Our Warglblasters Are Different

[K]

Sight and range only matter if the fucking rules say they matter. That's first principles shit.

Construct your ranged rules differently and the issue goes away. Maybe you use a zone combat system where ranged attacks can't be effectively used outside of a zone and melee attacks and ranged attacks only happen in the same zone. In that case, sight and the maximum effective range of the weapon is meaningless because everything takes place at very close ranges.

It's getting really irritating watching you argue in such a manner where you focus on pissant case-specific shit and offer fixes without seeing the underlying problem. Especially when the fixes are extremely specific and convoluted. I mean, honestly, what the fuck are you going to do if we do implement your stupid argument-dodging zone system and then we make the entirely reasonable assumption that zones should model, oh, darkness, people make a similar assumption that darkness should be a common condition for the game, and then people also make the entirely reasonable assumption that certain player-available races should be able to see in the dark better than others?

The "pissant case-specific shit" you are talking about is the "actual rules of the game you are designing." That's what rules do: determine results in specific cases.

It doesn't matter what "people" assume about the game, only what the designers write down in the rules. If they failed to write darkness rules, then their own fault for random MCs and players coming up with bad rules spawned from their own flawed assumptions to shore up your failings. (And let's face it, none of them are going to have the same assumptions, so in some games darkness is going to be auto-death and in others it's not even an inconvenience.)

Game design involves making actual choices that relate to other choices you make, not just writing up a subsystem that looks fine all by itself. I mean, lots of games look fine when you look at subsystems and don't look at how they effect the whole (See Wizards vs. Fighters in DnD 3.X, the result of using two assumptions for power levels and not considering how they affect each other).

For example, an abstract positioning system fixes ranged attacks, flying, spell ranges and spell AoEs, control issues, and eliminates a host of small decisions and positioning issues and speeds up play times. Those are major issues, and they can only be fixed by challenging a set of simulationist assumptions about how they should work in an RPG.

You have to talk about specific solutions to specific problems because theory doesn't address anything.

[souran]

While its likely that some bonuses will better line up to a certain classes than others why would this be an issue as long as you don't design signifcantly under performing races

Really, if you are going to have races I think that they should be a single racial power that does something unique. Then DO NOT give them a bunch of numeric bonuses (although possibly giving them things like not needing to sleep/night vision is probably still something that needs to be addressed).

However if you have races that are something like the following:

Mortal : +5 to one roll YOU make once per encounter
Feyan: Reroll on die YOU roll per encounter
Earthen: Force Gamemaster to reroll one die per encounter
Childpeople: +5 to one of your defenses, or in an opposed roll ad 5 to your total once per encounter.

Those kind of abilities would be both destinctive while at the same time not really being defintitively better for anything in particular (or not so much better than you couldn't get awa ywith playing one of hte others.)

[wotmaniac]

Unless you're proposing that racial abilities be no more interesting or complicated than 'shit a peasant can replicate by making a trip at the flea market' (which would exclude every racial ability ever proposed in 3E or 4E D&D) your approach just plain does not work. Get a new argument.

The thing is, that seems to be exactly what he's arguing. And it's just flat boring, making these supposed features completely meaningless -- and if they're gonna be so completely meaningless, why have it in the game at all? Just have the players make up whatever flavor bullshit they want. But then again, why even bother -- I'm not gonna waste my time with explicitly-meaningless choices.

Here's the part that bothers me the most:

[...]only matter if the fucking rules say they matter.

This is just a completely meaningless tautology. Nothing matters unless the rules say it matters (or, at the least, giving you a framework for allowing it to matter).

Seriously -- sight and range don't matter? Did I seriously see you suggest dissociating sight and sniping? What kind of flat and featureless system are you proposing here? Oh, and that whole lizardman thing is a little troubling as well. Lizardman's natural armor is a little more meaningful than that. It means that he has to spend less resources on boosting his armor than everybody else, freeing up those resources to be used elsewhere -- unless lizardman has some sort of comparable hindrance to offset his armor boost, then he will necessarily be strictly better than non-lizardmen. And fire resistance is meaningless? Well, not unless you remove all kill-it-with-fire options ... and that wouldn't resemble any game that I would even consider playing.
And the list goes on. You have just seriously proposed a kind of system wherein all of your choices are essentially meaningless, because "fuck it all -- it's all the same anyway".

I realize that your doing the "what if ..." mental exercise, but it's taken you down a dead-end road.

