best way to do it? Simple, half-humans aren't their own races as in getting their own racial writeup. They're a sub-subtype of human with a minor benefit. As in, half-elves, half-orcs, etc.. are just a half-page chart on the human page with a change to them. There's some mewling about how half-humans don't have their own universal culture and they tend to be bred out. As far as genetics go, a person has an equal chance of becoming any racial mix including one of their parents' races. Any previous lineage doesn't count. So a human/orc pairing has an equal chance to produce any of an orc, human, or half-orc. Half-orc/Half-elf has an equal chance of orc, elf, human, half-orc, or half-elf. No Orc-Elf combination is possible. Half-Dragon/Human can produce a full human, half-dragon, or dragon.

[Gx1080]

Well, the race debate starts fairly nicely by admiting that yes, you need the typical "Elves, Dwarves and Humans...", as Warhammer would say.

So:

Humanoids: Humans, Orcs, Tieflings, Daeva.
Elves: Eladrin, Wood Elf, Drow.
Dwarves: Gnomes, Halflings, Duegars.
Gobinoids: Goblin, Hobgoblin, Bugbear.

Don't see too much point to Foreskiths, they are just Goblins that hunt at night.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Lago, do you really want to invite arguments over whether a woman can survive giving birth to a foal? Should a game really have to deal with the ethical implications of having a dray beast or food animal for a sibling?

I'm cool with having humans and elves as subspecies of 'demihuman', or making elves homo sapiens arcanus, but "Dragon cock? I walk!" is more than just a catch phrase.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

Have you played Breath of Fire? Basically, the world is populated with Furries, it's not the same as breeding with animals.

[CatharzGodfoot]

Have you played Breath of Fire? Basically, the world is populated with Furries, it's not the same as breeding with animals.

I was referring to Lago's statement that a human and a half dragon could make babies, and that the result could be a dragon egg and a normal human infant.

...and from that inferring that a centaur and a human could make babies, and the result could be a foal and a normal human infant.

The centaur thing isn't necessarily as bad as it sounds{Oglaf, NSFW}

[Lago PARANOIA]

1) I proposed the whole system to avoid having to track lineage and genetics. If you want a 'realistic' outcome then it should be a real possibility that a half-orc and a human have a full-blooded orc. If you don't like the idea of human women laying eggs then you either need to retcon dragons as being mammals, find some middle ground, or eliminate the idea of half-dragons altogether.

Now, if you want something that's less squicky then we could make it so that people could only combine 'halves' as long as one of the halves were human. So half-elf + half-orc could have a human/elf, a human/human, or a human/orc. It would make less sense than the above (as much as human hybrids can make any sense) but would avoid stepping on delicate sensibilities. If you are really against the idea of human women giving birth to critters with hooves or whatnot (meaning that even the minotaur myth is going too far) then you're going to have to scrap the idea of certain hybrids entirely. Even though they're entrenched in myth even more firmly than elves.

[tzor]

A lot of the old notions of "race" comes from old outdated notions of species. If an orc can breed with a human and an elf can breed with a human, then an orc can breed with an elf. The notion of "half" simply implies someone with mixed heritage. Since we are defining these things in terms of attributes and since need to be predominant then you need at least 33% of any "race" to get the attribute. So humans might have some "elf" or "orc" in them but not enought to really matter. (So a half elf - 50/50 marries a half orc - 50/50 ; their children are 50% human, 25% elf, 25% orc and so for technical purposes are just "human".)

Anything else needs to be drastically altered from the standard procreation system. One viable alternative is viral genetic mutation (or ... crap I jst got bit by a wherewolf). Half dragons could be explained by some such effect. They are not technically dragons but are genetically altered so as to gain dragon features over time.

[Gx1080]

Why the need for rules for breeding in a game?

Half-Orcs, Half-Elves, Half-Dwarves (hi Dark Sun) are more than enough. Everything else is gravy.

And I'm going to retract and put Orcs on the Goblin template. Orcs+Goblins has a lot of culture leverage.

[Vebyast]

If an orc can breed with a human and an elf can breed with a human, then an orc can breed with an elf.

Just going to throw in that this is actually not quite true; it is entirely possible that elves and orcs can't breed despite both being able to breed with humans. Check out the wiki page for ring species for a few real-world examples. Traits can still diffuse all the way from one side of the ring to the other, though, so the rest still applies.

[CatharzGodfoot]

1) I proposed the whole system to avoid having to track lineage and genetics. If you want a 'realistic' outcome then it should be a real possibility that a half-orc and a human have a full-blooded orc.

You don't have to track lineage and genetics. You can seriously just fake the statistics however you like to fit the story, and a player should be able to decide whether her character's mom was an orc.

If you want to come up with some kind of statistics for inheritance, you can do that too. You don't have to make each outcome equally likely, because actual statistics for the inheritance of genetic traits are fairly well understood.

