Racial Determinism: TNE

[MartinHarper]

At least in the case of winged creatures, they could be born flightless and only grow functional wings later on - at a level where other characters are getting fly spells and wire-fu and magic carpets. There are plenty of examples of that in nature.

Do Alfar who grow up in the plains amongst the horse-riders become centaur? Do Alfar who grow up on the clouds become angels or faeries? Do Alfar who grow up in the sea become mermaids, and if so do they lose their legs forever? Do Alfar who grow up eating fruit and vegetables become unable to eat meat?

[Username17]

That is just dumb. Frank isn't proposing a setting and play style that is dramatically eccentric and different to standard D&D.

This isn't Paranoia here. Its a setting and play style which is ALREADY about as close as you can get to totally generic fantasy D&D.

At that point its just plain stupid if it doesn't support exceedingly popular and cool elements of the very setting and play style it already describes.

Think about what you just asked for. Everything that's popular in Dungeons and Dragons? Are you nuts?

Forgotten Realms is popular. It has a huge number of fans. So does Eberon. So does alignment. Check the Paizo boards, Fighters sucking has a tremendous fan base. In fact, everything in D&D is popular by the standards of number of fans, just because of the demographics of the number of D&D players and the fact that anything will be liked by some percentage of the population.

And yet, worlds like Forgotten Realms don't work. They are collections of crap that fail to make any literary or speculative sense at all. No one knows how anything functions in that setting. There's an epic calamity every generation, and yet things are supposed to behave as if they were fairly stable. There's a god damned lich lord living in a restaurant basement. You can stop by a bar in the woods that is defended by pixies using wands of paralyzation. Mystra goes down like a 5$ chickenhead, and still the entire world is completely magic dominated in a way that other D&D settings would run in terror.

You can't just add shit that seems superficially awesome and have it all work out. Eventually you get enough unplanned X + Y interactions that the setting as a whole becomes a morass of garbage like Rifts or Forgotten Realms. There is no other option where miraculously everything works out and is totally sweet together.

So if you want to make a fantasy setting that is "good" you're going to have to either start chopping things off D&D, or start with an established fantasy setting that already has way less crap in it than any D&D setting ever has. Tolkien has orcs, elves, humans, hobbits, trolls, and Istari, but he has no badger people or bugbears or dragonborn. Martin uses almost exclusively humans, but there are troll things that live north of the wall on the edges. Jordan just has Humans, Ogier, Mydraal and Trollocs (although there are extraplanar Aelfinn to talk to, those aren't even part of the world). Hardy just has humans and demons, and the demons are extraplanar enough that they might not even count.

But if you were intent upon starting with D&D, you'd have to chop a lot out. A lot of popular stuff would have to be chopped out before the world would hold up on its own at all. Remember at the end of the day that the actual players have to be able to anticipate the results of their actions, or their actions don't have meaning. Some things you'll chop despite popularity because they are inherently bad - like alignment. Some things you'll chop despite popularity because they are legally trademarked (like Evard and Mordenkainen). And a whole fuck tonne of things are going to have to be chopped because setting bloat is itself really bad and things that don't particularly add anything actually subtract from the setting. Once you agree to keep Orcs in the setting, having racial distinct Hobgoblins is actually bad for the setting, even though having hobgoblins alone would be kind of awesome.

Just because something is cool in its own context doesn't mean that it stays cool when jumbled together with hundreds or thousands of other things that are all also individually kind of cool in their own contexts. Look at standard D&D settings. Look at them whole. They fucking suck. And anything you make the same way by just tossing setting elements into the pile will also fucking suck for the same reason and in the same way.

The best settings D&D ever had were things like Rokugan - the ones that took the most out of standard D&D so that they could try to have a consistent storytelling mode.

-Username17

[virgil]

That almost reminds me of the argument of artists, Frank. The layman doesn't care and will love the setting even with really bad things, as evidenced by the popularity of D&D/Rifts.

[K]

There are lots of writers who have settings with crazy numbers of stuff. China Meville, Feist, Simon Green, Terry Brooks and the list goes on if I was willing to keep naming less popular writers or sci-fi writers.

And that's the thing: I don't think that the established settings suck.

Sure, they don't take into account what a high-level character could do if he put his mind to it, but that's a problem that is endemic to DnD and RPGs in general. Games like Shadowrun break the instant you become head of a megacorp, so it's no wonder that DnD breaks the instant you get a demon army.

The essential problem is this: in a novel, you only put in the things you will use, while in an RPG you put in anything someone might use. We don't know that if Jordan hadn't lived for a another twenty years and ten books the Wheel of Time series wouldn't have had a dozen new races. Settings in novels really can have lots and lots of stuff the author does not discuss or even allude to because it's simply not relevant to the story at hand. But, if he suddenly needed a new villain, up shoots a new race of serpent people that he had never even mentioned before.

I don't even think the problem of "setting bloat" even exists. People pick a few races to tell stories about, and the vast majority of them might as well not exist because in your game they don't play a major role. I've played whole DnD campaigns where no one ever played a dwarf and we never met a dwarf....so they might as well not have existed in the setting.

Any setting that people play in will get more and more stuff. People will add races, and organizations, and plots that need a conveniently placed high-level NPC and the fact that every party and DM enters into that at his own pace and it does matter if someone else put some other thing in there that should interfere because that DM will just write it out of his version of the setting.

