We already have the Far Realm and it's denizens for mysterious, wondrous, terrifying, etc. I don't want standard planes of the great wheel to feel that way. Uncertanty is one of the things I use escapist fantasy to leave behind. I'd rather outerplanes and their denizens be familiar, typical, and comforting. Simplicity in normal things too.
I don't understand this mindset that alignment doesn't/shouldn't really matter. Alignment is like hugest part of a characters identity that motivates all their decisions. If you don't want to make decisions based on Alingment, then just pick Tru-Neutral.
As someone has mentioned before, it would be easier to follow the conversation if you used the "Quote" button instead of the "Reply" button.
You want the Outer Planes to be familiar, typical and comforting!? Wow ... then you and I have vastly different desires for settings. Don't we already have all the various places in the Prima Material for that?
I don't think Alignment is the biggest part of a character's identity at all. I think Personality, Flaw, Bonds, Identity, and Background should figure more importantly. I don't think the nuances of a character can be encapsulated in something so arbitrary and sweeping as a nine by nine grid meant to cover all personalities. I don't necessarily think Alignment should be gone, but I definitely think it should be deemphasized in favor of something more personal.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Not sure how we got on the Alignment argument in a thread about errata to monster text and drow origins...but sure.
Action drives alignment; alignment does not drive action. You don't return the town's treasured keepsake because you're good. You're good because you returned the town's treasured keepsake rather than pawning it for cash. Should Alignment ever matter in a game I run, nobody gets to know it and they sure as shit don't get to decide it. Alignment is assigned to characters by the DM based on the actions of each said character. The DM controls 'The World' after all, and people who argue in favor of alignment say it's a mechanical, concrete force in The World.
Why should the player get to decide how The World judges them?
We-e-e-e-elll, i'm not going to say that I'm too stupid to figure things out for myself. At best, I wil lsay that I'm too lazy too
- in certain cases anyway; for some reason I like figuring out how much magic items should cost or what configurations of feats and class abilities and spells lead to which optimised effects;
but I don't like having to try and figure out people/npc's and how they should think and feel and what there goals are, etc. I'd rather just be provided with that stuff.
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We already have the Far Realm and it's denizens for mysterious, wondrous, terrifying, etc. I don't want standard planes of the great wheel to feel that way. Uncertanty is one of the things I use escapist fantasy to leave behind. I'd rather outerplanes and their denizens be familiar, typical, and comforting. Simplicity in normal things too.
I don't understand this mindset that alignment doesn't/shouldn't really matter. Alignment is like hugest part of a characters identity that motivates all their decisions. If you don't want to make decisions based on Alingment, then just pick Tru-Neutral.
IMO alignment is only really important when you have cosmic forces defined by them with the different planes etc. I can see the arguement there.
When it comes to individual characters however, I really don't see the value. I've always seen alignment as descriptive. A fleshed out character will have their own reasons for being lawful good, or chaotic neutral etc. Alignment should describe their beliefs and actions, not define them.
My rogue for example, was not motivated by her alignment. She didn't steal because she had a chaotic alignment, she had a chaotic alignment because she was driven to the fringes of society and had to steal to survive and had a dim outlook on authority because of the corruption she's experienced. Chaotic describes her but she isn't motivated by chaos. She lands towards good because, having once been in a situation where she was vulnerable and only survived because of the kindness of strangers, she repays that kindness where she can to help people out, not because she woke up one day and decided she wanted to be chaotic good.
Now to be clear I'm not saying everyone has to approach characters the way I do, and I'm not saying that other ways are doing it are wrong, play the way you enjoy. but using the overly simplistic 3 by 3 alignment grid to DEFINE a character rather than DESCRIBE them feels backwards to me unless you only want very minimal RP/backstory/motivation for your character. I guess coming from an RP heavy background it's just hard for me to wrap my head around using alignment as definitive rather than descriptive for a character.
but I don't like having to try and figure out people/npc's and how they should think and feel and what there goals are, etc. I'd rather just be provided with that stuff.
Yeah, but it's not like you have all the creatures of a similar Alignment act the same right? You don't play a beholder like you play a kobold, do you? That means there's stuff you take into account besides their alignment when you roleplay them. Now we can debate as go the degree of importance that alignment and the other stuff has, but at the bare minimum you should acknowledge that Alignment, by itself, doesn't even accomplish this task of handing you what you need to know to roleplay the character.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
We already have the Far Realm and it's denizens for mysterious, wondrous, terrifying, etc. I don't want standard planes of the great wheel to feel that way. Uncertanty is one of the things I use escapist fantasy to leave behind. I'd rather outerplanes and their denizens be familiar, typical, and comforting. Simplicity in normal things too.
I don't understand this mindset that alignment doesn't/shouldn't really matter. Alignment is like hugest part of a characters identity that motivates all their decisions. If you don't want to make decisions based on Alingment, then just pick Tru-Neutral.
IMO alignment is only really important when you have cosmic forces defined by them with the different planes etc. I can see the arguement there.
When it comes to individual characters however, I really don't see the value. I've always seen alignment as descriptive. A fleshed out character will have their own reasons for being lawful good, or chaotic neutral etc. Alignment should describe their beliefs and actions, not define them.
My rogue for example, was not motivated by her alignment. She didn't steal because she had a chaotic alignment, she had a chaotic alignment because she was driven to the fringes of society and had to steal to survive and had a dim outlook on authority because of the corruption she's experienced. Chaotic describes her but she isn't motivated by chaos. She lands towards good because, having once been in a situation where she was vulnerable and only survived because of the kindness of strangers, she repays that kindness where she can to help people out, not because she woke up one day and decided she wanted to be chaotic good.
Now to be clear I'm not saying everyone has to approach characters the way I do, and I'm not saying that other ways are doing it are wrong, play the way you enjoy. but using the overly simplistic 3 by 3 alignment grid to DEFINE a character rather than DESCRIBE them feels backwards to me unless you only want very minimal RP/backstory/motivation for your character. I guess coming from an RP heavy background it's just hard for me to wrap my head around using alignment as definitive rather than descriptive for a character.
