It’s still prejudiced to say that one race is smarter than another,..
Slightly pedantic, but no, this is not correct. Saying a gnome character is smarter than a half-orc character just because one is a gnome and the other a half-orc, that's prejudiced: racial tendencies are not absolutes and don't tell us anything about individuals. Saying gnomes are smarter on average however is simply stating a fact, like saying humans are taller than dwarves - there are certainly exceptions, but generally speaking it's true.
I don’t get the difference. They’re both still prejudiced.
I don't want to feel like I'm murdering people when I slaughter a cave full of orcs in retaliation for their raid against a small human town. I want to feel like I'm slaying evil monsters and rescuing the captured townspeople. Hero's vs. Villains. and specifically monstrous villains; not other kinds of human beings that just look different or have another culture.
That's a fair thing to want; then I suggest not playing / running games where PCs can be orcs. Or, for that matter, don't play / run a game that uses any of the current worldbuilding that literally declares orcs to be people.
(Were it me, I wouldn't consider that game much of a TTRPG and more of a board game. That's fine; it explains why I have trouble taking any D&D setting seriously.)
In 5e's writings, orcs are a people, and can be played as PCs, and the game continues to evolve to support that for a wider and wider playerbase.
Shepherd, you're not arguing anything that wasn't argued for literally hundreds of pages a year and a half ago. And hell, you just admitted it yourself: "If someone wants to play a halfling barbarian, all they have to do is admit that it's going to be a bad character and that it's okay to suck."
Do you really, truly wonder why people push back against that? Or why people get tired of playing Bad Builds That Suck and end up just playing the same tired, boring, played-out combinations all'a time because those are the only ones allowed to be good? We argued for months that it added nothing to the game and accomplished no noteworthy design goals to force some players to be Bad Sucky Characters while others arbitrarily got to be Good Useful Things instead, just because somebody's personal aesthetic doesn't line up with the mechanics.
It adds nothing. It makes nothing better. if someone actively wants to play the Terrible Horrible No-Good Very bad Strength 9, Capped-At-13 halfling barbarian because they feel like that would be a story they want to tell? That's on them, though there's also the point of "is everyone else at the table okay with this guy being a pointless boat anchor while he tells this story?" But it should not be forced on everyone. There's no reason to tell someone that he can't play a half-orc wizard unless he accepts that his character will be bad. What does that add to the game? What aspect of D&D does that make better? How does that improve the play experience?
That's the core question - how does telling someone their perfectly reasonable character concept is required to suck improve D&D?
I'm a bit new here. I only recently became a client and only came to the forums for the first time yesterday looking for magic item pricing advice. I happend into this thread while browsing.
Yes. Well, to be fair it's not going to 'be bad and suck', it's just not going to be fully optimizable. The player is choosing a still decent character for better role-playing purposes, which is encouragable behavior actually; it's just that many players; myself included in all honesty, like to min-max and optimize our characters to be mechanically the best able to do what we want to do: that means we make specific choices of race, class, background, feats, etc. based on considerations like "what combinations can make the highest dps or hps".
OTOH, like I also said, a good concept can still be allowed to optimize in spite of the standard archetype. The problem isn't the PC's character concept; it's the idea that such a concept is not rare in-universe anymore, but rather just as likely as not to be for any member of their race.
I'm literally saying, Halflings aren't likely to be barbarians (unless you are in a low cr campaign setting where everyone is basically a barbarian)
----
I think you are exagerating the "your character is going to suck" aspect of the argument.
I think it is equaly as reasonable of me to say that to maintain the correct flavor of my campaign, halflings have to be typically weaker but more lithe/nible than Orcs. This doesn't mean a PC can't have an atypical halfling who is a slow and steady powerhouse. The nature of the setting though requires that the halfling in question IS atypical and not a common representetive of halflings in general. It is in fact necessary as far as I am concerned form my campaigns proper flavor that, in general, halflings are lithe and nimble, but not very strong.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
Halflings don't suck as barbarians for lack of +2 Str. A 15 Str instead of a 17 is still perfectly fine. Not being able to use Heavy weapons is arguably a much bigger hindrance, but that doesn't get solved or even addressed by these errata, floating stat mods or anything else.
Nods, it's not too horrible of a concept, I was just using it as an example of a small creature vs a big one and how/why they should be different in their physical capacities. Actually, the hinderance in question is only evena factor at all because of 5e's attribute cap. Without it, even a -2str character could eventually hit 20+. ...and you know, there is always the wish spell...
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
It’s still prejudiced to say that one race is smarter than another,..
Slightly pedantic, but no, this is not correct. Saying a gnome character is smarter than a half-orc character just because one is a gnome and the other a half-orc, that's prejudiced: racial tendencies are not absolutes and don't tell us anything about individuals. Saying gnomes are smarter on average however is simply stating a fact, like saying humans are taller than dwarves - there are certainly exceptions, but generally speaking it's true.
I don’t get the difference. They’re both still prejudiced.
