I will first start off with evidence from Frank for why there is no good reason a cosmetic change should not be excluded from a game:
Good. It is agreed that any cosmetic change, which doesn’t affect game balance, and is agreed to by a particular gaming group, does not harm the game in any way.FrankTrollman wrote:Sigh. Space Jam!
Look, if there's even one Chinese man in 1.3 billion people who can play in the NBA as a giant, then you are willing to concede that this is something a Chinese man is "capable" of qualifying for. The problem is that you're then reversing yourself when talking about other scenarios where the population isn't even a billion.
Or to put it another way:
Being 3 standard deviations away from the mean of a demographic group you belong to does not make you be of a specific power level. Being a crazy tall pygmy is insufficient to be a basketball superstar. Height is measured against other NBA superstars when determining power. Being crazy tall as a Chinese man puts Yao Ming into the 7th standard deviation. Having a Kenyan come out that tall would him in like the 4th or 5th standard deviation. It would be more likely for "a Kenyan" chosen at random to have the height and athleticism to be an NBA superstar than to for "a Chinese guy" to be. After all, there are only four Chinese NBA players, and Kenya fields more than that out of a population that is 1/38th the size.
Truly your chances of becoming an NBA superstar as a man from China are laughably small compared to the Kenyans who are per capita literally a hundred times more likely to succeed at Basketball. But see, that doesn't matter. At all. A Space Jam character isn't selected at random from the people of his home nation or even the people of the world. He's not even selected at random from people in the Basketball industry or even people in the NBA. He's a specific, exceptional, main character, NBA superstar. He's not chosen randomly at all. He's constructed by the player and is a unique individual who by definition is one of the twelve most exceptional basketball players on the planet.
Yes, less than 1% of 1% of 1% of 1% of Yao Ming's people can be like Yao Ming. But that means fuck all for the purposes of making a Space Jam character. His height stat is balanced for a character in his power level (over nine thousand), and the fact that he's Chinese makes the height stat chosen "extremely rare." But not unbalanced. If Yao Ming's player had chosen to make him Kenyan instead, his height would be astoundingly less exceptional. Like literally a hundred or a thousand times less exceptional. But you don't create your character based on how exceptional they are, but by how powerful they are. Where people fall on demographic bell curves doesn't matter - the only thing that matters is where people fall on power scales.
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No. See that's ungamebalanced. Allowing someone to play character A who is "more special" but not "more powerful" than character B is not a problem. Allowing someone to play character B who is "more powerful" but not "more unusual" than character A is a problem.
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It's not even. Nothing is even. It's a specific fucking character who is a specific world saving champion. Whether it was easy for him to become that way due to an accident of birth or the end of a long and difficult road with lots of training and personal struggle means nothing for how powerful they are right now.
Next, Frank will provide evidence for why disallowing any possibility for centaurs existing in the game is a bad thing:
FrankTrollman wrote:But here's the part that's not a trade off: content which has achieved general acceptance throughout the culture has done so because it is awesome. Elves, Orcs, and Dwarves are cool. They are memes that persist because people like telling stories about them. They have mythic resonance.
The dragonborn are not cool. They look stupid. Their story is unengaging and noone cares what they are or what they do. They aren't cool. And every time you write new content, you have to contend with the fact that your new creation might actually kind of suck. You aren't relying on hundreds of years of meme evolution to sort the nifty fantastic creatures from the stupid, you're rolling the dice and betting that your own personal taste will match that of the many people who are going to read your product.
Sometimes it works. Sometimes you can write up a new people and have people say "you know what? That's pretty cool." and then bam! It goes into the lexicon. You know what a Wookie is. Wookies are awesome. If someone said "Basically, he's a Wookie" that would have mythic resonance with you. Same for Klingons.
And sometimes it doesn't work. And that's the problem here. The new Tiefling look doesn't have mythic resonance, it has a damn crocodile tail for no reason. It looks cobbled together out of parts that don't fit. Not because it isn't "generic" but because it's new content which happens to not be good.
Next I will show that the TNE setting can include only Frank’s dragonborn races (read: races which have no memetic traction), and can exist without centaurs (read: races which do have memetic traction), AND have personal player choice.
