Racial Determinism: TNE

[Username17]

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

...I'm not playing it.

That's fine. There are lots of games, and not everyone will want to play in every one of them. In fact, I think it's pretty cruel to tell people that they "can" play all kinds of things when the setting and rule system doesn't really support that.

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

The only way that can happen is if you basically go full dream logic for everybody. With the amount of narrative static that kind of "variety" brings to the table, the amount of narrative power you'd have to give everyone is far beyond anything that D&D-like games hand out.

The troll market only works because it's a single author fiction. To bring that into a game you'd need to give comparable authorial power to all the players. In short: you'd have to ditch the DM altogether. Which is fine, you could totally do that. But unstructured means unstructured. You can't even try to have it both ways without being a selfish bitch. If you can walk into a room and have it be filled with crazy tentacle trolls and huge mouthed bug musicians, you have to accept interjections from other players who want their character to ditch the respirator in order to look more attractive to womenfolk or develop new powers in the middle of the adventure and such.

If one person is playing the world, the world has to have established rules or that person is just basically fucking with you. If the world doesn't have constraints, doesn't have an internal sense, then the DM's role doesn't even have a reason to exist.

---

What you are asking for is Münchhausen with dice. That's workable. But don't even fucking pretend that it can work well in the standard Gamemaster + Players scenario. If you open up the world as much as the worlds of Guillermo del Toro, you need to provide everyone at the table with the powers of Guillermo del Toro. Otherwise, no one can do anything.

Either you have the world have an internal and consistent knowable logic or you don't. If you don't, then players cannot do things without being able to flaunt the world.

-Username17

[RiotGearEpsilon]

I'm not clear why you can't leave a finite wiggle room of 'weird monster capabilities' that you could mix and match from to create custom critters. As long as custom races don't have abilities that fall out of the bounds of what the system supports well, you could have hundreds or thousands of 'minor' races that crop up in isolated populations in weird corners of the world due to magical sites or whatever.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

Also, hell. The Troll market was composed of TROLLS. Who's to say those guys weren't all the same species in weird morphologies?

[rapa-nui]

Let's examine this problem at 3 levels:

1. The SYSTEM
2. The SETTING
3. The INDIVIDUAL CAMPAIGN

The System needs certain things defined in order to work. What kind of attacks and defenses are going to be used, what scale most adventures will occur in, and certain absolute limits (ie: what's the most powerful type of being, what does being 'really dead' mean, etc). The SYSTEM should explicitly say that any Races being used must stick to these guidelines.

The Setting affects the system in a top-down way. If you insert spacefaring silicon-based plasma rifle wielding crystal trees into your fantasy game, you just broke the system by layering some shitty Setting frosting on the System cake. So, the SETTING packaged with the system should be exemplary one that is internally consistent, and plays by the rules. Personally, I think that a system based on Humanoids, Magical Humanoids, and Hive Beings is pretty damn complete, specially when one considers that each of those 3 groups can be split into an infinite variety of tribes.

The Campaign is something the game designer is partially removed from. You can make as many suggestions in your text as you want, but there is no way to stop Crissa from taking TNE, and injecting whatever she damn well pleases into it. So, again, it seems like a good idea to include guidelines on Making Your Own Races, just so people who don't see that the game is complete as-is, can add whatever they feel is missing.

[PhoneLobster]

I'm going to say it again since it seems once wasn't enough. Player selectable racial abilities god damnit.

A good D&D system in this day and age must be able to do what Savage Species promised to do.

You don't do that you have failed. So we need a set of abilities that can be used to make reasonable approximations to fairies and centaurs and half the monster list as starting characters and those abilities need to be tradable against things that make you a dwarf/elf or things that make you some guy who ISN'T hung up on how awesomely "human" (or "smurfy") he is.

Also a good D&D system must be able to allow you to play AGAINST your racial archetype without massively punishing you. And oddly the solution here is the same solution. If there is an "Magically Talented" background option I can take that as part of being a magically talented race, or being a magically talented individual in a magically untalented race and "Orc Wizard" is no longer totally fricking gimped for being green with sharp teeth.

I'm with Crissa. There are a list of very standard fantasy character types I demand a system handle and I'm seeing a bunch of flouncing about arguing over which of two options that WON'T deliver the basics should be applied.

Anyway, here's some things I want to see be able to walk in as starting characters in any truly "quality" modern system trying to call itself D&D. And I want them to walk in with sufficient room left for diversity that they can be at least MOST classes in the game without suffering horribly and that a full party of a single option could work.

Centaur
Fairy
Orc
Yaunti
Winged Dudes
Midgets
Giant Beetle
Mermaid
Etc...