I've played in different systems, some like dnd with the alignment system, others like WoD with paths and virtues or others completely open. I prefer the WoD system were you are punished harshly when you go against your personal belief system. But it seems I'm in a minority, but I've already accepted that. I just get a good chuckle when I read : " I guess coming from an RP heavy background" Not condescending at all.
Not sure how we got on the Alignment argument in a thread about errata to monster text and drow origins...but sure.
Action drives alignment; alignment does not drive action. You don't return the town's treasured keepsake because you're good. You're good because you returned the town's treasured keepsake rather than pawning it for cash. Should Alignment ever matter in a game I run, nobody gets to know it and they sure as shit don't get to decide it. Alignment is assigned to characters by the DM based on the actions of each said character. The DM controls 'The World' after all, and people who argue in favor of alignment say it's a mechanical, concrete force in The World.
Why should the player get to decide how The World judges them?
Um, no? Even if alignment were a concrete force, it'd be what drives your actions. Alignment informs behaviour, not the other way around. What more recent editions of D&D make a point of is that alignment is not hard wired - for one, it doesn't come built in at birth along with your baby blues and that unfortunate 11th toe, and for another it's malleable and can evolve and certainly isn't absolute. Regardless, your goody-good hero doesn't turn evil because they start eating lizardfolk egg omelets or raising untenable taxes on their poor serfs. Their alignment shifts first; possibly only right in the moment they decide doing wrong would feel so right, but it happens before the dirty deeds get done. How and when it gets assigned as some metagame snitch on paper is something else, but that happens outside the game. Just because the DM decides your character only exceeded their weekly quota of morally questionable activities this session doesn't mean they weren't already sliding towards twirling their proverbial moustache over the previous three sessions, or maybe got in a good cackle and a long monologue too.
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Not sure how we got on the Alignment argument in a thread about errata to monster text and drow origins...but sure.
Action drives alignment; alignment does not drive action. You don't return the town's treasured keepsake because you're good. You're good because you returned the town's treasured keepsake rather than pawning it for cash. Should Alignment ever matter in a game I run, nobody gets to know it and they sure as shit don't get to decide it. Alignment is assigned to characters by the DM based on the actions of each said character. The DM controls 'The World' after all, and people who argue in favor of alignment say it's a mechanical, concrete force in The World.
Why should the player get to decide how The World judges them?
Um, no? Even if alignment were a concrete force, it'd be what drives your actions. Alignment informs behaviour, not the other way around. What more recent editions of D&D make a point of is that alignment is not hard wired - for one, it doesn't come built in at birth along with your baby blues and that unfortunate 11th toe, and for another it's malleable and can evolve and certainly isn't absolute. Regardless, your goody-good hero doesn't turn evil because they start eating lizardfolk egg omelets or raising untenable taxes on their poor serfs. Their alignment shifts first; possibly only right in the moment they decide doing wrong would feel so right, but it happens before the dirty deeds get done. How and when it gets assigned as some metagame snitch on paper is something else, but that happens outside the game. Just because the DM decides your character only exceeded their weekly quota of morally questionable activities this session doesn't mean they weren't already sliding towards twirling their proverbial moustache over the previous three sessions, or maybe got in a good cackle and a long monologue too.
Ehh ... I feel like this is backwards. Alignment is a descriptor of morality, not the cause, at least for PC's. You can argue that Alignment exists as some sort of moral force in the universe, but it clashes with how it actually happens in play. This is an instance where PC's are starkly different than NPC's, because they are not under DM control.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
People aren't really going to complain about a penalty being removed. Rather we would complain about bonus's being removed. Nerfs are bothersome, buffs and wonderful.
Even so, I'm sure someone somewhere did in fact complain about the penalty being removed. It means now something is being gotten for nothing; no trade off. I think you'll find many of the pre-2k and shorty after 2K crowd miss things like wizrd specialties comming at the cost of prohibited schools, and favored clases and favored weapons, and such. Just becaus epeople no longer like the term 'race' to mean creatue type doesn't mean creature types should all be the same. The point of the fantasy is to be different. Plus you can be sure conservatives players feel that Bonus's and Penaltys represent good moral values whereas penalty-free bonus's represent bad ones as it potentially gives impressionable young minds the ( faulse as we percieve it) idea that 'something can be had for nothing' rather than "there is no such thing as a free lunch" and "everything comes with a price."
I’m not that young of a mind, but I like the idea that something can be had for nothing, especially in a fantasy game where things should be the best of all possible worlds (Voltaire ref read him in college). I don’t wanna have to work hard and sacrifice just to create my character. Leave that stuff for reality (and even then not if you’re lucky).
Also, I like the Feywild version better so imma use that for my campaign. The version with the blood may be what elves believe, maybe that’s the story Corellon told them, but the reality is that elves are a natural species who evolved in the Feywild, probably from faeries. In my campaign at least; YMMV. Plus the two aren’t even contradictory if you assume that the battle between Corellon and Gruumsh took place in the Feywild.
Also feel free to ignore all this. It’s late and I can’t sleep lol.
someone mentioned I should use this quote feature from now on.
Perhaps, but with a large number of campaign worlds something for nothing rules could work well in high fantasy settings like Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance, but in Settings like Kalimar or Ravenloft, the work hard and sacrifice rules may better suit the flavor. Both sets could exist sumultaneously (and officially I mean if they wanted to) as varients or as like AD&D and Basic D&D used to coexist. Which is a solution I think that would best suit everyone - Instead of saying all the realms have no penalty costs, or all the realms have penalty costs, say these realms have no penalty costs and those realms have penalty costs. Players will flock to the realms they find most appealing.
DM's can independently rule wheather a character who falls into a place like Ravenloft from a place like Toril does or does not suddenly acquire a penalty.
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This is why ditching alignment is probably a good thing in the long run, since no one can really agree on what it's even supposed to represent
FWIW, I've always seen it as alignment drives behavior for the player, but behavior drives alignment for the character, if that makes sense.
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Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock) Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric) Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue) Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Ehh ... I feel like this is backwards. Alignment is a descriptor of morality, not the cause, at least for PC's.
