Ya, absolutely NOT. My preference would have been to give some AIS bonus due to Race to reflect the general tendencies, strengths and possible weaknesses inherent in that race. You know, like all the editions prior to 5. THEN I would have added additional ASI to the Backgrounds that made sense, more defined than what they have currently. Yes, this still could lead one to a "most optimized" set for a given class, BUT that is in fact perfectly fine. If people want to optimize, and are willing to accept the limitations that come with doing so, go for it. But for those who wanted a little more flexibility and /or not be so hedged in (or feeling that way anyway) well this would have allowed that. Yes, this could lead to a slight raising of the power curve, but not enough to matter. And yes, I DO think its good for the Races to have a basic general theme that the characters are a part of of. Sure if you want to custom homebrew races, cool too, but in almost all lore Elves ARE Dexterous as a Race and Beautiful and maybe you do knock em with a negative to Con like the old days.
My pt is, making the Races, Backgrounds, and even a lot of Class features just interchangeable skins is boring, lazy, and unnecessary. Imbalance is actually good. Though there is a good argument about HOW much, I firmly think that martials lagging casters in raw power is fine, the question is how much and what can be done to make the martials still feel cool....which is where WoTC keeps falling down on again and again and again unwilling or unable to actually give cool, powerful features to martials, hell they have gone out of their way to nerf or attemtped to nerf some in the playtest, lest we forget what they tried to do to Rogue sneak attack or what they DID do to Monks stunning strike and Open Hand capstone.
That monk bit only works if you ignore every other improvment.
I think monocultures and bioessentialism are lazy worldbuilding myself.
Races should be treated like gumballs. When mixed together, they become a rainbow of color. They do that _only_ if each gumball is kept distinct. Having each race have its own attribute bonuses was one way to keep them distinct.
The more this discussion goes on the more I'm in favor of races being cosmetic skins with no mechanical effects whatsoever.
This is what it should be, and what 2024 moves towards, but isn't quite there.
The Darkvision question is one of pure biology, so there's a case for species distribution, though in reality it's almost a pointless element. But Dexterity is more affected by training than birth, and Wisdom is dramatically affected by nuture over nature. So Ability Scores are far less a species distribution and far more a Background thing.
Cultural background should define your "species elements" but in a setting like Eberron it becomes even less pointed. For example, an Elf who grows up in the traditional lands of Aerenal, it makes sense to have the HIgh Elf backround elements. That's a big part of their culture and every elf that grows up in the culture gets exposed in the same way.
But an elf that grows up on the streets of Sharn, or in a small Breland farming community, shouldn't have Prestidigitation or Detect Magic as an available skill, as they've never had that trained into them. An elf that goes up among the Tairendal has had tons of weapons and combat training, so why would they learn Pass Without Trace or Druidcraft?
The old subraces sort of handled it, but they were constrained by the base Elf as well.
What Backgrounds can do is make the 'species' largely a cosmetic skin. "Tall, thin, with pointy ears", but with a Sage background, is a very different character to "Tall, thin with pointy ears" but a Soldier background. They haven't completely given it up, but the massive opportunities for different and varied custom backgrounds is huge.
That said, the people who think there are only 10 backgrounds are more of a problem than the system.
Ya, absolutely NOT. My preference would have been to give some AIS bonus due to Race to reflect the general tendencies, strengths and possible weaknesses inherent in that race. You know, like all the editions prior to 5. THEN I would have added additional ASI to the Backgrounds that made sense, more defined than what they have currently. Yes, this still could lead one to a "most optimized" set for a given class, BUT that is in fact perfectly fine. If people want to optimize, and are willing to accept the limitations that come with doing so, go for it. But for those who wanted a little more flexibility and /or not be so hedged in (or feeling that way anyway) well this would have allowed that. Yes, this could lead to a slight raising of the power curve, but not enough to matter. And yes, I DO think its good for the Races to have a basic general theme that the characters are a part of of. Sure if you want to custom homebrew races, cool too, but in almost all lore Elves ARE Dexterous as a Race and Beautiful and maybe you do knock em with a negative to Con like the old days.
My pt is, making the Races, Backgrounds, and even a lot of Class features just interchangeable skins is boring, lazy, and unnecessary. Imbalance is actually good. Though there is a good argument about HOW much, I firmly think that martials lagging casters in raw power is fine, the question is how much and what can be done to make the martials still feel cool....which is where WoTC keeps falling down on again and again and again unwilling or unable to actually give cool, powerful features to martials, hell they have gone out of their way to nerf or attemtped to nerf some in the playtest, lest we forget what they tried to do to Rogue sneak attack or what they DID do to Monks stunning strike and Open Hand capstone.
