Racial Determinism: TNE

[Username17]

At the end of the day, "few races" as an option just looks like lazy and uncreative design.

Exactly wrong.

You know that a design is perfect not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

-Username17

[Tydanosaurus]

Look, the system has to be able to have whatever setting put into it. Some people want kitchen-sink settings with seven superfluous flavors of elf, and while that may or may not be lame, I think it's madness to try to stop them. That's what they want to do, let them.

So what are we actually talking about here?

That's a really good question.

AFAICT, the real issue here is not whether you have 7 different flavors of elf, but whether those 7 different flavors of elf are different races. It's a subtle, but important, distinction whether picking "Elf" pigeon-holes you into one of several elven races, and you pick "Forest Elf," a "Barborous, long-lived, magic-oriented forest creature," or "Elf" opens up a package of options from Drow to Fey.

Among other things, the framework Frank's talking about allows Xanth, where everything is technically either "Mundane" or "Magical," but within those two basic racial types lie literally every type of creature any D&D sourcebook ever described. This isn't so much about who's in the zoo, but who's who in the zoo.

[Tydanosaurus]

Playing "stranger in a strange land" is as much of an RPG hook as any other, except you also get to do racial RPG when people from your race follow you to where you are("on no, ninjas/my tribe/guildmen have tracked me down to repay an old debt/avenge someone/bring me back by force!).

You can't play "stranger in a strange land" when everybody just says, "Oh, a half-dragon, half-construct gnome vampire? Cool, I haven't seen one of those in weeks!"

I can't begin to tell you how disappointed my wife was when we switched from 2E, where her half-elf was presented as a kind of cool, somewhat unusual race, to 3E, where you could easily be whatever the hell you wanted.

[CatharzGodfoot]

There's been some talk (mainly by Frank) about how interconnected 'game', 'setting', and 'campaign' are. If we imagine the the game is inherently tied to the setting, and that the setting is inherently tied to the campaign, then 'creature bloat' can be a real problem.

When you come up with a setting, you really do have to pick and choose what is going to be in it, because figuring out how every creature in the monster manual gets along together is way too much work.

For your island-based campaign, it might be meaningful to know that the merfolk control all of the 'coastal' reef cities, but that they have an underclass of locathah ex-nomads, which becomes larger every year. The locathah are traditionally nomadic traders, but the saughin have been taking over more and more territory as they expand out of the deeps, and their lifestyle is no longer safe. Meanwhile, the kuo toa (who are reviled by the other fish-races for their religious practices) live in hidden sea-caves under the islands.

On the other hand, it would work just as well with only one or two races of fish-people and four different cultures. If you're running a land-based campaign, having four kinds of fish people is just confusing. They don't belong in the setting, because they detract more than they add. If, on the other hand, you just had one race of fish people, you can have a meaningful culture that contributes slightly to the mythology of the cultures you focus on.

In any case, coming upon some 'lost tribe of aquamen' that are a fifth race of fish forehead aliens is annoying. What the hell is with this DM's obsession with fish???

Even though each of the four fish races is different (sharky guys, fish tail guys, fish head guys, froggy-fishy guys), it's not enough to make me care.

Similarly: short guys, short guys with big noses, short guys with big noses and green pants, short guys with big beards. Is there any reason they can't just be cave pygmies, agrarian pygmies, city pygmies, and forest pygmies (aside from political correctness)?


tl;dr: Having an arbitrary number of creatures to populate your world with is great so long as you do it in a meaningful way.

At the end of the day, "few races" as an option just looks like lazy and uncreative design.

Also: cultures, species, and races in a magic setting can be difficult to distinguish.

[the_taken]

As I understand this, Frank and K both fixating on two completely separate plobrems. Frank is complaining about setting bloat promoting bigotry, while K is worried about potential players not having their favourite options from the system, Vampire Cat Girls Ninjas from Venus, in a pitched battle against Mordor. These are two completely separate issues, arguing one against the other is like debating whether to serve rhubarb pie or ice cream.

This dilemma is easily solved by the following process.