A setting is not a novel. No one person says "this is in my setting and it has dwarves" and then forces thousands of gamers to conform to it by having X number of dwarf encounters per adventure. Settings are just collections of ingredients that individual DMs choose to mix to tell their own stories. The PCs come in with their own ingredients too, and it's the DM's job to make sure everything tastes right.

You really can gloss over contradictory elements. For example, if your setting has 30 epic-level characters you might ask "why are they not taking care of this adventure and not us" and the answer can honestly be "they are currently involved in a shadow war with each other and they don't want to expose themselves to attack by showing themselves and fixing this problem" and that is a viable answer for your campaign.

The only problem I have with established settings is that they don't provide convenient excuses for setting contradictions and they force people to come up with their own . Since that is easily fixable by just writing setting material that provides a number of solutions and lets DMs choose which they like best for their campaign, I think that complaining about contradictions is just silly.

[baduin]

This is all about settings. But settings will be created by individual DMs. In the standard setting by Frank Trollman there will be his standard races. But some other DM will want to create a different setting with different races. Why make this difficult for him?

The simplest way would be to give some standard races and race creation guidelines. Those guidelines don't need to offer the possibility to create anything too different; latex forehead aliens will be quite enough.

The races creation guideline could look like this: each race gets +2 to two abilities (or +2 to one ability and a skill point per level), some ranks in 2 skills, two predefined feats (can be exchanged for one feat chosen by player), and a trait (or a negative trait and two positive traits). Some example of traits:
-natural weapon
-small or large
-prehensile tail (bonus to Accrobatics, Climb, Balance etc)
-resistant to poison
-minor magic talent (cantrip)
-some elemental resistance
-extra quick
-water breathing

[RandomCasualty2]

And yet, worlds like Forgotten Realms don't work. They are collections of crap that fail to make any literary or speculative sense at all. No one knows how anything functions in that setting. There's an epic calamity every generation, and yet things are supposed to behave as if they were fairly stable. There's a god damned lich lord living in a restaurant basement. You can stop by a bar in the woods that is defended by pixies using wands of paralyzation. Mystra goes down like a 5$ chickenhead, and still the entire world is completely magic dominated in a way that other D&D settings would run in terror.

You can't just add shit that seems superficially awesome and have it all work out. Eventually you get enough unplanned X + Y interactions that the setting as a whole becomes a morass of garbage like Rifts or Forgotten Realms. There is no other option where miraculously everything works out and is totally sweet together.

Well, I don't really see a problem with having a world of mass diversity like Rifts. Sure, it may not be your cup of tea, and you may prefer a more focused world, but it shouldn't break the entirety of the system just because there happen to be fairies living among humans.

I think the big problems you're mixing up is that you're talking about Forgotten Realms under D&D rules. That's a big difference from Forgotten Realms as a setting. In the FR novels, nobody uses fabricate to break the economy or planar binds efreeti for infinite wishes. Really, the setting stops making sense once it has any contact with D&D rules, but that's really the case with almost any fantasy setting.

This is because D&D rules are too broken by default (and subsequently the very point to make TNE). The major mistake the D&D rules make is that they completely invalidate most fantasy settings. And that's a problem if you want to tell fantasy stories. The rules should work with your setting, not against it.

The base rules need to set up a few things:

• A stable economy: Seriously. No infinite gold and gems or instantly created suits of plate mail that can be created in great number. High level characters should be able to be rich, but not infinitely wealthy. Because once the economy gets broken, your world is no longer stable at all and people start asking why the streets of every city aren't made of gold. It would just take one philanthropist wizard.
• Controls on high level characters: We don't want Elminster to just be the superhero who fucks up the whole world and makes it so that nobody needs any other heroes. So high level characters need somethings that they can't do well that means other heroes (and armies) are necessary. So the teleporting, super scrying omnipresent all powerful hero concept has to be tossed. If you can be omnipresent, then you can't be all powerful. Otherwise it invalidates the setting. It doesn't mean you can't teleport at all, but teleport can't be something you can do per day or at will. It should be something that you can do a limited number of times per level, to explain why uber wizards don't just blink around the setting all the time. Other ways of controlling high level characters may well be long times to recover abilities like spells or even just long healing times. In any case, there has to be some kind of in game reason why Elminster can't be everywhere.
• Should support the default medieval setting: A lot of people tend to want to make their settings based off medieval setups. They want castles, and catapults and knights. That means that by default, this setting should be something that's going to work. Castle walls can't just be flown over by relatively low level characters for instance, at least without getting pelted by arrows (no flight/invis combo until very high levels). How you accomplish this is up to the rules, but the game shouldn't be dominated by a small handful of low level spells that completely render medieval defenses moot. Whether you allow places to be warded by invisibility and earthbinding wards, or you just don't have flight or invisibility powers until high level, either way, I think it's necessary to have some means of making basic medieval worlds work in some sense.

Stuff that breaks these rules needs to be setting specific. So if you wanted a setting with the wish economy, you'd include planar binding efreeti in that setting. But your base rules, if you want them to extend to multiple settings should behave with those rules in mind as default assumptions.

But that stuff doesn't really necessarily exclude the existence of races, thouh it may exclude certain tactics. Fairies may need a low flight ceiling to prevent them from flying over a bunch of crap, so it's more similar to FF style float spell than it is to true flight.