Stating a verified fact is not prejudice. Stating something based on a preconceived notion rather than knowing it to be true is prejudice.
Assuming some contact I spoke to on the phone is tall because it turns out he's Dutch is prejudice. Saying the Dutch are tall is not. The difference is that the latter is true and a documented fact, while the former is an assumption I made based on that fact which may or may not be true at all. On average Dutch people are tall; any individual Dutch person however can be tall, short, or anything in between. Similarly, gnomes are smarter than half-orcs: gnomes get an Int bonus, half-orcs don't, so we know this to be true. We're not basing this on rumors or even on inconclusive data, we know this because it's a fact. What we don't know, but might assume if we're prejudiced, is whether Skullsplitter the half-orc is less smart than Albert Gnomestein. Odds are that it's true, with the gnome being a clever chap and the half-orc a touch slow, but maybe Skullsplitter is a world-renowned scholar and Albert had a nasty fall when he was a kid and his brain never recovered. Or maybe Skullsplitter just happens to be a little smarter than the average half-orc and Albert is just a touch less bright than the average gnome. A prejudiced person will make the assumption the odds hold true, a non-prejudiced person will know better than to make that assumption.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
i think when you look at it through the idea of the average person's stats, like a commoner, and take into acount what the stats mean. If we use the racial bonus from half-orc, and the bonus from gnome, and add it to a commoner statblock, the gnome commoner would have a higher score than an orc. However, this doesn't mean that an orc can't be a wizard, it just means that they'll have to work the tinyest bit harder to get to 20 intelligence than a gnome if both put a 10 into their intelligence at the start. I kinda think it would actually be like a wisdom intelligence difference. A half-orc would likely have good wisdom and strength. Survival skills, animal handling, tracking, being able to lift thing, hit harder, etc. Meanwhile, a gnome would most likely have a higher intelligence and dexterity. Arcana, historical knowledge, nimblness from their small size, etc. Neither is better than the other, but both are important
It’s still prejudiced to say that one race is smarter than another,..
Slightly pedantic, but no, this is not correct. Saying a gnome character is smarter than a half-orc character just because one is a gnome and the other a half-orc, that's prejudiced: racial tendencies are not absolutes and don't tell us anything about individuals. Saying gnomes are smarter on average however is simply stating a fact, like saying humans are taller than dwarves - there are certainly exceptions, but generally speaking it's true.
This is the exact can of worms there's no good reason to even have in D&D
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
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)
It’s still prejudiced to say that one race is smarter than another,..
Slightly pedantic, but no, this is not correct. Saying a gnome character is smarter than a half-orc character just because one is a gnome and the other a half-orc, that's prejudiced: racial tendencies are not absolutes and don't tell us anything about individuals. Saying gnomes are smarter on average however is simply stating a fact, like saying humans are taller than dwarves - there are certainly exceptions, but generally speaking it's true.
This is the exact can of worms there's no good reason to even have in D&D
Exactly, i agree. I'm not racist, but if i'm making a close combat fighter i'll use something like a half-orc or goliath for the strength bonus. Atleast theres no longer downsides to picking a race, like elfs having -1 to con.
Yes, racial restrictions have been disappearing with each successive edition of the game, and that's been all for the good. Heck, going from BECMI to AD&D was a huge change on that front. In BECMI, non-humans didn't have classes. You weren't an elf fighter, you were just an elf, your race was your class. Humans could eb a fighter or a thief or a magic-user, but an elf was just an elf and a dwarf was just a dwarf. Then you go to AD&D (aka 1e) and now your elf can actually have a class. And each iteration since has has loosened things mor and more. I'll admit that when it was happening, I thought it would be strange. I wasn't angry like some people, but I was apprehensive, but then I played, and it turned out it was actually no big deal. I have no reason to think this time will be any different.
I'm not sure what you mean by the official multigroup setting. I've been playing for nearly 40 years, and I'm fairly certain I've never used it.
The arguments were wrong then. Time has proven them wrong. They consisted of two parts. 1: If these changes are made, there will be no difference between the races. Well, unless you think that in 3e, or even now, an elf, a human and a halfling are the same, then it has been proven wrong that there are no differences between the races. 2: If they do this it will destroy the game. Well, here we are 20-odd years later still playing. And the game, as they've removed more and more restrictions, has become more popular than ever. So again, the arguments were wrong.
As to less can be more. I can certainly agree with that. Honestly, the number of races has gotten absurd, and any DM whose world building would cut some of them just to maintain their sanity, but that's not the issue here, really. But it's much, much easier to cut things out then it is to put them in. Adding options requires homebrewing a solution, and homebrewing is hard, and most people don't do it well. Restrictions, banning certain classes or combinations or what have you, is relatively simple.
