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Even with 5E the group I'm playing with consistently has at least one person playing a very non-human species, and had sometimes very positive relations with NPC groups that were predominantly very non-human. It's really a matter of attitude. The very fact that there's at least one book (Volo's Guide to Monsters) that's essentially dedicated to expanding "monstrous" PCs shows that there's demand for it widely. It can also be very dark and gritty, just have a den of scum and villainy which has a bunch of people from various species working together to cheat and steal from each other.
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May 2, 2021 00:43
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KingKalamari posted:TL:DR - I just want to play a low magic game where a lizard person, a giant spider an orc and a robot delve into dungeons, why aren't more people catering to that? Mostly serious questions here: 1: What's a dungeon in a low magic game? Almost all dungeons are very artificial environments that rely on magic. 2: What's a playable giant spider in a low magic game? And how does it talk or avoid the consequences of the square-cube rule without magic. And you may have answers to those questions - but other people may not have the same answers. For example I'd break out Gamma World 4e - but that might not be what you want at all (especially not if you want grit). And because it's confusing it's a narrow niche
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May 2, 2021 02:01
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That's really dumb of people to get mad about non-human PCs and the "they'd probibly get attacked/lynched on site" kind of feels really gross, and just bad GMIng in general (allowing a player to make a choice that's not any more powerful, but punishing them for it). Thankfully I've never had a problem with running non-standard races, though I haven't been in any really dark/gritty games. I'm currently running a dragonborn bard and having a lot of fun stabbing things with my rapier, and occasionally using magic to make enemies miss their turns and healing. He's not treated any differentyly by the NPCs for being a dragonborn .
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May 2, 2021 02:18
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The only "issue" I've ever had with non-human PCs was the observation that players who tend to play certain types of especially exotic races ("I'm a half-dragonborn/half-tiefling!") tend to be annoying or awkward people to play with, but that's on them, not the fluff.
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May 2, 2021 02:23
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Imagined posted:The only "issue" I've ever had with non-human PCs was the observation that players who tend to play certain types of especially exotic races ("I'm a half-dragonborn/half-tiefling!") tend to be annoying or awkward people to play with, but that's on them, not the fluff. I chalk most of the hostility to more exotic races up to two things: folks who are self conscious about their own early RPG urges. They remember their drizzt clones so protest all the louder when they see others doing the same. The other drive is plain ol grognard poo poo, since most of the really cool exotic races like modern tieflings are from newer editions. But yeah, I personally lean towards games that are either all human, funky other creatures like sentient crystal shards, or actually have interesting twists on fantasy heritages.
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May 2, 2021 02:42
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Imagined posted:The only "issue" I've ever had with non-human PCs was the observation that players who tend to play certain types of especially exotic races ("I'm a half-dragonborn/half-tiefling!") tend to be annoying or awkward people to play with, but that's on them, not the fluff.
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May 2, 2021 03:05
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How appropriate non-standard species characters are varies wildly by setting and campaign tone, and there's not really any problem with putting forward guidelines about what those expectations are up front. I've at various times run games where human (or close equivalents) is the only available species, where humans are strongly preferred, where I am ambivalent about player species, and where non-standard species are encouraged, depending on the kind of world I was building and story I intended to tell.
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May 2, 2021 06:47
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I tend to find there's a tendency for certain players to substitute having a weird exotic character for having a character with a personality.
