Quote from: Wrath of God on August 02, 2021, 07:23:32 PM

QuoteThe woke view of race is absolutely a rubber costume. Its mascot is Trudeau in black face. They don't want to roleplay as an elf, they want to cosplay as an elf. The Kryptonite to this horror show ideology is genetic differences hardwired into the system. We have passed the point in 5e (with the latest updates) where there is more diversity in terms of genetic differences in real world human populations than there is between the fantasy RPG world "races".

The problem is those differences were never baked into D&D more than human in rubber costume that may hinder Dex a bit or improve it a bit due to supper googles but ultimately it's costume.
And since D&D never really supported playing really alien species, most of people played them as basically humans with few extra notes. Wanna really make those species non-human - you need some psychology/culture mechanics that will actively enforce certain choices on player. And Players hates losing control over choices... so... good luck

You mean things like alignment?

You're a Vulcan, Vulcans eschew emotion and put rationality above al else.

You're a Ferengi...

You're a Klingon...

I seem to remember a few games where those races do exist, haven't ever bought or played one but I would expect something like that to be there.

I'd use the new Stargate SG-1 rpg as the basis of my own fantasy 5e clone.

The new SG rpg has classes only up to level 5. After that the game goes classless. Instead of getting a full 20 levels of predetermined abilities, when you get a new level after level 5 you get 10 build points and you just buy the character abilities you want.

This is what I'd do with a 5e fantasy clone.

The classes would be more broad... Warrior, Rogue, Devoted (someone devoted to a deity or cause), Magic User, Nomad/Ranger (someone who is focused on travelling, the environment, tracking, hunting, and knowledge of various different locations), Forger (someone focused on smithing, creating things, architecture, and engineering things), and Warlord (by far the best thing about 4e and deserves more love).

I'd change other things and have to come up with a lot of new feat-/class-like abilities players could choose from starting at level 6.

And the XP chart would have to be changed. No more of that 300 XP to level 2 stuff.

I don't mind the gender paragraphs in the book as they are. If humans actually took the words used literally they basically come down to "Respect each other and don't be a fucking jerk at the table" but because the woke left uses double speak and dialectical thinking then everything they do has hidden meanings that work to undo what is proper grammatical language and change the meanings of words. So what is an alright message of being respectful gets twisted into a message of hate and division.

But my 5e fantasy game wouldn't have those paragraphs. It would just have a disclaimer like ... "This game book is written with the assumption that you, the reader, is a mature and intelligent human being (or possibly an intelligence from a different dimension) that is capable of role-playing and being respectful of others sharing the game space with you. If you cannot separate fictional reality from real reality, like if you are a person who cannot tell the difference between a fictional race like orcs and real life humans then you should put this book down and go see a therapist. It's clear you need help.

To everyone else, have fun and don't be a jerk."

Quote from: RebelSky on August 02, 2021, 09:14:50 PM
I'd use the new Stargate SG-1 rpg as the basis of my own fantasy 5e clone.

The new SG rpg has classes only up to level 5. After that the game goes classless. Instead of getting a full 20 levels of predetermined abilities, when you get a new level after level 5 you get 10 build points and you just buy the character abilities you want.

This is what I'd do with a 5e fantasy clone.

The classes would be more broad... Warrior, Rogue, Devoted (someone devoted to a deity or cause), Magic User, Nomad/Ranger (someone who is focused on travelling, the environment, tracking, hunting, and knowledge of various different locations), Forger (someone focused on smithing, creating things, architecture, and engineering things), and Warlord (by far the best thing about 4e and deserves more love).

I'd change other things and have to come up with a lot of new feat-/class-like abilities players could choose from starting at level 6.

And the XP chart would have to be changed. No more of that 300 XP to level 2 stuff.

I don't mind the gender paragraphs in the book as they are. If humans actually took the words used literally they basically come down to "Respect each other and don't be a fucking jerk at the table" but because the woke left uses double speak and dialectical thinking then everything they do has hidden meanings that work to undo what is proper grammatical language and change the meanings of words. So what is an alright message of being respectful gets twisted into a message of hate and division.

But my 5e fantasy game wouldn't have those paragraphs. It would just have a disclaimer like ... "This game book is written with the assumption that you, the reader, is a mature and intelligent human being (or possibly an intelligence from a different dimension) that is capable of role-playing and being respectful of others sharing the game space with you. If you cannot separate fictional reality from real reality, like if you are a person who cannot tell the difference between a fictional race like orcs and real life humans then you should put this book down and go see a therapist. It's clear you need help.

