Should characters even have different combat numbers?

[K]

"Easier" is not better. The designs that are the hardest to get right are usually better.

Not sure I object to your basic design, but even with "usually" in there you're claiming a much stronger correlation between labor and value than I'm willing to accept. It's trivially easy to come up with designs that are very difficult and also terrible (race writeup is one paragraph, each race has as many racial powers as the race name has letters, each power writeup is an anagram of the race writeup).

What's more, my general experience in all of life has led me to be skeptical of people who say "Yeah well my way is harder so that makes it better because life is fair!"

The effort that it takes to get to create a bad design has nothing to do with the quality.

Making things that work well is actually hard. That's why being afraid of a tough design problem and not even attempting it means that you've decided to settle for something that doesn't work well.

If making good things was easy, everyone would do it. We'd live in a world where nothing could be improved because we were all masters.

[momothefiddler]

I think the closest I'll get to agreeing with you is that many of the "good and also easy" solutions have already been found, since most of the explored territory is easy solutions.

So while better is often harder, I reject any claim that harder is a good signifier for better (despite technically being weak evidence, I think). Which, unless I'm misunderstanding you, this is:

"Easier" is not better. The designs that are the hardest to get right are usually better.

tl;dr Make your ideas stand on your own, because if you defend them on the grounds that they're hard, they're as well defended as my anagram suggestion.

[K]

...I reject any claim that harder is a good signifier for better ...

I didn't say that. You have missed the context and are now just trolling (intentionally or accidently).

I'm saying that rejecting an idea because the design work involved sounds hard is a sure way to get a shit design.

[PhoneLobster]

"Easier" is not better. The designs that are the hardest to get right are usually better.

That's just plain not true at all. "Easier" to design doesn't correlate with anything much other than MAYBE increases in simplicity, standardization or intuitiveness. And those things while not automatically "better" often are. Harder is not by any means even "usually" anything in particular other than potentially more complex... and excessive complexity in rules design is actually bad.

No, the entire point I have to make over how easy it is to have individual variation supported by RPG mechanics is that individual variation has a great deal of good outcomes... AND it happens to be really easy to support mechanically. So we should do it because of those good outcomes right within reach. Your response to that being "easy isn't better" is... not helpful, you are effectively attempting to use a point in it's favor to attack all the other benefits of implementing it. That's crazy.

You are attempting to argue that your poorer solution is better than the better solution just because it requires more work and is less likely to succeed.

It takes a lot of creativity and thought to come up with good designs for abilities that are useful to all classes

And why lock those options away as inflexible racial stereotypes that you can neither escape from nor select on a different character?

It's not about easy or hard decisions, it's about good or bad decisions, and inflexible racial stereotypes are a bad decision with bad consequences.

Your minotaur charge ability is nice. It is marginally class agnostic... (but actually there WILL be classes/builds that benefit from it massively more as an escape/delivery mechanism, and actually yeah anything which cares about melee delivery is going to care about that ability MORE than anything that only cares about the escape aspect of it)

But why the hell limit that to minotaurs? The actual flavor of the ability is actually too generic to justify limiting it to minotaurs. It actually sounds like something any "strong guy" character should be able to simply learn rather than be inflexibly born with without any choice in the matter.

There is no reason at all that "burst through stuff with a charge" shouldn't be an ability available to god damn ogres, centaurs, orcs, dwarves, golems, humans and any one building with any component of "strong guy" in their theme. Hell the damn thing should PROBABLY be a class ability for barbarians, hell if you ARE going with a system with a Strength attribute thing going on it should be a god damn generic "free" special maneuver thing ANYONE can just attempt by running face first at walls (and in my system actually pretty much already is).

No. Minotaur race abilities (or any physical "race" abilities) shouldn't be generic stuff more suited to "learnable" themes. You about as much as admit it in your gnome wrestlers should derive from class based abilities bit, but fail to connect your minotaur inflexible race only strong man bursting through ability to your position on gnome strong man wrestling abilities.