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May 2, 2021 06:54
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I've heard that sentiment from a decent chunk of people who are cagey about the more exotic race options in things like D&D, though I can't say I've ever really experienced that phenomenon first-hand, and I've gamed with a decent chunk of people who gravitate towards the stranger species options (Wait...does that mean I'm that guy?). It's funny because I've seen more than a few relatively recent posts on other forums of groggier types of people who hate Drow as a player option because they claim people only play Drow to be Driz'zt Clones and I just keep thinking to myself "How many current D&D players actually know of and give a poo poo about Driz'zt in the 2020s?". As a sort of counterpoint, I find myself usually drawn towards the more non-traditional races in D&D and the like because they tend to have fewer established expectations of how a member of that species is "supposed to" behave, leaving me more freedom as a player to define my character's cultural background and how their race/species relates to it. Basically the more traditional stalwarts of near-human fantasy races have so many well-established expectations, archetypes and stereotypes associated with them that it it often makes it difficult for some people to accept a character that doesn't conform to them. Take this with a grain of salt, of course, as I don't want to dump on people who prefer to play characters of more traditional fantasy races; my frustration is not with people's individual preferences but with the underlying assumptions that lead to there only being options for humans, elves and dwarves in a lot of fantasy RPGs. Colonel Cool posted:I tend to find there's a tendency for certain players to substitute having a weird exotic character for having a character with a personality. At the same time, I feel like that's just as much or more of a problem with things like Elves and especially Dwarves. I can probably count the number of Dwarf PCs I've encountered who have a more complex personality than "drunk, rowdy and faux-Scottish" on one hand. neonchameleon posted:Mostly serious questions here: I think for me my active definition of "low magic game" is generally "magic is not as universally powerful as in your typical D&Ds". It's much less a matter of being opposed to magic being present in the setting (I'm actually pretty in favor of some form of magic showing up) or the player options and more wanting a system where magic is scaled back to the point where it doesn't dominate player abilities in the latter half of the game. In terms of how that affects the more outlandish player options, I think the other problem I run into is that I'm kind of stuck in the no man's land between science fiction and fantasy where I really like concepts like speculative xenobiology and want to see that tackled in a fantasy setting, especially a game that gives some degree of nuance to questions like how radically different morphology and evolutionary origins would affect the culture and worldview of non-human sapient beings. Basically I want to mix my sci-fi and fantasy together and there aren't a lot of games that do so out-of-the-box in a way that works for me.
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May 2, 2021 07:06
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KingKalamari posted:Basically I want to mix my sci-fi and fantasy together and there aren't a lot of games that do so out-of-the-box in a way that works for me. I mean the traditional solution here is to design your own game that does that.
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May 2, 2021 08:04
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Is there a thread about Lex Arcana?
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May 2, 2021 09:28
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One of the ideas that a certain class of grog clings to is "things used to be more racist, because racism is the natural state of things", and depending on the grog, this is followed up with either "so we should be grateful for the few crumbs of equality we've managed to achieve" or "and things would be better if we went back to that". Ditto with sexism, ditto with homophobia. In reality a lot of our society's prejudices about race (and gender and sexuality) come from the Victorians. The medieval period wasn't great of course -- they had their prejudices just like anyone else -- but pretending that it was a neverending tide of bigotry and hatred is primarily an excuse used by people who want to justify their own bigotry and hatred.
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May 2, 2021 09:32
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The thing with more out there races is that they are often actually a bit more interesting - i've seen humans/dwarves/elves a million times so of course i'm a little bored of them. I dont think i've ever actually seen anyone post about how playing non-humans is wrong.
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May 2, 2021 12:03
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potatocubed posted:I mean the traditional solution here is to design your own game that does that. Or get really into gurps
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May 2, 2021 12:04
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With my group it's always much more about mechanics than anything else. When we used to play D&D 3.5 we always had all-human parties. Same with 13th Age. Now we started on D&D 4E again where there's strong mechanical support for different races being their own thing, rather than them feeling like an offshoot of humans as a neutral baseline, and what do you know: not a single human in the party and even the one guy who plays a halfling reskinned him to be more exotic.