A hypothetical TNE setting: Frank creates his setting which includes:
Dragonborn races #1, #2, #3, and #4, which have specific, detailed, complex descriptions of their culture, empires, and interaction with other groups. Multiple balanced classes exist, using the design criteria of a particular class’s schtick being able to solve a particular problem in many different ways.
Npc’s in the setting choose their non-class abilities by selecting a background. Backgrounds are based upon culture and environment (c/e). Dragonborn race #1 npc’s choose background #1, and so on. This is true for every society in the setting, making the setting very stable and predictable, according to Frank’s subjective desires.
Races inherently don’t give you any abilities which cause undue synergy with classes. This is accomplished either by having no inherent biological abilities, or by having a racial ability be equally synergistic with all classes. I believe the second to be possible, but in any case it should be irrelevant because the majority of your non-class abilities are derived from your culture/environment.
These c/e abilities are synergistic with classes. You choose one per character. The best archers are say, elves. But your non-elf character can get the “elf archer” skill set by virtue of choosing it for his c/e package. He then describes how he came by this knowledge. In other words, one particular Dragonborn Pc from race #1, can choose the c/e package from race #2.
Additionally, the c/e sets are not limited to learnable skills. They also include your native environment’s magical curses, blessings, etc. These can drastically alter your physical form. These are level appropriate powers, the same as the learned skills. These c/e basically allow you to define your character’s body. So you can make a fairy or a centaur. Magic makes the races as malleable as dogs. Of course, the appearance of any particular individual signals their abilities. In fact, this is more true for environmental abilities than culturally learned abilities.
Here are two example c/e packages:
Forest Assassin
C/E: Culture trait.
Description: You have learned from the best. You are a master at surviving in the wilderness, picking off your enemies one by one.
Level benefits:
1 Master of Camouflage
3 Fleeing Shot
6 Hidden Snare
etc.
Quadruped
C/E: Environmental trait.
Description: You are a quadruped.
Level benefits:
1 Gallop
3 Enduring Canter
6 Great Leap
etc.
Now, you may argue that the environmental traits are basically your race. Or that this system allows every player to create a unique race, and this turns the setting into shit. My responses to this are: So? And Bullshit.
To elaborate: What does it matter that your native environment has a huge effect on your physical appearance? We expect Pc’s to take transformational classes, gain deity-like power, and drastically alter the course of regional or world events. How is gameworld verisimilitude destroyed by the fact that this orc chose to be a centaur-like creature? He comes from a small tribe of them off in the gray sands. He was cursed. He is an experiment. Who cares? The player and the group get their centaur, and it doesn’t unduly strain credulity. His being a centaur does not create balance issues. This one centaur isn’t even a drop in the ocean compared to the tsunami of fantastic abilities, magical empires, and gods in a gameworld.
It has been decided that classes differentiate themselves based on breadth of abilities in performing a particular schtick. Any particular class might be able to solve a problem in half a dozen ways. A relevant question might be: “How much does the setting change when a class goes from having 5 solutions to 6 solutions to a particular problem.” The answer is obviously: “An acceptable amount.”
C/e abilities are the 6th ability. It does not harm the setting any more than a single class ability. And don’t give me shit about it being too rare that it fucks up game balance for the entire setting. ANY particular class ability might not be chosen by ANY player in a gaming group. It might not even come up in a particular campaign for any npc. Having a centaur in the setting can have exactly the same impact on the setting as a wizard choosing to learn a level appropriate spell which is similar to half a dozen similar spells.
Additionally, the centaur ability doesn’t need to be accounted for in the communities/nations/races of setting at all. It is a player selectable ability that only they have, they can be one of a kind, explained by magic. This centaur in no way impacts the thematic aspects of the setting, and it does not damage game balance any more than one wizard spell.
Frank, you don’t have to describe centaurs at all in your setting. We simply should make a short rubric in the rules for how to create one. It could be as short as a paragraph in one of the player selectable c/e backgrounds.
Thank you for reading all of that. Do people think this is an acceptable solution? If not, what modifications would you make to the above?