And I don't give one crap if your fluff says that Fairies, winged dudes, mermaids, midgets and yaunti are all one race and orcs, beetles and centaurs are another just with "cultural diversity" or not. I care whether or not a player can sit down and say "I'm making a flying fairy pickpocket, no wait, I'll make her a warrior archer fairy, oooh, no wait, a cleric moon priest fairy!"

You don't deliver that and I'm off playing whatever the crap Crissa is playing.

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

[Bigode]

Anyway, here's some things I want to see be able to walk in as starting characters in any truly "quality" modern system trying to call itself D&D.

TNE was only called such because initially there was an objective to release a product better than 4E before it launched. However, we failed at that*. From this point on, there's not even a reason (other, than, of course, the very good reason "no other good name appeared yet") to keep the name. Thus, calling itself D&D would be demeaning. Other, longer responses later ...

*: not trying to say we're worse; it's just that we aren't paid staff for the development - were we, playtest (actual, not WotC crap) would've been done by now; otherwise, we each got tangled with other stuff.

[PhoneLobster]

However you mess with the semantics I don't care. From my understanding the project was intended ultimately as an improved alternative to using D&D, and that would include 3.5.

It's a re-invention of a many times reinvented mousetrap and this time its supposed to deliver all the promised mouse trapping fun that the other mouse traps talked big about and failed to deliver.

And that means player selectable racial and character background abilities.

Because one off rare magical genius Orcish wizards should be COOLER not weaker.

[Username17]

The best that can possibly be done on the front of people wanting to play as fairies and shit is to create a series of discussions on game tweaks and rationalizations throughout the text. That's probably a good idea anyway, but the pernicious idea that people can just plug a 20cm character into a game and have things work out somehow has simply got to go. People have tried that for forty years and it doesn't work out.

Let's consider the relatively simple addition of "True Names." Boom, now that True Names are in the system, people can use more powerful magic on you if they know your true name than if they don't. There's a number of ways to model that, from caps on spell levels if the name is unknown to bonuses to spell effects if the name is known, and front and back, side to side. But regardless of how you go about doing it, the players are presumably going to trust each other with their true names, and the players will not have already figured out the name of Pirate #3, which means that any penalty you provide for not knowing a name will impinge upon Black Mage and not upon White Mage, and any bonus you grant for knowing the name will come through for White Mage and not for Black Mage. Assuming that the game was in any way balanced and functional before you added that, you just made White Mage much better relative to Black Mage by throwing True Names into the mix.

And every addition to the game is similarly fraught. There simply is no way to add things to a game without having the game be different after those things have been added. One can make a universalist game, but only by the expedient of not having anything specific in it.

-Username17

[Bigode]

However you mess with the semantics I don't care. From my understanding the project was intended ultimately as an improved alternative to using D&D, and that would include 3.5.

It's a re-invention of a many times reinvented mousetrap and this time its supposed to deliver all the promised mouse trapping fun that the other mouse traps talked big about and failed to deliver.

And that means player selectable racial and character background abilities.

Because one off rare magical genius Orcish wizards should be COOLER not weaker.

I might haven't been clear enough, but what I meant's "TNE didn't have as a stated objective the retarded D&D staple of settings without a lick of internal consistency, nor should it". Do note I do want it to support multiple settings - but I put it that an uncapped-content setting is retarded.

[Crissa]

1) We already know you have qualms about sizes of characters under a meter tall and over two. The argument isn't that there should be characters of differing size - but that there should be a method for easily coming up with unique background and racial packages that players can select on the fly.

It doesn't matter if the packages don't exist in the default setting, it merely matters that the mechanic exists for making city trolls and mountain trolls.

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'.

I don't even know why you brought up True Names.

3) Whether you roll to punch someone in hack-n-slash or gumshoe or are chasing with speeder bikes or gryphons, the core mechanics are the same. Obviously someone needs to look at the balance of the bonuses, stats, and die rolls... But isn't that the difference between writing an adventure that isn't tested and one that is?

I want some universality to it so I can have many 'adventures' with different characters. That means different worlds, maybe spell lists and definitely different races.

How is that not doable? What is required of your game that the races must be written in stone?

-Crissa

(Which is why in Pooka d20 racial bonuses are both fewer than from 3.0 and scaling and costing only a feat. And I would argue for the same in TNE.)

[PhoneLobster]

You know I don't give a damn if you DO say "no wings, no little races, no fairies, just orc, human, elf"

Because EVEN THEN the orc, human and elf racial abilities still need to be PLAYER SELECTABLE because like I said.