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May 2, 2021 12:41
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KingKalamari posted:I think for me my active definition of "low magic game" is generally "magic is not as universally powerful as in your typical D&Ds". It's much less a matter of being opposed to magic being present in the setting (I'm actually pretty in favor of some form of magic showing up) or the player options and more wanting a system where magic is scaled back to the point where it doesn't dominate player abilities in the latter half of the game. I've long said that a major part of the problem with D&D's worldbuilding is (with the exception of a few artifacts) making everything interesting be a spell. This reached its utter nadir with 3.X where we had the concept of a "spell like ability" getting things precisely backwards by implying that the spell came first. D&D 4e was actually pretty good with what I think you want from a ruleset, and Gamma World 4e is better. Also with Tasha's Cauldron of Everything 5e has made huge steps in the right direction, from the second partial caster becoming actually good (Ranger) and the addition of a third (Artificer) to there being two subclasses for each of the fighter and rogue that have magical abilities without them being spells. If you're looking for something D&Dish that isnt so overwhelmed by spells you could do a whole lot worse than 5e banning the wizard, sorcerer, bard, cleric, and druid, and possibly also the warlock. Premade worlds are harder to find however. Whybird posted:In reality a lot of our society's prejudices about race (and gender and sexuality) come from the Victorians. The medieval period wasn't great of course -- they had their prejudices just like anyone else -- but pretending that it was a neverending tide of bigotry and hatred is primarily an excuse used by people who want to justify their own bigotry and hatred. In reality a lot of our society's prejudices about what the Victorians thought are much more modern and it has always benefited both conservatives and young transgressive radicals to pretend that the past was a whole lot more conservative than it was.
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May 2, 2021 15:02
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KingKalamari posted:TL:DR - I just want to play a low magic game where a lizard person, a giant spider an orc and a robot delve into dungeons, why aren't more people catering to that? Ask your GM for a Homebrew or reskin. Topic locked.
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May 2, 2021 15:27
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KingKalamari posted:At the same time, I feel like that's just as much or more of a problem with things like Elves and especially Dwarves. I can probably count the number of Dwarf PCs I've encountered who have a more complex personality than "drunk, rowdy and faux-Scottish" on one hand.
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May 2, 2021 15:40
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Charlz Guybon posted:Is there a thread about Lex Arcana? I haven't seen one, but if you made one, I'd be interested. I haven't gotten the opportunity to play, but it's definitely an interesting setting.
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May 2, 2021 15:44
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I think the only trend I've seen recently with atypical race players is tieflings being excessively horny
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May 2, 2021 15:49
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Colonel Cool posted:I tend to find there's a tendency for certain players to substitute having a weird exotic character for having a character with a personality. I actually had one person who had 20 character sheets for their character, one for each level, and they would only ever play this character. And then they would proceed to (try to) dictate what would happen next in the plot, what items the enemies had, all kinds of stuff that made me ask "why don't you just write a book instead of trying to hijack my game?" I found out later that this person had done this before to pretty much everyone else on that particular website.
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May 2, 2021 15:54
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My experience with the 'player who wants to play really exotic races as a way to be annoying' thing is that 1) I did that 2) most of the people I know that have done that (self included) grew out of it fairly quickly. It's just not a very interesting gimmick for a character to center them all around a simple part of their birth status. If only because it means putting more thought into stuff that your character did before play rather than through play. To me it's just kind of a correlate with inexperience, since I've seen some great uses of weird monstrous races.neonchameleon posted:In reality a lot of our society's prejudices about what the Victorians thought are much more modern and it has always benefited both conservatives and young transgressive radicals to pretend that the past was a whole lot more conservative than it was. I've been getting into Bronze Age history of late and just read up on Hittite laws, which means that of 3 Bronze Age legal systems I've read (Sumerian, Egyptian, Hittite), all three are much more permissive about gender and sexuality than 21st century America. And yeah I agree with your prognosis on the why of it. Jimbozig posted:This has always baffled me because it's so different from what appeals to me about dwarves. Sure they get drunk, but so do humans. That's not interesting to me. Given the choice between elf, dwarf, or human, I've always been one to pick dwarf. But what appeals to me about dwarves is their technical