[Bigode]

What we NEED is a system where you have a pool of background abilities and one guy can spend that on being "Streetwise Pickpocket With A Scar" while the next girl can spend it on being "Tiny Naked Flying Fairy" and the next guy can spend it on "I'm calling myself a Dwarf but taking abilities to be atypically frail and scholarly due to individual variation" while another girl declares herself a half elf but spends all her background on the elf flavoured options because that's where the stuff she thinks is cool is at or because she wants to play "rediscover my ancestral heritage" archetype.

If everyone has a race and all races have abilities, there's no dichotomy between the first 2, because "fairy" costs races resources and the pickpocket does have races resources yet untapped that'll be spent on some race - the idea of humans being "nothing" is retarded. As for the "atypically frail and scholarly" dwarf, the only hurdle present's the retarded ability modifiers - ditch them. And fvck the half-elf - D&D crossbreeding doesn't work, period.

If you have a system where individual characters get selectable background/physical abilities (and they fucking SHOULD) then the issue of "are dark elves a separate race or just another culture" really is nothing but a bit of fluff that people can and will adopt or ignore without even caring.

No, it's not; races have a very definite and probably quite low limit imposed by populations density, while cultures are (almost) unbounded (since yeah, there's cases of one-village cultures even in present-day Earth).

If you seriously have objective criteria that say "this race is evil AND worth power if you kill it", then people will murder it as a first option. If you don't, then PCs will actually not murder new people that they meet because they will have no reasons to do so.

What, are you saying that every single prejudice-caused aggression in our world had something to do with XP? AFAIK, people often kill people just because they feel they must, and the only reason some wars haven't involved every single citizen on both sides' cowardice (which's presumably absent from adventurers), and that's with rich cultures in both sides: imagine if all said about them was 2 paragraphs because you crammed 100 races in the setting, with some using part of that space to say "they like halfling meat" - case in point: whatever MM says in no unclear terms that witchknives kill and get killed on sight, and you can go no deeper than that if you want to include races at the same rate as D&D.

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

Since the accusation of Frank trying to make a game for himself has popped often enough: I don't want to turn my brain off for anything other than sleeping (and presumably Frank has "getting outrageously drunk" for it, not needing "play RPGs"). I want the fvcking game I play to make sense, and that's not a virtue of cartoons. And now the count's gone from 1 to 2, but I suppose it wouldn't just stop there. And anyway, large populations normally show where the retardation is, not the opposite.

... 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.

If he chooses to exclude the races that I want in my setting... Then it's no better than 4e.

D&D 4E's an unbalanced divergent flavorless dungeon-restricted game, with a thoroughly false promise of offering actually different power levels. Nothing discussed in this thread keeps TNE from being much better by dint of being balanced, stable, flavorful (in the sense of "having flavor" even if arguably it's too narrow), friendly to activities other than "dungeoneering" (since 4E doesn't even cover all I'd expect for it), and possessed of actual power level variation, even if TNE kept all other 4E flaws and added some (which I don't see happening anyway).

I however will also call you a Dumb Jerk for making that obvious mistake.

How's "not making the game everyone wants to play" a mistake? Just by being distinct, people won't ever wanna play the same game; and what D&D's brand and lack of standards actually do's convincing some they will, but what we've in practice's people complaining about D&D not being what they want while they could/should be playing something else (see ckafrica here for an example of someone who didn't even give a reason for not playing something else - GURPS just happens to be my favorite, and seemingly more adequate than D&D, but others might be even better). D&D proper (not "D20 system") can only be called a success by the mercenary standard of WotC filling pockets with brand power (and let's be frank, FrankTrollman isn't that strong a brand, much less the people who actually want to universalize) more than anything else.

2) WTF does True Names have to do with anything? Didn't we already discuss that elsewhere? It's totally plausible that White Mage's I-Help-You spells aren't boosted by having a back door and that Black Mage's do. Perhaps 'back door' could be something like the bonus we give to 'willing target'.

Frank, this violates rule #1: You are not allowed to play the race/class of "I am better than you;" as written. Secondly, why should we assume that is how True Name Magic works?

Did you read what he said? (To take a - retarded - page from Crissa.) Who fvcking cares about the specifics of an example? What matters' that once a working set of rules' in place, anything changed will have a ripple effect of some extent, and in many cases the extent's way beyond the ability of the average GM to handle (and even for a non-average GM, it can take a significant amount of time and writing - except for those mistaught by D&D, who run all the ensuing risks).

But this is not well established by having all racial powers player designed, that just makes all races "feel" like nothing at all. Seriously, you just might as well not have the racial spot on the character sheet if you go that direction.

Many things have to go. Stat modifiers for one. And Racial Powerz that only work with a few select builds. That's got to go as well. But races should still do specific things. It's just that those things shouldn't be "swordsman centric" or whatever the hell you want to call Orcish rage.

(Yes, I can disagree with him, if anyone was wondering.)
Well, first, Orcish rage doesn't have to be sword-centric. But more importantly, why not have each race be a collection of selectable powers (forget about player-designed, of course)? For one, it did seem like the Alfar would be exactly that. Also, if those lists are separate from "class" lists, what's the implementation problem (it even helps with culture distinctions)?

Otherwise, your game is a waste of shelf space. It's an adventure. One. That's it. That's your price point. One night, maybe one campaign's worth of play. There's many games like that... But most of them get forgotten after less than a couple years.

