Honestly, would a customizable hybrid templet be too much to ask for as a replacement for the half races?
For example, Appearance, choose a mixture of physical traits from the parent races. Game-mechanics, choose between which traits the character inherited from the parent races, not all of the traits to keep things balanced.
Honestly, would a customizable hybrid templet be too much to ask for as a replacement for the half races?
In the PHB? Yes, balancing it to be player-appropriate would be a huge task. In the DMG? No real point, it's just a special case of more general "define your own species".
Honestly, would a customizable hybrid templet be too much to ask for as a replacement for the half races?
In the PHB? Yes, balancing it to be player-appropriate would be a huge task. In the DMG? No real point, it's just a special case of more general "define your own species".
no it wouldnt be to much for them DC20 did it and they are a much smaller team making way less money WOTC has the ability to do it they just wont bc most of the higher ups dont care about the player anymore only the money. I know the designers and stuff care about us but since the higher ups call the shots they can get away with not caring. Most of the changes in the PHB are nothing more then common HB fixes people have been doing for the last 10 years now its just in a WOTC book
Honestly, would a customizable hybrid templet be too much to ask for as a replacement for the half races?
For example, Appearance, choose a mixture of physical traits from the parent races. Game-mechanics, choose between which traits the character inherited from the parent races, not all of the traits to keep things balanced.
As much as I'd love that, it's far far too late for that.
All the 2024 onwards species would need to be designed with features which are balanced when swapped around, rather than just balanced individually. This would need to have been started at the beginning of the OneDnD playtest.
Considering that the 2024 PHB has essentially released, that ship has not only sailed, but it's arriving at its planned destination.
Trying to mechanically separate characters with parents of different humanoid types runs into problems: 1) It makes people with multiracial backgrounds seem inherently and innately different form their parents, which is uncomfortable for many people who are actually multiracial. 2) It gives special exclusionary status to Half Elf and Half Orc specifically, out of all the other kinds of multispecies characters one could make, which is odd and again uncomfortable. 3) It begs the question why you can't make characters with parents of different sorts, or ancestry that includes more than two humanoid types, which is way too complex to mechanize well
The solution posed on the Origins UA solves all these rather neatly. It makes it so that ones ancestry is lore rather than gameable mechanics and also doesn't innately make people who have such ancestry into some weird, innate, other. Plus it allows the freedom to make characters of whatever ancestry one would like and doesn't give special exclusion to just Half Elf and Half Orc. I hope the UA Origins solution made it through to PHB '24.
Are you unfamiliar with the term Third Culture Kid? Many of us do see our being bicultural as placing us in a category of our own. I teach bicultural kids in a foreign country for a living and this is how they identify. I don't think Wizards particularly care whether or not they upset people who are multiethnic. Whoever is making these decisions is displaying gross bias.
I am multiethnic. What I am uncomfortable with is the idea I must choose the ethnicity of one parent or the other. It is like how historically racist people expected people in the past who were multiethnic to choose the ethnicity to which they "belonged." It is gross.
As someone who is multiethnic, I have expressed my displeasure on how WotC is doing this. [REDACTED] It's pure frustration at this point for me. Because no one wants to listen to us on it.
As someone who is multiethnic, I have expressed my displeasure on how WotC is doing this. [REDACTED] It's pure frustration at this point for me. Because no one wants to listen to us on it.
Trying to mechanically separate characters with parents of different humanoid types runs into problems: 1) It makes people with multiracial backgrounds seem inherently and innately different form their parents, which is uncomfortable for many people who are actually multiracial. 2) It gives special exclusionary status to Half Elf and Half Orc specifically, out of all the other kinds of multispecies characters one could make, which is odd and again uncomfortable. 3) It begs the question why you can't make characters with parents of different sorts, or ancestry that includes more than two humanoid types, which is way too complex to mechanize well
The solution posed on the Origins UA solves all these rather neatly. It makes it so that ones ancestry is lore rather than gameable mechanics and also doesn't innately make people who have such ancestry into some weird, innate, other. Plus it allows the freedom to make characters of whatever ancestry one would like and doesn't give special exclusion to just Half Elf and Half Orc. I hope the UA Origins solution made it through to PHB '24.
