I am listening on You Tube to various creators talking about backgrounds and new race options and if they are correct Orcs will be a race and Half Elf and Half Orc will not be a race that you select. According to the You Tubers WOTC is saying that if you want a character to be a cross breed you can still do this you just pick one race as the main and choose their abilities and starting setups and then add the other as flavor text.
Ok, I am actually good with this line of thinking overall. In Dark Sun you could play a cross between a human and a dwarf called a mule (they were always male and always born sterile unable to sire children aka the reason for the name, they were just like Mules in real life in that respect). this gives a DM or a player with DM consent the ability to play around with this and come up with their own version of this. Another trope that comes to mind is the fairy changeling. Not exactly the same but one could say the magic of starting out as the original race and then transforming to fairy at puberty involved intermixing the bloodlines magically. This I think is good and I like.
What I am not a fan of is that you simply choose one race or the other and just use all those starting settings. I really feel there should be ways to remove one or two abilities of the start race and the ability to add one or two from the other. This would give DM's the ability to define the crossbreeding races he wants in his game. I know that we can create home brew but I think it might be better to have a mechanic to help with this so that the race can be "official" as it were.
Now, I understand that for DND Beyond this requires programming a new mechanic and that is not just done without development but there is a mechanic that you guys already have that can be tweaked I think which would work very well. I am speaking of the Lineages racial subclass/class (sorry forget exactly how it is defined) from the Ravenloft books. You can use that mechanic to modify characters to fit any combination of racial cross breeding a DM can envision with minimal alteration to fit it to creating a half breed character. I think the developers might want to consider this.
The reason for this is that in many worlds Half Elves and Half Orcs etc. are more than just occasional offspring of the pairing of different races of creature, the half breed will breed true and thus you actually have communities of half elves and half orcs in these campaign worlds. Not every world but many DMs I played under did this. I think some DMs and players might end up using the lineages template from Ravenloft to do this anyways so why not. create some mechanic that allows characters to do this "officially" for roleplaying leagues.
Any rate just my thoughts. Is this a good idea or not?
I get the desire and I don't think it's a bad solution, necessarily, but I think they went with the planned system because it's so hard to balance it otherwise.
Because if you decide that you can mix and match features from various races, it becomes very hard to make sure people don't just min-max weirdo characters. Like taking two different Genasi parents... like taking mostly Water Genasi features, then dropping Acid Resistance to take Spellcasting from Air Genasi to get an additional cantrip and two more spells.
So at this point you have to give limitations on which features can or can't be combined. And you have to do it with every single race... maybe each feature could be assigned a value and you can't get features that exceed a certain value. Or you have to design an official "half" version of each race, with strict rules like the lineages. The alternative is limiting these half-races to specific ones (such as half-orc or half-elf, which seem to the most common requests), but at that point how do you decide which races are and aren't capable of creating half-race lineages, and you have to come up for some reason why the other races can't.
So... yeah. I think more detailed options wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but it would either have to be an extremely limited thing that's only marginally different from the proposed rules, or it would have to be a complicated system unto itself that would be a separate part of character creation that's as complex as a good chunk of the rest of character creation combined.
A good DM is going to think through the changes he wants to define it as he wants and if the race is too powerful it just becomes a monste with a challenge rating if it still fits the campaign world.
To my mind creative options should trump game balance every time. I do not believe that you can't devise a way to allow character driven elements that have game mechanics attached to them because game balance. The overriding answer should be does it fit in the world. That is a question for the DM with input from the players and not some overarching balance argument by people not playing the game. Guidelines sure but not outright restrictions.
The overall limitations should be set by the DM of the game and not some undefinable narrative about power levels set by anonymous people that don't play in that game.
The Game Balance Nazis can end up being more annoying than the power gamer and at the end of the day both are only interested in power levels and not roleplaying. RPG's need the creative fluff and they need the mechanics to justify it. This is part of what makes the game different than reading a book or watching a movie.