mindedness, literalness, and obsession. I'm a big dwarf fan, love Deeprock Galactic, so it's interesting to me what appeals about dwarfs. For me a lot if it is just purely aesthetic, as a stocky bearded dude. But unless it's Glorantha dwarves, who have a VERY specific thing they're going for that is kind of in line with what you're talking about, the thing that I like about dwarves and about playing dwarves is a sort of directness. I'll play all sorts of dwarf characters but all of them will have a similar vibe of going for the straightforward solution or telling people how they feel with little hesitation. Just generally less mediation or artifice than I usually play. Which is good at a basic level because it helps keep things going without annoying everybody else. Maybe I just really like Gimli (book version more than movie version). Tulip fucked around with this message at 16:40 on May 2, 2021 |
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May 2, 2021 16:35
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Whybird posted:One of the ideas that a certain class of grog clings to is "things used to be more racist, because racism is the natural state of things", and depending on the grog, this is followed up with either "so we should be grateful for the few crumbs of equality we've managed to achieve" or "and things would be better if we went back to that". Ditto with sexism, ditto with homophobia. it's still a uselessly broad generalization but if you want to model medieval attitudes a little better, you should have a setting where nobody cares that their neighbor is an orc but if you come from the other village across the river you then gently caress you, buddy
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May 2, 2021 18:01
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I used to just pick the race with the most applicable stats/bonuses. Now I still do that but also make up some fluff about them because I'm a serious mature rpger.
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May 2, 2021 19:07
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I am sorta curious how your average medieval parochial peasant village would react if, say, an actual elf or dog-faced man or one of those headless guys with their face on their torso walked into town. Those were all things that people may have heard of and acknowledged that yeah, those probably exist and are merely weird and not fundamentally evil, that's just what people in far off Cathay or whatever look like. Mind you they were obviously never actually confronted with one in-person, they were just stories about some exotic thing that lived so far away it might as well be a Star Trek alien
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May 2, 2021 19:09
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I'm learning Strike right now, and I feel kinda bad for the first people I GM this for. They're gonna have to dealing with me referring back to the book a lot whenever something happens  Does anyone else often have first sessions of a system end up like that, where it's slow going and a lot of reviewing on the part of the GM? Or am I doing it wrong, somehow?
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May 2, 2021 19:48
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Asterite34 posted:I am sorta curious how your average medieval parochial peasant village would react if, say, an actual elf or dog-faced man or one of those headless guys with their face on their torso walked into town. Those were all things that people may have heard of and acknowledged that yeah, those probably exist and are merely weird and not fundamentally evil, that's just what people in far off Cathay or whatever look like. Mind you they were obviously never actually confronted with one in-person, they were just stories about some exotic thing that lived so far away it might as well be a Star Trek alien One of my favorite books, Baudolino, had a small party of Crusaders visit a city in the Kingdom of Prester John inhabited by dog faced people, pygmies, blemnyes and all sort of medieval bestiary freaks and after the initial shock they were nore unsettled by the fact they followed all sorta of pre Chalcedonian heresies (and the races themselves bickered just because of those) than by their actual appearances.
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May 2, 2021 19:53
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Pollyanna posted:I'm learning Strike right now, and I feel kinda bad for the first people I GM this for. They're gonna have to dealing with me referring back to the book a lot whenever something happens I GM new systems all the time and while my ideal standard is that I sit down and run encounters solo until I can retain the rules from memory, there isn't always time or energy for that. I also don't really like the idea that the GM is solely responsible for teaching the game (or even for rules adjudication) even if cultural momentum from D&D and running games for other adults sometimes makes it inevitable. Basically don't worry about it too much, you'll all get better with practice. e: although it's usually better to make fast and potentially incorrect rulings and fix it later than bog down the game Tuxedo Catfish fucked around with this message at 20:03 on May 2, 2021 |
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May 2, 2021 19:58
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:e: although it's usually better to make fast and potentially incorrect rulings and fix it later than bog down the game This is my big advice yeah. Just keep a text doc open and jot down any questions that come up, make a fast "let's go with this" ruling, then check the book the next day to confirm the right rule. If anyone gives you poo poo about it tell them they are free to read the rules too.