And that's the most retarded thing I remember you saying - congratulations. Are you perhaps telling me that there can't be more than one campaign in, say, a single country of [insert campaign setting here]? And note that's way less than the old TNE (Sumeru) work would accomodate (and I'm not implying the new work's more restrictive - it's too short to say anything).

Or because you can do that math means you get to pick our setting for us?

If you want to get down to an ad-hominem of such scale: actually, YES. You need him and he doesn't need you - that alone says that should he really want to ignore you (Which he's not doing - see the discussion continuing?), he could. Funny that he didn't (so far at least), isn't it?

This isn't Paranoia here. Its a setting and play style which is ALREADY about as close as you can get to totally generic fantasy D&D.

Thanks for "generic" - and see RC below.

Some people want Middle Earth, and some people want Forgotten Realms.

ROFL, thanks for being the posterboy for stereotypical D&D retardation. Let's get something clear: I'm the guy who wants TNE to have short conversion guides for different settings. But I know that FR and M-E are just not the same game, in any way, shape or form (and before someone says "it's just level difference", not even the Silmarillion) - trying to do both in even vaguely similar games' a recipe for disaster the very way Frank's alluded to? Hell, has everyone forgotten the flamewars precisely between, say, Tolkien fans and ... almost everyone else?

But that stuff I don't think has much to do with the rules balance. I mean, for all intensive purposes it may not matter if the PCs are 4 humans, or a githyanki, a centaur, a dragonborn and a warforged. Rules wise, I don't see why we can't make both groups balanced.

Githyanki cross planes, centaurs don't fit everywhere, dragonborn fly (admittedly, I'm picking the hardest case, but it's at least as possible as anything else) and warforged don't breath or sleep. Those are some pretty big differences, and whenever you work them enough that you can claim they're each as desirable as humans, you'll have made a lot of assumptions - changing settings has a pretty decent chance of rendering some unfeasible, and then the work needed'll be far from trivial? BTW, do you know that githyanki as-is literally can't exist in Sumeru (no plane has a similar role to the astral, and planar travel's nowhere near the D&D model)?

So long as you adhere to some basic principles like "The game is combat centric and characters are balanced around having even combat ability. ", I don't see why a lot of it matters.

So, we're talking about a board game? Sorry, I didn't know. In that case, we can ditch all setting considerations, I think.

Heroic fantasy is pretty damn diverse in itself and people want to play their own preferred version of it.

"Pretty damn diverse", BTW, means "they can't all be the same game". In fact, we had already cornered ourselves into high fantasy (as Draco did say right after you, but you at least don't seem to recognize), since the beginning; right from when anyone could claim to have a TNE conception, Tolkien, for example, was unfeasible.

Well, I don't really see a problem with having a world of mass diversity like Rifts. Sure, it may not be your cup of tea, and you may prefer a more focused world, but it shouldn't break the entirety of the system just because there happen to be fairies living among humans.

How about a world that someone can actually understand?

A stable economy: Seriously. No infinite gold and gems or instantly created suits of plate mail that can be created in great number. High level characters should be able to be rich, but not infinitely wealthy. Because once the economy gets broken, your world is no longer stable at all and people start asking why the streets of every city aren't made of gold. It would just take one philanthropist wizard.

Real (i.e. not 4E) high-level characters won't keep an economy stable. Hence economic tiers.

Controls on high level characters: We don't want Elminster to just be the superhero who fucks up the whole world and makes it so that nobody needs any other heroes. So high level characters need somethings that they can't do well that means other heroes (and armies) are necessary. So the teleporting, super scrying omnipresent all powerful hero concept has to be tossed. If you can be omnipresent, then you can't be all powerful. Otherwise it invalidates the setting. It doesn't mean you can't teleport at all, but teleport can't be something you can do per day or at will. It should be something that you can do a limited number of times per level, to explain why uber wizards don't just blink around the setting all the time. Other ways of controlling high level characters may well be long times to recover abilities like spells or even just long healing times. In any case, there has to be some kind of in game reason why Elminster can't be everywhere.

First, thanks for bringing the fvcking Catholic god to the discussion. Second, how about that limit being "not being able to know about everything in time" + "great threats take time to lift" + "great threats cause risks that might carry on beyond them"? In other words, you did the best job so far of actually putting your own particular desires (of nobody being particualrly better, just having higher numbers) in the discussion, since a (specific) setting can support the most powerful teleporting multiple times a day (scry-and-die's an unrelated problem).

Should support the default medieval setting: A lot of people tend to want to make their settings based off medieval setups. They want castles, and catapults and knights. That means that by default, this setting should be something that's going to work. Castle walls can't just be flown over by relatively low level characters for instance, at least without getting pelted by arrows (no flight/invis combo until very high levels). How you accomplish this is up to the rules, but the game shouldn't be dominated by a small handful of low level spells that completely render medieval defenses moot. Whether you allow places to be warded by invisibility and earthbinding wards, or you just don't have flight or invisibility powers until high level, either way, I think it's necessary to have some means of making basic medieval worlds work in some sense.

You're actually the first person to imply that levels wouldn't be distinct from each other; by other's reckoning, low level < high level, period.