Restrictions can be as simple as: at my table, halflings can't be barbarians, to use an example from another post. That can really make sense in a lot of worlds, and I'm not going to criticize anyone for saying that. But when the game designers write it down in the PHB, then it becomes the standard for every campaign everywhere. So, if you want to play one, you have to find a DM who will let you carve out an exception so you can play the character you want. Where on the other side, if you are a DM who runs into a player who says, the rule book says I can do this, so I want to even though it doesn't exist in your world, that's a player issue, not a rules issue.
1e and previous was before my time, I don't know too much about it. I came in at 3e but know folk from 2e whose material I've read a bit; 90's material.
I don't know what they call it now, in 3e it was 'Role Playing Game Association' who ran a living greyhawk campaign. I looked into it once but they were using 1st 3 books exclusively and a level limit of 16. I had just gotten Epic Level Handbook, and was planning my character out to level 45 and went on the forum to ask about whether a certain epic feat that does the same thing as one of my normal feats but better means I shouldn't bother to waste the slot on taking that normal version of the feat, and was told, they don't use that content.
No, but I know too many people who play by the older rules systems or who integrate parts of them into their homebrew. i.e. WoTC doesn't/can't? actually enforce it's content changes outside of it's own official setting. The people making those arguments may never actually have stopped using the old way at their table and the new ways don't count in their headcannons. I for example skipped right over 4e and used pathfinder as v3.75 and today use 5e with a bit of hybridization with 3e and some 2e. I disagree with the alignment nerfs for example; so I don't use them.
Fair enough. But I have an advantage of already knowing some of the old rules vs. players or a DM who is band new to the game in the 2020's. When WoTC leaves certain information behind, it's all the more difficult for newer folk to compare and contrast to find out what really might work best at ones table. Including things as variants in DMG means the reference material is handy and can be considered for worldbuilding.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
This whole racial ASI discussion has nothing to do with the latest errata and is very off topic for this thread. There have been tons of other threads discussing floating vs non floating ASIs
I don't want to feel like I'm murdering people when I slaughter a cave full of orcs in retaliation for their raid against a small human town. I want to feel like I'm slaying evil monsters and rescuing the captured townspeople. Hero's vs. Villains. and specifically monstrous villains; not other kinds of human beings that just look different or have another culture.
That's a fair thing to want; then I suggest not playing / running games where PCs can be orcs. Or, for that matter, don't play / run a game that uses any of the current worldbuilding that literally declares orcs to be people.
(Were it me, I wouldn't consider that game much of a TTRPG and more of a board game. That's fine; it explains why I have trouble taking any D&D setting seriously.)
In 5e's writings, orcs are a people, and can be played as PCs, and the game continues to evolve to support that for a wider and wider playerbase.
I don't think I know of any settings where PC's can play a full blooded Orc. I think I remeber one where we could play as a hobgoblin or half-hobgoblin and also there were half-ogres and half-giants. Oh, are they a playable race now in 5e? -went to look- I don't have it yet on my choose a race selection. I do seem to have assimar now, and Aarakocra
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
It’s still prejudiced to say that one race is smarter than another,..
Slightly pedantic, but no, this is not correct. Saying a gnome character is smarter than a half-orc character just because one is a gnome and the other a half-orc, that's prejudiced: racial tendencies are not absolutes and don't tell us anything about individuals. Saying gnomes are smarter on average however is simply stating a fact, like saying humans are taller than dwarves - there are certainly exceptions, but generally speaking it's true.
I don’t get the difference. They’re both still prejudiced.
Stating a verified fact is not prejudice. Stating something based on a preconceived notion rather than knowing it to be true is prejudice.
Assuming some contact I spoke to on the phone is tall because it turns out he's Dutch is prejudice. Saying the Dutch are tall is not. The difference is that the latter is true and a documented fact, while the former is an assumption I made based on that fact which may or may not be true at all. On average Dutch people are tall; any individual Dutch person however can be tall, short, or anything in between. Similarly, gnomes are smarter than half-orcs: gnomes get an Int bonus, half-orcs don't, so we know this to be true. We're not basing this on rumors or even on inconclusive data, we know this because it's a fact. What we don't know, but might assume if we're prejudiced, is whether Skullsplitter the half-orc is less smart than Albert Gnomestein. Odds are that it's true, with the gnome being a clever chap and the half-orc a touch slow, but maybe Skullsplitter is a world-renowned scholar and Albert had a nasty fall when he was a kid and his brain never recovered. Or maybe Skullsplitter just happens to be a little smarter than the average half-orc and Albert is just a touch less bright than the average gnome. A prejudiced person will make the assumption the odds hold true, a non-prejudiced person will know better than to make that assumption.
Yeah, but it's close enough to feel like it, which is what the article is saying:
the problem with D&D Orc racial classification is not that orcs were necessarily designed to resemble black and/or poc cultures, but that the ideology of "this group of sentient beings is unable to overcome the inherent animal nature of their bloodline" is the same as irl racism
Ah, I still disagree with this as a premise. In RL we only were dealing with human beings, whom all do have a common origin and blah, blah etc.