Are you unfamiliar with the term Third Culture Kid? Many of us do see our being bicultural as placing us in a category of our own. I teach bicultural kids in a foreign country for a living and this is how they identify. I don't think Wizards particularly care whether or not they upset people who are multiethnic. Whoever is making these decisions is displaying gross bias.
I am multiethnic. What I am uncomfortable with is the idea I must choose the ethnicity of one parent or the other. It is like how historically racist people expected people in the past who were multiethnic to choose the ethnicity to which they "belonged." It is gross.
As someone who is multiethnic, I have expressed my displeasure on how WotC is doing this. [REDACTED] It's pure frustration at this point for me. Because no one wants to listen to us on it.
The first person in this post pyramid also has a personal interest in the outcome of WotC's decision, just as you do. I believe people are listening to you, and many others, and using the best tools we have available to move forward. This includes inclusion consultants, sensitivity designers, cultural consultants, and anthropologists when approaching this topic and, as far as I remember from their recent announcement, literally every other work WotC will be publishing last year going forward. There is no one size fits all solution, as you have demonstrated. All they can do is use what we understand about this subject today to meet the needs of as many people as possible and make the game accessible to as many people as possible, while leveraging professionals in the field to minimize any feelings of exclusion. Just because you do not agree with it does not make it wrong. It doesn't mean you are wrong either.
Except doing away with them entirely undermines much of the roleplay aspect if every character is just built as a chimera of individual powers. One common pillar of roleplay is having significant relatively static blocks of traits that represent various role identities. And yes, that is also covered by class choice, but that's one axis. Having another increases diversity of identity options. And that sets aside the headache of trying to balance a giant grab bag of options so every possible combination is roughly equivalent.
Except doing away with them entirely undermines much of the roleplay aspect if every character is just built as a chimera of individual powers. One common pillar of roleplay is having significant relatively static blocks of traits that represent various role identities. And yes, that is also covered by class choice, but that's one axis. Having another increases diversity of identity options. And that sets aside the headache of trying to balance a giant grab bag of options so every possible combination is roughly equivalent.
I really don't want to wade into this thread, but I don't think this point is true. The Cypher System by Monte Cook Games doesn't treat race mechanically by default. They discuss adding some of that back in the Godsforsaken book, but Numenera and Invisibe Sun don't, and they don't suffer without it. And these games have plenty of customization options given by a character's type (class), descriptor (characteristic), and focus (special powers).
Trying to mechanically separate characters with parents of different humanoid types runs into problems: 1) It makes people with multiracial backgrounds seem inherently and innately different form their parents, which is uncomfortable for many people who are actually multiracial. 2) It gives special exclusionary status to Half Elf and Half Orc specifically, out of all the other kinds of multispecies characters one could make, which is odd and again uncomfortable. 3) It begs the question why you can't make characters with parents of different sorts, or ancestry that includes more than two humanoid types, which is way too complex to mechanize well
The solution posed on the Origins UA solves all these rather neatly. It makes it so that ones ancestry is lore rather than gameable mechanics and also doesn't innately make people who have such ancestry into some weird, innate, other. Plus it allows the freedom to make characters of whatever ancestry one would like and doesn't give special exclusion to just Half Elf and Half Orc. I hope the UA Origins solution made it through to PHB '24.
Are you unfamiliar with the term Third Culture Kid? Many of us do see our being bicultural as placing us in a category of our own. I teach bicultural kids in a foreign country for a living and this is how they identify. I don't think Wizards particularly care whether or not they upset people who are multiethnic. Whoever is making these decisions is displaying gross bias.
I am multiethnic. What I am uncomfortable with is the idea I must choose the ethnicity of one parent or the other. It is like how historically racist people expected people in the past who were multiethnic to choose the ethnicity to which they "belonged." It is gross.