And this last post of yours doesn't even look like it's coming from the same person .... are you sharing your account with someone? If this last post was your thesis, then all the posts leading up to it seem to answer things with "fuck it -- why bother making any of it matter?". I can't even follow what your point is.

[DSMatticus]

Construct your ranged rules differently and the issue goes away. Maybe you use a zone combat system where ranged attacks can't be effectively used outside of a zone and melee attacks and ranged attacks only happen in the same zone. In that case, sight and the maximum effective range of the weapon is meaningless because everything takes place at very close ranges.

You are designing a game that does not have ranged combat. While that will fix any melee vs ranged problem at all, fuck that so much.

[K]

Construct your ranged rules differently and the issue goes away. Maybe you use a zone combat system where ranged attacks can't be effectively used outside of a zone and melee attacks and ranged attacks only happen in the same zone. In that case, sight and the maximum effective range of the weapon is meaningless because everything takes place at very close ranges.

You are designing a game that does not have ranged combat. While that will fix any melee vs ranged problem at all, fuck that so much.

What has DnD ranged combat done for you lately?

I mean that seriously. It ruins flying, melee combat, and makes combats look nothing like the combats seen in the source material (books, movies, history, whatever).

Write the movie scene where the swordsman fights the archer. How is that supposed to look?

We know that it's supposed to be "archer gets a few shots off that miss or are deflected and then drops the bow in favor of a sword when the swordsman gets close in a few seconds," but in DnD it's totally acceptable to shoot arrows point blank or at extreme ranges into chaotic melees and expect them to be just as damaging and accurate as sword swings from a foot away.

There are a lot of core assumptions in DnD that make little sense from a source material AND a simulationist perspective. They are DnD assumptions spawned by Gygax and Arneson and nothing more.

In the source material, it's totally acceptable to fire into the darkness because you hear something(but not in DnD). In the source material, darkvision is line of sight (but not in DnD where they come increments of 30 feet and then seeing nothing past that). In the source material, archers have swords and use them (but not in DnD where all archers are Green Arrow from DC). In the source material, daggers have a range that depends on the thrower's strength (but not in DnD where even supernaturally strong giants have tiny ranges).

[wotmaniac]

And what's with this "nobody should be different in any inherently-meaningful way?" business? Fuck, really?

You have this Fantasy Game, with Fantasy-type elements .. which means that you're gonna have a world populated with these fantastical races. Which means that they're gonna have fantastical qualities (otherwise, they're not really fantastical). Unless these qualities are meaningful, then why even bother? Seriously -- what's the fucking point.

Sure, you could do away with dwarfs and replace them with just some minerclan hammerbearers; but that's boring. Sure, monotone cultures are a bit cliche as well, but surely there is some middle ground to be struck.

[Dr_Noface]

I support Frank's elegant solution of purchasing attributes with build points. Each race can have a standard "racial package" worth the same build points, but PCs (and important NPCs) get to spend their build points however they want and proceed to say "I'm a _____!" .

Even gross physical mutations (like giving a "human" some claws) can be easily explained through liberal amounts of magical experimentation and dragon boning.

Heck, even size doesn't matter. You can purchase Large size and call yourself a halfing as long as you describe yourself as some weird ten foot dude with a halfing's build. I mean, Fire Giants are already giant dwarves. Who gives a fudge?

[wotmaniac]

I'm not too keen on the idea of having all options open on a single smorgasbord. I like the idea of build points, but have various drop-down menus.
For example, you could have menus like:
- various "lives in (terrain)" menus (e.g., woods, mountains, seafaring, plains, etc.)
-- "woods" menu might have available options such as tracking, bowman-ship, etc.; mountains ....
- magic-centric culture menu
- "open society" vs. "closed society" menus
- etc.
Let's say you have 10-12 different menus (or however many), then you say that a given character (or even a given race) can select options from 2-3 menus. Or whatever.

[RadiantPhoenix]

Just remember to make sure that the menu options that are mechanically the best for a given archetype are a good thematic fit for that archetype.

[CapnTthePirateG]

Can we not specialize race into class? That shit sucks.

[Username17]

K's tirade about how vision doesn't need to benefit one class type over another is insane. I hope we can all agree on that. If it was hard to reach agreement on that point, I propose we look at the Conjurer, a character archetype that doesn't literally need to see at all. It doesn't fucking matter whether you produce some sort of bullshit "zone" rules in which ranged attacks are really the same as melee attacks, the Conjurer doesn't make attack rolls at all. If the ability to see has any effect at all, then the Conjurer gets measurably less benefit from it.

