name_here wrote:You know, we should probably put a limiter on these before we get setting bloat.
I like each individual one, but too many gets stupid even if EACH ONE is wonderful in isolation and better than every non-TNE culture ever designed.
IGTN wrote:I'm not really worried about culture bloat making the setting too big, as long as their interactions can be figured out and their power lists written up; there's no risk of having too many countries or ethnic groups here. How many ethnic groups are there in, for example, just eastern europe? The old Atayalan empire is far bigger than eastern europe, and, of course, the barbarians that toppled the empire (from the outside?) are also part of the world. We're more likely to run out of quality writing and time to write up spells and powers than we are to run out of space in the world.
I think even Frank is overstating the risk of culture bloat here, at least from a mechanical perspective. The sheer number of character classes was not what caused a problem with the Truenamer and Soulborn. It was more that they were bringing up entirely new magic systems that didn't fit with anything (not our problem here). There's seriously room in D&D for more than they already have, in Beguiler-style classes (out of eight schools of magic, four of them have classes, one class covers two, and another class sucks), elemental specialists (parallels to the Fire Mage), and so on, not to mention various prestige class-type ideas, such as for planar affiliations and so on. I count twelve classes in the Tome PDF main section, plus the Cleric, Druid, Rogue, Beguiler, Dread Necromancer, and possibly Wizard and Sorcerer, that are supposedly compatible, and it still doesn't have a Paladin replacement until the community material, the Ranger role ever, and so on.FrankTrollman wrote:This is of course the central paradox of fantasy universes. They can't be as rich and deep as the Earth history they parallel. Which is a shame, but there you go. On the other hand, real history is extremely complicated. I mean seriously, back in recognizably "fantasy" time periods, what we think of as "Germany" looked like This. And yeah, Bohemians and Silesians and Utrechtians and Hessians and Tyrolians all considered themselves different peoples. There were seven major warring states in "China", but that's only because those were the cultures that won their wars and conquered other cultures. Not a single one of them annexed less than five opposing nations, and they call it the time of the Hundred Schools of Thought for a reason.
There hasn't been a second sapient species on Earth for ten thousand years. But while fantasy worlds have a lot more species in them, they are by necessity much more culturally monolithic than Earth's actual past. That being said, I definitely believe that there is room for more than a dozen such cultures in this setup. Cultures are kind of like character classes. And while I definitely believe that 3rd edition strained at the seams under the pressure of having too many character classes - I also believe that there was room for the basic 11 and most of the bonus classes in the secondary books. True Namers and Soulborn were the points at which setting bloat actually broke things. The game was able to handle Warlocks and Scouts without noticeable strain.
In short, just as I don't feel that D&D was severely impacted by the inclusion of about two dozen classes, I think this project can sustain about two dozen cultures. Much beyond that and I think we'd be straying into Magic of Incarnum territory.
-Username17
We won't have a problem with tacked-on magic systems unless some culture uses an eighth element, but, if they do that, it'll be obvious what they're trying to do and we can just not let that happen, and with the elements we have, we have a huge amount of room for new cultures. If each culture uses either a single element or a single two-element pair as the basis of their magic, that's room for 28 cultures without any culture having similar magic to someone else.
That uses a huge pile of assumptions that aren't necessarily true. It ignores cultures like Hive Acatl, which uses everything. Also it assumes that any culture's magic can be completely described by which combination (not permutation) of elements it uses: Tugnali and Hive Moskitia both use Water and Life, Wuvu-lu-aua and the Lifarian League are both Ghost only, and the Senicians were life-only before Lolahshi, yet nobody would mistake one culture's magic for the other in the pair. So you might have room for more like 60 distinct cultures without too bad of collision, within the system you already have. That's also assuming that two cultures that use the same magic are going to necessarily be bloat, which isn't necessarily true; a barbarian tribe that stole the magics of the Atayalans after their own magical tradition was destroyed, for instance, would be a distinct culture from the xenophobes on Chuluan.
Filling up the world to the point that nothing more fits at all is not the problem that you're going to run into. The problem is making sure that everything fits together, interacts when it should, has the mechanics that it needs, and keeping it intuitive enough that a DM can learn, understand, and track all of it that they'll need. These are all surmountable obstacles:
-Writing cultures when there are already a lot will take consideration, since the number of interactions to consider goes up with the size of everyone else, but that's just work in writing interactions.
-Making things fit is a matter of following precedent and keeping interactions.
-Mechanics are pretty much drudge work. Writing up powers is fairly (just time consuming) when you know what they should do and what the math needs to be.
-DM knowledge is the tough one, but surmountable. If the world gets complex enough, every region will need an executive summary of its interactions for DMs to read when they try to run that region, and every culture needs a list of who it interacts with. Keeping mechanics memorable isn't even that hard, since they only need to remember what their players can do (which is a small subset) and what their NPCs can do (which is restricted by background and NPCs, and is a subset that they get to pick).