If you don't like the idea of human women laying eggs then you either need to retcon dragons as being mammals, find some middle ground, or eliminate the idea of half-dragons altogether.

Or half-dragon can be a magical transformational state along the way to magically becoming a full-dragon. But I'm not adverse to removing half-dragons, particularly as a race.

Now, if you want something that's less squicky then we could make it so that people could only combine 'halves' as long as one of the halves were human. So half-elf + half-orc could have a human/elf, a human/human, or a human/orc. It would make less sense than the above (as much as human hybrids can make any sense) but would avoid stepping on delicate sensibilities. If you are really against the idea of human women giving birth to critters with hooves or whatnot (meaning that even the minotaur myth is going too far) then you're going to have to scrap the idea of certain hybrids entirely. Even though they're entrenched in myth even more firmly than elves.

Or certain hybrids might not be hybrids. Gnolls, illithids, and dwarves do not need common ancestry.

[Krusk]

Every race gets 8 things. (Pick a number you like) A half human/half orc gets 4 human things and 4 orc things. You want some elven thrown in there on the orc side and its 4 human, 2 orc, 2 elven things.

All 8 things are equal, so it doesn't matter if they are balanced among one another. OR you prohibit taking the same tier thing on multiple races.
EX stat block.
1- stats
2- Feat
3- skill
4- Other
A half human half orc picks human stats and feat, but orc skill and other. NOT human and orc stats, human feat, and orc other.

Just say it breeds true, and then tell individual groups to regulate that as they want for their games. Anywhere from humans and actual cows are cool to human elf hybrids don't work. I'd also say "We don't recommend letting players play 1/8th A, 1/8th B, 1/8th C, 1/8th D, ect... but here are the rules if you want to do it."

In some instances, you create a monster that isn't suitable for PC race. You don't need to publish the racial write up for every monster, but you leave the template for homebrew there and fans will do it. Combine that with racial classes, to get unique abilities you don't want PCs to have.

This whole post assumes you choose 8 Things. You could do any multiple of two really, provided it is a square number.

In my personal games I feel like this would come up during character creation and thats about it. I don't see my players bothering to say "I'm gonna bang this sheep, lets see how it turns out". I expand that to encompass the majority of groups.

[Josh_Kablack]

So, Josh (and others) brought this up in another thread but he raises such a good point that I think it's time to resurrect this thread.

We need a new fantasy race paradigm

I think you misunderstood my suggestion on the other thread. My assertion is that we need different races plugged into the traditional D&D paradigm.

Furthermore, my assertion is that the traditional D&D paradigm was 6-15 standardly playable races, most of which are ripped from fantasy works that are currently hot in pop culture.

Now what Krusk suggests above is a completely new paradigm, and while I like that in the abstract, I'm dubious about its inclusion in Dungeons and Dragons.

[Krusk]

For thematic "it's not dnd" reasons or for another reason. I ask because many of my homebrew games use this idea and I'd like to know of any downfalls if they exist.

[Josh_Kablack]

For thematic "it's not dnd" reasons or for another reason. I ask because many of my homebrew games use this idea and I'd like to know of any downfalls if they exist.

A little bit of both seen through my own prejudices:

What you propose for races is a relatively simple point-buy subsystem for racial abilities And while that's entirely workable, even a trivially simple point buy is more complex than the traditional D&D "pick a race get these abilities" mechanics.

As D&D is the introduction to RPGs for most gamers, and complexity is probably the biggest barrier to getting non-gamers to learn to play. I'm leery of changes that would increase complexity in D&D. Note that I said "leery of" not "opposed to" - the basic question for any increase in complexity is whether it offers something worth the extra effort. Without seeing a more full implementation, I can't say that your proposal does so.

However for a game other than D&D, or even as an optional rule in a D&D expansion -- any system where the intended playerbase is not as wide as core D&D and people playing it may regard additional complexity as a non-issue or even novelty -- then the setup you propose is an interesting and potentially workable new paradigm.

[K]

1) I proposed the whole system to avoid having to track lineage and genetics. If you want a 'realistic' outcome then it should be a real possibility that a half-orc and a human have a full-blooded orc.

You don't have to track lineage and genetics. You can seriously just fake the statistics however you like to fit the story, and a player should be able to decide whether her character's mom was an orc.

If you want to come up with some kind of statistics for inheritance, you can do that too. You don't have to make each outcome equally likely, because actual statistics for the inheritance of genetic traits are fairly well understood.

Not only do you not have to track lineage and genetics, you can just come up with cooler things.

I mean, to avoid the "dragon cock, I walk" problem you can just say that drinking dragon's blood turns you into a half-dragon or even a full dragon with enough exposure. Then, no one has to worry about dragons boning everything in sight because the DM wants to toss in a half-dragon monster.

You can just say that anyone anointed by dark gods is an orc, Elves are a product of faerie magic, and drow are a form of faerie magic corrupted by dark gods.