[RandomCasualty2]

ROFL, thanks for being the posterboy for stereotypical D&D retardation. Let's get something clear: I'm the guy who wants TNE to have short conversion guides for different settings. But I know that FR and M-E are just not the same game, in any way, shape or form (and before someone says "it's just level difference", not even the Silmarillion) - trying to do both in even vaguely similar games' a recipe for disaster the very way Frank's alluded to? Hell, has everyone forgotten the flamewars precisely between, say, Tolkien fans and ... almost everyone else?

Look, like it or not a lot of people want to do classical fantasy. And really, FR and Middle earth can be the same game. Have you ever read any FR novels? Seriously, the characters aren't superhuman. Cyric is just your average thief. No magical powers, not really any major magical items even. He just does classic thief shit. Drizz't has a magic panther and carries a couple swords that happen to have some minor magic (that seriously could just be mundane blades).

Or lets take Dragonlance. Take any warrior from there. Tanis, Flint, Sturm... they're your basic fucking medieval warrior.

Are these characters that different from Aragorn and Legolas? Fuck no.

It's just that you can't separate FR the setting from the D&D rules set in your mind.

Do yourself a favor and go read a FR novel sometime that doesn't deal with Elminster, before you continue spouting ignorant crap about a setting that you obviously don't know much about beyond what the D&D rules tell you.

And once you accept that Drizz't, King Azoun, Ren or any number of other fighter types can be heroes in FR, then so can Aragorn.

I know you don't like Middle Earth, and would rather play a high level setting where you play Goku. I honestly don't give a fuck. If you're talking Forgotten Realms, then Middle Earth power level fucking exists. Burying your head in the sand and pretending fighter heroes don't exist doesn't change that, because mundane fighter heroes do exist in Forgotten Realms and yes they do travel with wizard heroes. You may not like it, you may not agree with it, but in the source material they do exist and nothing you do or say is going to change that. Therefore in the RPG they must exist as viable characters as well.

Any RPG capable of running FR correctly must be able to have mundane fighters compete with wizards at least at low to mid levels. Not surprisingly this also means that it's capable of running Middle Earth as well. Maybe you never want to use the system to do that, but it still should be capable, because damn, it's a very popular fantasy world style.

Githyanki cross planes, centaurs don't fit everywhere, dragonborn fly (admittedly, I'm picking the hardest case, but it's at least as possible as anything else) and warforged don't breath or sleep. Those are some pretty big differences, and whenever you work them enough that you can claim they're each as desirable as humans, you'll have made a lot of assumptions - changing settings has a pretty decent chance of rendering some unfeasible, and then the work needed'll be far from trivial? BTW, do you know that githyanki as-is literally can't exist in Sumeru (no plane has a similar role to the astral, and planar travel's nowhere near the D&D model)?

Well obviously if you're including those races then you're playing a setting that's diverse like Planescape. Now, I'm not saying that should happen in every setting, but that should be something the setting decides, not the system.

Having it hardcoded in the system that you can't be a githyanki or a centaur really sucks.

That doesn't mean that the setting shouldn't ban certain types.

Real (i.e. not 4E) high-level characters won't keep an economy stable. Hence economic tiers.

Why? I mean I'm not certain where high level equates to "infinite gold", simply because in D&D it works out that way.

Ideally high level characters still work within the economy and have needs that peasants can provide. Consider that high level characters still need food, water, clothes, places to live and if wizards, they need components and such for their laboratories.

Now I don't really see why high level necessarily means you can conjure that shit out of thin air, at least not easily. Bill Gates has a shitload of cash and can buy private jets and shit, but he still needs someone else to put together those jets, which means you've got people mining and refining the metals, factories for assembly, and of course a transportation network to get the materials from place to place.

Now, it may be okay if wizards can turn spell components into clothes or castles, but at some point they have to gather those components too.

But you need some kind of equivalent exchange set up for magic. The power has to come from some finite source. If the wizard has no finite source to exchange then it has to come from his own life force (which is it itself finite, and would equate to tricks he can only do X/level without permanent damage).

So maybe the wizard employs people to find him spell components instead of having them mine iron. In any case, you've still got an economy, it just has different types of valuable goods.

What isn't okay is characters that generate shit from nothing. It is why even in economic tier systems that you have to create some new type of currency that can't be replicated by magic. Well, why not simply just make that be gold and silver?

First, thanks for bringing the fvcking Catholic god to the discussion. Second, how about that limit being "not being able to know about everything in time" + "great threats take time to lift" + "great threats cause risks that might carry on beyond them"?

The old "great threats" thing is something I don't buy. Yeah, Cthulhu might attack once every hundred years and Elminster has to deal with it, but it's not like Elminster is constantly fighting some world threat every single day. The big cosmic plans take months or years to get in motion, so it's not like Elminster doesn't have lots of free time to screw with stuff. As far as great threats taking time to clear out, not really. Seriously, I mean with the fact that a high level wizard can prepare tons of artillery each day or just throw a fuck ton of planar bound armies at it, it means that most battles aren't going to last long.

Hell, he could just gate in his enemies, soul trap them and win, without ever leaving his tower. Once the fight starts in D&D, it's not going to go on long. Because D&D isnt' taking the mass time it takes to marshall troops, raise armies and build castles. D&D high level is about teleporting across the world in small groups in an instant. It's about brutally efficient strike teams that can topple all the high level guys in a day. And once a team loses its high level guys, it's basically done for.