As for the Lizardman thing, I can't believe people are even making that argument after forty years of the naked blaster wizard trope. Either the Lizardman's natural armor counts as him being naked for purposes of using naked blaster wizard powers (in which case the Lizardman is a clear point of high synergy with the blaster wizard class), or it doesn't (in which case the Lizardman is completely fucked by taking the blaster wizard class because he can't get sufficiently naked). There's no middle ground. If the scales provide defense under any circumstances then you're either stupid for not being a lizardman blaster wizard or you're stupid for being a lizardman blaster wizard.

Can we not specialize race into class? That shit sucks.

Not the way K is trying to go about it. If your background abilities do anything at all, then they will do something that synergizes better or worse with your class abilities. Clever min/maxxers will eventually figure out which backgrounds work best for which character builds and gravitate towards them accordingly.

You can make the background abilities more minor than they are in previous editions of D&D, in which case the marginal benefit for taking the "right" background/build combinations over the "wrong" combinations will be less. But there will still be a marginal benefit of getting your combinations "correctly" provided that they can do anything at all.

You can also give backgrounds long lists of abilities that specifically work with different archetypes. Like how the 3e Elf gets proficiency with the longsword (that only matters to clerics and wizards) and a search reroll (that only matters to Rangers and Rogues). While the clear intent is to make all background/build combinations viable, in reality it just makes there be a short list of optimal backgrounds for various builds and a short list of optimal builds for various backgrounds. So your Rogue might be best as a Halfling or an Elf, for example.

And finally, you can just fucking let people buy their backgrounds piecemeal with points. There are still optimal Background/Build combinations, it's just that you're allowed to have the optimal Backgrounds for your Build regardless of whether your character is short or cat eared or red skinned or whatever or not.

-Username17

[Foxwarrior]

The problem with freely bought background points is the problem with all significant refluffing: you reduce the amount of information that descriptions give to the players, and the value of changing your appearance to confuse your opponents. There is some entertainment value in listening to a character description, hearing the term "red skin", and trying to figure out whether they're an Azerty who's immune to fire or an Angus who frequently goes mad with rage. Freely deciding the appearance of your character might be nice, but I gladly trade it for having character descriptions matter.

[Username17]

The problem with freely bought background points is the problem with all significant refluffing: you reduce the amount of information that descriptions give to the players, and the value of changing your appearance to confuse your opponents. There is some entertainment value in listening to a character description, hearing the term "red skin", and trying to figure out whether they're an Azerty who's immune to fire or an Angus who frequently goes mad with rage. Freely deciding the appearance of your character might be nice, but I gladly trade it for having character descriptions matter.

Certainly if your design goal is that Dwarves are defensive fighters or pyromancers while Drow are skirmish fighters or necromancers, then the 3e "racial list of powers" is probably what you want to go with.

-Username17

[K]

K's tirade about how vision doesn't need to benefit one class type over another is insane. I hope we can all agree on that. If it was hard to reach agreement on that point, I propose we look at the Conjurer, a character archetype that doesn't literally need to see at all. It doesn't fucking matter whether you produce some sort of bullshit "zone" rules in which ranged attacks are really the same as melee attacks, the Conjurer doesn't make attack rolls at all. If the ability to see has any effect at all, then the Conjurer gets measurably less benefit from it.

I hate to break it to you, but any mechanic can have an attack roll or equivalent attached to it. Adding one to the Conjurer would be trivial, and I say that confidently without even knowing what the fuck you mean by "Conjurer." (Summoner...? Area-control mage...? Whatever...)

It doesn't matter, I guess. The only "winning" argument here is that everyone seems to want more games where some people lose at chargen.

Who am I to argue with the CharOp culture? It's not like its the most off-putting part of RPG gaming.

Oh wait, it is.

[Username17]

Watching you contort yourself in order to save your ridiculous position is hilarious. We are now at "Conjurers have to make vision-based targeting rolls in order for their demons to attack enemies and those enemies can't actually be farther away from them in game terms than they could attack with a warhammer". And we're doing all this crazy so that... people can't get differential bonuses from seeing in the dark.