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May 2, 2021 20:18
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Pollyanna posted:I'm learning Strike right now, and I feel kinda bad for the first people I GM this for. They're gonna have to dealing with me referring back to the book a lot whenever something happens When we launched this Never Going Home campaign 2 weeks ago, we planned for that. There were several points I had to just read straight from the book. There's no shame in it, it's a learning experience - I normally would have just gone forward with rulings but I'm intentionally trying to run NGH as close to mechanical-standard as possible before making changes, so that's "one mission RAW and then modifications where we see issues". I did put together a cheat sheet of book excerpts before we started, though, which hopefully lessened those issues before we even started going. (It helped me if nothing else.) We did have to skip this week, so that test mission isn't wrapped up yet
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May 2, 2021 21:06
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Countblanc posted:I think the only trend I've seen recently with atypical race players is tieflings being excessively horny Well yeah, they're born with them.
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May 2, 2021 23:17
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Zarick posted:Well yeah, they're born with them. 
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May 2, 2021 23:34
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Anyone play Flesh & Blood? I am picking up the demo/blitz decks for their new expansion to try it out, but it seems like the severe lack of stock everywhere may either mean that a) it is a good game people like or b) people are just buying up stock to resell due to low supply.
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May 3, 2021 04:14
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jeeves posted:Anyone play Flesh & Blood? I am picking up the demo/blitz decks for their new expansion to try it out, but it seems like the severe lack of stock everywhere may either mean that a) it is a good game people like or b) people are just buying up stock to resell due to low supply. I haven't gotten deep into it or anything (it didn't exactly launch at a great time), but the few games I've played online I really enjoyed. It has a rhythm similar to the DBZ CCG with a lot more immediate back and forth between players. The experience feels much more direct than the myriad of creatures-on-a-board games since it's just your avatar fighting your opponent's avatar.
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May 3, 2021 04:34
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Plutonis posted:One of my favorite books, Baudolino, had a small party of Crusaders visit a city in the Kingdom of Prester John inhabited by dog faced people, pygmies, blemnyes and all sort of medieval bestiary freaks and after the initial shock they were nore unsettled by the fact they followed all sorta of pre Chalcedonian heresies (and the races themselves bickered just because of those) than by their actual appearances. That sounds like a fun read
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May 3, 2021 06:44
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Hiro Protagonist posted:I haven't seen one, but if you made one, I'd be interested. I haven't gotten the opportunity to play, but it's definitely an interesting setting. I've never gotten to play it or any other Roman themed game unfortunately. Which is too bad, because they all look incredible. They're just terribly niche in the US market. Hopefully a Euro-juggernaut like Lex Arcana can break into the market a bit.
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May 3, 2021 09:19
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Plutonis posted:One of my favorite books, Baudolino, had a small party of Crusaders visit a city in the Kingdom of Prester John inhabited by dog faced people, pygmies, blemnyes and all sort of medieval bestiary freaks and after the initial shock they were nore unsettled by the fact they followed all sorta of pre Chalcedonian heresies (and the races themselves bickered just because of those) than by their actual appearances. That actually sounds really interesting.
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May 3, 2021 09:19
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jeeves posted:Anyone play Flesh & Blood? I am picking up the demo/blitz decks for their new expansion to try it out, but it seems like the severe lack of stock everywhere may either mean that a) it is a good game people like or b) people are just buying up stock to resell due to low supply. This doesn't answer the question but the guy that runs my game parlor posted this a few weeks back and doesn't understand why 
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May 3, 2021 11:28
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drrockso20 posted:That sounds like a fun read Also made me remember this setting; The Lands of Adventure by Irondoors Which is still one of my absolute favorites, basically everything about it is pure gold
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May 3, 2021 11:41
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Len posted:This doesn't answer the question but the guy that runs my game parlor posted this a few weeks back and doesn't understand why This poo poo is why I asked, can’t tell if the game is good or if it is just so under printed that speculators are sitting on all of the product. *Futurama eye squint meme*
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May 3, 2021 16:33
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