The one of Orc who grew up as a freaky magical savant should be cooler not weaker.

And once you are delivering that level of character background/race selectability, which lets remember, is vital or you get 4th edition fairy warlock optimises with demon dude phenomena then its a massive over sight to not include options to represent things like wings and shit.

Because supporting super duper multiverse settings aside YOUR setting has wings and shit so not supporting them fails to support your own damn setting.

[Username17]

The one of Orc who grew up as a freaky magical savant should be cooler not weaker.

Agreed. In fact, I don't really think that this is much in dispute. The tightrope of racial determinism is indeed a tight rope, in that the two demands upon it are:

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

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.

I don't even know why you brought up True Names.

Because you aren't thinking about this two or three moves ahead. Which is why you think putting in Centaurs without adjustment is a good idea. If you were thinking two or three moves ahead, you would see the relevance of a walkthrough of two or three moves ahead with the True Names and its impact onto character powers after its exposure to player character social dynamics to any single fucking other thing you wanted to add to the game.

I want some universality to it so I can have many 'adventures' with different characters. That means different worlds, maybe spell lists and definitely different races.

How is that not doable?

It's not doable because by the time you've written a different world and a different ability list for different character types chosen from different races you've written a different game!

What you are asking one game to do is the single thing it can't do:

Be more than one game.

-Username17

[Crissa]

It's not doable because by the time you've written a different world and a different ability list for different character types chosen from different races you've written a different game!

What you are asking one game to do is the single thing it can't do:

Be more than one game.

That's stupid.

No, really, it's the stupidest thing I've heard you say. Well, maybe not, but I can't think of one right now.

Writing new ability lists, different flavor texts, and new settings is exactly what people want to do. They will do it without support (4e) or they will do it badly (3e), but they will do it.

Your game should support it.

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.

-Crissa

[PhoneLobster]

But this is not well established by having all racial powers player designed, that just makes all races "feel" like nothing at all.

It damn well is well established that way.

You have a pool of racial options associated with orcs, maybe even a single specific "template" and that's what the vast majority of NPC orcs just get. It can even include the swordsman centric orc rage.

Because the player doesn't HAVE to select from that pool or take precisely that template.

You simultaneously and EASILY satisfy both edges of your "tight rope", you have a stereotype to interact with and you have true freedom in designing important and atypical characters.

And then K and the "all the races in the rainbow" crowd can create the albino orc people from the other side of the hill by swapping around some pieces of the orc template with other options.

And you don't have to specifically come up with a big pile of non abilities that carefully fail to interact with further character archetypes in any way shape or form.

And you have designed a system which is already highly adaptable for both character AND culture/race creation and is more open to extension and additions than a "you have to write each race from scratch and walk this dangerous tightrope I set up every time" option.

Seriously, you just might as well not have the racial spot on the character sheet if you go that direction.

If actual race box on the character sheet was about as important as hair colour I wouldn't shed a tear.

[K]

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.

For everyone watching, this IS a strawman argument (my argument blown out of proportion because it's then easier to attack).

Adding in lots of races doesn't even mean suddenly you are trying to play Toon in LotR. Adding in lots of races means that you want to play something resembling most fantasy RPGs and most fantasy novels.

Authors don't write a lot of races into their novels because they seriously don't have the page space to include everything, and they still tend to be prolific with races and cultures. The key difference is that RPGers expect to spend thousands of hours in a setting rather than five or six. Variety is necessary at about the third adventure.

People thus want to play one of those many races they need to encounter for an interesting game. The important thing about a race is that you really can say "I'm sorry, I can't eat meat because I can't actually digest meat" and that is a real reason. If you said "I can't eat meat because my culture doesn't allow it", people will say "suck it up and eat the damned meat." People want racial determinism when they play a race that you just can't get when you play a culture.

At the end of the day, there is no argument to not include many races other than apocalyptic prophecies by Frank. There seriously aren't even bad arguments that have grains of truth or poorly constructed arguments. Accusations of "then it's all Munchhowsenism" are just empty. At best, I see a failure of creativity.

Unless something of merit comes up, I rest my case.

(And as an aside and for the sake of argument, there is a Grimace-like character in Final Fantasy VII and it works out just fine.)

[Username17]

Writing new ability lists, different flavor texts, and new settings is exactly what people want to do. They will do it without support (4e) or they will do it badly (3e), but they will do it.

Your game should support it.

People wanting to do something does not mean that we should support it. There are lots of things that people want to do that are bad for the game.