I realized where the problem lies here:
> Sure if you want to custom homebrew races, cool too, but in almost all lore Elves ARE Dexterous as a Race and Beautiful and maybe you do knock em with a negative to Con like the old days.
That's great... if you want to play in Middle Earth. If you want to look at the total sum of human lore about "elves", they're far more what you call fae than a normal humanoid species. There's more lore about elves being 2-3ft tall than 5-6ft.
If you don't want to play in Forgotton Realms, Greyhawk, or any other Tolkien based low magic medieval world... the "standard" lore isn't relevant or appropriate. Forcing every world to be a carbon copy of Middle Earth is not "fun" or "interesting". It's literally boring.
The Darkvision question is one of pure biology, so there's a case for species distribution, though in reality it's almost a pointless element. But Dexterity is more affected by training than birth, and Wisdom is dramatically affected by nuture over nature. So Ability Scores are far less a species distribution and far more a Background thing.
Most studies in this area attribute our characteristics as being around 50:50 between nature and nurture (admittedly with any number of caveats). I think the notion of attributing Dexterity largely to nurture (training) over nature (birth) is where you're farthest from the mark. There is little doubt that certain groups of people are more likely to be one thing or another than the average person. Fast twitch muscles are more prevalent in those from a West African background (just look at the Olympic 100m final for the last 30 years or so). Obviously we can all improve on what nature has given us, at least within the boundaries of our own capabilities. This can be a touchy subject for some, it's just a shame its entered a fantasy game that's been happily chugging along for 50 years or so.
I think a paraphrased quote from the new DMG is most relevant here.
Rules Aren’t Physics Biology. The rules of the game are meant to provide a fun game experience, not to describe the laws of physics biology in the worlds of D&D, let alone the real world.
It is far more useful to have a system where everyone can express their character in their unique ways, than have everyone homogenised into "Elf, Gnome, Dwarf" etc. As I said, Darkvision less important from rules perspective, and in many settings, the "traditional Elf" is not only inaccurate, but largely irrelevant.
I'm going to forget about the real world justifications that get into biological theory (which I disagree with your assessment greatly, with good reason, but it's a pointless argument that's not relevant), because the goal here is to define a ruleset that makes the game more enjoyable.
We are aiming to have characters that are more real, and less "Every elf is Legolas, every Dwarf is Gimli" and the Backgrounds system is a much better way to establish unique characters within the various flavours. Especially in settings like Eberron where the "traditional culture" is often quite different.
Just ask the Gnomes who live in a fascist ideological state.
Sure if you want to custom homebrew races, cool too, but in almost all lore Elves ARE Dexterous as a Race and Beautiful and maybe you do knock em with a negative to Con like the old days.
In Tolkien-influenced lore Elves are just Better Than Human. That does include being dexterous and beautiful, but it's not limited to that (Tolkien seems to have been to some degree modeling his elves after the Tuatha Dé Danann... which are basically demigods).
In non-Tolkien lore 'elf' is to a large degree just synonymous with 'fey', and unless it's referring to nobility, likely small and not notably attractive (e.g. "The Elves and the Shoemaker" or Santa's Elves).
Races should be treated like gumballs. When mixed together, they become a rainbow of color. They do that _only_ if each gumball is kept distinct. Having each race have its own attribute bonuses was one way to keep them distinct.
The more this discussion goes on the more I'm in favor of races being cosmetic skins with no mechanical effects whatsoever.
People who think this are the ones approaching the subject of fantasy races as though they were all different ethnicities of human being rather than different species of creature.
ALL cheetahs are faster than ALL tree sloths. Even the fastest tree sloth is slower than the slowest of cheetahs.
D&D racial modifiers never even went to such an extreme analogy in the first place. 1 race had a dex range of 6-16, another 8-18, and another 10-20.
All three could have individuals with a dex score of 12 for example being equally as fast and similarly, species A might have someone with a dex 16, next to someone from species B with a dex score of 14 and a person from species c with a dex score of 11, all in spite of the stereotypes; but generally speaking, YES - Elves and Halflings are faster than dwarves who generally ARE more resilient and half-orcs are generally stronger than them all, etc.
These are truths that the modifiers reflected and are no less true by being associated with terms like 'bioessentialism' or whatever other excuse is used for anthropomorphizing all the other creatures. The company was wrong to cave to the interpretation of other creatures as expressions of 'humanity' rather than simply as other creatures.
