So we’ve gone over stats (though nobody guessed that Comeliness is also useful as dump stat for your grizzled and scarred warriors and so on. That helps blunt the ‘problem’ with rolled stats in the same way assigning rolls does.
What I’m looking at next is races and having gone with eliminating the stats and sticking with bonuses that’s considerably easier because if you alter attributes you no longer need to go back and recalculate, you can just take away or add on as needed.
I’m not convinced by the profusion of races in fantasy games. World specific ones, yes, or a massive profusion where it makes internal sense or is key to the gameworld (Majipoor perhaps or Talislanta). Otherwise my inner evolutionary biologist starts protesting and no amount of ‘It’s MAGIC!’ excuses will get him to shut up.
It shuts up my inner biologist somewhat if I think of fantasy races in more of a Ringworld way, divergent evolution from the same basic type. That means we need to think about where these other races come in and what has made them what they are.
So, I reckon I’m going to slim down the races in terms of general availability to:
Elves: Long-lived, detached and somewhat autistic.
Dwarves: Gruff, hard-work, hard-play.
Humans: Community builders.
Orcs: They’re a fantasy staple and make more sense to me as a core race than, say, gnomes.
Half-breeds? Why bother complicating matters really? Want to play a ‘mule’? Pick the dominant race and pop your stats in where you think they fit with the concept better.
Balance? Nah, balance can get screwed.
OK, so, what’ve we go then:
***
Elf: +1 Dexterity, +1 Comeliness, -1 Charisma, -2 Constitution.
Dwarf: +1 Strength, +1 Constitution, -1 Comeliness.
Human: +1 Charisma
Orc: +1 Strength, +1 Constitution, -2 Comeliness, -1 Intelligence, +1 Wisdom.
Races will also have their own particular ‘bonuses’ , but that’ll come later on.
Pingback: G&D Recap/Summary (What would my D&D look like?) | Postmortem Studios
That’s interesting. I’m going the complete opposite for my next campaign. Humans exist as the only “civilized” intelligent species and all other races are stable hybrids of them.
Races (mostly from the Eberron books)then are:
Shifters – Human\Lycanthrope descendants
Changelings – Human\Doppleganger descendants
Aasimar – Human\Upper planar descendants
Tiefling – Human\Lower planar descendants
Kalashtar – Human created “race” bonded with a psionic being
Half Orc – Human\Orc
Half Elf – Human\Elf
and
Warforged as a constructed “race”.
Elves and orcs do exist but they aren’t playable races. I’ve made elves, orcs and goblinoids races from a distant land who were brought back to the Old World as slaves. The half breeds are descended from them. Anyone born of a hybrid race is a member of that race or human in the case of two separate hybrids breeding. i.e a tielfling a shifter produce human children though they may share part of the parents’ appearance.. Warforged cannot reproduce naturally.
This made more sense to me and it more closely mirrors the real world where one dominant species (humans) pushed the other species (Neanderthal) to the fringes of the world where they died out. It is only in isolated areas (the goblin\elven land) that this hasn’t been the case. This is similar to how mammals dominate and marsupials are rare except in Australia.