As it happens, writing up new games and trying to play them while the rest of the people at the table are trying to play the game that they physically showed up asking to play is one of them. At some point you have to agree to a set of rules with the rest of the people playing the game or you aren't playing the same game.

-Username17

[Crissa]

Games are about letting people do something they want to do. Which is PLAY.

If you don't support it, and your name isn't D&D, they'll throw it out.

-Crissa

People declare what they're playing ahead of time. If you show up with an L5R character for a TNE game, no where did we say that was a good idea, nor is anyone (but Frank) suggesting that situation.

What was asked was for TNE to allow an L5R game (no orcs, no fey, but instead rats and snakes). Or to be able to play a Dark Sun game with TNE rules. So that people can come to the table and play something other than your one delicate flower setting.

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

[Koumei]

which is the best Reservoir-Dogs-meets-ronin-fantasy-in-a-journey-up-Mount-Fuji-to-kill-a-witch game there is.

I really must know. Exactly how many Reservoir-Dogs-meets-ronin-fantasy-in-a-journey-up-Mount-Fuji-to-kill-a-witch games are there?

Yes, I would have liked to play a new race because I got really bored with the basic races.

I agree there, but I also see a problem: back in the day, I thought Tieflings and Ass-marts were cool. Granted, I thought dryads (Eddings style) and lizardmen were cooler, but those two were presented as playable. I know people who still talk about Tieflings as rare, exotic, interesting critters.

Now, they've become standard and when I want to play something rare and "interesting/awesome because I have better DNA than you, not through all this practice and effort." I need to up the ante, and be a half-dragon ninja/pirate (it sucked, for the record), and when half dragons became cool it was mind flayers and succubi.

Although it wasn't a complete slippery-slope. If the core books had said dryads and lizardmen were in, I possibly would still be happy with them. I thought mind flayers were awesome as soon as I saw them, not as a result of escalating strangeness.

So I do see your point - people are going to get bored of the standard, or occasionally want something different, and when that happens, it'd be nice for them to have an option. But in these cases, it's probably better to say "I am a one-off strange thing" than to cram an entire race into the setting, as this way you get to be unique and don't feel sad when you encounter a whole gang of your creature type.

And as an aside and for the sake of argument, there is a Grimace-like character in Final Fantasy VII and it works out just fine.

Cait Sith was stupid. I could never actually bring it into battle in anything serious, because its existence was a big joke. Besides, it had shitty Limit Breaks (all two of them). The only time I actually said "the game isn't forcing me to, but I'm putting that Shin-Ra spy in my party" was just before a certain scene. I'd but Yuffie and Cait Sith in the party, and then enter the scene, and Cloud says "I trust everyone here."

Because I find it funny that Cloud would say that to the spy and the thief.

[Nihlin]

What you are asking one game to do is the single thing it can't do:

Be more than one game.

Win.

Games are about letting people do something they want to do. Which is PLAY.

If you don't support it, and your name isn't D&D, they'll throw it out.

Fail.

System matters. System matters. For the love of all that is good, if there's anything that RPG design has managed to accomplish in the last 10 years, it is to realize that RPGs are collaborative fiction negotiated by system. The more tightly those two are linked, the better.

Grey Ranks is about child soldiers in the Warsaw uprising, and the entire system is built around making that work. If you try to make it about space exploration, the system is incoherent with the fiction and the thing falls apart. If you try to make it about hardened, veteran adult soldiers in the Warsaw Uprising, it also fairs pretty poorly.

Agon is about Greek heroes (the players) competing with each other for everlasting fame and glory on a "playing field" created by the GM. The system is built around making that work. If you play it as non-competitive game, such as one player and one GM, it fails completely. If you try to port it to a GRIMDARK setting where life ends fast and easily, even for protagonists, it fails completely.

Prime Time Adventures is about making a TV show. It's getting close to Frank's "Munchausen with dice" territory in terms of narrative control, because you're acting more like scriptwriters than method actors. It's deeply tied to "what works on TV." If you drop that key link at all, the system becomes nonsensical, because it's about making up something you'd see on TV.

All of these are good games that I'd play in a heartbeat. I own the latter two. All of these games have tight concept-system combos that you hack at your peril. Not only are laser guns inappropriate for Grey Ranks, even weapons equal to the enemy are inappropriate. You can drift Agon pretty easily into any other Iron Age setting where violence is easy and fate-bound heroes get marching orders from gods to bring back trophies, but at that point you're mostly changing people's clothes. PTA does television and most definitely not interesting tactical combat or complex yomi games.