Write out a setting following Frank's guidelines of avoiding bloat.
Write out some sample adventures.
Write out expansion sets featuring more races and/or monsters, but don't place them in the setting.
Release guidelines for people to create their own settings using the released expansions. Include the anti-bloat warning.
Release a setting involving a plethora of the new creations, while still avoiding bloat.
Write out some sample adventures.
Bask in your victory.

Just because something it mechanically compatible, doesn't mean it is thematically compatible.
Just because something it thematically incompatible, doesn't mean it can't be mechanically compatible.

[JonSetanta]

If you have a party that has an L5R samurai, a Dark Sun Psychic, and a Krynnish Tinker, you do not have a game. That's not a cooperative storytelling game of fantasy adventure, that's a TFOS team. Anything too out-there and absurdist to make it onto a Saturday morning cartoon show is just indescribably lame.

No.
You don't have a Frank Trollman game.
Perhaps this is what got under your skin.

Many gamers happen to enjoy Saturday morning cartoon campaigns, sans token minorities and half-hour plots.

In your defense I notice mention of "L5R", "Dark Sun", and Krynn (Dragonlance, Greyhawk, etc).
Perhaps this is the cause for rage, since one could easily have a samurai, psychic and tinkerer WITHOUT the infused style and cultural expectations of their origin settings.
Instead, one would have an Orc/Rakshasa Samurai, Hormogan Psychic, and Alfar Tinkerer with all implied stylistic entrapments as a side.

A setting without diversity and adaptability to player requests is boring.

[K]

At the end of the day, "few races" as an option just looks like lazy and uncreative design.

Exactly wrong.

You know that a design is perfect not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

-Username17

So the first time someone says "I want to play a different race" or a DM says "I want to add a race" and the system doesn't do that and they have to stop using your system and homebrew it, then your design is not perfect?

Excellent. I win. Thanks for playing.

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

On racial bigotry: It's the alignment system that makes people bigots, and it's the XP system that makes them murderers.

Making only five races and many cultures has just as much or as little bigotry as many races and many cultures. It just means that in the few races system, people say things like "All Westerners are evil" rather than saying "all orcs are evil."

Xenophobia affects cultures just as easily as race, and minimizing races doesn't affect that.

[K]

Playing "stranger in a strange land" is as much of an RPG hook as any other, except you also get to do racial RPG when people from your race follow you to where you are("on no, ninjas/my tribe/guildmen have tracked me down to repay an old debt/avenge someone/bring me back by force!).

You can't play "stranger in a strange land" when everybody just says, "Oh, a half-dragon, half-construct gnome vampire? Cool, I haven't seen one of those in weeks!"

I can't begin to tell you how disappointed my wife was when we switched from 2E, where her half-elf was presented as a kind of cool, somewhat unusual race, to 3E, where you could easily be whatever the hell you wanted.

I played 2e, and I don't recall half-elves ever being cool.

Whatever. I see your point that a "half-dragon, half-construct gnome vampire" is a bloated concept, but I don't see your point as to what that has to do with the RP.

At the end of the day, you pick your setting and your major races and anyone from a minor race plays "stranger from a strange land." It doesn't even matter if your race never comes up because fantasy literature seriously does this successfully all the time.

However, I am behind the issue of "pick a concept and run with it" rather than doing six concepts. My idea is that a player has one race, one background story, and one class. Add to that four options for singular abilities from any list so you can customize yourself, and you are good to go. Under that system, you would have to pick a race, but if you wanted to use your options for a Dragon ability, a gnome one, a vampire one, and a construct one you could do that but you would only get the full suite of abilities from one race.

[Tydanosaurus]

Making only five races and many cultures has just as much or as little bigotry as many races and many cultures. It just means that in the few races system, people say things like "All Westerners are evil" rather than saying "all orcs are evil."

Xenophobia affects cultures just as easily as race, and minimizing races doesn't affect that.

Ssssssssssstrawman.

The issue isn't xeonphobia or evilness, but the immutability of characteristics. If eviliality is tied to race, a lot of people are going to go w/ the 3.x "Orcs are pure evil" theory. Cultures are always changeable, so the currently despicable and evil British Orcs can soon become our allies, the freedom-loving and peppy British Orcs.