Orcs should not be thought of as "this group of sapient beings". Orcs were created, on purpose, by Gruumsh, the god of slaughter, whom they worship, and whom is active in the cosmology, to kill elves, as proxy in his struggle against Corellan, and to dominate the material plane in his name by subjugating other sentient beings.
That was the point of Orcs; to be a villain/henchmenesque type that the heroes are meant to defeat on their way to the BBE? is it? They were 2 dimensional throw 'em at the party, 1 and done encounters to give exp and treasure to pc's. So are goblins, gnolls, kobolds, etc. They are fodder for the killing fields. They aren't meant to be taken so seriously or as representations of misunderstood peoples.
Sometimes a monster is just a monster and you'll have more fun thinking of the game as a people vs monsters scenario and not a people vs. people scenario. The former is a simple basic game; the latter is complex social experiment and life simulator and evokes different feelings.
I don't want to feel like I'm murdering people when I slaughter a cave full of orcs in retaliation for their raid against a small human town. I want to feel like I'm slaying evil monsters and rescuing the captured townspeople. Hero's vs. Villains. and specifically monstrous villains; not other kinds of human beings that just look different or have another culture.
I object to this. Gruumsh does not exist in every (or even the majority) of D&D settings. Same with Lolth for the Drow, Maglubiyet for the Goblinoids, and every other typically "Evil" humanoid species in D&D (or even non-evil species-distinct deities, like Corellon, Moradin, Bahamut, and Garl Glittergold). These deities are typically only present on about a handful of official D&D worlds (the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Nentir Vale, Exandria). They don't exist in Eberron, Dark Sun, Ravnica, Theros, Mystara, Strixhaven, and plenty other official D&D world.
Sure, maybe in the Forgotten Realms Orcs were created to be Demons-in-all-but-name (in which case they should probably just be fiends instead of humanoids), but that's not true in Eberron, where they're just a different group of people with their own culture and history. Sure, Gnolls in the Greyhawk may have been created by Yeenoghu and are also just Demons-in-all-but-name, but that's not true in Eberron. Sure, maybe Drow in Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms were corrupted by Lolth, stolen of their elven immortality because Corellon is racist, have a matriarchal-theocratic society, and have fetus-death-battles in the womb where the superior drow-baby absorbs their dead twin (and, no, I'm not making this up), but that's not true in Exandria or Ravnica. In Exandria, the Drow broke free of Lolth's grasp, formed their nation with goblinoids and gnolls, and worship an eldritch entity that created all life on the planet.
So, the "Drow/Orcs/Goblinoids/Gnolls were designed by their deities to be Always Chaotic Evil Mooks that we can kill without moral repercussions" argument falls flat. D&D is not just one setting. It wasn't when it first came out, and it definitelyisn't now.
Side Note: Even J. R. R. Tolkien himself, you know, the guy whose works inspired approximately 99.99% of the modern fantasy genre, was not really okay with how he depicted orcs in his own books, and it was a moral quandary that he wrestled with until he died. If the guy that basically invented this trope and popularized it in the modern media wasn't 100% on-board with it, maybe that should be a sign to all of us that there probably should be more to these races than the simplistic "evil races are okay to murder because they're born that way" mindset.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Just because he's not called Gruumsh in other worlds doesn't mean that as a concept he doesn't exist. If these worlds are any where near as fleshed out as Greyhawk and Kalimar etc. There will be a reletively large number of gods whose names don't matter as much as the fact that all the portfolio elements are covered by someone; or a fewer number of gods with wider porfolio elements. i.e. There will be a god whose domain for all intents an purposes is or includes "Slaughter". This god might not be affiliated with Orcs in a particular campaign setting, but the setting must have someone who are the bad guys. If you don't have bad guys, you can't have good guys.
Is the RAW taking multiple settings into account during the descriptions or are the referencing a default setting such as faerun? I don't really care about how different all these other settings are that I've never been in. My concern is that the one or two long running settings that I do always play, don't fundamentally change on me. My top 3 settings are Greyhawk, Ravenloft, and Kalimar. Orc's aren't an issue in Ravenloft, InKalimar they already got humanized Orcs in 3.5; I dug it up last night when looking to see if there were any settings that let you play as a full-blooded Orc. The backdrop of Kalimar in the first place though is a human-centric empire that persecutes everyone else, and where there are human groups who are for more evil and monstrous than your typical orcs.
Greyhawk was the standard setting of 3e and Forgotten Realms was the other main one almost everyone I knew used besides Greyhawk. I'm not sure what 5e is doing for it's prime material plance concept, they seem to be sharing it with multiple worlds, but I pretty much only use Greyhawk, Kalimar, and Ravenloft. In Greyhawk at least, Gruumsh is Gruumsh and he likes his Orcs to have an intelligence score of 6 (8-2) so they can be nearly mindless, unquestioning, obediant, thugs and villains, who can't understand that murdering and enslaving folk is wrong. - An Orc with an intelligence score of 13 (15-2) is likely smart enough to realize Gruumsh is an Explitive and his ways are wrong, and so leave the tribe and strike out on his own to become an adventurer.