Same argument, different words. Actions/decisions don't drive your morality, your morality drives your actions/decisions. Alignment and morality are rough synonyms.
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Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
We already have the Far Realm and it's denizens for mysterious, wondrous, terrifying, etc. I don't want standard planes of the great wheel to feel that way. Uncertanty is one of the things I use escapist fantasy to leave behind. I'd rather outerplanes and their denizens be familiar, typical, and comforting. Simplicity in normal things too.
I don't understand this mindset that alignment doesn't/shouldn't really matter. Alignment is like hugest part of a characters identity that motivates all their decisions. If you don't want to make decisions based on Alingment, then just pick Tru-Neutral.
IMO alignment is only really important when you have cosmic forces defined by them with the different planes etc. I can see the arguement there.
When it comes to individual characters however, I really don't see the value. I've always seen alignment as descriptive. A fleshed out character will have their own reasons for being lawful good, or chaotic neutral etc. Alignment should describe their beliefs and actions, not define them.
My rogue for example, was not motivated by her alignment. She didn't steal because she had a chaotic alignment, she had a chaotic alignment because she was driven to the fringes of society and had to steal to survive and had a dim outlook on authority because of the corruption she's experienced. Chaotic describes her but she isn't motivated by chaos. She lands towards good because, having once been in a situation where she was vulnerable and only survived because of the kindness of strangers, she repays that kindness where she can to help people out, not because she woke up one day and decided she wanted to be chaotic good.
Now to be clear I'm not saying everyone has to approach characters the way I do, and I'm not saying that other ways are doing it are wrong, play the way you enjoy. but using the overly simplistic 3 by 3 alignment grid to DEFINE a character rather than DESCRIBE them feels backwards to me unless you only want very minimal RP/backstory/motivation for your character. I guess coming from an RP heavy background it's just hard for me to wrap my head around using alignment as definitive rather than descriptive for a character.
I've played in different systems, some like dnd with the alignment system, others like WoD with paths and virtues or others completely open. I prefer the WoD system were you are punished harshly when you go against your personal belief system. But it seems I'm in a minority, but I've already accepted that. I just get a good chuckle when I read : " I guess coming from an RP heavy background" Not condescending at all.
I could have phrased that better, but what I meant was that I was roleplaying before I ever touched D&D, largely in MMOs and text based RP. So before I ever picked up a PHB or filled out a character sheet, I was already used to making fleshed out characters with backstory and motivation etc. So it's hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of taking something as simple as 3x3 alignment and having that alone be the definitive core and decision maker for a character. But again I'm not saying that's a bad/wrong way to play just one that I struggle to wrap my head around.
As far as being punished for going against a belief system, for me that really depends on the context. If a character such as say, a cleric or warlock strays from the beliefs or goals of the god/patron etc, then yeah I could get behind consequences for that. In the terms of defining your character's alignment up front and then being punished for going against that, I would need a story reason for that punishment for it to work for me, otherwise it's just standing as an arbitrary punishment for character development if there isn't a story reason for why that shift in alignment should cause a problem.
Ehh ... I feel like this is backwards. Alignment is a descriptor of morality, not the cause, at least for PC's.
Same argument, different words. Actions/decisions don't drive your morality, your morality drives your actions/decisions. Alignment and morality are rough synonyms.
There's a lot of psychological evidence to support that actions and decisions actually do drive your morality, but we won't get into that. What I will say is that many times when roleplaying a character, people will act first and justify that with their character's morality second, meaning that PC morality tends to be at least partially emergent rather than wholly scripted beforehand, mainly because of the nature of acting and roleplaying some other person than yourself.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
For the past few decades of playing D&D, alignment has merely been a starting place I pick for my characters, and many of the characters that I have seen played. As the games progress, alignments shift based on the actions of the characters, never other way around. There were even rules built around alignment shifting back in "ancient times".
People aren't really going to complain about a penalty being removed. Rather we would complain about bonus's being removed. Nerfs are bothersome, buffs and wonderful.
Even so, I'm sure someone somewhere did in fact complain about the penalty being removed. It means now something is being gotten for nothing; no trade off. I think you'll find many of the pre-2k and shorty after 2K crowd miss things like wizrd specialties comming at the cost of prohibited schools, and favored clases and favored weapons, and such. Just becaus epeople no longer like the term 'race' to mean creatue type doesn't mean creature types should all be the same. The point of the fantasy is to be different. Plus you can be sure conservatives players feel that Bonus's and Penaltys represent good moral values whereas penalty-free bonus's represent bad ones as it potentially gives impressionable young minds the ( faulse as we percieve it) idea that 'something can be had for nothing' rather than "there is no such thing as a free lunch" and "everything comes with a price."
This isn't happening though.
They're moving toward flexible stat bonuses, yes. But the ASIs are the most boring, gamey number crunching rather than flavorful lore/RP part of racial bonuses. Races are not becoming interchangable because the wood elf bard can get a cha bonus. Tieflings aren't getting Trance. Halflings aren't getting relentless endurance. IMO the other racial features are far more interesting and flavorful than what numbers go into what stats.
I'm not really sure where this issue over 'something can be had for nothing' is coming from. Sometimes games are updated for game balance reasons. If something gets buffed that doesn't mean you have to nerf it somewhere else just for the sake of not 'getting something for nothing.' It's all about updating the game to be better, not about handouts in the first place so I really don't see where the issue is here. Every player race gets ASI bonuses and other features for nothing. The orc race, as is not, gets +2 str and +1 con it looks like, so it's not like they're getting crazy bonuses compared to other races. That's pretty standard.
Presume that the stat cap of 20 is kept for the sake of this discussion. The point behind racial abblity score bonus's and penalties, particularly in point-buy or standard-array vs rolled ability score options, is to set things up such that a race built around Str for example, such as an Orc, will never have to spend as many points (read icly to mean focus as much "effort") to achieve a 20 in that score, more easily affiliating that race with STR based classes such as Barbarian and an affinity for Heavy-Weapons over light ones - Meanwhile a race like Halfling or Gnome (don't remember if this was really or not, just for the sake of argument), can NEVER have a STR of 20, and even with 20 points will only ever have a+4 to STR rather than a +5; reducing the races affiliation with STR based classes such as the Barbarian and granting more of an affinity for Light-Weapons than for larger kinds.