I am very familiar with that term and I would also be uncomfortable with something that implied that a multiracial person must pick or identify as one of their ethnicities more than another. I don't think the Origins UA did that, because I don't think that the Origins UA implied that a species special benefit was all of what one got from one of their parents. The species special power is only one thing that makes up a character and the Feat and Skills and Languages, etc, were other parts of it. To focus solely on the species special power as the only thing that defines a character is being too hyperfocused on just that one element.
That being said, it seems that the "Characters with parents of different humanoid kinds" sidebar did not make it through to PHB '24 ... and neither did Half Elves or Half Orcs. Which seems disappointing everyone.
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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!
That being said, it seems that the "Characters with parents of different humanoid kinds" sidebar did not make it through to PHB '24 ... and neither did Half Elves or Half Orcs. Which seems disappointing everyone.
Well, that sidebar was sort of terrible. Honestly, one sentence that boils down to "talk to your DM" would probably have been the best answer (I don't know if something of the sort is in there).
That being said, it seems that the "Characters with parents of different humanoid kinds" sidebar did not make it through to PHB '24 ... and neither did Half Elves or Half Orcs. Which seems disappointing everyone.
Well, that sidebar was sort of terrible. Honestly, one sentence that boils down to "talk to your DM" would probably have been the best answer (I don't know if something of the sort is in there).
It was brief but it honestly was probably the best answer possible if they weren't willing to actually define some in-world limits as a baseline people could choose to work off of or alter for their campaigns. Like I've said, it's possible since it ultimately tossed the question to the DM that it'll make an appearance in the DMG, since the current one already had a section on creating new character options, including tweaking existing race blocks or making them from whole-cloth.
Except doing away with them entirely undermines much of the roleplay aspect if every character is just built as a chimera of individual powers. One common pillar of roleplay is having significant relatively static blocks of traits that represent various role identities. And yes, that is also covered by class choice, but that's one axis. Having another increases diversity of identity options. And that sets aside the headache of trying to balance a giant grab bag of options so every possible combination is roughly equivalent.
I have to disagree quite firmly. You're essentially implying that games that don't use fixed blocks of traits are necessarily worse roleplaying experiences; that's just factually wrong, and anyone who's played a classless RPG can tell you that. Race essentialism is not a cool roleplaying tool; it's an outdated worldview that leads to obvious problems like "our game represents characters of mixed parentage as necessarily, biologically other" and "our game represents characters of mixed parentage as really one race or the other (but with cosmetic changes that our rulebook explicitly tells you don't matter)".
I acknowledge that developing a balanced "grab bag" of origin features would take effort (although not any more effort than, say, feats) but that is literally why we pay for games, so like. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that a team making a paid product direct its effort in a way that leads to a better product.
A lot of people complained that the Tasha's ASI changes would make RP worse and make the game more difficult to balance; a few years on from that, we all pretty much agree that those changes were good for the game. I encourage people to really examine whether their hesitancy towards fully customisable character origins comes from a real game design criticism, or simple reactionism.
Except doing away with them entirely undermines much of the roleplay aspect if every character is just built as a chimera of individual powers. One common pillar of roleplay is having significant relatively static blocks of traits that represent various role identities. And yes, that is also covered by class choice, but that's one axis. Having another increases diversity of identity options. And that sets aside the headache of trying to balance a giant grab bag of options so every possible combination is roughly equivalent.
(another person chiming in as disagreeing with this, thoroughly)
Someone else has covered the philosophical issues with "race essentialism" so I'll just add: "race" mechanics gamify race; species mechanics gamify species; ethnicity mechanics gamify ethnithicies. And so on. It's dumb to gamify those things, because it's regressive to gamify "who your parents were." I know that it's traditional for D&D (and thus kinda traditional for whole lineages of RPGs), but it was dumb in the beginning and dumb now.