Physical and cultural race abilities need to be SEPARATED and the cultural ones then should not be race exclusive, because anyone can and should be able to "learn stuff", even if they need to go hang around with the culture where most of the minotaurs are at in order to do so. And those minotaurs who don't want to learn it, shouldn't HAVE to pay for and learn it just because their god damn dad did.

As an aside, things like natural weapons shouldn't ever be bought with race or class slots. Having horns on your head really should not be better or worse mechanically than simply wearing a horned helm.

Entirely correct, and actually how I already treat such things in my own "ideal" little rules set.

Minotaur horns are just tacky glued on equipment and at most should cost you only the same resource you spend on having a horned hat and NOT the resource you spend on awesome personal abilities.

But as an extension of that, a horn based "special attack" like some special horn exclusive charge that does... oh hell, whatever because there are so many things it could do... shouldn't be an exclusive physical only "race" ability either.

Because while it isn't equipment and is only merely equipment dependent, it is a cultural learned ability and one that a wide variety of horned and hat wearing "races" might potentially want to learn and really SHOULD be able to learn.

This really continues the general theme of your race solutions. You start heading in some good directions conceptually then inexplicably stop without tackling the most troublesome issues that typically plague RPG race mechanics.

I'd say you are stopping before dealing with the actual hard issues, but that would be correlating difficulty and successful outcomes.

[OgreBattle]

The problem with the idea that races shouldn't give combat numbers is that among your races you have shit like gnomes and ogres. A system where both deal the same base damage strains suspension of disbelief.

People can already accept a gnome eventually having more hitpoints and fortitude than a brown bear because it leveled up.

I figure at level 1 people would expect a minotaur and gnome warrior to deal different damage in melee combat, but by level 6-10 the modifiers from class levels become bigger than the attribute bonuses from species.

This would also apply to "minotaur mages and ogre ninjas", where the low tier of play your species is a bigger part of what your PC is mechanically capable of and as you level up and graduate to a new tier it's more about class choice.

[momothefiddler]

Look, I specifically quoted the part where you said something that seemed to me to parse as Hard->Good, and qualified my statements as based on that interpretation.

Did you really need to ignore that part, quote something else, and accuse me of trolling, just to reject my premise?

Fine, you didn't mean what I thought you meant, and we have no real argument. Fair enough. Fine, you're an asshole. Nothing remarkable there; note the url. But did you really have to be an evasive bad-faith shitbag?

[MGuy]

The problem with the idea that races shouldn't give combat numbers is that among your races you have shit like gnomes and ogres. A system where both deal the same base damage strains suspension of disbelief.

People can already accept a gnome eventually having more hitpoints and fortitude than a brown bear because it leveled up.

I figure at level 1 people would expect a minotaur and gnome warrior to deal different damage in melee combat, but by level 6-10 the modifiers from class levels become bigger than the attribute bonuses from species.

This would also apply to "minotaur mages and ogre ninjas", where the low tier of play your species is a bigger part of what your PC is mechanically capable of and as you level up and graduate to a new tier it's more about class choice.

Assuming e are talking about a system where numbers like hp get bigger as you level wouldn't that leveling already take care of that whole thing between the gnome and minotaur anyway? In an ideal system, if you were to make the minotaur inherently strong, for whatever reason then wouldn't you already then be committing yourself to having one be better in that aspect than another? If you didn't want that what exactly would be the point off having small people and very large people in the first place? Just for aesthetics?

[K]

Look, I specifically quoted the part where you said something that seemed to me to parse as Hard->Good, and qualified my statements as based on that interpretation.

Did you really need to ignore that part, quote something else, and accuse me of trolling, just to reject my premise?

Fine, you didn't mean what I thought you meant, and we have no real argument. Fair enough. Fine, you're an asshole. Nothing remarkable there; note the url. But did you really have to be an evasive bad-faith shitbag?

Welcome to my Ignore list.

[K]

You are attempting to argue that your poorer solution is better than the better solution just because it requires more work and is less likely to succeed.

No, I'm arguing that you shouldn't dismiss things just because they might take more work to design than other ideas. It sounds like you are looking at the moon and saying "gosh, going to the moon sounds really hard because there are so many problems to solve.... why don't we just shoot it on a movie set and just tell people that we went to the moon because that's way easier for our engineers."