Again, the high-fantasy element of D&D not-withstanding, many of us prefer this aspect of gritty realism in our campaign settings: that an equally statted out hobbit can never actually beat an Orc in a straight up Strength check (presuming a take-10 or take-20 to exclude the random factor). The idea that an optimized Orc will always be stronger than an optimized Halfling of the same class and build; is to our mind better and more interesting and more flavorful; rather than vice versa; particularly regarding strategy. The reverse is true re: Dexterity based classes and small creatures vs. bigger ones - finesse based combat having it's own advantages.
The only reason non-woke folk think that woke-folk don't like this kind of differentiation is because we think that they feel the game would influence "impressionable young minds" into believing that there really is, in actual life, an advantage to being big and strong vs being short and lithe; and they don't want players who may be short to feel like they have a disadvantage in life, or players who may be tall to feel like they have more power in real life than short people.
Notwithstanding that this kind of thinking in game terms undervalues the benefits of litheness/nibbleness in relation to strength; but in terms of "Hey, don't just do things to be PC"; Making changes that let halflings and orcs both use greatswords with a +5 bonus, and for the same costs; all in spite of good sense; just to avoid the false impression that there is actually something better about being tall than being short - is silly, as far as we are concerned.
Just tell people, "Oy, no there isn't. Short people and tall peope are equally as awesome, even though their optimal abilities lie in different areas of achievment.
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I don't know if I buy that Dow in settings external to the forgotten realms have different origins from those within. It seems the Great Wheel these days is linking together multiple prime material planes for adventures to be part of worlds spanning organizations. This implies that even if Lolth herself is staying in one area of the multivers'es cosmology, Drow might have made their way from Toril via extraplanar travel to other worlds like Kryn etc. to settle there. Those Drow societies do not necessarily have to be Native to the worlds they currently inhabit but rather decended from travelers whose origin is on Toril. This isn't to say that once seperated from Lolth's influence, they wouln't have been able to turn out alright; but I do prefer common origins rather than separate origins for species, even when they exist on multiple worlds.
[SNIP]
forces precise lore or role. playing characterirzation.
What role-playing was being forced on players prior to the errata?
Was it forced on them by WotC or DMs/other players?
All drow MUST be from Menzoberranzen, and are either actively moustache-twirlingly Super Evil or tormented souls trying vainly to escape their dark urges and avoid going on a slaving frenzy.
Yes. The Player's Handbook states "drow adventurers are very rare, you need the DM's permission to play one" specifically because the Faerunian lore demands that ALL drow must be from Menzo and must be unrealistically over-the-top self-harmingly levels of evil. And because set-in-their-ways players who make posts like "what was stopping anyone from doing this pre-errata?" beat a new player with lawn care equipment whenever that player even looks like they might be thinking of playing a character that doesn't align with Traditional Hero Fantasy a'la Tolkien, which is a very effective means of stopping a new player from doing something other than a Traditional Hero Fantasy character. If an extremely ineffective way of actually getting new players engaged with D&D and growing the hobby.
How do I SNIP? I only want to respond to that last sentence
What you are saying is that 'kids today' don't like the traditional hero archytype and would rather play a non-traditional say anti-hero style achetype.
You of course realize conservative will consider that a terrible thing about society today and will want to encourage children to try out the traditional-hero archetype afterall just to see if they may actually like it or develope a taste for it in spite of what they think about it beforehand.
Call it the "Eat your leafy-greens" method of introducing kids to fantasy gaming.
Why has playing the hero become unpopular by the by, I don't understand that?
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Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
I don't know if I buy that Dow in settings external to the forgotten realms have different origins from those within. It seems the Great Wheel these days is linking together multiple prime material planes for adventures to be part of worlds spanning organizations. This implies that even if Lolth herself is staying in one area of the multivers'es cosmology, Drow might have made their way from Toril via extraplanar travel to other worlds like Kryn etc. to settle there. Those Drow societies do not necessarily have to be Native to the worlds they currently inhabit but rather decended from travelers whose origin is on Toril. This isn't to say that once seperated from Lolth's influence, they wouln't have been able to turn out alright; but I do prefer common origins rather than separate origins for species, even when they exist on multiple worlds.
[SNIP]
forces precise lore or role. playing characterirzation.
What role-playing was being forced on players prior to the errata?
Was it forced on them by WotC or DMs/other players?
All drow MUST be from Menzoberranzen, and are either actively moustache-twirlingly Super Evil or tormented souls trying vainly to escape their dark urges and avoid going on a slaving frenzy.
Yes. The Player's Handbook states "drow adventurers are very rare, you need the DM's permission to play one" specifically because the Faerunian lore demands that ALL drow must be from Menzo and must be unrealistically over-the-top self-harmingly levels of evil. And because set-in-their-ways players who make posts like "what was stopping anyone from doing this pre-errata?" beat a new player with lawn care equipment whenever that player even looks like they might be thinking of playing a character that doesn't align with Traditional Hero Fantasy a'la Tolkien, which is a very effective means of stopping a new player from doing something other than a Traditional Hero Fantasy character. If an extremely ineffective way of actually getting new players engaged with D&D and growing the hobby.
How do I SNIP? I only want to respond to that last sentence
What you are saying is that 'kids today' don't like the traditional hero archytype and would rather play a non-traditional say anti-hero style achetype.
You of course realize conservative will consider that a terrible thing about society today and will want to encourage children to try out the traditional-hero archetype afterall just to see if they may actually like it or develope a taste for it in spite of what they think about it beforehand.
Call it the "Eat your leafy-greens" method of introducing kids to fantasy gaming.
Why has playing the hero become unpopular by the by, I don't understand that?
You do remember Elric and other characters by Moorcock? I would say that it has always been popular. If we go back to the first DnD tables you had Robilar who was created by Rob Kuntz at Gygax's table? He was most assuredly not a good character or even a hero.