[Username17]

Look, the system has to be able to have whatever setting put into it.

Absolutely not. This is perhaps the single most destructive and pernicious idea inflicting itself on game design the world over, and it has got to stop. Systems don't have to be able to have any setting input into them. They can't. When you make a system, you make the world with it.

Now you can make a system out of a system already in place to make a game and associated world with less effort than one might expect. And heck,at the very simple level you can take some pretty general stuff ad reuse it many times as long as you never detailed the basic stuff very well. I mean, die roll mechanics can be kludged into pretty much any game with a minimum of fuss, which is why games like FUDGE work at all - since they aren't complete you can make a functional game in many different genres just by completing the system.

---

But you can't get down to the nuts and bolts unless you know what is in your world. I mean seriously: what level is appropriate for a character to be able to siphon Incarnum from his enemies' reserves?

In a game based on James Bond spying, there should not be a Willpower defense at all. Higher level characters all have high Willpowers unless they have a disadvantage that makes them weak willed. Defenses in such a system should be along the lines of Toughness, Speed, Stealth, Unobtrusiveness. Crap like Willpower and Magic Resistance don't exist, and they shouldn't appear in the system. D20 Modern was crap because it attempted to take a system designed for Rifts: Fantasy and tried to apply it to Gumshoe Detectivery, and that's bullshit.

You can scavenge mechanics from one system to another. There's no reason that your game of modern intrigue can't have people throwing around a d20 in order to check against a DC to see whether they succeed or fail at an action - that's a perfectly reasonable way to do things that generates easily identified probabilities in increments from 5-95%. But you can't take the whole system without things falling apart badly. If there aren't psychics running around mind blasting you all the time, it's god damn ridiculous to have one of your 4 basic defenses be "Willpower." Heck, if people aren't running around stabbing each other with spears and wearing ring mail as a matter of course then it's completely obscene to have "Armor Class" being in the basic four as well. Out of the basic defenses of D&D, fully half of them have no place at all on a modern private eye's character sheet.

And that's the point. Until you have the discipline to determine what is actually in your game, you can't put anything in your game. And until you have the discipline to determine what's not in the game, then your game isn't really anything except a tirade by a 4th grader. If you can't sit down and honestly refuse to put stuff in your game world, your game cannot generate anything except badly written slash fiction.

-Username17

[K]

Making only five races and many cultures has just as much or as little bigotry as many races and many cultures. It just means that in the few races system, people say things like "All Westerners are evil" rather than saying "all orcs are evil."

Xenophobia affects cultures just as easily as race, and minimizing races doesn't affect that.

Ssssssssssstrawman.

The issue isn't xeonphobia or evilness, but the immutability of characteristics. If eviliality is tied to race, a lot of people are going to go w/ the 3.x "Orcs are pure evil" theory. Cultures are always changeable, so the currently despicable and evil British Orcs can soon become our allies, the freedom-loving and peppy British Orcs.

Here is what a strawman argument is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man. Feel free to come back when you know what the hell you are talking about.

Frank and I long ago agreed that "alignment" would not be tied to race except in the extreme case of things like angels and devils. Since we have at no point in this thread discussed assigning immutable racial "good and evil" tags to people, your whole argument is as meaningless as it is erroneous.

[Tydanosaurus]

Whatever. I see your point that a "half-dragon, half-construct gnome vampire" is a bloated concept, but I don't see your point as to what that has to do with the RP.

At the end of the day, you pick your setting and your major races and anyone from a minor race plays "stranger from a strange land."

There aren't "minor races." There's just races that can be played, and races that can't. If a race can be played, it will be, and from that point on it's not a "stranger" to your table.

You can monkey your setting around all you want, but there is no way on gawd's green earth that you can make it exotic to play a dwarf. Or a human. Or any other standard race. You will pretend that your setting, in which minotaurs, goblins and trolls are the main races and barbarian elves live as desert nomads (or whatever your creative concept is) is sooooo different, but an elf is an elf. And whatever standard race your system allows is just that, a standard race.