The end goal is still mechanics that are easy to understand, not too complex, balanced, flavorful, and fit well within the overall system. It seems like a serious lack of confidence when you say "oh shit, writing up good mechanics is hard... I need to be super reductionist about this and only keep my design problems to the absolute minimum."

It takes a lot of creativity and thought to come up with good designs for abilities that are useful to all classes

And why lock those options away as inflexible racial stereotypes that you can neither escape from nor select on a different character?

It's not about easy or hard decisions, it's about good or bad decisions, and inflexible racial stereotypes are a bad decision with bad consequences.

Here's the thing: either having a race matters or it doesn't.

You can easily make a game where there are no races and let people pick abilities off a list, but if you are going to have races at all then being a member of a race HAS TO MEAN SOMETHING.

Your race is something that that you can't escape, just like your class, you sex, or any other decision you've decided to make that is supposed to limit your choices.

Try to have this same argument about CLASS. "Why should my Wizard only get fixed abilities to cast spells? Why can't I choose all my abilities off the Fighter list instead?"

See how silly that sounds? Choices have to mean something.

PS. I'd love to play an RPG with no races.

[PhoneLobster]

It sounds like you are looking at the moon and saying "gosh, going to the moon sounds really

I'm rather explicitly looking at your drawings describing your elaborate plan to catapult yourself into the next door neighbors yard and suggesting that the moon is way better and we have a convenient elevator like RIGHT HERE already.

...being a member of a race HAS TO MEAN SOMETHING...
...Your race is something that that you can't escape, just like your class, you sex, or any other decision you've decided to make that is supposed to limit your choices.

Races don't HAVE too mean something, they also don't have to mean your specific something, and really the whole "race must be a choice you can't escape" ends up in the "borderline racist" territory as it's end point because it is already in the "borderline racist" territory as a starting assumption.

There is no reason in hell that RPGs must have races "mean something" any more so than they do in the real world where individual variation utterly trumps the exceedingly limited physical and cultural stereotypes of ethnicity.

An atypical orc that doesn't meet a stereotype is just as "meaningfully" an orc as an atypical human Italian that defies some arbitrary stereotype is still a human and an Italian.

The orc necromancer who was weak and weedy but developed compensatory cunning and learned mighty arcane power is just as much an orc as the dumb strong orcs who hit things he may or may not live among. We do NOT need to either penalize or eliminate that perfectly viable weak wizardy orc profile for "race to mean something", we don't even need any set proportion of stereotypical orcs to exist or be interacted with for orc to still be sufficiently "meaningful" on that atypical orcs character sheet.

And meanwhile your plan to eliminate BOTH profiles and replace them with something really generic and interchangeable (that probably belongs in cultural/learned options) in order to solve the problem is not a sensible solution either.

Try to have this same argument about CLASS. "Why should my Wizard only get fixed abilities to cast spells? Why can't I choose all my abilities off the Fighter list instead?"

See how silly that sounds? Choices have to mean something.

It doesn't sound silly at all, I prefer classless systems and class is also an unnecessary limitation that restricts choice and restricts the potential usable character archetypes an RPG supports.

But the thing is class, while certainly unnecessary, isn't flat out bad for both game play and that whole "borderline racist" thing we have going in RPGs. Classes have an (optional) game play reason for existence, and the only bad thing they do is reduce choices (and presumably you produce sufficient classes covering the limited choices you actually want supported so that shouldn't be an issue).

And saying that greater choice eliminates choice is insane. Your choice to put a specific game mechanical option on your character sheet is ALWAYS a meaningful choice, changing the thing you put on your sheet from a Race with fixed option to a merely writing that option or not or something else is actually pretty much just as meaningful from a choice perspective if not more so.

Being able to write "elf" in your cosmetic fluffy box and write "but still strong" in your meaningful mechanical box is MORE of a choice than only ever being allowed to write "fragile and dextrous" in your mechanical box when you write elf in your cosmetic fluff box.

PS. I'd love to play an RPG with no races.

Then why would you want to make one that uses the methodology you are outlining?