To everyone else, have fun and don't be a jerk."

I'm totally stealing that disclaimer.

Quote from: Chris24601 on August 02, 2021, 02:05:06 PM
My elves...
My dwarves...

Thats some Good Stuff, Chris.

Why is this confusing?

Races produce organisms with <X> beneficial/non-beneficial traits for *reasons*.

Cultures are produced by racial species with the aforementioned traits - predictably the *reasons* may influence the emphasis of certain behaviors.

Over time, specialization of certain behaviors will either allow that culture to proliferate or decline as competition/environment changes where adaptability will further refine the species and their cultures. If they go extinct - who cares? It means they're not playable.

So yes you can have your Elf, and they can be smart, agile. But you can make cultural differences matter at the culture level, rather than the species level. Good design should baseline the physical/mental characteristics of your species. Cultural matters should be given a baseline and PC's that want to be from that specific (sub)culture should purchase them out of their own pool of resources. And if they don't - they should suffer the repercussions of it socially.

So the Grey Elves of Elennia do a lot of hunting from the backs of their giant horse-sized stag-hounds. In the write up for that sub-culture they get +1 to hit with Spears. If in the char-gent process the Grey Elf chooses to buy proficiency in the Spear, they get that bonus. If they choose something else, then he's a snowflake among them and they will treat him accordingly.

This is just an example. The point being is that as a GM or world-builder, you should make anything above the "norm" or out of the assumed baseline *MEAN* something. It doesn't have to be good/bad - or maybe it does. You need to contextualize it.

This is why SJW's can't do good games. Being Woke is about demanding an orthodoxy that is free of the context of GAMING ITSELF. It's imposing values and rules on a secondary world, much like reality, that doesn't give TWO fucks about their Woke view of the world.

I look forward to the day some new player in my group pretends all Drow aren't Evil and tries to act accordingly. Oh sure there's good Drow out there. But they may be willing to shift Alignment and kill that PC if only to save their own asses. Just because you're "Good" doesn't make you heroic. Just because you're "Evil" doesn't mean you go around murdering people. Context and circumstance are KING.

Quote from: Aglondir on August 02, 2021, 09:52:05 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on August 02, 2021, 02:05:06 PM
My elves...
My dwarves...

Thats some Good Stuff, Chris.

Thanks. Mostly it was a case of "How the heck do I include the standard fantasy races people expect without being absolutely derivative."

I'll admit, at one point I was so uninspired by bog standard elves and dwarves at different points that I was about to merge them into other species (dwarves would have been just a type of mutant, elves would have a colloquialism for several humanoid subtypes of Eldritch).

I mean, I STILL haven't found an interesting spin on Halflings, my informal conversion from D&D is basically "play a human; choose Reflexes for an attribute bonus and don't pick Strength as an attribute bonus; say you're a pygmy and make sure you pick sling as one of your skilled weapons."

The big part though is that I decided to dump the OGL, which required me to go back to original myths and legends or invent all new spins rather than just using what D&D had mostly borrowed from Tolkien... and Halflings just aren't a thing outside of D&D.

But there was enough there to build something original for elves and dwarves by doing a big of mix and match and some of my own ideas tossed in.

The Elves are very much inspired by the Sidhe with the notion of Seelie/Unseelie tied to the cycles of a moon goddess whose purview was also goddess of dreams/nightmares. The desire to include half-elves led me to the idea that they were specifically the embodied dreams of humans who could interbreed with humans because they were spiritually related and that dreams about having children make that a supernatural gift of certain elves in the same way some can fly or shift shape (though half-elves pretty quickly became just an option for "elven ancestry" under the human entry allowing quarter or even further back connections where a recessive trait popped up).

My seed of inspiration for the version of the dwarves that I ended up going with was Nuada Silverhand; legendary first king of the Tuatha del Danaan who lost his arm in battle and had it replaced with a magical one made of silver. That quickly expanded into their mastering essentially arcane cybernetics and then a reason for why they'd find it a species necessity (and demons being shoddy with their work and unable to truly create just fit with my paradigm for demons).

There's all sorts of things you can do if you have limits to start; I can't directly reference the D&D SRDs and I had a personal worldbuilding rule that Humans were to be the ONLY natural and native sapient species in the world; every other PC kind/race had to either come from elsewhere or be created from or by humans because there's an underlying current of science fantasy akin to He-Man (the real one) and Thundarr the Barbarian where actual evolution played at least some role and, while there are a plethora of species NOW, the setting is a specific point in time where the Cataclysm created/sucked in a bunch of other species and if you jumped ahead a few thousand years the competition between species see most of the non-human sapients extinct and the rest either endangered or hybridized with humans to the point all that's left of them are certain ethnic features in the human population.

