I was prompted to thought by the resent resurrection of my Haven setting for a brief D&D game this last weekend. As some of you might recall it was originally used for Runequest rules, and was designed as generically as possible with regards to rules systems... though the influence of Runequest could not be underestimated.
To bring this more to topic, one of my semi-regular players who has been referenced in the past for his habitual character death/swapping brought in a Nezumi from Oriental Adventures... sort of.
Now, I am a fan of the L5R nezumi, and thus (by extension) their OA presence. Mr. Character ADD, however, did not utilize any of that, being content to be a talking rat, but that is neither here nor there.
Now, as you may recall, the races of Haven do not include Rat men of any stripe, though I was able to fit him in under the auspice of 'one of those less common races that occupy the corners'. The signature 'trait' of the Nezumi is, you might recall... Survival. They are hardy survivors who live where other races can or will not.
That would be Orcs in my setting, and by extension the Half Orcs for playability.
Now: Lizardmen DO exist in my setting and thus porting in the Dragonborn from 4E to the Pathfinder we were using should be relatively simple.
But what is the role of a Dragonborn character (we have a player who wants to do a dragonborn...) in a party of D&D? According to my 4E book they are constitution based.
This spurred the entire thought regarding elegance in design. If D&D were 'elegant' in how they handled races there would be six races (plus humans), corresponding to the six attributes, like so:
Strength: Half Orcs
Dexterity: Halflings
Constituiton: Dwarves
Intelligence: Elves
Wisdom: Gnomes
Charisma: Half Elves.
This would be elegance, a clear correspondece of a signature defining trait with the world/system.
To a lesser extent, my cultural studies assignment of defining traits represents another, broader, method of doing so.
Compare, however, to what you actually have in D&D, a sprawling plethora of races that only SEEM to fit a pattern, if you don't look too closely. Nezumi don't look out of place in D&D because you can have multiple races that fit into the simple pattern above. Nezumi are not Dwarves despite, arguably, having the same attribute spread. Dragonborn are not dwarves despite, arguably, having both the same attribute spread and possibly similar stereotypes (dour agressive tough guys, possibly viewed as excessivly tilted towards masculine characters).
D&D is the most popular game out there and even its detractors have nary a peep regarding the races aside from 'too tolkeenesque', which is hardly and objective measure of quality.
This lead me to think on the new World of Darkness.
Each 'fatsplat' has five 'races' and five 'factions'. Fatigue sets in when faced with a new 'fatsplat'. The Races (in vampire this is most explicit) do divide up much as I postulate above. Gangrel are tough (Resiliance as a clan discipline), the Nosferatu are strong (vigor) and so on. There are actually nine attributes and thus there should be nine clans, but that isn't quite the pattern being filled.... but bear with me.
Compare the old world of darkness with its original idea of 13 clans, which was then complicated by the spread of new, additional clans scattered here and there, and the fact that only... what? 9 clans actually appeared in the main book? Then there was the crossover on disciplines. If you liked a particular discipline (celerity, for example) you probably had two, if not more, clans to look at in the main book alone (Brujah and Toreador in this example).
It was a mess.
Yet, even after five years it is quite easy to find players who have not switched over to the new rules/new setting. In fact that was a minor issue for me this last week in a horrible example of mixed party play... one of my more active players was, to be blunt, crazy. Not the character, the player, and by accident I put one of the most passive players into the position of 'party leader', with the balance of the players being very new to Roleplaying in general. It was, in short, a disaster.
But more importantly, every experienced 'world of darkness' player at the table was still playing in the old world, and thus 'new' to the new world. Obviously this is not a representative sample, but it is interesting.
Comparing to my own older thoughts on the subject it occurs to me that while an elegantly designed rule set and world can be very appealing aesthetically it may actually be poor design. Too elegant a rule set may be too easily mastered, leading to boredom with nothing new to find out, it certainly leads to 'game exhaustion' when talking about a 'house engine' used for multiple games in a line. The new world of darkness, for example lost its appeal around Mage. Dream Pod 9 can only sell me a new game if the premise is radically different and appealing, despite the fact that I love the shit out their system... on paper.
Yet, despite a near burning rage at level/class based design, I can still be convinced to pick up a new D&D based game just to find the new, messy, ways they do things. Compare, if you will, D20 modern vs D&D.
Just a random train of thought, but it does occur to me that in the long run an excessive elegance is probably just as bad for a game as an excessive mess... which in itself isn't relavatory but: the line for 'excessive' in elegance may be much lower than recognized.