Shorter: Familiarity = not strange.

[K]

Whatever. I see your point that a "half-dragon, half-construct gnome vampire" is a bloated concept, but I don't see your point as to what that has to do with the RP.

At the end of the day, you pick your setting and your major races and anyone from a minor race plays "stranger from a strange land."

There aren't "minor races." There's just races that can be played, and races that can't. If a race can be played, it will be, and from that point on it's not a "stranger" to your table.

Sure you can. It's RP, so you seriously can have peasants come out and throw rocks and merchants refuse to make lizard-man armor. You can even assign penalties like "-4 to social checks when near your allies."

The rules of the system inform the setting, and RP penalties can seriously be felt if you try at all. Either works to make a minor race strange and exotic.

Also, as a note "stanger from a strange land" is a way of interacting with the game world. It doesn't matter what other PCs do, only what NPCs do.

[Tydanosaurus]

Making only five races and many cultures has just as much or as little bigotry as many races and many cultures. It just means that in the few races system, people say things like "All Westerners are evil" rather than saying "all orcs are evil."

Xenophobia affects cultures just as easily as race, and minimizing races doesn't affect that.

Ssssssssssstrawman.

The issue isn't xeonphobia or evilness, but the immutability of characteristics. If eviliality is tied to race, a lot of people are going to go w/ the 3.x "Orcs are pure evil" theory. Cultures are always changeable, so the currently despicable and evil British Orcs can soon become our allies, the freedom-loving and peppy British Orcs.

Here is what a strawman argument is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man. Feel free to come back when you know what the hell you are talking about.

Frank and I long ago agreed that "alignment" would not be tied to race except in the extreme case of things like angels and devils. Since we have at no point in this thread discussed assigning immutable racial "good and evil" tags to people, your whole argument is as meaningless as it is erroneous.

I don't think there's an argument that a system requires less xenophobia or evilness with fewer races. That is a strawman you created on your own. The issue was whether that bigotry would as automatic and reflexive, and as immutable, with races rather than cultures as the issue.

But you are mighty smart for pointing out that people are xenophobic towards other cultures, not just other races. Let me bask in your wisdom a little. Little more. Liiiiiitttttllllleee bit more.

There. Done.

I don't much care what you and Frank agreed on. The problem is how a game system is going to be used. If you tie characteristics to race, they are more likely to be thought immutable, and actions reflexive. If you tie them to cultures, they are not.

[Tydanosaurus]

Whatever. I see your point that a "half-dragon, half-construct gnome vampire" is a bloated concept, but I don't see your point as to what that has to do with the RP.

At the end of the day, you pick your setting and your major races and anyone from a minor race plays "stranger from a strange land."

There aren't "minor races." There's just races that can be played, and races that can't. If a race can be played, it will be, and from that point on it's not a "stranger" to your table.

Sure you can. It's RP, so you seriously can have peasants come out and throw rocks and merchants refuse to make lizard-man armor. You can even assign penalties like "-4 to social checks when near your allies."

The rules of the system inform the setting, and RP penalties can seriously be felt if you try at all. Either works to make a minor race strange and exotic.

Also, as a note "stanger from a strange land" is a way of interacting with the game world. It doesn't matter what other PCs do, only what NPCs do.

Wow, you've just required "strange" species to invest more in social skills. Or create a system where some people just suck at stuff, I'm not sure. Either way, I bow to your leet skills.

I doubt you actually played 2E much, or you'd remember how truly cool it was to think of a Drow character, or a Minotaur character. I know you never played 1E, or you'd remember how revolutionary it was to think of playing a Centaur or a Werebear. Those, K, were "strangers in a strange land." You didn't need minor changes to social skills to feel the difference, regardless of setting.

In the end, I think we have a difference of opinion here. I think unless you impress the other players at the table, there's not much point in playing a "strange" character. YMMV.