[OgreBattle]

Assuming e are talking about a system where numbers like hp get bigger as you level wouldn't that leveling already take care of that whole thing between the gnome and minotaur anyway? In an ideal system, if you were to make the minotaur inherently strong, for whatever reason then wouldn't you already then be committing yourself to having one be better in that aspect than another?

If we're going with a "minotaurs being huge and gnomes being small are a large part of the PC", then I'd have a game where the low level characters can supplement their class abilities with their species traits in level appropriate encounters.

So a level 1 gnome warrior can use his innate illusion ability to supplement his swordsmanship and a minotaur mage's beefiness means he can be more aggressive in his positioning and not worry about keeping mage armor up as much. In that model it's OK that a gnome warrior isn't as beefy as a minotaur warrior, but the gnome warrior has a way to still be an effective warrior with its illusions/trickiness or whatever gnomish traits are in this hypothetical RPG.

The level progression (as you mentioned) would then be done in a way where by the time you hit level 6 and go into mandatory PrC's, being a beefy minotaur or cantrip gnome doesn't matter much for level appropriate challenges as it does being a level 6 solar exalt and level 6 wizard does.

If you didn't want that what exactly would be the point off having small people and very large people in the first place? Just for aesthetics?

It would mostly be an aesthetic choice if you went with that, but even Phonelobster's Mouse Trap has "size" as one of the traits you pick with a mechanical effect.

[PhoneLobster]

...even Phonelobster's Mouse Trap has "size" as one of the traits you pick with a mechanical effect.

However it is worth noting that size is one of the few physical traits in the system which in fact does attempt to follow a "class agnostic" mold similar to K's plan for everything.

It goes further than that and is also entirely attribute agnostic (not to hard since there aren't really attributes anyway) so you aren't getting extra strength just from being big, and if it were an attribute using game where strength was your primary attribute sometimes that would very much matter.

And it is (at least intended to be) value agnostic. As in it isn't actually supposed to be worth anything in net value for your character. It's a size descriptor that interacts with equipment fitting, squeezing into confined spaces, riding steeds and grabbing onto things, and a bunch of not too important stuff, and the only "important" things it does is qualify you for some size based skills you can learn and give you a defence bonus, an attack bonus against the same sizes, and an attack penalty against opposing sizes.

All the agnosticism going on there is basically because when you have a physical attribute that is UTTERLY unavoidably required on starting characters for them to be part of a specific "race" then it needs to be affordable to starting characters. Since my system's theoretical minimum starting point is effectively level zero...

Gnomes are small Ogres are big. There are a lot of things you can give costs to and have monstrous characters advance into later in their careers, if not most of them, but SOME physical traits actually HAVE to be there from scratch, or at least have cheap/free precursors there from scratch.

[ishy]

Races don't HAVE too mean something, they also don't have to mean your specific something, and really the whole "race must be a choice you can't escape" ends up in the "borderline racist" territory as it's end point because it is already in the "borderline racist" territory as a starting assumption.

Races really do have to mean something.
I'm perfectly fine with gnome fighters being just as powerful in melee as ogre fighters, but I will feel offended if the large ogre can hide behind a small object (unless there is magic involved, but fighters should not get abilities).
If I'm fighting a fire elemental fighter, I expect anti-fire shit to be very effective (unless the elemental is protecting himself with magic bling).
Minotaurs not being affected by the maze spell is really cool; if everyone was not affected by the maze spell, it'd just be a trap option.

[PhoneLobster]

Races really do have to mean something.

On careful reading of you post I think it's an attempt at satire. But it's really a near thing.

[Red_Rob]

PS. I'd love to play an RPG with no races.

Then... do that?

We played a campaign of 3.5 where everyone was mechanically human and race was just a flavour thing. We had a Goblin Samurai, an Elven Druid, a Halfling Mage and a Half Orc Barbarian (some things never change). It worked fine, the different cultures still made the characters feel distinct and the fact the Halfling and Goblin were slightly shorter didn't really come up as an issue. Nonhumans not having darkvision was probably the biggest change, but that was the only thing that was noticeable.