If TNE is a good, tight game that fires on all cylinders and does what its supposed to do in an evocative and compelling way, then its time to ask how we cram whatever pet fantasy tropes it lacks in as a hack or drift. But having a tight system-setting-situation combo with clear design goals is not only a good place to start, its the only design philosophy that's ever lead to me promoting games to my friends rather than just playing something because it was there.

[PhoneLobster]

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.

[rapa-nui]

This discussion of races is really a discussion of baseline abilities available to the player in disguise.

Campaign world believability is something for the players and GM to figure out on their table, but whether or not a starting character has wings and can fly is a major consideration for the SYSTEM.

If you just allow any crazy race from being immediately player-selectable, then it has rules repercussions. Major race-specific abilities that can have a huge impact on the rest of the system can be any of the following:

1. Movement type (swimming, galloping, flying, teleportation)
2. Movement Speed
3. Lower and upper size boundaries (seriously... some people want to play as Giants, but can the System really handle those types of characters as PCs? What about a Titan? You HAVE to set limits, even if it seems restrictive to the imagination)

The races presented in the PHB of 3e and 4e are remarkably similar in all these traits, and that is good design. What is BAD design are the racial ability modifiers and other junk that push the Race unequivocally towards a certain class or archetype.

No one really cares if Dwarves and Elves are really the same thing. Hell, Dwarves, Elves and Humans and Goblins could all use the same ruleset with a different coat of cultural paint and it wouldn't fucking matter.

What DOES matter are abilities, and some races, by virtue of their description alone (see Centaurs and winged Angels) have abilities that affect the system as a whole. Because of this, the system design must proceed with either these choices available to the player or not available to the player... you can't have both.

[NoDot]

Frank, I think you're falling to bad word choice; I think you want the word "genre." Otherwise, Modern Earth is not a setting by your reckoning.

Let's consider the relatively simple addition of "True Names." Boom, now that True Names are in the system, people can use more powerful magic on you if they know your true name than if they don't.

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?

[Crissa]

Nihlin, how many shelves do those exist upon? Those games exist on so few tables as to be little more than a rounding error vs those who've seen D&D.

But this is my point, it bears repeating: Is it really okay that Frank gets to choose the setting, but others who didn't do the math behind how a d20 falls are not allowed to?

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

-Crissa

[RandomCasualty2]

Writing new ability lists, different flavor texts, and new settings is exactly what people want to do. They will do it without support (4e) or they will do it badly (3e), but they will do it.

Your game should support it.

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.

Yeah, every RPG needs to be extensible and be able to cover a variety of situations.

If the system is sound it should be able to handle a few new situations without totally falling apart. While new races can be story damaging when introduced to a setting, they really shouldn't be damaging to the system as a whole. It seriously shouldn't collapse a game if you wanted to add minotaurs as a playable race in your world.

Now what is important is genre. If your system is designed for heroic fantasy it's probably not going to handle well in a grim and gritty modern warfare scenario, or a complex game of politics. Mainly because the value of abilities changes depending on how useful they may be to the campaign as a whole.

This does not mean however that a system should have a mandatory fantasy setting and trying to play a different setting will automatically fuck with the rules in a way that breaks them. Because nobody really wants that. Fantasy games especially are very varied. Some people want Middle Earth, and some people want Forgotten Realms. Some people want minotaurs, pit fiends and other weird ass shit walking around in town, and other people want meeting an elf or a dragon to be a major campaign event.

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.

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. Sure you're going to have to sometimes say no to certain races, like playing a great wyrm in a low level game, but that doesn't mean that you've got to necessarily throw races out of the game entirely.

The choice to include races should be a setting choice, not a system choice.

What is necessary though I think is distinct tiers of power so people can tell the stories that they want to tell.

The general concepts of 4E tiers were pretty good:

Heroic for crap like LotR, Conan and other baseline fantasy.
Paragon for tales of high powered wizards, mageknights and over the top anime fighting moves.
Epic for totally off the wall shit like DBZ, deity play and so on.

Heroic fantasy is pretty damn diverse in itself and people want to play their own preferred version of it. I don't think that people want to be told what races are okay in the setting and which aren't for no good reason. Some people want Thri-kreen in their stories and others don't. That's just a fact of life. If at all possible you want to cater to both people and honestly, there's no reason why you can't.

[Draco_Argentum]

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.

How about we straw man less? Noone appears to be asking for TNE to cover James Bond. What is clearly wanted by most of the people arguing is for TNE to cover multiple different settings that are all high fantasy.

As well written as your fluff tends to be its not going to interest everyone. If thats the only thing TNE can do then the entire system doesn't interest enough people to make it worth writing. How many people do you think will read the fluff and decide to play a game in that setting? I suspect very few.