[K]

[
In a game based on James Bond spying, there should not be a Willpower defense at all. Higher level characters all have high Willpowers unless they have a disadvantage that makes them weak willed. Defenses in such a system should be along the lines of Toughness, Speed, Stealth, Unobtrusiveness. Crap like Willpower and Magic Resistance don't exist, and they shouldn't appear in the system. D20 Modern was crap because it attempted to take a system designed for Rifts: Fantasy and tried to apply it to Gumshoe Detectivery, and that's bullshit.

You have half a point there.

Yes, MR doesn't make any sense in a non-magical setting.

No, Will does have a place in a James Bond setting. You could use it to resist intimidation or other social checks.

My point is that making setting-specific mechanics is bad when you can just make well designed systems that don't have extra pieces. I mean, we all know that MR is just an extra system when you have other traits that let you save from the same effect, so cutting it out actually makes a better system regardless of whether you plan to mix genres and settings.

By the same token, you seriously can give some abilities tags that inform whether they should be in a a setting or not or if a certain character concept should have them or not. Incarnum Sucking may be a 5th level power, but its [magical] so James Bond can't have it and needs to take another 5th level power like Trick Shot[martial].

[angelfromanotherpin]

Look, the system has to be able to have whatever setting put into it.

Absolutely not. This is perhaps the single most destructive and pernicious idea inflicting itself on game design the world over, and it has got to stop. Systems don't have to be able to have any setting input into them. They can't. When you make a system, you make the world with it.

Dude, I've played very specific games. I've played The Mountain Witch, which is the best Reservoir-Dogs-meets-ronin-fantasy-in-a-journey-up-Mount-Fuji-to-kill-a-witch game there is. That style of design can work - but I don't think too many people are here for that. People are looking for a kickass level-based fantasy system that they can do their own world-building for.

I agree that any individual setting is empowered by being as specific as possible. But the game will succeed by supporting many individual settings, not one. That's a big reason that D&D thrives and Earthdawn doesn't. I'm not asking TNE to support weird out-of-genre settings like Dark City or even weird in-genre settings like A Man of His Word.

My expectation for the game is that if you want to move from (for example) Ravenloft to Dark Sun, all you need is the relevant World Book. If that's not the case, and TNE gets tied down to Alfar and Hormigans, I'm just going someplace else for my fantasy fix, because those don't speak to me.

[Calibron]

My philosophy when it comes to setting design is mostly in the Frank camp. The world 90% of my campaigns take place on only has 5 real intelligent species(+1 nearly extinct species) that have civilizations above the tribe level. However, this is just one plane in a vast, mostly unstatted, cosmology and there is specifically a "Planar Hub" located in an out of the way location in the world that pre-wish economy adventurers could ostensibly get to and encounter new beings completely outside of their sphere. To be honest I mostly added this so that my players could in fact experience the near total freedom of character creation at lower levels while still allowing me to maintain the credibility of my world and avoid the ridiculous race bloat and over all flavorlessnes that effects the generic D&D setting.

I wonder if there's not some sort of similar, though hopefully less obviously forced, "best of both worlds" compromise that can be reached.

[CatharzGodfoot]

You can monkey your setting around all you want, but there is no way on gawd's green earth that you can make it exotic to play a dwarf. Or a human. Or any other standard race. You will pretend that your setting, in which minotaurs, goblins and trolls are the main races and barbarian elves live as desert nomads (or whatever your creative concept is) is sooooo different, but an elf is an elf. And whatever standard race your system allows is just that, a standard race.

Shorter: Familiarity = not strange.

Totally. To be strange, a race has to have blue skin and really big eyebrows. Or covered in feathers. Or have a giant bug for a head. Or orange skin and shark teeth. Or green skin and big tusks.

Until it becomes the norm for some major setting. Then thrill seekers who can't wrap their heads around the idea that in certain settings being a giant bug is totally normal have to come up with something totally new and unique. Like a race of short guys with black skin, white hair, and pointy ears.

[Crissa]

Look, there's no reason for the core system to be filled with races. It's an example.

But the mechanics need to be available to support many races, because presumably each setting has its own.

That's why I don't think racial packages should have anything to do with species and more to do with culture and magic.

...Also, I have no problem with someone going from Human to half-elf by picking up a Feat.