End of the day, D&D Beyond is not going to create a special mixed lineage [REDACTED] tool for character generation unless it's reflected in the official rules that come out of the One D&D Project, and do understand the idea articulated in the first One D&D drop is not necessarily or at all the last word on D&D thinking on race for whatever 2024 brings us, thankfully since a lot of folks had a lot of problems with WotC's take on mixed lineages beyond the mechanics.
I also wouldn't call folks who favor game balance in RAW as opposed to unabashed race kit-bashing based on one sentence "concepts" like changeling fairy (who is simply a changeling who became a fairy, not really a "mix," though the real world fairy tale changeling is nothing like what you describe and is best rendered by the Hexblood concept anyway) "Nazis." It doesn't help you come across as someone willing to take constructive criticism or even converse with differing perspectives in good faith.
Past this end, people wanting to break out of the confines of prescriptive race limitations do so all the time through homebrew.
I will say it is curious, maybe a bit disappointing that the lineage over a "quasi-template" race in Van Richtens doesn't seem like it'll be present in One D&D's initial core, and may, as is likely the case with the Artificer, have to wait for some "advanced options" book I'm tenatively called Asmodeus's Contract for Everything (Else).
There's a really great book, your YouTube viewing may well be aware of "An Elf and an Orc had a Little Baby" that presents a great guide to mixed lineages (though I do sorta :/ its presumption that parentage/origin must derive from binary parentage, as if other forms of creating life or existence can't come via other means in fantastic settings, I mean we have Warforged dang it, but I admit I do need to read the title a bit more thoroughly than I did when it was getting more buzz). That system you're not going to see on DDB, but it strikes me as very doable through Homebrew.
If there are 10 races and you want rules for every possible combination, you would need description for 45 extra mixed race combo with unique abilities.
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Hello,
I am listening on You Tube to various creators talking about backgrounds and new race options and if they are correct Orcs will be a race and Half Elf and Half Orc will not be a race that you select. According to the You Tubers WOTC is saying that if you want a character to be a cross breed you can still do this you just pick one race as the main and choose their abilities and starting setups and then add the other as flavor text.
Ok, I am actually good with this line of thinking overall. In Dark Sun you could play a cross between a human and a dwarf called a mule (they were always male and always born sterile unable to sire children aka the reason for the name, they were just like Mules in real life in that respect). this gives a DM or a player with DM consent the ability to play around with this and come up with their own version of this. Another trope that comes to mind is the fairy changeling. Not exactly the same but one could say the magic of starting out as the original race and then transforming to fairy at puberty involved intermixing the bloodlines magically. This I think is good and I like.
What I am not a fan of is that you simply choose one race or the other and just use all those starting settings. I really feel there should be ways to remove one or two abilities of the start race and the ability to add one or two from the other. This would give DM's the ability to define the crossbreeding races he wants in his game. I know that we can create home brew but I think it might be better to have a mechanic to help with this so that the race can be "official" as it were.
Now, I understand that for DND Beyond this requires programming a new mechanic and that is not just done without development but there is a mechanic that you guys already have that can be tweaked I think which would work very well. I am speaking of the Lineages racial subclass/class (sorry forget exactly how it is defined) from the Ravenloft books. You can use that mechanic to modify characters to fit any combination of racial cross breeding a DM can envision with minimal alteration to fit it to creating a half breed character. I think the developers might want to consider this.
The reason for this is that in many worlds Half Elves and Half Orcs etc. are more than just occasional offspring of the pairing of different races of creature, the half breed will breed true and thus you actually have communities of half elves and half orcs in these campaign worlds. Not every world but many DMs I played under did this. I think some DMs and players might end up using the lineages template from Ravenloft to do this anyways so why not. create some mechanic that allows characters to do this "officially" for roleplaying leagues.
Any rate just my thoughts. Is this a good idea or not?