We already have the Far Realm and it's denizens for mysterious, wondrous, terrifying, etc. I don't want standard planes of the great wheel to feel that way. Uncertanty is one of the things I use escapist fantasy to leave behind. I'd rather outerplanes and their denizens be familiar, typical, and comforting. Simplicity in normal things too.
I don't understand this mindset that alignment doesn't/shouldn't really matter. Alignment is like hugest part of a characters identity that motivates all their decisions. If you don't want to make decisions based on Alingment, then just pick Tru-Neutral.
You want the Outer Planes to be familiar, typical and comforting!? Wow ... then you and I have vastly different desires for settings. Don't we already have all the various places in the Prima Material for that?
Nah, the prime material plane isn't like that, hence all the necessary adventuring and exploring and fighting of monsters etc. The outerplanes are where you go when you die, no? I don't that to be like RL, something you don't know what it's like or can be sure is even real. I want to know the 7 Mounting heavens of Celestia or what not, are definetly there and that I actually will find myself surrounded by friendly angels and such.
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Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
People aren't really going to complain about a penalty being removed. Rather we would complain about bonus's being removed. Nerfs are bothersome, buffs and wonderful.
Even so, I'm sure someone somewhere did in fact complain about the penalty being removed. It means now something is being gotten for nothing; no trade off. I think you'll find many of the pre-2k and shorty after 2K crowd miss things like wizrd specialties comming at the cost of prohibited schools, and favored clases and favored weapons, and such. Just becaus epeople no longer like the term 'race' to mean creatue type doesn't mean creature types should all be the same. The point of the fantasy is to be different. Plus you can be sure conservatives players feel that Bonus's and Penaltys represent good moral values whereas penalty-free bonus's represent bad ones as it potentially gives impressionable young minds the ( faulse as we percieve it) idea that 'something can be had for nothing' rather than "there is no such thing as a free lunch" and "everything comes with a price."
This isn't happening though.
They're moving toward flexible stat bonuses, yes. But the ASIs are the most boring, gamey number crunching rather than flavorful lore/RP part of racial bonuses. Races are not becoming interchangable because the wood elf bard can get a cha bonus. Tieflings aren't getting Trance. Halflings aren't getting relentless endurance. IMO the other racial features are far more interesting and flavorful than what numbers go into what stats.
I'm not really sure where this issue over 'something can be had for nothing' is coming from. Sometimes games are updated for game balance reasons. If something gets buffed that doesn't mean you have to nerf it somewhere else just for the sake of not 'getting something for nothing.' It's all about updating the game to be better, not about handouts in the first place so I really don't see where the issue is here. Every player race gets ASI bonuses and other features for nothing. The orc race, as is not, gets +2 str and +1 con it looks like, so it's not like they're getting crazy bonuses compared to other races. That's pretty standard.
Presume that the stat cap of 20 is kept for the sake of this discussion. The point behind racial abblity score bonus's and penalties, particularly in point-buy or standard-array vs rolled ability score options, is to set things up such that a race built around Str for example, such as an Orc, will never have to spend as many points (read icly to mean focus as much "effort") to achieve a 20 in that score, more easily affiliating that race with STR based classes such as Barbarian and an affinity for Heavy-Weapons over light ones - Meanwhile a race like Halfling or Gnome (don't remember if this was really or not, just for the sake of argument), can NEVER have a STR of 20, and even with 20 points will only ever have a+4 to STR rather than a +5; reducing the races affiliation with STR based classes such as the Barbarian and granting more of an affinity for Light-Weapons than for larger kinds.
Again, the high-fantasy element of D&D not-withstanding, many of us prefer this aspect of gritty realism in our campaign settings: that an equally statted out hobbit can never actually beat an Orc in a straight up Strength check (presuming a take-10 or take-20 to exclude the random factor). The idea that an optimized Orc will always be stronger than an optimized Halfling of the same class and build; is to our mind better and more interesting and more flavorful; rather than vice versa; particularly regarding strategy. The reverse is true re: Dexterity based classes and small creatures vs. bigger ones - finesse based combat having it's own advantages.
The only reason non-woke folk think that woke-folk don't like this kind of differentiation is because we think that they feel the game would influence "impressionable young minds" into believing that there really is, in actual life, an advantage to being big and strong vs being short and lithe; and they don't want players who may be short to feel like they have a disadvantage in life, or players who may be tall to feel like they have more power in real life than short people.
Notwithstanding that this kind of thinking in game terms undervalues the benefits of litheness/nibbleness in relation to strength; but in terms of "Hey, don't just do things to be PC"; Making changes that let halflings and orcs both use greatswords with a +5 bonus, and for the same costs; all in spite of good sense; just to avoid the false impression that there is actually something better about being tall than being short - is silly, as far as we are concerned.
Just tell people, "Oy, no there isn't. Short people and tall peope are equally as awesome, even though their optimal abilities lie in different areas of achievment.
For me it has nothing to do with 'woke' or 'not woke.' I support the decision to move to floating ASIs because of the flexibility it affords character creation without making your character numerically inferior. Allowing you to freely pick a race/class idea for a character without feeling like you're 'doing it wrong' for picking an elf barbarian instead of a half orc. I see it ultimately as a good thing that the wood elf bard and the tiefling bard, the human wizard and the dwarf wizard, can start on roughly equal footing stat wise. While you still have things like heavy weapon disadvantage, or specific racial traits like relentless endurance etc that are still tied to different races that can still emphasize their biology in more interesting ways. All things being equal, if you have an orc barbarian and an elf barbarian in the same party, far more often than not which one does better in a strength check is going to be determined by their d20 rolls rather than their strength score anyway.
It also opens the door for characters that may be atypical for their race mentally or physically. A sickly scrawny orc or a stronger than average tiefling, etc.
How do I SNIP? I only want to respond to that last sentence
What you are saying is that 'kids today' don't like the traditional hero archytype and would rather play a non-traditional say anti-hero style achetype.
You of course realize conservative will consider that a terrible thing about society today and will want to encourage children to try out the traditional-hero archetype afterall just to see if they may actually like it or develope a taste for it in spite of what they think about it beforehand.