Just because he's not called Gruumsh in other worlds doesn't mean that as a concept he doesn't exist. If these worlds are any where near as fleshed out as Greyhawk and Kalimar etc. There will be a reletively large number of gods whose names don't matter as much as the fact that all the portfolio elements are covered by someone; or a fewer number of gods with wider porfolio elements. i.e. There will be a god whose domain for all intents an purposes is or includes "Slaughter". This god might not be affiliated with Orcs in a particular campaign setting, but the setting must have someone who are the bad guys. If you don't have bad guys, you can't have good guys.
Is the RAW taking multiple settings into account during the descriptions or are the referencing a default setting such as faerun? I don't really care about how different all these other settings are that I've never been in. My concern is that the one or two long running settings that I do always play, don't fundamentally change on me. My top 3 settings are Greyhawk, Ravenloft, and Kalimar. Orc's aren't an issue in Ravenloft, InKalimar they already got humanized Orcs in 3.5; I dug it up last night when looking to see if there were any settings that let you play as a full-blooded Orc. The backdrop of Kalimar in the first place though is a human-centric empire that persecutes everyone else, and where there are human groups who are for more evil and monstrous than your typical orcs.
Greyhawk was the standard setting of 3e and Forgotten Realms was the other main one almost everyone I knew used besides Greyhawk. I'm not sure what 5e is doing for it's prime material plance concept, they seem to be sharing it with multiple worlds, but I pretty much only use Greyhawk, Kalimar, and Ravenloft. In Greyhawk at least, Gruumsh is Gruumsh and he likes his Orcs to have an intelligence score of 6 (8-2) so they can be nearly mindless, unquestioning, obediant, thugs and villains, who can't understand that murdering and enslaving folk is wrong. - An Orc with an intelligence score of 13 (15-2) is likely smart enough to realize Gruumsh is an Explitive and his ways are wrong, and so leave the tribe and strike out on his own to become an adventurer.
So I'm going to go over 5th edition worlds you haven't mentioned. Eberron, Orcs span the spectrum and are playable. Without the Orcs the world would have been destroyed by that worlds version of the big bad. Wildemount-Exandria’s Orcs are a young race Gruumsh is mentioned but with a twist, span the spectrum. Ravnica no Orcs. Theros no Orcs, Strixhaven no mention but no ban it's a magic school so... Greyhawk and Krynn haven't gotten lore updates, they are mentioned in modules as possible locations but that's about it. Although to be fair we do have had a lot of old Greyhawk modules that have been adapted to generic 5th settings. Edit no word on Dark Sun but lets stay cautiously optimistic with the Tri-kreen UA although that could just be part of the larger Multiverse thing we don't know anything about.
I don't think I know of any settings where PC's can play a full blooded Orc. I think I remeber one where we could play as a hobgoblin or half-hobgoblin and also there were half-ogres and half-giants. Oh, are they a playable race now in 5e? -went to look- I don't have it yet on my choose a race selection. I do seem to have assimar now, and Aarakocra
Forgotten Realms et. al, per Volo's
Exandria, per Explorer's Guide to Wildemount
Eberron, per Eberron Rising from the Last War
and, in all likelihood, the multliverse, per the upcoming Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Universe (a reworking of Volo's + Mordenkainens + possibly some other sources)
I don't think I know of any settings where PC's can play a full blooded Orc. I think I remeber one where we could play as a hobgoblin or half-hobgoblin and also there were half-ogres and half-giants. Oh, are they a playable race now in 5e? -went to look- I don't have it yet on my choose a race selection. I do seem to have assimar now, and Aarakocra
Forgotten Realms et. al, per Volo's
Exandria, per Explorer's Guide to Wildemount
Eberron, per Eberron Rising from the Last War
and, in all likelihood, the multliverse, per the upcoming Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Universe (a reworking of Volo's + Mordenkainens + possibly some other sources)
I think I need to buy those on here before the character generator will let me make such a character. For the moemnt, i've only fully unlocked the players handbook, and bought a few bits piecemeal from other sources.
I'm looking forward to Dark Sun at some point. There's speculation itm might be re-released in 5.5. It sounds like an interesting setting.
It is. Which happens is that I do not think we see it in 5e (or in the hypothetical 5.5). Dark Sun has its own way of understanding some classic aspects of DnD, such as some classes. Thus, by memory, clerics do not worship gods, but natural elements (water, fire, etc ...). Wizards would be a bit easier to put in 5e, but they would be two very special subclasses (and they would have to be made for sorecerers as well). In addition, there is a lot of psionic presence, which is not contemplated in 5e, and it would be difficult to put it in without breaking the game. The least troublesome are the Templars, who could be a warlock subclass.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I see it difficult. Now, I would love to see Dark Sun at 5e. It is one of the old settings that I remember most fondly.
I'm looking forward to Dark Sun at some point. There's speculation itm might be re-released in 5.5. It sounds like an interesting setting.