Sure if you want to custom homebrew races, cool too, but in almost all lore Elves ARE Dexterous as a Race and Beautiful and maybe you do knock em with a negative to Con like the old days.
In Tolkien-influenced lore Elves are just Better Than Human. That does include being dexterous and beautiful, but it's not limited to that (Tolkien seems to have been to some degree modeling his elves after the Tuatha Dé Danann... which are basically demigods).
In non-Tolkien lore 'elf' is to a large degree just synonymous with 'fey', and unless it's referring to nobility, likely small and not notably attractive (e.g. "The Elves and the Shoemaker" or Santa's Elves).
Nods. Tolkien didn't much care the perception of elves as the cultural zeitgeist of his time perceived them - Santas elves included, which is why he did base his elves on the older Germanic, Scandinavian and other similar lores indeed possibly including the Tuatha De Danann.
Part of the point I'm making above however, is that unless you are using a campaign setting sourcebook (or whatever the DM's table sheet is called), which by definition supersedes the general rules of the core sourcebooks, and which specify a different conceptual model for elves etc. It should be assumed that the standard D&D elf IS indeed based on the Tolkien model of being an embodied spirit creature that is in several ways superior to the human being: 'the race of Man'; though not in other ways.
The ways in which they are superior is meant to be reflected in their various racial features, and so are the balancing negatives that compensate for said superiority to create relative mechanical equality between Elves and Humans et al.
More important than the mechanical stuff though is the RP perspective of Elves as an otherworldly creature and not merely a human with pointy ears. This also creates the niche for half-elves being exactly that - a means to play basically a human being but with some of the mechanical features of an elf so that a player can enjoy those without necessarily having to portray an otherworldly nature.
Races should be treated like gumballs. When mixed together, they become a rainbow of color. They do that _only_ if each gumball is kept distinct. Having each race have its own attribute bonuses was one way to keep them distinct.
The more this discussion goes on the more I'm in favor of races being cosmetic skins with no mechanical effects whatsoever.
You are certainly welcome to your opinion, but if you are going to do that, then you might as well get rid of race completely.
1. Not sure why we are discussing race in a Background Mechanics thread. Maybe we should stay on topic.
2. What I got from Panta’s comment was these discussions on race typically end up going down an uncomfortable path which tends to get threads locked. So maybe going to skins would keep these problematic posts from cropping up.
Actually going to lock this thread as looking back through this conversation seems to have run it's course and keeps veering off into edition wars and inappropriate topics.
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That monk bit only works if you ignore every other improvment.
I think monocultures and bioessentialism are lazy worldbuilding myself.
This is what it should be, and what 2024 moves towards, but isn't quite there.
The Darkvision question is one of pure biology, so there's a case for species distribution, though in reality it's almost a pointless element. But Dexterity is more affected by training than birth, and Wisdom is dramatically affected by nuture over nature. So Ability Scores are far less a species distribution and far more a Background thing.
Cultural background should define your "species elements" but in a setting like Eberron it becomes even less pointed. For example, an Elf who grows up in the traditional lands of Aerenal, it makes sense to have the HIgh Elf backround elements. That's a big part of their culture and every elf that grows up in the culture gets exposed in the same way.
But an elf that grows up on the streets of Sharn, or in a small Breland farming community, shouldn't have Prestidigitation or Detect Magic as an available skill, as they've never had that trained into them. An elf that goes up among the Tairendal has had tons of weapons and combat training, so why would they learn Pass Without Trace or Druidcraft?
The old subraces sort of handled it, but they were constrained by the base Elf as well.
What Backgrounds can do is make the 'species' largely a cosmetic skin. "Tall, thin, with pointy ears", but with a Sage background, is a very different character to "Tall, thin with pointy ears" but a Soldier background. They haven't completely given it up, but the massive opportunities for different and varied custom backgrounds is huge.
That said, the people who think there are only 10 backgrounds are more of a problem than the system.
I realized where the problem lies here:
> Sure if you want to custom homebrew races, cool too, but in almost all lore Elves ARE Dexterous as a Race and Beautiful and maybe you do knock em with a negative to Con like the old days.
That's great... if you want to play in Middle Earth. If you want to look at the total sum of human lore about "elves", they're far more what you call fae than a normal humanoid species. There's more lore about elves being 2-3ft tall than 5-6ft.
If you don't want to play in Forgotton Realms, Greyhawk, or any other Tolkien based low magic medieval world... the "standard" lore isn't relevant or appropriate. Forcing every world to be a carbon copy of Middle Earth is not "fun" or "interesting". It's literally boring.