You're actually the first person to imply that levels wouldn't be distinct from each other; by other's reckoning, low level < high level, period.

Sure low levels are weaker, but that doesn't mean that they're useless. Otherwise that sucks, because it means that the moment Elminster exists, that your low level heroes are ultimately trivial and useless. And that sucks.

The setting has to support a place for low level heroes. And that means that high level guys can't be everywhere.

The problem is that Elminster arriving late isn't even a big deal. With infinite cash and infinite resurrection, you honestly don't care when you get there, because anything the villain can do, you can undo. Now Elminster can be awesome, but we need room for both Batman and Superman and that means that for the most part, Superman needs to stay the fuck out of Gotham City. And we need a good reason why that's so.

[virgil]

There's a good reason why Superman doesn't rescue Gotham, and that's the writers not bothering to explain it. Why are there criminals in New York City in the Marvel universe, despite the presence of Fantastic Four, Spiderman, Avengers (a rather large team), Daredevil, Doctor Strange, X-Men HQ down the road...? If I was a criminal, the last place I'd do anything would be NYC, and yet apparently there's a thriving law-breaking market.

The same reason exists for Elminster not saving the day in settings, the writers just put the same stories in the same world without thinking about the consequences.

[RandomCasualty2]

There's a good reason why Superman doesn't rescue Gotham, and that's the writers not bothering to explain it. Why are there criminals in New York City in the Marvel universe, despite the presence of Fantastic Four, Spiderman, Avengers (a rather large team), Daredevil, Doctor Strange, X-Men HQ down the road...? If I was a criminal, the last place I'd do anything would be NYC, and yet apparently there's a thriving law-breaking market.

The same reason exists for Elminster not saving the day in settings, the writers just put the same stories in the same world without thinking about the consequences.

Yeah, and we could do that for our game, but at that point all talk of "a world that makes sense" is out the window.

It's not ath I'm necessarily against comic book logic, it's just that you can't both have comic book logic and try to make your world have realistic style economies and such.

[NoDot]

Frank, this violates rule #1: You are not allowed to play the race/class of "I am better than you;" as written. Secondly, why should we assume that is how True Name Magic works?

Did you read what he said? (To take a - retarded - page from Crissa.) Who fvcking cares about the specifics of an example?

He based his entire argument on a specific (hypothetical) implementation of True Names. For that, the specifics can come under attack.

What matters' that once a working set of rules' in place, anything changed will have a ripple effect of some extent,

Thank you for stating the obvious.

Unless the ripple effect causes a violation of Rule #1, does it matter to us?

[Crissa]

There's some important things about races:

- We don't want races to get nonsensical bonuses to abilities. Bonuses to Int means those are the best at Int based attacks and defenses - and that you're stupid to play a role that doesn't use it. So we want to avoid bonuses to Ability scores.

- Races should have some mechanic that is different for them. Maybe a race flies - but can't fire arrows while flying until higher level, when it's combat-appropriate. Maybe centaurs get to switch off extra move actions while doing a plain action (so they can do ride-by attacks). Whatever they do, should be like a bonus feat, and it should scale.

- Frank has a point about tiny and large races. This needs to be campaign specific. Any 'realism' aspects should scale, so that tiny critters need just as much time to forage and trade riches as large creatures. The gold economy sucks for this.

- Races that have additional travel powers - swimming, flying, running - can leave the group behind, and those powers therefore aren't as valuable as you might think. Leaving your compatriots behind is worth very little.

- Noncombat skills are cultural, which is a good thing to put into a race - at least a D&D race - but what skill you get usually depends upon where you grew up. That's why it's like a Feat, again. So we should remind DMs to give city elves city skills and forest dwarves forest skills.

Lastly, the races should be simple. Very simple. A domain, or a pile of skills, or an extra mechanic is all a race needs. They don't need +1 to swords or +2 to Int or a free cantrip that never gets better. That's both lame, hard to remember, and... Stuff.

-Crissa

[RandomCasualty2]

- We don't want races to get nonsensical bonuses to abilities. Bonuses to Int means those are the best at Int based attacks and defenses - and that you're stupid to play a role that doesn't use it. So we want to avoid bonuses to Ability scores.

One thing I say is to get rid of attack stats altogether and just make it entirely level based. As we saw with 4E all attack stats do is give you every incentive to max out your attack stat above all else.

[NoDot]

The TNE plan involves cutting level out of the attack figures.

[RandomCasualty2]

The TNE plan involves cutting level out of the attack figures.

really? I guess I missed that part somewhere. I figure level has to be figured into it somewhere, even if indirectly though.

[Crissa]

Level is either to-hit ability or to-damage ability. To-hit limits the levels that can play together. To-damage merely means that a hero can be taken out by some number of the lowest level. But I believe we were looking to make it so that you could not fall off the range because you could not pick your offense bonus blindly. Level was going to give us durability and options, not stacking offense. Hopefully. To a point. We hadn't agreed upon that point yet.

But racial bonuses should be toward maneuvers, not to classes.

-Crissa

(Also, if centaur can't fit everywhere, neither can the paladin's mount. If centaurs can't fight in a human tunnel, neither can humans fight in a dwarven tunnel nor dwarves climb Titan stairs. It happens. How is this adventure killing?)