Except doing away with them entirely undermines much of the roleplay aspect if every character is just built as a chimera of individual powers. One common pillar of roleplay is having significant relatively static blocks of traits that represent various role identities. And yes, that is also covered by class choice, but that's one axis. Having another increases diversity of identity options. And that sets aside the headache of trying to balance a giant grab bag of options so every possible combination is roughly equivalent.
I played 1st. and 2nd. Edition for around a decade stretching between the 80s and 90s during which we would just negotiate with the DM if we wanted to roll up something outside of the confines of ability score improvements being dependent on ancestry. That elf labored on a farm in his or her formative years? Give him or her a +1 to STR instead of +1 to DEX.
Wizards don't give enough credit to just how ahead of things we players were back then. There's nothing particularly innovative about what Tasha's has brought to the table. But it does officially allow for what many of us have always allowed at our tables. Insisting these changes were necessary however in some effort to combat racial prejudice while simultaneously expecting mechanical differences between characters of different ancestries is a case of wanting to have one's cake and eat it too.
Doing away with all of it wouldn't undermine roleplay in the slightest. This comes from how a player breathes life into a character and has absolutely nothing to do with the numbers on the character sheet.
I have seen two Human Fighters exhibit greater variety in terms of roleplaying based purely on how their players envisioned them and played them than I have seen among parties that were motley assortments of ancestries. Too often the latter is treated as little more than window dressing.
Except doing away with them entirely undermines much of the roleplay aspect if every character is just built as a chimera of individual powers. One common pillar of roleplay is having significant relatively static blocks of traits that represent various role identities. And yes, that is also covered by class choice, but that's one axis. Having another increases diversity of identity options. And that sets aside the headache of trying to balance a giant grab bag of options so every possible combination is roughly equivalent.
I have to disagree quite firmly. You're essentially implying that games that don't use fixed blocks of traits are necessarily worse roleplaying experiences; that's just factually wrong, and anyone who's played a classless RPG can tell you that. Race essentialism is not a cool roleplaying tool; it's an outdated worldview that leads to obvious problems like "our game represents characters of mixed parentage as necessarily, biologically other" and "our game represents characters of mixed parentage as really one race or the other (but with cosmetic changes that our rulebook explicitly tells you don't matter)".
I acknowledge that developing a balanced "grab bag" of origin features would take effort (although not any more effort than, say, feats) but that is literally why we pay for games, so like. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that a team making a paid product direct its effort in a way that leads to a better product.
A lot of people complained that the Tasha's ASI changes would make RP worse and make the game more difficult to balance; a few years on from that, we all pretty much agree that those changes were good for the game. I encourage people to really examine whether their hesitancy towards fully customisable character origins comes from a real game design criticism, or simple reactionism.
I'm not sure how differences between different species is 'race essentialism'. These aren't human ethnicities, they're a bunch of completely separate species who all happen to be sapient. A hare being faster than a tortoise isn't racism. It's simply two species evolving to use different strategies to be successful. An aarokokra flying while a human can't isn't racism. It's just one species has wings, the other doesn't.
I'm not sure how differences between different species is 'race essentialism'. These aren't human ethnicities, they're a bunch of completely separate species who all happen to be sapient. A hare being faster than a tortoise isn't racism. It's simply two species evolving to use different strategies to be successful. An aarokokra flying while a human can't isn't racism. It's just one species has wings, the other doesn't.
I just think it's a boring an uninspired solution. You could already play a character with two species of parents and just take one species traits right? You could always have a dwarf/gnome as long as you only used the stats of one, or halfling/dragonborn as long as you used the stats of one. They aren't replacing it with something new or different, there's just fewer options than there used to be.
They aren't replacing it with something new or different, there's just fewer options than there used to be.
That's objectively untrue: they've added three species (aasimar, goliath, and orc) and removed two. As a practical issue the 2024 orc is a drop-in replacement for the 2014 half-orc, I suspect the number of people who prefer orc to half-orc exceeds the number who prefer half-orc to orc, the majority of "half-orc" art I see online is really just orc art.