Call it the "Eat your leafy-greens" method of introducing kids to fantasy gaming.
Why has playing the hero become unpopular by the by, I don't understand that?
On 'SNIP':
Press the "Quote" button, so you have the post you want to partially quote in the Reply box.
Find the "</>" button in your post editor, labeled 'Source Code'. It will bring up the HMTL/software code for formatting your post. The very first line, when you have a quote in the box, will be < ... blockquote class="source-quote" ... >, without the spaces or ellipses. That's the start of the last post in the nested chain.
Find the next Blockquote Class Source Quote line in the postsource code; that's the start of the next quote in the internested chain. Delete that line, and absolutely everything between it and the text of the post you're actually trying to quote. Like so(ish):
That gets rid of everything but the post you are directly replying to, cuts out the seven hundred completely unnecessary and deeply annoying internested quotes. After that, you can just edit the text box as normal to get rid of anything you're not specifically replying to, though I like to leave an ellipsis anywhere I cut words out to make it more clear that I'm picking out a specific piece of what was said. It's polite, at least to me.
* * *
I've got no issue with Heroic Archetypes. I almost always play bright-eyed do-gooders, and I have a marked distates for the Brooding Lone-Wolf Antihero archetype. What I meant by "Traditional Hero Fantasy" is not 'heroic characters', but "a very strict set of extremely specific, narrowly defined Acceptable Fantasy Archetypes as defined by books that are nearly seventy years old." You can't just play an elf who is a hero - you have to play a graceful, woods-wise elf attuned to nature but only deciduous-forest nature please no other nature counts and snobbily disdainful of the antics of the shorter-lived species, yet hypocritically appreciative of their drive. You can't just play a dwarf who is a hero - you have to play a crude, boisterous, facial hair-obssessed alcoholic with a somewhat worryingly deep love for his axe and a sharp distrust of all Weavers of the Dark Arts. You can't play a halfling who's a stalwart protector of his people and trained from his childhood to the blade - you have to play a meek, mellow halfling with a tea-and-crumpets belly who's just celebrated his eleventy-first birthday and has been recruited as a sneakthief by a bunch of aforementioned ale-guzzling walking beards.
If someone can't point to your character and say "That's Bilbo!" or "that's Gimli!" or "that's Aragorn!", the hyper-traditionalists who keep making a giant ******* issue of every tiny little thing Wizards does will decry that character as Uncool, Unplayable, and Spoiling D&D Forever. You are simply not allowed to play, as 6th Lyran Guard so delightfully relayed in a previous thread, a perky-goth drow necromancer girl who's unfailingly friendly and energetic and uses her powers over life and death to bolster the party's life and bring death to the enemies of civilization. That's not okay. That's not how drow work. You can't play a halfling paladin called to protect his fellows and trained to keen martial prowess. That's not how halflings work - they all absolutely must be rogues. You can't play an elf who lived in a comfortable mage's compound in a large city, well supplied with the magical paraphernalia and deep libraries required of a sage of the arcane. That's not how elves work - they are all genetically required to be leaf-obssessed druids or rangers that would burn down an entire city without blinking an eye if one human picked one flower from one lilac bush in their forest.
Hyper-traditionalists can suck eggs. Those characters' stories were told seventy years ago, and have been retold thousands and thousands and thousands of times since. Those stories are boring, and nobody's gonna tell them better than Tolkien did anyways. Make new stories, with delightful new ideas like Perky Goth Drow Necromancer, and do something that hasn't been done to death and so far beyond the corpse has turned to dust.
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As someone has mentioned before, it would be easier to follow the conversation if you used the "Quote" button instead of the "Reply" button.
You want the Outer Planes to be familiar, typical and comforting!? Wow ... then you and I have vastly different desires for settings. Don't we already have all the various places in the Prima Material for that?
I don't think Alignment is the biggest part of a character's identity at all. I think Personality, Flaw, Bonds, Identity, and Background should figure more importantly. I don't think the nuances of a character can be encapsulated in something so arbitrary and sweeping as a nine by nine grid meant to cover all personalities. I don't necessarily think Alignment should be gone, but I definitely think it should be deemphasized in favor of something more personal.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Not sure how we got on the Alignment argument in a thread about errata to monster text and drow origins...but sure.
Action drives alignment; alignment does not drive action. You don't return the town's treasured keepsake because you're good. You're good because you returned the town's treasured keepsake rather than pawning it for cash. Should Alignment ever matter in a game I run, nobody gets to know it and they sure as shit don't get to decide it. Alignment is assigned to characters by the DM based on the actions of each said character. The DM controls 'The World' after all, and people who argue in favor of alignment say it's a mechanical, concrete force in The World.
Why should the player get to decide how The World judges them?
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We-e-e-e-elll, i'm not going to say that I'm too stupid to figure things out for myself. At best, I wil lsay that I'm too lazy too
- in certain cases anyway; for some reason I like figuring out how much magic items should cost or what configurations of feats and class abilities and spells lead to which optimised effects;
but I don't like having to try and figure out people/npc's and how they should think and feel and what there goals are, etc. I'd rather just be provided with that stuff.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
IMO alignment is only really important when you have cosmic forces defined by them with the different planes etc. I can see the arguement there.
When it comes to individual characters however, I really don't see the value. I've always seen alignment as descriptive. A fleshed out character will have their own reasons for being lawful good, or chaotic neutral etc. Alignment should describe their beliefs and actions, not define them.
My rogue for example, was not motivated by her alignment. She didn't steal because she had a chaotic alignment, she had a chaotic alignment because she was driven to the fringes of society and had to steal to survive and had a dim outlook on authority because of the corruption she's experienced. Chaotic describes her but she isn't motivated by chaos. She lands towards good because, having once been in a situation where she was vulnerable and only survived because of the kindness of strangers, she repays that kindness where she can to help people out, not because she woke up one day and decided she wanted to be chaotic good.
Now to be clear I'm not saying everyone has to approach characters the way I do, and I'm not saying that other ways are doing it are wrong, play the way you enjoy. but using the overly simplistic 3 by 3 alignment grid to DEFINE a character rather than DESCRIBE them feels backwards to me unless you only want very minimal RP/backstory/motivation for your character. I guess coming from an RP heavy background it's just hard for me to wrap my head around using alignment as definitive rather than descriptive for a character.