It is. Which happens is that I do not think we see it in 5e (or in the hypothetical 5.5). Dark Sun has its own way of understanding some classic aspects of DnD, such as some classes. Thus, by memory, clerics do not worship gods, but natural elements (water, fire, etc ...). Wizards would be a bit easier to put in 5e, but they would be two very special subclasses (and they would have to be made for sorecerers as well). In addition, there is a lot of psionic presence, which is not contemplated in 5e, and it would be difficult to put it in without breaking the game. The least troublesome are the Templars, who could be a warlock subclass.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I see it difficult. Now, I would love to see Dark Sun at 5e. It is one of the old settings that I remember most fondly.
Of all the old settings this one would need the most work, not only purely game technically but also lore based. It was a very, very harsh world. And when we now see that the cannibalism part of the Yuan-ti has been removed I don't really see how they're going to deal with the Half-Lings, Tri-kreen and others. Or the the way Elves were portrayed, or how euh Muls are created. Or the rampant slavery, or the genocidal aspect of the "Dragons". I mean WoTC can't win bringing this setting back.
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
I don’t get the difference. They’re both still prejudiced.
That's a fair thing to want; then I suggest not playing / running games where PCs can be orcs. Or, for that matter, don't play / run a game that uses any of the current worldbuilding that literally declares orcs to be people.
(Were it me, I wouldn't consider that game much of a TTRPG and more of a board game. That's fine; it explains why I have trouble taking any D&D setting seriously.)
In 5e's writings, orcs are a people, and can be played as PCs, and the game continues to evolve to support that for a wider and wider playerbase.
I'm a bit new here. I only recently became a client and only came to the forums for the first time yesterday looking for magic item pricing advice. I happend into this thread while browsing.
Yes. Well, to be fair it's not going to 'be bad and suck', it's just not going to be fully optimizable. The player is choosing a still decent character for better role-playing purposes, which is encouragable behavior actually; it's just that many players; myself included in all honesty, like to min-max and optimize our characters to be mechanically the best able to do what we want to do: that means we make specific choices of race, class, background, feats, etc. based on considerations like "what combinations can make the highest dps or hps".
OTOH, like I also said, a good concept can still be allowed to optimize in spite of the standard archetype. The problem isn't the PC's character concept; it's the idea that such a concept is not rare in-universe anymore, but rather just as likely as not to be for any member of their race.
I'm literally saying, Halflings aren't likely to be barbarians (unless you are in a low cr campaign setting where everyone is basically a barbarian)
----
I think you are exagerating the "your character is going to suck" aspect of the argument.
I think it is equaly as reasonable of me to say that to maintain the correct flavor of my campaign, halflings have to be typically weaker but more lithe/nible than Orcs. This doesn't mean a PC can't have an atypical halfling who is a slow and steady powerhouse. The nature of the setting though requires that the halfling in question IS atypical and not a common representetive of halflings in general. It is in fact necessary as far as I am concerned form my campaigns proper flavor that, in general, halflings are lithe and nimble, but not very strong.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
Nods, it's not too horrible of a concept, I was just using it as an example of a small creature vs a big one and how/why they should be different in their physical capacities. Actually, the hinderance in question is only evena factor at all because of 5e's attribute cap. Without it, even a -2str character could eventually hit 20+. ...and you know, there is always the wish spell...
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
Stating a verified fact is not prejudice. Stating something based on a preconceived notion rather than knowing it to be true is prejudice.
Assuming some contact I spoke to on the phone is tall because it turns out he's Dutch is prejudice. Saying the Dutch are tall is not. The difference is that the latter is true and a documented fact, while the former is an assumption I made based on that fact which may or may not be true at all. On average Dutch people are tall; any individual Dutch person however can be tall, short, or anything in between. Similarly, gnomes are smarter than half-orcs: gnomes get an Int bonus, half-orcs don't, so we know this to be true. We're not basing this on rumors or even on inconclusive data, we know this because it's a fact. What we don't know, but might assume if we're prejudiced, is whether Skullsplitter the half-orc is less smart than Albert Gnomestein. Odds are that it's true, with the gnome being a clever chap and the half-orc a touch slow, but maybe Skullsplitter is a world-renowned scholar and Albert had a nasty fall when he was a kid and his brain never recovered. Or maybe Skullsplitter just happens to be a little smarter than the average half-orc and Albert is just a touch less bright than the average gnome. A prejudiced person will make the assumption the odds hold true, a non-prejudiced person will know better than to make that assumption.
Want to start playing but don't have anyone to play with? You can try these options: [link].
i think when you look at it through the idea of the average person's stats, like a commoner, and take into acount what the stats mean. If we use the racial bonus from half-orc, and the bonus from gnome, and add it to a commoner statblock, the gnome commoner would have a higher score than an orc. However, this doesn't mean that an orc can't be a wizard, it just means that they'll have to work the tinyest bit harder to get to 20 intelligence than a gnome if both put a 10 into their intelligence at the start. I kinda think it would actually be like a wisdom intelligence difference. A half-orc would likely have good wisdom and strength. Survival skills, animal handling, tracking, being able to lift thing, hit harder, etc. Meanwhile, a gnome would most likely have a higher intelligence and dexterity. Arcana, historical knowledge, nimblness from their small size, etc. Neither is better than the other, but both are important
I play a miriad of characters at the lord's rest inn
Two things are infinite: The universe, and human stupidity; and I'm not so sure about the universe.