That leaves replacing the half-elf with the aasimar and goliath. I'll be honest: the 2014 half-elf is boring. It's mechanically powerful, which is why people pick it, but its mechanics are utterly uninspired; either the aasimar or the goliath is significantly more interesting. Replacing one boring option with two interesting options is an upgrade.
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Honestly, would a customizable hybrid templet be too much to ask for as a replacement for the half races?
For example,
Appearance, choose a mixture of physical traits from the parent races.
Game-mechanics, choose between which traits the character inherited from the parent races, not all of the traits to keep things balanced.
In the PHB? Yes, balancing it to be player-appropriate would be a huge task. In the DMG? No real point, it's just a special case of more general "define your own species".
no it wouldnt be to much for them DC20 did it and they are a much smaller team making way less money WOTC has the ability to do it they just wont bc most of the higher ups dont care about the player anymore only the money. I know the designers and stuff care about us but since the higher ups call the shots they can get away with not caring. Most of the changes in the PHB are nothing more then common HB fixes people have been doing for the last 10 years now its just in a WOTC book
As much as I'd love that, it's far far too late for that.
All the 2024 onwards species would need to be designed with features which are balanced when swapped around, rather than just balanced individually. This would need to have been started at the beginning of the OneDnD playtest.
Considering that the 2024 PHB has essentially released, that ship has not only sailed, but it's arriving at its planned destination.
As someone who is multiethnic, I have expressed my displeasure on how WotC is doing this. [REDACTED] It's pure frustration at this point for me. Because no one wants to listen to us on it.
You are exactly right.
The first person in this post pyramid also has a personal interest in the outcome of WotC's decision, just as you do. I believe people are listening to you, and many others, and using the best tools we have available to move forward. This includes inclusion consultants, sensitivity designers, cultural consultants, and anthropologists when approaching this topic and, as far as I remember from their recent announcement, literally every other work WotC will be publishing last year going forward. There is no one size fits all solution, as you have demonstrated. All they can do is use what we understand about this subject today to meet the needs of as many people as possible and make the game accessible to as many people as possible, while leveraging professionals in the field to minimize any feelings of exclusion. Just because you do not agree with it does not make it wrong. It doesn't mean you are wrong either.
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Yet another problem that would be solved by doing away with fixed racial traits entirely, what a surprise.
Except doing away with them entirely undermines much of the roleplay aspect if every character is just built as a chimera of individual powers. One common pillar of roleplay is having significant relatively static blocks of traits that represent various role identities. And yes, that is also covered by class choice, but that's one axis. Having another increases diversity of identity options. And that sets aside the headache of trying to balance a giant grab bag of options so every possible combination is roughly equivalent.
I really don't want to wade into this thread, but I don't think this point is true. The Cypher System by Monte Cook Games doesn't treat race mechanically by default. They discuss adding some of that back in the Godsforsaken book, but Numenera and Invisibe Sun don't, and they don't suffer without it. And these games have plenty of customization options given by a character's type (class), descriptor (characteristic), and focus (special powers).
I am very familiar with that term and I would also be uncomfortable with something that implied that a multiracial person must pick or identify as one of their ethnicities more than another. I don't think the Origins UA did that, because I don't think that the Origins UA implied that a species special benefit was all of what one got from one of their parents. The species special power is only one thing that makes up a character and the Feat and Skills and Languages, etc, were other parts of it. To focus solely on the species special power as the only thing that defines a character is being too hyperfocused on just that one element.
That being said, it seems that the "Characters with parents of different humanoid kinds" sidebar did not make it through to PHB '24 ... and neither did Half Elves or Half Orcs. Which seems disappointing everyone.
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!
Well, that sidebar was sort of terrible. Honestly, one sentence that boils down to "talk to your DM" would probably have been the best answer (I don't know if something of the sort is in there).
It was brief but it honestly was probably the best answer possible if they weren't willing to actually define some in-world limits as a baseline people could choose to work off of or alter for their campaigns. Like I've said, it's possible since it ultimately tossed the question to the DM that it'll make an appearance in the DMG, since the current one already had a section on creating new character options, including tweaking existing race blocks or making them from whole-cloth.