Most studies in this area attribute our characteristics as being around 50:50 between nature and nurture (admittedly with any number of caveats). I think the notion of attributing Dexterity largely to nurture (training) over nature (birth) is where you're farthest from the mark. There is little doubt that certain groups of people are more likely to be one thing or another than the average person. Fast twitch muscles are more prevalent in those from a West African background (just look at the Olympic 100m final for the last 30 years or so). Obviously we can all improve on what nature has given us, at least within the boundaries of our own capabilities. This can be a touchy subject for some, it's just a shame its entered a fantasy game that's been happily chugging along for 50 years or so.
I think a paraphrased quote from the new DMG is most relevant here.
It is far more useful to have a system where everyone can express their character in their unique ways, than have everyone homogenised into "Elf, Gnome, Dwarf" etc. As I said, Darkvision less important from rules perspective, and in many settings, the "traditional Elf" is not only inaccurate, but largely irrelevant.
I'm going to forget about the real world justifications that get into biological theory (which I disagree with your assessment greatly, with good reason, but it's a pointless argument that's not relevant), because the goal here is to define a ruleset that makes the game more enjoyable.
We are aiming to have characters that are more real, and less "Every elf is Legolas, every Dwarf is Gimli" and the Backgrounds system is a much better way to establish unique characters within the various flavours. Especially in settings like Eberron where the "traditional culture" is often quite different.
Just ask the Gnomes who live in a fascist ideological state.
In Tolkien-influenced lore Elves are just Better Than Human. That does include being dexterous and beautiful, but it's not limited to that (Tolkien seems to have been to some degree modeling his elves after the Tuatha Dé Danann... which are basically demigods).
In non-Tolkien lore 'elf' is to a large degree just synonymous with 'fey', and unless it's referring to nobility, likely small and not notably attractive (e.g. "The Elves and the Shoemaker" or Santa's Elves).
People who think this are the ones approaching the subject of fantasy races as though they were all different ethnicities of human being rather than different species of creature.
ALL cheetahs are faster than ALL tree sloths. Even the fastest tree sloth is slower than the slowest of cheetahs.
D&D racial modifiers never even went to such an extreme analogy in the first place. 1 race had a dex range of 6-16, another 8-18, and another 10-20.
All three could have individuals with a dex score of 12 for example being equally as fast and similarly, species A might have someone with a dex 16, next to someone from species B with a dex score of 14 and a person from species c with a dex score of 11, all in spite of the stereotypes; but generally speaking, YES - Elves and Halflings are faster than dwarves who generally ARE more resilient and half-orcs are generally stronger than them all, etc.
These are truths that the modifiers reflected and are no less true by being associated with terms like 'bioessentialism' or whatever other excuse is used for anthropomorphizing all the other creatures. The company was wrong to cave to the interpretation of other creatures as expressions of 'humanity' rather than simply as other creatures.
Nods. Tolkien didn't much care the perception of elves as the cultural zeitgeist of his time perceived them - Santas elves included, which is why he did base his elves on the older Germanic, Scandinavian and other similar lores indeed possibly including the Tuatha De Danann.
Part of the point I'm making above however, is that unless you are using a campaign setting sourcebook (or whatever the DM's table sheet is called), which by definition supersedes the general rules of the core sourcebooks, and which specify a different conceptual model for elves etc. It should be assumed that the standard D&D elf IS indeed based on the Tolkien model of being an embodied spirit creature that is in several ways superior to the human being: 'the race of Man'; though not in other ways.
The ways in which they are superior is meant to be reflected in their various racial features, and so are the balancing negatives that compensate for said superiority to create relative mechanical equality between Elves and Humans et al.
More important than the mechanical stuff though is the RP perspective of Elves as an otherworldly creature and not merely a human with pointy ears. This also creates the niche for half-elves being exactly that - a means to play basically a human being but with some of the mechanical features of an elf so that a player can enjoy those without necessarily having to portray an otherworldly nature.
Thank you for your time and please have a very pleasant day.
1. Not sure why we are discussing race in a Background Mechanics thread. Maybe we should stay on topic.
2. What I got from Panta’s comment was these discussions on race typically end up going down an uncomfortable path which tends to get threads locked. So maybe going to skins would keep these problematic posts from cropping up.
Not saying you are doing this, Wren.
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ModeratorActually going to lock this thread as looking back through this conversation seems to have run it's course and keeps veering off into edition wars and inappropriate topics.