Of course you probably don't want to allow races like Ogre or Fire Elemental when using a system like this. But for the standard PHB races it really doesn't make a whole lot of difference.

[K]

Of course you probably don't want to allow races like Ogre or Fire Elemental when using a system like this. But for the standard PHB races it really doesn't make a whole lot of difference.

And that's the essential problem. I'm 100% in the camp that wants to stamp out fantasy RPG racism, but the instant you want to play a Fire Elemental with no fire powers people are going to say "this game is shit because none of the mechanics matches the flavor." It's the same problem with 4e DnD where all the powers had cool and thematic names, but were all some damage and a maybe one of eight status effects. People hated that.

But yeh, it doesn't really matter if the racist Tolkien races aren't part of your mechanics at all. People will miss them because they really like exclusive abilities and they want their race choice to mean something mechanically. but that's the sacrifice for simply not dealing with or trying to solve this issue at all.

[PhoneLobster]

...but the instant you want to play a Fire Elemental with no fire powers people are going to say "this game is shit because none of the mechanics matches the flavor."...

But is anyone going to actually do that?

If they want to be a fire elemental they take the fire powers. If they don't and they claim they are descended from fire elementals... then they aren't a fire elemental, they're just someone related to fire elementals, and we (sort of) want to support "my grandpa was a beholder, but I'm basically just some human guy with a creepy stare" so that's fine.

My own system actually does have some cheap enough options for entry point fire elemental traits if you want them. But much as there are some unavoidable physical limits like gnomes being small, if you don't take your body material as energy (which is free) and that one burny skin option (which is free if it's constant and involuntary), you aren't properly a (full) fire elemental, you're just their actual red headed step child.

But that is again, just the absolute unavoidable mandatory physical limits that a minority of "races" must have. Once you've separated them from the cultural options, once you've pulled out the options that can reasonably be "advanced into", once you've put aside but kept the options that aren't unavoidable parts of being an X... there aren't actually all THAT many left.

Seriously, "but what about... um... fire elementals?" is a bit of a stretch searching for an edge case, and it actually works out pretty ok despite that. If you keep trying hard enough you'll eventually find a monster archetype I haven't (and possibly can't) account for with cheap enough "size equivalent" unavoidable starting options in my, er, lets call it an example system, but fire elemental isn't it.

Not to mention that my own methodology still handles it significantly better than anything 3.x or anything that K's class agnosticism plan does.

[Orion]

Forchrist's sake, Momo, K didn't say "most hard designs are good", he said "most good designs are hard." There are many designs which are both hard and terrible. We all know that.

[K]

...but the instant you want to play a Fire Elemental with no fire powers people are going to say "this game is shit because none of the mechanics matches the flavor."...

But is anyone going to actually do that?

Definitely. People are going to want to be room-temp fire elementals, day-walking vampires and drow, etc, etc etc.

Currently, I'm in an Adventure Time DnD 5e game with a burnt-bacon rogue, a collection-of-red-hots giant-sized monk, a trangendered object-shapeshifter, a dog-man fighter and a man-dog sorcerer. Guess which default race packages we took?

[PhoneLobster]

Definitely. People are going to want to be room-temp fire elementals, day-walking vampires and drow, etc, etc etc.

And then you go on to basically describe what five seconds ago was an undesirable outcome as a desirable outcome.

Personally I doubt too many players will want to be a room temperature fire elemental, but they can just do that by not taking the burny contact damage option. So if you ARE going to define it as desirable, it's fine the modular stereotype/individual selectable "racial" options method covers it no problem, if you aren't going to define it as desirable the rules support is still there for "regular" fire elementals.

But it would be awfully nice if you could just decide one way or another whether you want fire elementals to be on fire or not.

As for day walking guys, personally I'm completely cool with that. The whole "can only play the night shift" thing is iffy at best so anyone opting out of it is OK, and frankly it's probably very reasonably and desirably one of the first priorities of any special snowflake PC versions of somehow punitively nocturnal character themes.

Currently, I'm in an Adventure Time DnD 5e game

Ew.