I am awaiting with bated breath your insane workaround for the Shadowcaster and the Pyromancer, characters who can create or eliminate areas of darkness (respectively). I would think that in almost any conceivable system, that creating darkness would synergize with being able to see in it, while creating light would be counter synergistic with not needing light to see. But you're doing so well in contorting your game proposal to accommodate low light vision without differential class benefit that I can't wait to see how you continue to refuse to concede this point.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

I support Frank's elegant solution of purchasing attributes with build points. Each race can have a standard "racial package" worth the same build points, but PCs (and important NPCs) get to spend their build points however they want and proceed to say "I'm a _____!" .

Cough Cough. Phonelobster's elegant solution.

I've been pushing this on for years and as far as I can tell Frank, apparently, is only VERY recently on board.

Back in the day I remember a thread where Frank pushed very hard on his plan to write a game call it TNE DnD and implement only about 5 races using basically traditional methods. It copped a lot of flack simply for being so insultingly restrictive and dictatorial. Especially with one of his few races being, if I recall, his own bullshit pet insect race no one cared for. And for the most part the entire thread is about Frank's strong intention to burn TNE to the ground rather than compromise on allowing anyone to think of providing two lines of mechanical support for a strawberry rather than vanilla flavored elf.

But it's notable because it has just snippets of me pushing, by then not for the first time, an idea about selectable background abilities, I'd already been promoting for ages well before that point in 2008, and it has Frank...

...well REALLY interestingly it basically has Frank taking what amounts to K's position on this thread. Where he wanted to walk a "tight rope" between having distinct notable racial powers associated very strictly with race selection... and he wanted them to not include any class based synergies.

Back then he appeared to think that non-class synergistic racial abilities was something doable or desirable. Or that there was some compromise of minimal class synergy that was acceptable. But mostly I'm really glad he has, apparently, come around to my way of thinking on the matter and rather annoyed that is seems, once again, to be defaulting to "Frank's idea" for some reason, you know, now that he seems to suddenly like it.

[Username17]

PL, if you have races mean anything, then you have to have small enough numbers of races to be able to explain what they all do. If you have a large number of races, then you can't do that and going full point based is a better option. They are two completely incompatible sets of game design goals and they do different things.

Either you have a small number of races and they have places in the world and comprehensible mechanics and defined strengths and weaknesses or you have a game where everyone is Steve. Foxwarrior just explicitly asked for the first, and there's nothing wrong with that. PL, you insist on the second, and there's nothing wrong with that either. However, K's position is neither of those, and that is why it is wrong. He is asking to have Kitchen Sink Fantasy Races (which necessitates "Everyone is Steve"), while giving every race fixed ability lists (which in turn necessitates "A Place For Everything"), and wants to claim that he can magically make all the races work equally well for all the classes - which is simply insane.

With a small number of races, it's an achievable goal. You have like 5 races and you fiddle with the abilities granted by each so that every race is a viable choice for at least several classes. It's a difficult, but entirely workable scenario. You fiddle with the Orcs and the Dwarves until they can both be viable warriors that feel different. It's what a lot of people want. But this is not achievable with many races, or with N races. You're not going to be able to fiddle with Orcs, Dwarves, Goblins, Dwarrow, Drow, Gremlins, Ogres, Warforged, Vampires, Wookies, Dryads, Gythyanki, Elves, Sea Elves, Gargoyles, Lizardfolk, Jacks, Gnomes, Halflings, and Pixies until they are all viable and different Warriors. That's just too much fucking work.

Once you make the concession that you're making kitchen sink fantasy with a large and expansable number of races, it just isn't practical to try to balance unique ability lists in such a way that you don't have strong race/class association. Because you run into the 4e D&D problem, where even if (no, especially if) you simplify and reduce everything to small effects, that those effects are going to synergize more and better with some classes than others. And with a large number of racial packages to choose from, one of them will by definition synergize the best.

You'll note that in the tight rope analogy the two constraints were:

• Being Race A should matter in a way that players in the game can identify and predict.
• Being any race should be a viable life choice while filling any role that the game feels is important.

And that the conclusion of those two constraints was that large numbers of kitchen sink fantasy races simply could not be fit into the game. You could also choose to get rid of the idea that being a member of any particular race should matter in any meaningful or consistent fashion and bring in an unlimited number of kitchen sink fantasy races.

Basically, you have a three legged stool of what people want:

• Races have meaning: a character is an X and the players can make meaningful and accurate statements based on that fact.
• All races are available: the world is full of weird monster races and if a player wants to add a new race because they were cool in a book they read they can just do that.
• All class/race combinations are viable: Every role the game considers important can be filled by a character from every playable race.