I get the desire and I don't think it's a bad solution, necessarily, but I think they went with the planned system because it's so hard to balance it otherwise.
Because if you decide that you can mix and match features from various races, it becomes very hard to make sure people don't just min-max weirdo characters. Like taking two different Genasi parents... like taking mostly Water Genasi features, then dropping Acid Resistance to take Spellcasting from Air Genasi to get an additional cantrip and two more spells.
So at this point you have to give limitations on which features can or can't be combined. And you have to do it with every single race... maybe each feature could be assigned a value and you can't get features that exceed a certain value. Or you have to design an official "half" version of each race, with strict rules like the lineages. The alternative is limiting these half-races to specific ones (such as half-orc or half-elf, which seem to the most common requests), but at that point how do you decide which races are and aren't capable of creating half-race lineages, and you have to come up for some reason why the other races can't.
So... yeah. I think more detailed options wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, but it would either have to be an extremely limited thing that's only marginally different from the proposed rules, or it would have to be a complicated system unto itself that would be a separate part of character creation that's as complex as a good chunk of the rest of character creation combined.
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There’s like a 12 page thread on this. You might want to skim through the arguments there.
https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/dungeons-dragons-discussion/unearthed-arcana/149849-half-elves-half-orcs-as-we-knew-them-are-gone?page=12#c254
A good DM is going to think through the changes he wants to define it as he wants and if the race is too powerful it just becomes a monste with a challenge rating if it still fits the campaign world.
To my mind creative options should trump game balance every time. I do not believe that you can't devise a way to allow character driven elements that have game mechanics attached to them because game balance. The overriding answer should be does it fit in the world. That is a question for the DM with input from the players and not some overarching balance argument by people not playing the game. Guidelines sure but not outright restrictions.
The overall limitations should be set by the DM of the game and not some undefinable narrative about power levels set by anonymous people that don't play in that game.
The Game Balance Nazis can end up being more annoying than the power gamer and at the end of the day both are only interested in power levels and not roleplaying. RPG's need the creative fluff and they need the mechanics to justify it. This is part of what makes the game different than reading a book or watching a movie.
End of the day, D&D Beyond is not going to create a special mixed lineage [REDACTED] tool for character generation unless it's reflected in the official rules that come out of the One D&D Project, and do understand the idea articulated in the first One D&D drop is not necessarily or at all the last word on D&D thinking on race for whatever 2024 brings us, thankfully since a lot of folks had a lot of problems with WotC's take on mixed lineages beyond the mechanics.
I also wouldn't call folks who favor game balance in RAW as opposed to unabashed race kit-bashing based on one sentence "concepts" like changeling fairy (who is simply a changeling who became a fairy, not really a "mix," though the real world fairy tale changeling is nothing like what you describe and is best rendered by the Hexblood concept anyway) "Nazis." It doesn't help you come across as someone willing to take constructive criticism or even converse with differing perspectives in good faith.
Past this end, people wanting to break out of the confines of prescriptive race limitations do so all the time through homebrew.
I will say it is curious, maybe a bit disappointing that the lineage over a "quasi-template" race in Van Richtens doesn't seem like it'll be present in One D&D's initial core, and may, as is likely the case with the Artificer, have to wait for some "advanced options" book I'm tenatively called Asmodeus's Contract for Everything (Else).
There's a really great book, your YouTube viewing may well be aware of "An Elf and an Orc had a Little Baby" that presents a great guide to mixed lineages (though I do sorta :/ its presumption that parentage/origin must derive from binary parentage, as if other forms of creating life or existence can't come via other means in fantastic settings, I mean we have Warforged dang it, but I admit I do need to read the title a bit more thoroughly than I did when it was getting more buzz). That system you're not going to see on DDB, but it strikes me as very doable through Homebrew.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
If there are 10 races and you want rules for every possible combination, you would need description for 45 extra mixed race combo with unique abilities.