[MGuy]

So say someone does make a system where larger creatures are inherently better at the dealing physical damage to stuff part off the game. Bigger weapons, higher damage thresholds, whatever. What are the harmful effects of having smaller people, using smaller implements and dealing inherently less damage and all be? Let's say for the sake of argument that size purely effects certain numbers (mainly damage and perhaps damage reduction/Hp) but not actual attributes. So being bigger just means you get a bigger stick, can take a harder beating, and are easier for small people to shoot at but you don't play wacky games with strength and dexterity does to get there. What compelling reasons are there to not allow this to be a thing? What if this stays true throughout the game such that larger creatures of equal level get the edge of having a bigger stick even if otherwise their numbers are comparable to smaller, leveled adversaries?

[K]

Definitely. People are going to want to be room-temp fire elementals, day-walking vampires and drow, etc, etc etc.

And then you go on to basically describe what five seconds ago was an undesirable outcome as a desirable outcome.

Completely wrong. I'm saying that people will pick terrible options when those are available in the game.

It's straight dreamer-talk to think you can make a game where all options are available. In fact, the more options you give people, the less fun your game will be. Between option paralysis and spreading the flavor of your game too thin, trying to please everyone pleases no one.

The basic idea behind a good RPG game is that the mechanics make you feel the flavor of the game you are trying to get people to play. For example, this is why Cthulhu games have insanity mechanics... it's to make you feel like your character is going insane. It's why Vampire has Humanity mechanics... to make you feel like your character is losing his humanity. It's why race mechanics have fixed abilities... to make a player feel like a member of that race.

This means that if you are going to have any mechanics for race at all, then you need to have those be fixed mechanics that limit PC options. Other people at the table need to hear a player say "I'm playing an elven ranger" and have any idea at all what that means.

PS. Lists of abilities based on culture is pretty racist too. Just say this sentence and try not to feel like a racist: "Jews get the option to pick a Gold-counting ability." Racist, right?

[PhoneLobster]

It's straight dreamer-talk to think you can make a game where all options are available.

You seriously are going to go from "harder is better" in describing your master plan to write utterly synergy agnostic options for everything to "that's just dreamer talk" to criticize an easily viable alternative?

And misrepresentation for that matter. The methodology I am describing can be used to represent a setting/system with the option for room temperature fire elementals or not that doesn't mean it's universal methodology/system or that either potential setting/game is ever "all options are available".

You eventually draw the line somewhere on compulsory physical traits. You just don't draw it anywhere near "hrm, generic learnable charge maneuver?". You can draw it either side of "fire elementals, hot or not?" personally I don't see why you would draw it on the not side, but you wanted to for a moment there when it was convenient. And hell, it isn't even especially relevant to whether you then went on from drawing that line to use my own methodology or yours.

In fact, the more options you give people, the less fun your game will be. Between option paralysis and spreading the flavor of your game too thin, trying to please everyone pleases no one.

You're misrepresenting the degree of choice going on here by a long shot. Even my own "race" mechanic methodology isn't in it's own right particularly increasing or decreasing the amount of mechanical options at all, it's merely a change in the WAY they are selected.

Your own plan to tie mechanical options to fixed semi-relevant fluff options with borderline racist stereotypes is in no way a reduction in the sheer number of mechanical options available. It's just tying potentially undesirable/borderline racist fluff to them. You can still choose the special learnable charge option, you just have to pick cow man fluff with it, because screw you for no particular reason if you wanted your dwarf barbarian to do that really rather appropriate action.

If you were at all serious about reducing options, because that's suddenly the latest goal post, your proposals wouldn't even include discussing minotaurs, ogres, or fire elementals and would flat out stop at a very small number of probably not remotely monstrous options, and the responding argument would rapidly be "why the hell aren't these all just humanoids and ALL the "racial" options just end up being learnable cultural crap?".

Meanwhile even my own current implementation of this methodology isn't even primarily intended to be used as a complete shopping list for "every combination of physical "race" abilities listed in the rules ever every time!". You use it to build your available, hopefully short, list of playable races, they have very short lists of compulsory physical traits and potentially slightly longer lists (but still shorter than "entire rules set") of optional abilities to invest in through character advancement.