Scifi horror is quite the trip :) Comics and a story
#FreeDND
This is the exact can of worms there's no good reason to even have in D&D
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)
Exactly, i agree. I'm not racist, but if i'm making a close combat fighter i'll use something like a half-orc or goliath for the strength bonus. Atleast theres no longer downsides to picking a race, like elfs having -1 to con.
I play a miriad of characters at the lord's rest inn
Two things are infinite: The universe, and human stupidity; and I'm not so sure about the universe.
Scifi horror is quite the trip :) Comics and a story
#FreeDND
1e and previous was before my time, I don't know too much about it. I came in at 3e but know folk from 2e whose material I've read a bit; 90's material.
I don't know what they call it now, in 3e it was 'Role Playing Game Association' who ran a living greyhawk campaign. I looked into it once but they were using 1st 3 books exclusively and a level limit of 16. I had just gotten Epic Level Handbook, and was planning my character out to level 45 and went on the forum to ask about whether a certain epic feat that does the same thing as one of my normal feats but better means I shouldn't bother to waste the slot on taking that normal version of the feat, and was told, they don't use that content.
No, but I know too many people who play by the older rules systems or who integrate parts of them into their homebrew. i.e. WoTC doesn't/can't? actually enforce it's content changes outside of it's own official setting. The people making those arguments may never actually have stopped using the old way at their table and the new ways don't count in their headcannons. I for example skipped right over 4e and used pathfinder as v3.75 and today use 5e with a bit of hybridization with 3e and some 2e. I disagree with the alignment nerfs for example; so I don't use them.
Fair enough. But I have an advantage of already knowing some of the old rules vs. players or a DM who is band new to the game in the 2020's. When WoTC leaves certain information behind, it's all the more difficult for newer folk to compare and contrast to find out what really might work best at ones table. Including things as variants in DMG means the reference material is handy and can be considered for worldbuilding.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
This whole racial ASI discussion has nothing to do with the latest errata and is very off topic for this thread. There have been tons of other threads discussing floating vs non floating ASIs
Three-time Judge of the Competition of the Finest Brews! Come join us in making fun, unique homebrew and voting for your favorite entries!
I don't think I know of any settings where PC's can play a full blooded Orc. I think I remeber one where we could play as a hobgoblin or half-hobgoblin and also there were half-ogres and half-giants. Oh, are they a playable race now in 5e? -went to look- I don't have it yet on my choose a race selection. I do seem to have assimar now, and Aarakocra
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
But tall is different than smart.
I object to this. Gruumsh does not exist in every (or even the majority) of D&D settings. Same with Lolth for the Drow, Maglubiyet for the Goblinoids, and every other typically "Evil" humanoid species in D&D (or even non-evil species-distinct deities, like Corellon, Moradin, Bahamut, and Garl Glittergold). These deities are typically only present on about a handful of official D&D worlds (the Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk, Nentir Vale, Exandria). They don't exist in Eberron, Dark Sun, Ravnica, Theros, Mystara, Strixhaven, and plenty other official D&D world.
Sure, maybe in the Forgotten Realms Orcs were created to be Demons-in-all-but-name (in which case they should probably just be fiends instead of humanoids), but that's not true in Eberron, where they're just a different group of people with their own culture and history. Sure, Gnolls in the Greyhawk may have been created by Yeenoghu and are also just Demons-in-all-but-name, but that's not true in Eberron. Sure, maybe Drow in Greyhawk and the Forgotten Realms were corrupted by Lolth, stolen of their elven immortality because Corellon is racist, have a matriarchal-theocratic society, and have fetus-death-battles in the womb where the superior drow-baby absorbs their dead twin (and, no, I'm not making this up), but that's not true in Exandria or Ravnica. In Exandria, the Drow broke free of Lolth's grasp, formed their nation with goblinoids and gnolls, and worship an eldritch entity that created all life on the planet.
So, the "Drow/Orcs/Goblinoids/Gnolls were designed by their deities to be Always Chaotic Evil Mooks that we can kill without moral repercussions" argument falls flat. D&D is not just one setting. It wasn't when it first came out, and it definitely isn't now.