[PhoneLobster]

If everyone has a race and all races have abilities, there's no dichotomy between the first 2, because "fairy" costs races resources and the pickpocket does have races resources yet untapped

Way to have the point fly clean over your head there. The point is that every character has selectable abilities that CAN be racial abilities, but can just be other background abilities. The benefits to this are numerous and massive.

One of the most significant being the ability to deliver races with varying levels of power and varying class synergistic abilities. And that is part of the point of having "grew up on the streets" be a tradable option with "have wings, will fly".

the idea of humans being "nothing" is retarded.

The idea is ANYONE can be "nothing" an ORC can walk in and say fuck it, I was raised by gypsies and I like musical instruments and thieving as background abilities, I never learned orc rage, orc toughness, orc stupidity, etc... That is a fundamentally GOOD thing.

As for the "atypically frail and scholarly" dwarf, the only hurdle present's the retarded ability modifiers - ditch them.

That indicates a total lack of familiarity with D&D 3.x and with rules systems in general. Frank discusses avoiding dangerously class synergistic abilities as a tight rope because it is VERY much a tight rope. If people can just pick the abilities that synergise with their intended archetype without what they wrote in the hair color/skin color/race box on their character sheet dictating their selection for them then you can just not get on the fucking tight rope.

And fvck the half-elf - D&D crossbreeding doesn't work, period.

People want half elfs and half thingies. Crossbreeding or not. The fact that player selectable racial abilities just happen to make half races incredibly intuitive, easy and balanced is just a pleasant coincidence of a system that we need to have implemented ANYWAY.

No, it's not; races have a very definite and probably quite low limit imposed by populations density, while cultures are (almost) unbounded (since yeah, there's cases of one-village cultures even in present-day Earth).

I'm talking about the impacts of a rules and mechanics on actual game play outcomes and character archetypes players want. You are talking about completely irrelevant bullshit. You lose.

Well, first, Orcish rage doesn't have to be sword-centric. But more importantly, why not have each race be a collection of selectable powers (forget about player-designed, of course)?

What the FUCK do you think I've been talking about.

Though I admit you still get it wrong by deciding that characters MUST invest in abilities stamped "this is your race, bitch, roll in your filthy ethnicity and glory in it's separateness and superiority to your individuality and personal background"

YES. You need him and he doesn't need you

Actually this is a forum full of homebrewers and ameteur game designers, just like Frank. We don't actually NEED him. If he says "I'm doing it my way" and we don't like that way we take our bat and ball and go home to invent our own game of cricket.

Thanks for "generic"

Er. No really, Frank has described "D&D land with a fancy magic colors and a slightly Indian feel." If I saw that on an RPG shelf I would go "oh, generic D&D land, we meet again".

If you can't recognise the big and deliberate "Generic" stamp on Frank's setting here you are blind.

centaurs don't fit everywhere, dragonborn fly (admittedly, I'm picking the hardest case, but it's at least as possible as anything else) and warforged don't breath or sleep. Those are some pretty big differences,

Holy crap so Frank's game will not be able to support the existance of things the size of horses? Birds? Golems and elmentals?

Bullshit. Those abilities are pretty much non abilities, even Githwhatsi which I dropped off the list for being pretty much a non event are presented as nothing more than an ability to cut themselves off from the rest of the party.

And as for the horrible issue of dealing with characters like that breaking the game, like I said, if the system can't deal with a centaur and a fairy as PCs from level one it has serious issues with things like horses, guys on horses, angry birds, and archers that climb trees.

So if I can't walk in as a flier or a horse man at level one because it will "hurt the game mechanics" then I can't walk in as a tree climber or a guy who rides a horse either and that is fucking stupid.

BTW, do you know that githyanki as-is literally can't exist in Sumeru (no plane has a similar role to the astral, and planar travel's nowhere near the D&D model)?

WTF? Does anyone care about Giththingimis? Why are you saying this? Do you think you just made a point or are you rambling incoherently?




Now as to Frank who said something much more coherent if completely off track about "gosh do you realise how much popular stuff we COULD include!"

Here is the thing. I'm describing a methodology which is highly beneficial within the constraints of a single setting that just happens to have the added, and apparently highly desirable bonus of increasing the degree of flex for modifying and customising the setting.

You can't support every race ever invented, and frankly no one wants you to provide for Teletubbies. But we already know you are going to have winged and multi limbed races in your actual setting so who the hell are you fooling with this continued pretence that its 3 flavours of human (orc, human, otherone) or bust?

Your setting already explicitly intends to contain the components required to create the vast majority of generic fantasy races and critters. If you actually support your own setting properly you will be supporting the ability to present other similarly generic D&D settings properly.

[CatharzGodfoot]

OK, so we all don't even want to play the same game.That's pretty interesting, considering that this is ostensibly the new D&D edition. Making it D&D is all about keeping the iffy things that make it what it is, and running with them. Things like the unbalanced Str/Dex/Con/Int/Wis/Cha attribute system.

So is there a way to sacrifice idealism to support shitty settings? Why not simply make a game that breaks a bit when you try to use it with unbalanced settings, and be OK with that? Supply an 'ideal' setting, and then accept that people are going to ruin it or use it how it 'isn't meant to be used'. Try to do some preemptive damage control.

[Koumei]

Yeah, it does look like we can't actually agree on what we want. And while, if we chose any one preference and went with it, it would be better than 4E, the fact is that we're probably never going to decide.