The setting is basically presented as a specific time and place where many species are present and interesting events are occurring. There will be a time in the future when there are no more dragons or elves, but that is not this day and probably not even for thousands of years and a hundred generations yet (PC have the immediate history of the last decade or so to deal with).

It's not my favorite way to handle it, but I have run a setting where all the humanoid races were all derivatives of early, proto-human species--in a world with a lot of magical radiation where folk take on the characteristics of where they live.  Think of it as standard evolution accelerated radically and often run amuck and you have the basic idea.

What that logically gives you is that every race pretty much is a human in a rubber suit in one sense.  They've all got some dim connection to the same thing.  On the other hand, the cultures are even more different and strange than real human cultures.  "Elves" and "Humans" in this particular area dominated by a great wood may have conflicts, but they at least understand each other to some extent and likely have a grudging respect for capabilities.  Those idiots over there in the mountains?  Could be utter disdain, kill on sight, vast pity, etc.

One of the reasons it's not my favorite is that it makes travel and trade almost impossible, though for a change of pace it was interesting. 

@Steven Mitchell But those are perfectly fine as long as in-setting you commit to it and whatever permutations are required to meet your satisfaction. I dabble a LOT with those ideas myself.

The part that I'm mystified about is this: do people really think the issue of D&D 5e is in-game races/species??? Removing "woke" stuff is trivial. I took the idea of a 5e Clone to "make it better" to mean to PLAY better.

the Woke shit is easy to leave out.

I'm truly amazed at the amount of discussion going on about Species, sub-races, cultures etc. which definitely should be addressed in the creation of an alternative 5e Clone... but I didn't realize it was such an apparent issue for for so many people. Or am I reading this thread incorrectly?

I think 5e has a lot of other mechanical issues that if I were to Clone it, I'd be more concerned with? Wondering whether or not Alignment matters for Drow or Orcs, or whether or not sub-races should have cultural benefits intrinsically or as part of some other sub-system (which is a legit discussion, I think it's easy to separate from being a major concern). I feel like we're all pretty self-aware enough that handwringing over this (if that's what it is - or whether new folks here are merely getting their first shot at discussing this stuff they've felt but never had a forum in which to do it, heh) is like self-gaslighting party.

Generally speaking I say if biological/sociological reality is something that matters to you - then build your world accordingly. If it doesn't, be prepared to be called out on the dancefloor, and if you're honest, you better have some thick soles and be ready to boogie.

The Human In the Rubber Suit Issue


Here's my Hot Sports Opinion. I'm going to call Cosmic BULLLLLLLLSHIT on this whole phenomenon. For all the people that dismiss alternative races as "Humans in a Rubber Suit" I'll point out that games that those people

1) Do not play games that earnestly try to avoid this issue - like Jorune
2) May play those games but they comprise such a tiny part of the game-purchasing/playing public they may as well not exist as consumer.

My experience is that people generally need the Rubber Suit just to get their heads in the game. You may be of rarified taste, wanting some exotic experience to play as a multi-tentacled semi-aquatic race that communicates in luminous light-bubbles that pop musical tones that infer "ideas" as abstract mental textures as their primary mode of information-exchange - but most people are going to avoid that shit like the plague.

Players want to play things adjacent to their experience AT MOST. And even then most of them don't want to really do that either. Tolkien as the primary ingredient of D&D is what conditioned most people to this. Try explaining what an Elf is to a normie that has never seen Lord of the Rings. They'll look at you like you're "One of those people".

And my final card to play in calling bullshit on people that shit on Humans in Rubber Suits is - Talislanta. That's right, you bastards. TALISLANTA.

I've heard it for years and years - how if I point out NO ELVES. Motherfuckers will come out of the woodwork and say... "But Elves... look pointy ears." with ZERO attempts to even back that claim up in-setting. Yes there is one race that happens to check off more than a few superficial boxes but even then by D&D standards they're not even *remotely* traditional to D&D concepts of Elves (lookin at you Ariane!). But meanwhile as much as anyone wants to debate it (I'm down for that!) the reality is Talislanta, which has DOZENS and DOZENS of races with unique cultures, many of which can and do plug right into any S&S conceptions of fantasy, is largely ignored by the gaming populace.