Yeah, but it's not like you have all the creatures of a similar Alignment act the same right? You don't play a beholder like you play a kobold, do you? That means there's stuff you take into account besides their alignment when you roleplay them. Now we can debate as go the degree of importance that alignment and the other stuff has, but at the bare minimum you should acknowledge that Alignment, by itself, doesn't even accomplish this task of handing you what you need to know to roleplay the character.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
I've played in different systems, some like dnd with the alignment system, others like WoD with paths and virtues or others completely open. I prefer the WoD system were you are punished harshly when you go against your personal belief system. But it seems I'm in a minority, but I've already accepted that. I just get a good chuckle when I read : " I guess coming from an RP heavy background" Not condescending at all.
Um, no? Even if alignment were a concrete force, it'd be what drives your actions. Alignment informs behaviour, not the other way around. What more recent editions of D&D make a point of is that alignment is not hard wired - for one, it doesn't come built in at birth along with your baby blues and that unfortunate 11th toe, and for another it's malleable and can evolve and certainly isn't absolute. Regardless, your goody-good hero doesn't turn evil because they start eating lizardfolk egg omelets or raising untenable taxes on their poor serfs. Their alignment shifts first; possibly only right in the moment they decide doing wrong would feel so right, but it happens before the dirty deeds get done. How and when it gets assigned as some metagame snitch on paper is something else, but that happens outside the game. Just because the DM decides your character only exceeded their weekly quota of morally questionable activities this session doesn't mean they weren't already sliding towards twirling their proverbial moustache over the previous three sessions, or maybe got in a good cackle and a long monologue too.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
Ehh ... I feel like this is backwards. Alignment is a descriptor of morality, not the cause, at least for PC's. You can argue that Alignment exists as some sort of moral force in the universe, but it clashes with how it actually happens in play. This is an instance where PC's are starkly different than NPC's, because they are not under DM control.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
someone mentioned I should use this quote feature from now on.
Perhaps, but with a large number of campaign worlds something for nothing rules could work well in high fantasy settings like Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance, but in Settings like Kalimar or Ravenloft, the work hard and sacrifice rules may better suit the flavor. Both sets could exist sumultaneously (and officially I mean if they wanted to) as varients or as like AD&D and Basic D&D used to coexist. Which is a solution I think that would best suit everyone - Instead of saying all the realms have no penalty costs, or all the realms have penalty costs, say these realms have no penalty costs and those realms have penalty costs. Players will flock to the realms they find most appealing.
DM's can independently rule wheather a character who falls into a place like Ravenloft from a place like Toril does or does not suddenly acquire a penalty.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
This is why ditching alignment is probably a good thing in the long run, since no one can really agree on what it's even supposed to represent
FWIW, I've always seen it as alignment drives behavior for the player, but behavior drives alignment for the character, if that makes sense.
Active characters:
Carric Aquissar, elven wannabe artist in his deconstructionist period (Archfey warlock)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Mardan Ferres, elven private investigator obsessed with that one unsolved murder (Assassin rogue)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Same argument, different words. Actions/decisions don't drive your morality, your morality drives your actions/decisions. Alignment and morality are rough synonyms.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
I could have phrased that better, but what I meant was that I was roleplaying before I ever touched D&D, largely in MMOs and text based RP. So before I ever picked up a PHB or filled out a character sheet, I was already used to making fleshed out characters with backstory and motivation etc. So it's hard for me to wrap my head around the idea of taking something as simple as 3x3 alignment and having that alone be the definitive core and decision maker for a character. But again I'm not saying that's a bad/wrong way to play just one that I struggle to wrap my head around.
As far as being punished for going against a belief system, for me that really depends on the context. If a character such as say, a cleric or warlock strays from the beliefs or goals of the god/patron etc, then yeah I could get behind consequences for that. In the terms of defining your character's alignment up front and then being punished for going against that, I would need a story reason for that punishment for it to work for me, otherwise it's just standing as an arbitrary punishment for character development if there isn't a story reason for why that shift in alignment should cause a problem.
There's a lot of psychological evidence to support that actions and decisions actually do drive your morality, but we won't get into that. What I will say is that many times when roleplaying a character, people will act first and justify that with their character's morality second, meaning that PC morality tends to be at least partially emergent rather than wholly scripted beforehand, mainly because of the nature of acting and roleplaying some other person than yourself.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
For the past few decades of playing D&D, alignment has merely been a starting place I pick for my characters, and many of the characters that I have seen played. As the games progress, alignments shift based on the actions of the characters, never other way around. There were even rules built around alignment shifting back in "ancient times".
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Presume that the stat cap of 20 is kept for the sake of this discussion. The point behind racial abblity score bonus's and penalties, particularly in point-buy or standard-array vs rolled ability score options, is to set things up such that a race built around Str for example, such as an Orc, will never have to spend as many points (read icly to mean focus as much "effort") to achieve a 20 in that score, more easily affiliating that race with STR based classes such as Barbarian and an affinity for Heavy-Weapons over light ones - Meanwhile a race like Halfling or Gnome (don't remember if this was really or not, just for the sake of argument), can NEVER have a STR of 20, and even with 20 points will only ever have a+4 to STR rather than a +5; reducing the races affiliation with STR based classes such as the Barbarian and granting more of an affinity for Light-Weapons than for larger kinds.
Again, the high-fantasy element of D&D not-withstanding, many of us prefer this aspect of gritty realism in our campaign settings: that an equally statted out hobbit can never actually beat an Orc in a straight up Strength check (presuming a take-10 or take-20 to exclude the random factor). The idea that an optimized Orc will always be stronger than an optimized Halfling of the same class and build; is to our mind better and more interesting and more flavorful; rather than vice versa; particularly regarding strategy. The reverse is true re: Dexterity based classes and small creatures vs. bigger ones - finesse based combat having it's own advantages.