People want all of those. They can't have them. They can have two. You can have limited numbers of meaningfully distinct races that can each fill every role. They can have limitless numbers of races that can each fill every role, so long as the choice of race doesn't actually mean anything. And finally, they can have limitless numbers of races that all have real consistent individual effects, provided that they accept that there are "best" and "worst" classes for each role.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

Oooh, nice now Frank is going BACK to his old "tight rope" argument he just yelled at K for brushing on and is pulling a direct contradiction on everything and once again declaring that you CAN'T do selectable background options like he was just talking about because... erm... choices are bad!

I suggest everyone take a short cut and go read the link to the old thread where he had a melt down over the "I demand five speschul snow flake races" thing and no fucker of any worth agreed with him. What with him apparently reverting to his bad old ways.

Since after all a relatively simple selectable background option mechanic solves all three legs of his stool to pretty satisfactory degrees rather neatly. As you know. Explained rather simply by me 4 fucking years ago and partially by Frank earlier in this thread.

[Username17]

Oooh, nice now Frank is going BACK to his old "tight rope" argument he just yelled at K for brushing on and is pulling a direct contradiction on everything and once again declaring that you CAN'T do selectable background options like he was just talking about because... erm... choices are bad!

Uh... no. Seriously, go fuck yourself. You're not even quoting me out of context, you're just lying about what I said in the immediately preceding post!

Selectable Background Options is totally the way forward if you insist on having hundreds or thousands of playable races. It is. I don't recall having ever disputed that. If, however, you want the races to actually mean something, then it's not an option and you have to toss either the fantasy kitchen sink or game balance.

Since after all a relatively simple selectable background option mechanic solves all three legs of his stool to pretty satisfactory degrees rather neatly. As you know. Explained rather simply by me 4 fucking years ago and partially by Frank earlier in this thread.

No. Simple selectable background options by definition means that writing "Orc" on your character sheet doesn't mean fucking anything, because you could have bought the same background abilities as a Drow. It fails the "races mean something" leg of the stool.

-Username17

[shadzar]

Basically, you have a three legged stool of what people want:

1. Races have meaning: a character is an X and the players can make meaningful and accurate statements based on that fact.
2. All races are available: the world is full of weird monster races and if a player wants to add a new race because they were cool in a book they read they can just do that.
3. All class/race combinations are viable: Every role the game considers important can be filled by a character from every playable race.

People want all of those. They can't have them. They can have two.

i would think only one is feasible (a).

(b) entails really just not having a monster manual for a game, but a giant PC race book, and anything can be a monster. you lose (a) ro balance of any sort int his situation.

(c) here again you will lose (a) or balance. how does the kraken fighter allow the human fighter to still fill the role or be a viable choice?

wouldnt the ability to fill any role by any race just create homogenous races that are only different colored skin?

[hogarth]

I agreed with most of what Frank said, except for this:

Because you run into the 4e D&D problem, where even if (no, especially if) you simplify and reduce everything to small effects, that those effects are going to synergize more and better with some classes than others.

This is wrong. Small, almost-useless bonuses don't suddenly become interesting or incredibly desirable just because they're the only bonuses you get. That's one of the big mistakes the designers of 4E made; while it's much more accurate to claim that Tiny Effect A is balanced against Tiny Effect B (as opposed to Huge Effect A vs. Huge Effect B) since they're both effectively worth zero, you end up with a hot mess of minor variations that nobody gives a shit about.

[Username17]

I agreed with most of what Frank said, except for this:

Because you run into the 4e D&D problem, where even if (no, especially if) you simplify and reduce everything to small effects, that those effects are going to synergize more and better with some classes than others.

This is wrong. Small, almost-useless bonuses don't suddenly become interesting or incredibly desirable just because they're the only bonuses you get. That's one of the big mistakes the designers of 4E made; while it's much more accurate to claim that Tiny Effect A is balanced against Tiny Effect B (as opposed to Huge Effect A vs. Huge Effect B) since they're both effectively worth zero, you end up with a hot mess of minor variations that nobody gives a shit about.

I meant small as in "only adds to one thing", not necessarily small as in "only adds a small number". The relative size of the effects in terms of their literal numeric bonuses doesn't make any difference at all to whether the synergy is better for one class or another - though of course getting or not getting a +1 synergy bonus is less of a deal breaker than getting or not getting a +5.