I rest my case, in my smug conviction. Talislanta, baby. Talislanta.

Just to spite the cucks, I'd fortify the concept of race.
Humans get races, too, with positive and negative modifiers, just like in reality.

I don't get why roleplayers have trouble with races. They should understand it better than Joe Sixpack.
Isn't diversity the greatest thing? Then why can't we cherish it in games?

Quote from: tenbones on August 03, 2021, 09:48:51 AM
@Steven Mitchell But those are perfectly fine as long as in-setting you commit to it and whatever permutations are required to meet your satisfaction. I dabble a LOT with those ideas myself.

The part that I'm mystified about is this: do people really think the issue of D&D 5e is in-game races/species??? Removing "woke" stuff is trivial. I took the idea of a 5e Clone to "make it better" to mean to PLAY better.

the Woke shit is easy to leave out.

I'm truly amazed at the amount of discussion going on about Species, sub-races, cultures etc. which definitely should be addressed in the creation of an alternative 5e Clone... but I didn't realize it was such an apparent issue for for so many people. Or am I reading this thread incorrectly?

I think 5e has a lot of other mechanical issues that if I were to Clone it, I'd be more concerned with? Wondering whether or not Alignment matters for Drow or Orcs, or whether or not sub-races should have cultural benefits intrinsically or as part of some other sub-system (which is a legit discussion, I think it's easy to separate from being a major concern). I feel like we're all pretty self-aware enough that handwringing over this (if that's what it is - or whether new folks here are merely getting their first shot at discussing this stuff they've felt but never had a forum in which to do it, heh) is like self-gaslighting party.

Generally speaking I say if biological/sociological reality is something that matters to you - then build your world accordingly. If it doesn't, be prepared to be called out on the dancefloor, and if you're honest, you better have some thick soles and be ready to boogie.

I don't even remember why the tread went that way. 

Yeah, the intent is to discuss the mechanics, the whys and hows to making a "better" (because better is subjective) 5e, that plays smoothly, that lacks the "bad design" parts (or has fixed them) and includes the "good design" parts, even if those are borrowed from elsewhere.

BUT with the underlaying chassis of 5e, something current 5e players could gork easily and switch to without a hickup.

Quote from: strcondex18cha3 on August 03, 2021, 10:48:38 AM
Just to spite the cucks, I'd fortify the concept of race.
Humans get races, too, with positive and negative modifiers, just like in reality.

I don't get why roleplayers have trouble with races. They should understand it better than Joe Sixpack.
Isn't diversity the greatest thing? Then why can't we cherish it in games?

Go play Myfarog oh migthy uncucked one.

It's not a good game so I won't.
Do you think the woke idea that no race can have penalties is good for the game? Do you think all orc lives matter?

Quote from: strcondex18cha3 on August 03, 2021, 11:37:02 AM
It's not a good game so I won't.
Do you think the woke idea that no race can have penalties is good for the game? Do you think all orc lives matter?

What races? Elves, Dwarves, Humans & Halflings? By all means bonus & penalties is how we make them different.

Different human "races"? Nope, which is why you should go play Myfarog, the racist developer made it so.

You want to make different types of human? Make cultures, so the mountain barbarian is different from the civilized imperial. But this doesn't imply skin tone so it might not be your cup of tea.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 03, 2021, 10:51:32 AM
Yeah, the intent is to discuss the mechanics, the whys and hows to making a "better" (because better is subjective) 5e, that plays smoothly, that lacks the "bad design" parts (or has fixed them) and includes the "good design" parts, even if those are borrowed from elsewhere.

BUT with the underlaying chassis of 5e, something current 5e players could gork easily and switch to without a hickup.

Cool! I'm in!

I confess, the list I tossed up of mechanical changes is very aggressive. I haven't put it to the test, but I plan someday on trying to make it work.

One of the big issues I think plauges D&D is the assumption that high-level play is somehow a thing, when in reality the d20 20-level spread has never been friendly for play at 13+ level. And I'm saying that from personal experience of having had multi-year campaigns that were above 13th level in 1e, 2e, and 3.x/PF well into the 20th level+ play. It's *miserable* to GM in the aggregate.

It's the *system* itself. I think it can be re-tooled to be more scale-friendly, so you could actually have the "high-level" experience without sacrificing the low-level gritty game, AND make the system leaner and lighter all at the same time.

But Sacred Cows must be on the table for sacrifice.