I have to disagree quite firmly. You're essentially implying that games that don't use fixed blocks of traits are necessarily worse roleplaying experiences; that's just factually wrong, and anyone who's played a classless RPG can tell you that. Race essentialism is not a cool roleplaying tool; it's an outdated worldview that leads to obvious problems like "our game represents characters of mixed parentage as necessarily, biologically other" and "our game represents characters of mixed parentage as really one race or the other (but with cosmetic changes that our rulebook explicitly tells you don't matter)".
I acknowledge that developing a balanced "grab bag" of origin features would take effort (although not any more effort than, say, feats) but that is literally why we pay for games, so like. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that a team making a paid product direct its effort in a way that leads to a better product.
A lot of people complained that the Tasha's ASI changes would make RP worse and make the game more difficult to balance; a few years on from that, we all pretty much agree that those changes were good for the game. I encourage people to really examine whether their hesitancy towards fully customisable character origins comes from a real game design criticism, or simple reactionism.
(another person chiming in as disagreeing with this, thoroughly)
Someone else has covered the philosophical issues with "race essentialism" so I'll just add: "race" mechanics gamify race; species mechanics gamify species; ethnicity mechanics gamify ethnithicies. And so on. It's dumb to gamify those things, because it's regressive to gamify "who your parents were." I know that it's traditional for D&D (and thus kinda traditional for whole lineages of RPGs), but it was dumb in the beginning and dumb now.
I played 1st. and 2nd. Edition for around a decade stretching between the 80s and 90s during which we would just negotiate with the DM if we wanted to roll up something outside of the confines of ability score improvements being dependent on ancestry. That elf labored on a farm in his or her formative years? Give him or her a +1 to STR instead of +1 to DEX.
Wizards don't give enough credit to just how ahead of things we players were back then. There's nothing particularly innovative about what Tasha's has brought to the table. But it does officially allow for what many of us have always allowed at our tables. Insisting these changes were necessary however in some effort to combat racial prejudice while simultaneously expecting mechanical differences between characters of different ancestries is a case of wanting to have one's cake and eat it too.
Doing away with all of it wouldn't undermine roleplay in the slightest. This comes from how a player breathes life into a character and has absolutely nothing to do with the numbers on the character sheet.
I have seen two Human Fighters exhibit greater variety in terms of roleplaying based purely on how their players envisioned them and played them than I have seen among parties that were motley assortments of ancestries. Too often the latter is treated as little more than window dressing.
I'm not sure how differences between different species is 'race essentialism'. These aren't human ethnicities, they're a bunch of completely separate species who all happen to be sapient. A hare being faster than a tortoise isn't racism. It's simply two species evolving to use different strategies to be successful. An aarokokra flying while a human can't isn't racism. It's just one species has wings, the other doesn't.
https://www.webtoons.com/en/canvas/cosmopolis/people-please/viewer?title_no=913270&episode_no=38
I think that link explains it pretty well.
I just think it's a boring an uninspired solution. You could already play a character with two species of parents and just take one species traits right? You could always have a dwarf/gnome as long as you only used the stats of one, or halfling/dragonborn as long as you used the stats of one. They aren't replacing it with something new or different, there's just fewer options than there used to be.
That's objectively untrue: they've added three species (aasimar, goliath, and orc) and removed two. As a practical issue the 2024 orc is a drop-in replacement for the 2014 half-orc, I suspect the number of people who prefer orc to half-orc exceeds the number who prefer half-orc to orc, the majority of "half-orc" art I see online is really just orc art.
That leaves replacing the half-elf with the aasimar and goliath. I'll be honest: the 2014 half-elf is boring. It's mechanically powerful, which is why people pick it, but its mechanics are utterly uninspired; either the aasimar or the goliath is significantly more interesting. Replacing one boring option with two interesting options is an upgrade.