The only reason non-woke folk think that woke-folk don't like this kind of differentiation is because we think that they feel the game would influence "impressionable young minds" into believing that there really is, in actual life, an advantage to being big and strong vs being short and lithe; and they don't want players who may be short to feel like they have a disadvantage in life, or players who may be tall to feel like they have more power in real life than short people.
Notwithstanding that this kind of thinking in game terms undervalues the benefits of litheness/nibbleness in relation to strength; but in terms of "Hey, don't just do things to be PC"; Making changes that let halflings and orcs both use greatswords with a +5 bonus, and for the same costs; all in spite of good sense; just to avoid the false impression that there is actually something better about being tall than being short - is silly, as far as we are concerned.
Just tell people, "Oy, no there isn't. Short people and tall peope are equally as awesome, even though their optimal abilities lie in different areas of achievment.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
How do I SNIP? I only want to respond to that last sentence
What you are saying is that 'kids today' don't like the traditional hero archytype and would rather play a non-traditional say anti-hero style achetype.
You of course realize conservative will consider that a terrible thing about society today and will want to encourage children to try out the traditional-hero archetype afterall just to see if they may actually like it or develope a taste for it in spite of what they think about it beforehand.
Call it the "Eat your leafy-greens" method of introducing kids to fantasy gaming.
Why has playing the hero become unpopular by the by, I don't understand that?
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
You do remember Elric and other characters by Moorcock? I would say that it has always been popular. If we go back to the first DnD tables you had Robilar who was created by Rob Kuntz at Gygax's table? He was most assuredly not a good character or even a hero.
Nah, the prime material plane isn't like that, hence all the necessary adventuring and exploring and fighting of monsters etc. The outerplanes are where you go when you die, no? I don't that to be like RL, something you don't know what it's like or can be sure is even real. I want to know the 7 Mounting heavens of Celestia or what not, are definetly there and that I actually will find myself surrounded by friendly angels and such.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
For me it has nothing to do with 'woke' or 'not woke.' I support the decision to move to floating ASIs because of the flexibility it affords character creation without making your character numerically inferior. Allowing you to freely pick a race/class idea for a character without feeling like you're 'doing it wrong' for picking an elf barbarian instead of a half orc. I see it ultimately as a good thing that the wood elf bard and the tiefling bard, the human wizard and the dwarf wizard, can start on roughly equal footing stat wise. While you still have things like heavy weapon disadvantage, or specific racial traits like relentless endurance etc that are still tied to different races that can still emphasize their biology in more interesting ways. All things being equal, if you have an orc barbarian and an elf barbarian in the same party, far more often than not which one does better in a strength check is going to be determined by their d20 rolls rather than their strength score anyway.
It also opens the door for characters that may be atypical for their race mentally or physically. A sickly scrawny orc or a stronger than average tiefling, etc.
On 'SNIP':
Press the "Quote" button, so you have the post you want to partially quote in the Reply box.
Find the "</>" button in your post editor, labeled 'Source Code'. It will bring up the HMTL/software code for formatting your post. The very first line, when you have a quote in the box, will be < ... blockquote class="source-quote" ... >, without the spaces or ellipses. That's the start of the last post in the nested chain.
Find the next Blockquote Class Source Quote line in the postsource code; that's the start of the next quote in the internested chain. Delete that line, and absolutely everything between it and the text of the post you're actually trying to quote. Like so(ish):
That gets rid of everything but the post you are directly replying to, cuts out the seven hundred completely unnecessary and deeply annoying internested quotes. After that, you can just edit the text box as normal to get rid of anything you're not specifically replying to, though I like to leave an ellipsis anywhere I cut words out to make it more clear that I'm picking out a specific piece of what was said. It's polite, at least to me.
* * *
I've got no issue with Heroic Archetypes. I almost always play bright-eyed do-gooders, and I have a marked distates for the Brooding Lone-Wolf Antihero archetype. What I meant by "Traditional Hero Fantasy" is not 'heroic characters', but "a very strict set of extremely specific, narrowly defined Acceptable Fantasy Archetypes as defined by books that are nearly seventy years old." You can't just play an elf who is a hero - you have to play a graceful, woods-wise elf attuned to nature but only deciduous-forest nature please no other nature counts and snobbily disdainful of the antics of the shorter-lived species, yet hypocritically appreciative of their drive. You can't just play a dwarf who is a hero - you have to play a crude, boisterous, facial hair-obssessed alcoholic with a somewhat worryingly deep love for his axe and a sharp distrust of all Weavers of the Dark Arts. You can't play a halfling who's a stalwart protector of his people and trained from his childhood to the blade - you have to play a meek, mellow halfling with a tea-and-crumpets belly who's just celebrated his eleventy-first birthday and has been recruited as a sneakthief by a bunch of aforementioned ale-guzzling walking beards.
If someone can't point to your character and say "That's Bilbo!" or "that's Gimli!" or "that's Aragorn!", the hyper-traditionalists who keep making a giant ******* issue of every tiny little thing Wizards does will decry that character as Uncool, Unplayable, and Spoiling D&D Forever. You are simply not allowed to play, as 6th Lyran Guard so delightfully relayed in a previous thread, a perky-goth drow necromancer girl who's unfailingly friendly and energetic and uses her powers over life and death to bolster the party's life and bring death to the enemies of civilization. That's not okay. That's not how drow work. You can't play a halfling paladin called to protect his fellows and trained to keen martial prowess. That's not how halflings work - they all absolutely must be rogues. You can't play an elf who lived in a comfortable mage's compound in a large city, well supplied with the magical paraphernalia and deep libraries required of a sage of the arcane. That's not how elves work - they are all genetically required to be leaf-obssessed druids or rangers that would burn down an entire city without blinking an eye if one human picked one flower from one lilac bush in their forest.
Hyper-traditionalists can suck eggs. Those characters' stories were told seventy years ago, and have been retold thousands and thousands and thousands of times since. Those stories are boring, and nobody's gonna tell them better than Tolkien did anyways. Make new stories, with delightful new ideas like Perky Goth Drow Necromancer, and do something that hasn't been done to death and so far beyond the corpse has turned to dust.
Please do not contact or message me.