Contrarywise, if races give big lists of bonuses, there will be all kinds of synergy here and there, and what the "best" synergy is will at the very least be arguable. And likely contingent on other things.

But yeah, I was talking in that quote about smallness in terms of breadth, not height. I really wish English had a good unambiguous way to distinguish them, but I don't think it does. If the racial bonuses apply to less things, then the class/racial synergies will be more apparent rather than less.

-Username17

[K]

Watching you contort yourself in order to save your ridiculous position is hilarious. We are now at "Conjurers have to make vision-based targeting rolls in order for their demons to attack enemies and those enemies can't actually be farther away from them in game terms than they could attack with a warhammer". And we're doing all this crazy so that... people can't get differential bonuses from seeing in the dark.

Bonuses/penalties are not the point.

The whole point of this is to prevent the Flying Archer problem as it's constructed. In this case, it's constructed using darkness and low-light vision and archers, and that is why an abstract positioning system that doesn't fellate ranged attacks is part of the whole idea.

Once you start handing out any abilities, you have to start choosing a core system to make those things work in a balanced way.

It certainly is easier to just write-up abilities and not worry about the core system or assumptions or even balance of the game, but it's not going to produce anything better than what's sitting on the bookshelves right now.

I am awaiting with bated breath your insane workaround for the Shadowcaster and the Pyromancer, characters who can create or eliminate areas of darkness (respectively). I would think that in almost any conceivable system, that creating darkness would synergize with being able to see in it, while creating light would be counter synergistic with not needing light to see. But you're doing so well in contorting your game proposal to accommodate low light vision without differential class benefit that I can't wait to see how you continue to refuse to concede this point.

A passive saving throw or dispel check can be converted into a attack roll.

Done. Super-easy.


-----------------------------


Still, it really doesn't matter. The masses have spoken and they want yet another RPG where people make bad choices at chargen and no one can even pretend that something like a CR system can work.

That's fine. It's certainly easy to write and most people expect that from RPGs, so rewarding system mastery can just be a selling point.

[fectin]

I meant small as in "only adds to one thing", not necessarily small as in "only adds a small number". The relative size of the effects in terms of their literal numeric bonuses doesn't make any difference at all to whether the synergy is better for one class or another - though of course getting or not getting a +1 synergy bonus is less of a deal breaker than getting or not getting a +5.

Contrarywise, if races give big lists of bonuses, there will be all kinds of synergy here and there, and what the "best" synergy is will at the very least be arguable. And likely contingent on other things.

But yeah, I was talking in that quote about smallness in terms of breadth, not height. I really wish English had a good unambiguous way to distinguish them, but I don't think it does. If the racial bonuses apply to less things, then the class/racial synergies will be more apparent rather than less.

-Username17

"Narrow" for very selective bonuses
"Short" for lists of bonuses that are not long
"Small" or "low" for the magnitude of bonuses

[Mask_De_H]

K's tirade about how vision doesn't need to benefit one class type over another is insane. I hope we can all agree on that. If it was hard to reach agreement on that point, I propose we look at the Conjurer, a character archetype that doesn't literally need to see at all. It doesn't fucking matter whether you produce some sort of bullshit "zone" rules in which ranged attacks are really the same as melee attacks, the Conjurer doesn't make attack rolls at all. If the ability to see has any effect at all, then the Conjurer gets measurably less benefit from it.

I hate to break it to you, but any mechanic can have an attack roll or equivalent attached to it. Adding one to the Conjurer would be trivial, and I say that confidently without even knowing what the fuck you mean by "Conjurer." (Summoner...? Area-control mage...? Whatever...)

It doesn't matter, I guess. The only "winning" argument here is that everyone seems to want more games where some people lose at chargen.

Who am I to argue with the CharOp culture? It's not like its the most off-putting part of RPG gaming.

Oh wait, it is.

K, I have no idea what you're trying to say here, but it looks like you're using a nebulous game system to argue that racial (or any) abilities don't have to matter because blah blah mechanics blah blah some weird variation of the Stormwind Fallacy.

There's a difference between CharOp culture and basic synergies; you can ignore the former but can't get rid of the latter. Even with heavy abstraction in all aspects of the design space, people are going to put two and two together to make characters work better. Are you trying to do something where each race has a set list of abilities that work decently well for any of the combat modes, like the Kitchen Sink Fantasy stereotype powers? Because yeah, that's workable but your argument obfuscates it with silly bullshit.