Side Note: Even J. R. R. Tolkien himself, you know, the guy whose works inspired approximately 99.99% of the modern fantasy genre, was not really okay with how he depicted orcs in his own books, and it was a moral quandary that he wrestled with until he died. If the guy that basically invented this trope and popularized it in the modern media wasn't 100% on-board with it, maybe that should be a sign to all of us that there probably should be more to these races than the simplistic "evil races are okay to murder because they're born that way" mindset.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
Just because he's not called Gruumsh in other worlds doesn't mean that as a concept he doesn't exist. If these worlds are any where near as fleshed out as Greyhawk and Kalimar etc. There will be a reletively large number of gods whose names don't matter as much as the fact that all the portfolio elements are covered by someone; or a fewer number of gods with wider porfolio elements. i.e. There will be a god whose domain for all intents an purposes is or includes "Slaughter". This god might not be affiliated with Orcs in a particular campaign setting, but the setting must have someone who are the bad guys. If you don't have bad guys, you can't have good guys.
Is the RAW taking multiple settings into account during the descriptions or are the referencing a default setting such as faerun? I don't really care about how different all these other settings are that I've never been in. My concern is that the one or two long running settings that I do always play, don't fundamentally change on me. My top 3 settings are Greyhawk, Ravenloft, and Kalimar. Orc's aren't an issue in Ravenloft, InKalimar they already got humanized Orcs in 3.5; I dug it up last night when looking to see if there were any settings that let you play as a full-blooded Orc. The backdrop of Kalimar in the first place though is a human-centric empire that persecutes everyone else, and where there are human groups who are for more evil and monstrous than your typical orcs.
Greyhawk was the standard setting of 3e and Forgotten Realms was the other main one almost everyone I knew used besides Greyhawk. I'm not sure what 5e is doing for it's prime material plance concept, they seem to be sharing it with multiple worlds, but I pretty much only use Greyhawk, Kalimar, and Ravenloft. In Greyhawk at least, Gruumsh is Gruumsh and he likes his Orcs to have an intelligence score of 6 (8-2) so they can be nearly mindless, unquestioning, obediant, thugs and villains, who can't understand that murdering and enslaving folk is wrong. - An Orc with an intelligence score of 13 (15-2) is likely smart enough to realize Gruumsh is an Explitive and his ways are wrong, and so leave the tribe and strike out on his own to become an adventurer.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
So I'm going to go over 5th edition worlds you haven't mentioned. Eberron, Orcs span the spectrum and are playable. Without the Orcs the world would have been destroyed by that worlds version of the big bad. Wildemount-Exandria’s Orcs are a young race Gruumsh is mentioned but with a twist, span the spectrum. Ravnica no Orcs. Theros no Orcs, Strixhaven no mention but no ban it's a magic school so... Greyhawk and Krynn haven't gotten lore updates, they are mentioned in modules as possible locations but that's about it. Although to be fair we do have had a lot of old Greyhawk modules that have been adapted to generic 5th settings. Edit no word on Dark Sun but lets stay cautiously optimistic with the Tri-kreen UA although that could just be part of the larger Multiverse thing we don't know anything about.
I'm looking forward to Dark Sun at some point. There's speculation itm might be re-released in 5.5. It sounds like an interesting setting.
Yeah, Oberron introduced some neat stuff. I've not actually played in it, but I've had people use material from it, like being a warforged character.
but yeah, I've also been somewhat recycling my 3e modules for Grayhawk content. Can't go wrong with "Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil".
I'd also like to try Spelljammer.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
Forgotten Realms et. al, per Volo's
Exandria, per Explorer's Guide to Wildemount
Eberron, per Eberron Rising from the Last War
and, in all likelihood, the multliverse, per the upcoming Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Universe (a reworking of Volo's + Mordenkainens + possibly some other sources)
Trying to Decide if DDB is for you? A few helpful threads: A Buyer's Guide to DDB; What I/We Bought and Why; How some DMs use DDB; A Newer Thread on Using DDB to Play
Helpful threads on other topics: Homebrew FAQ by IamSposta; Accessing Content by ConalTheGreat;
Check your entitlements here. | Support Ticket LInk
I think I need to buy those on here before the character generator will let me make such a character. For the moemnt, i've only fully unlocked the players handbook, and bought a few bits piecemeal from other sources.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
It is. Which happens is that I do not think we see it in 5e (or in the hypothetical 5.5). Dark Sun has its own way of understanding some classic aspects of DnD, such as some classes. Thus, by memory, clerics do not worship gods, but natural elements (water, fire, etc ...). Wizards would be a bit easier to put in 5e, but they would be two very special subclasses (and they would have to be made for sorecerers as well). In addition, there is a lot of psionic presence, which is not contemplated in 5e, and it would be difficult to put it in without breaking the game. The least troublesome are the Templars, who could be a warlock subclass.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but I see it difficult. Now, I would love to see Dark Sun at 5e. It is one of the old settings that I remember most fondly.
Of all the old settings this one would need the most work, not only purely game technically but also lore based. It was a very, very harsh world. And when we now see that the cannibalism part of the Yuan-ti has been removed I don't really see how they're going to deal with the Half-Lings, Tri-kreen and others. Or the the way Elves were portrayed, or how euh Muls are created. Or the rampant slavery, or the genocidal aspect of the "Dragons". I mean WoTC can't win bringing this setting back.