By implementing a separation between cultural and physical, and between compulsory (usually free) physical options and optional (usually costed) physical options the system for the vast majority of the time manages to avoid any compulsory investment in non-synergistic options just because you choose a specific set of compulsory cosmetics without even having to resort to "well, you COULD just say you are an atypical individual like a mutant or something and pick whatever off the list...".

Yes, at the outer bounds of the actual mechanics even as actually implemented a group of players and GM could sit down, and a guy could write up a "Gnome" PC and say "hey, I'm a special snowflake so could I like, be a gnome, but like human sized?" and the GM could be all "You realize the actual only notable compulsory component of being a Gnome is not being human sized? But whatever, I'll allow it" and the system can and directly does support that IF that is the groups consensus on character/race/setting design... but you are REALLY pushing the edges of credibility on using that as an attempted primary criticism. The moment your scenario is "the group decides race X can be Y" then "the group gets to do that" is actually a desirable outcome.

Other people at the table need to hear a player say "I'm playing an elven ranger" and have any idea at all what that means.

No you don't, not in the god damn slightest. They are right there at the god damn table, they watched you make your damn character and play it, they know what you do and if they don't they can damn well ask.

It's fine if you snowflake it up and "oh no they won't be able to know I'm conforming with an borderline racist stereotype that means my wizard sucks at his class!" isn't actually a real problem, at best it is concern trolling compared to the real problems it's "solution" causes.

And it's not like NOT snowflaking it up even automatically lets anyone have any idea what it means when you tell them "oh yeah I'm playing a blue goblin" in a system that DOESN'T permit any individual variation, because some of our primary widely used examples of such systems are full of so god damn many races and sub races that they are functionally not that different from either a "no body knows what X even is!"/"too many choices waaaah!" alternative.

PS. Lists of abilities based on culture is pretty racist too. Just say this sentence and try not to feel like a racist: "Jews get the option to pick a Gold-counting ability." Racist, right?

Nice how you picked a "culture" example that happens to be a conflation of race, culture and religion there. You know, for maximum specificity, transparency and what not.

Not to mention the whole point of the cultural/physical divide is that the cultural options are open to everyone. Even in a hypothetical "Racism: the RPG setting" using my methodology the "Jews" don't get the exclusive option to pick "gold counting", everyone does, at worst a lot of people in or around the Jewish culture pick it, and it is a place you can go (whoever you are) to learn it more reliably than other places.

It still sounds pretty racist and anything that involves "the Jews" and "Gold Counting" (hell in practice any statement that starts with "Jews" is probably going bad places in general), but it's a hell of a lot LESS racist than "this is a Jewish option just for Jews".

And once you avoid using a confused real world race/religion/culture and follow the actual methodology I'm proposing you end up with something like "This is a French option taught widely in France to people of any physical descent, with no particular regard to their religion" it is significantly less bad. If your cultural/physical divide doesn't exist in large part to make exactly that differentiation you aren't doing it right.

Though ideally the option is also not gold counting. That is pretty terrible.

[K]

Other people at the table need to hear a player say "I'm playing an elven ranger" and have any idea at all what that means.

No you don't, not in the god damn slightest. They are right there at the god damn table, they watched you make your damn character and play it, they know what you do and if they don't they can damn well ask.

That's not how people actually play.

Have you played in any games recently? People don't want to interrogate you about your character, they weren't watching you pick every option, and they definitely don't remember what your character did even as recently as last game. They are too busy with their own character, playing a game for fun, and trying to remember the rules. In some groups, they were also making jokes and socializing, cooking food, and drinking recreationally.

I'm going to offer this one bit of design advice before I abandon this thread: go onto youtube and watch people play various RPGs. Really pay attention to what the average player is capable of doing, what he/she is capable of remembering, and just how much of the rules they actually have mastery of. I promise you that the experience will be informative from a game design standpoint.

[Prak]

Also, there are players who habitually make their characters on their own even when you express the desire to have a character building session. My friend can say he's playing a paladin, but beyond "detect evil, smite, maybe a mount" that means nothing to me until I look at his character, because no matter how many fucking times I ask, he will always make his character on his own.