As it stands, 3.X + Tomes + shit I make up when bored, starting at "Levels that aren't balls", is perfect for me. So I feel no need to actually give input into TNE except for insulting people from time to time.

[Orion]

Dudes, Name Magic was just as example. However, if you have all D&D races, you have Illumians, so you *do* have name magic.

Frank, I'm on board with each campaign featuring a small number of races. And I understand that some... maybe most races come with setting and system constraints that make them unable to coexist in the same game. I get that Githyanky, Steampunk Gnomes, and Rokugani all come with huge baggage? But at a bar eminimum, can't TNE as published support procedurally generated races within a certain "swords and sorcery" genre?

I mean, I agree that you shouldn't have Sahuagin, Locathah, and Kuo-Toa in the same campaign unless maybe it's an aquatic campaign. But it seems to me that if you already have ogres and merfolk, your rules engine can probably handle locathah and sahuagin fairly well. Gnolls and Bugbears too.

Obviously you don't want all that stuff in the same campaign, but why can't we have all of them available when desired?

[Username17]

I think the big problems you're mixing up is that you're talking about Forgotten Realms under D&D rules. That's a big difference from Forgotten Realms as a setting. In the FR novels, nobody uses fabricate to break the economy or planar binds efreeti for infinite wishes. Really, the setting stops making sense once it has any contact with D&D rules, but that's really the case with almost any fantasy setting.

This is to an extent true, but it also opens up another nasty problem: Forgotten Realms breaks if you throw in all the crap that happens in the novels as well. Basically, regardless of hat ruleset you use, the very setting itself cannot make any sense once enough crap has been written into it. There are a number of books that seem like they take place in a sensible world because everything that takes place in that book follows a sort of narrative logic and nothing gets mentioned in that book that would undermine the plot. But once you start throwing in the stuff that happens in other books, that kind of paradigm falls apart completely. Whether or not you get the chance to read and be appalled by the D&D stats assigned to these characters, the actions themselves completely invalidate much of the rest of the action.

And that's really kind of inevitable. If you allow enough stuff into your game world it's always going to end up a cluttered mess just because of entropy effects.

---

Basically when it comes down to it I've decided that you can't please everyone all the time, and more specifically you can't please people like Crissa at all. And that even attempting to do so will harm your creative works tremendously. Everyone wants their character to be a certain amount "special." But any option which is standard is by definition not that special and instead on some level banal. I mean seriously, we consider tiny rugged humanoids who can talk to badgers and blind people with magic laser shows from their hands to be normal just because it's a standard option.

So people who want a certain level of specialness cannot be pleased. If you give them what they want today it won't be special enough tomorrow. Once you add their pet special race to the setting it becomes a standard option and then it's banal. Eventually the buck has to stop somewhere, because the specific sense of wonder that they are actually after cannot be granted by a role playing game. And while it's totally bullshit to put things into the game world with a "not to be played" stamp on them, that's not really what we're talking about here.

-Username17

[PhoneLobster]

In a freakish twist of fate today I started a new 3.5/tome/+ campaign (not exactly a hard core long haul campaign but still).

Alarmingly one player opened up the MM pointed at the Githwhatsi and said "I want to be one of them".

I'm amazed on various levels.

[PhoneLobster]

Ok so like there was ONE person who expressed the "I want to be bleeding edge" view. Crissa is pretty dead set on centaur support, I mostly talk winged things.

You get from that "fuck, I can't put in winged things or centaurs, next thing they will demand name magic and smurfs"

But seriously, very seriously I've got some significant questions for you Frank.

Does your rules set allow low level characters to shoot arrows from treetops? (you know, fairies)

Does it let them ride horses? Will guys on horses even exist? (you know, centaurs)

Will you be removing multi legged stuff like your bug people from the setting because they are hard and open the door to Were-zebras?

Will you be removing your winged bird flavoured people from your setting because they open the door to fairies and sugar glider men?

Because if you don't deal with this shit your rules set or setting is total shit and/or not what you already claimed you intended it to be.

If you do deal with it you are actually wrangling with the self same mechanical issues you are throwing up your hands and declaring too hard to deal with when YOU don't get to write the flavour text.

It seems pretty petulant.

[NoDot]

Frank is someone who looks more and more like someone who just hates the Fantasy Kitchen Sink.

[SphereOfFeetMan]

This is to an extent true, but it also opens up another nasty problem: Forgotten Realms breaks if you throw in all the crap that happens in the novels as well. Basically, regardless of hat ruleset you use, the very setting itself cannot make any sense once enough crap has been written into it. There are a number of books that seem like they take place in a sensible world because everything that takes place in that book follows a sort of narrative logic and nothing gets mentioned in that book that would undermine the plot. But once you start throwing in the stuff that happens in other books, that kind of paradigm falls apart completely. Whether or not you get the chance to read and be appalled by the D&D stats assigned to these characters, the actions themselves completely invalidate much of the rest of the action.

And that's really kind of inevitable. If you allow enough stuff into your game world it's always going to end up a cluttered mess just because of entropy effects.

...Or FR is a cluttered mess not because it has too much stuff, but because it has existed for more than two decades, and has dozens of different novelists contributing to the setting, while going through multiple edition changes with faulty rulesets.

Your threshold of "enough stuff" is set artificially low because of flaws in the setting originating from other areas.