-Crissa

Guns and Technology are basically Magic. They're the same dice rolls. Different labels and different lists, sure.

Willpower totally needs to be in 007 - how else can you tell which badguys break under torture and which do not?

[K]

Wow, you've just required "strange" species to invest more in social skills. Or create a system where some people just suck at stuff, I'm not sure. Either way, I bow to your leet skills.

Unless you go with a "raceless" system where every race gets no extra abilities, some races are going to be better at some things (either slightly or greatly). Show me a system where that is not true and I'd take it under consideration.

I doubt you actually played 2E much, or you'd remember how truly cool it was to think of a Drow character, or a Minotaur character. I know you never played 1E, or you'd remember how revolutionary it was to think of playing a Centaur or a Werebear. Those, K, were "strangers in a strange land." You didn't need minor changes to social skills to feel the difference, regardless of setting.

In the end, I think we have a difference of opinion here. I think unless you impress the other players at the table, there's not much point in playing a "strange" character. YMMV.

I played 2e for around five years. Yes, I would have liked to play a new race because I got really bored with the basic races.

But I still don't get your point, so I'm tempted to just accuse you of trolling and move on. We'll pretend you have a point for a few more minutes.

I don't care what other PCs think. Seriously. When I play a different race it's because I want to RP someone strange and different with a different biology and culture. Sometimes, I've had my ass handed to me often enough by a certain race that I just want to play that race (drow) or I just watched a movie and I though something would be cool (ogre).

Since it's an RP choice, all that matters is that I'm happy. You don't play a drow unless you want to be emo and have peasants toss rocks at you. The other players can suck it as long as I can still contribute meaningfully to the party, and they'll know my character is a stranger because I'll RP it that way.

[Crissa]

Let me put K's point another way:

If your setting doesn't have fairies and centaurs, I'll probably put the book down and not think about it anymore. But if it doesn't have fairies and centaurs, but instead says, 'but this is how you could have fairies and centaurs instead' of the standard races, I'm right there.

Just have a note on setting construction: Be sparing with your races, and detailed with your cultures.

-Crissa

[Username17]

Since it's an RP choice, all that matters is that I'm happy.

And that's the core of why you're wrong. It's a cooperative story. The important thing isn't just that you are happy, it's that everyone is happy. Your character doesn't just have to fit into your mental story, it has to fit into the mental story of every single player.

And that means that while you could be perfectly happy coming into a game about hobgoblin ghost pirates with some sort of giant purple Grimace-like character, exercising your weird surrealistic out-of-genre abilities, it would piss everyone else off because they signed up for a game of hobgoblin ghost pirates rather than Hamburglary on the high seas.

The game system is slanted, even written based on the capabilities of every single thing that is in it. What defenses exist is based on what threats exist, what lethality levels are like, what is important in the game. If you want to do something else you can, but you have to write a new system to do so. And while it's entirely possible that you can reuse a lot of mechanics and even whole subsystems with just the faintest coats of new paint (Orcs -> Rakshasa is a good example), you're going to have to accept that you are making a new system and you do have to evaluate it in those terms.

Fundamentals like attributes, defenses, and abilities may not be appropriate in a different setting, or even a different theme in nominally the same setting. You have to nail down what your game is supposed to do before you can determine if your game is successfully doing it. And that means that all the crap we were told about how D&D could do any kind of adventure or that GURPS could run any genre is just that - crap. It's a wrong headed idea that we have to divest ourselves of if we're going to get anything done.

-Username17

[JonSetanta]

OK, so TNE will be race-specific with the tiny selection and limited variety of player options.

... but include support for making new races for DM and player alike, as K mentioned. Without that you've done no better than 4e at all.
It's one thing to say "you shouldn't" and the gamers go and make their own species.
It's another to say "you can't" and don't provide the mechanics to so that gamers not only make new species but those creations break the game due to lack of infrastructure for expanding.

[Crissa]

Frank, if your system cannot have races other than orcs and humans...

...I'm not playing it.

I want my fantasy to look like the troll's market in Hellboy: Filled with many fantastic races. I can't imagine I'm the only one.

-Crissa