Silver2195 posted:

So you were Iggy’s ancestor?

Also, do you have a link to the GURPS JoJo rules?

ohhyeah posted:

Q: has anyone written an essay about how roleplaying games, where rules like attributes break down under scrutiny, really parallel the real world, where simple rules about like biology and physics have all sorts of complications and edge cases? Feels like an area where someone way smarter than me has written something good.

Runa posted:

Shadowrun is set ostensibly in the real world awakened to magic and there are "races" as we know them and there are "metatypes," as in types of metahuman, which map to classic fantasy races. So it is possible to be a Latina elf, a white orc, a black dwarf, an Asian troll, etc. This is because in Shadowrun's world, people were already categorized into these groups before magic reemerged and changed large swathes of them into different forms.

Though it is also quite possible to have people in D&D whose features map to these combinations, if you play Baldur's Gate 3 for example the real world genetic clades that get mapped to "races" in real life aren't identified as such because presumably Faerun lacks the context that would create such distinctions, and instead uses "race" to refer to what Shadowrun would call metatype.

Runa posted:

This pretty much just comes down to, have you ever played Shadowrun before.

I've never actually played Shadowrun on tabletop but I've played a ton of the videogames across different generations and I've read Ice Phisherman's Blake Island CYOA/web serial on these forums. It's a good read, though I fell off after he said some things that weirded me out during the height of the pandemic. Stuff has calmed down now but things cannot really be the same after that.

YggdrasilTM posted:

Not really. It was written in Italian and It was 20 years ago.

Nessus posted:

Of course it was written in Italian!

Runa posted:

Shadowrun is set ostensibly in the real world awakened to magic and there are "races" as we know them and there are "metatypes," as in types of metahuman, which map to classic fantasy races. So it is possible to be a Latina elf, a white orc, a black dwarf, an Asian troll, etc. This is because in Shadowrun's world, people were already categorized into these groups before magic reemerged and changed large swathes of them into different forms.

Though it is also quite possible to have people in D&D whose features map to these combinations, if you play Baldur's Gate 3 for example the real world genetic clades that get mapped to "races" in real life aren't identified as such because presumably Faerun lacks the context that would create such distinctions, and instead uses "race" to refer to what Shadowrun would call metatype.

Runa posted:

That is the least surprising thing anybody could've told me about a fanmade JoJo GURPS

theironjef posted:

BG3 doesn't want to deal with it and I don't blame them, but Faerûn has a Mesoamerica equivalent, an East Asia equivalent, Roma equivalents, and probably way more. It was written by humans and therefore is packed to the very gills with exisiting human assumptions and biases.

Runa posted:

You know this all also tracks and just reminded me that Kara-Tur 'exists'

Jimbozig posted:

I agree for the most part. But it's also true that you could just not do that. [snip] and then just not have a species that is more intelligent.

Jimbozig posted:

You could have trolls be bigger and therefore stronger but not necessarily more athletic

Splicer posted:

They can instead be Large [from being a] troll, which comes with a set package of benefits such as a higher carrying and lifting capacity than their raw strength score may indicate, and possibly as a thematic tag to justify bennie use.

Jimbozig posted:

Intelligence has its own issues which is that unlike strength, which is basically a real thing that D&D implements badly, intelligence isn't even real- at least not the way D&D thinks it is. Which sort of gets to Kestral's question... in what way would the fantasy creature be more or less intelligent and how would that manifest? In the real world, are orcas more or less intelligent than us and how can we tell for sure? (Answer: we don't know for sure and don't even know how to find out. All we have are suspicions and suppositions.)

An "education" stat would functionally be closer to the way D&D actually works. Being broadly educated makes further education easier. Just like practicing a broad range of athletic skills makes learning new athletic skills easier. I'm absolutely a DTAS diehard, at least in the context of D&D, but if you were going to have a set of broad things that act as the roots for specific skills, I think that Education, Athleticism, and something like Sociability would be a good starting point: they are traits that people genuinely can have; they are derived from practicing specific skills and spending time in that area; they make it easier to learn similar new skills; they improve performance on tasks the possessor has never tried before.

But they are manifestly acquired traits. Calling it education instead of intelligence makes that crystal clear.

Jimbozig posted:

It would be obviously stupid to say that an elf is born with more education than a troll.

Splicer posted:

*nods sagely* so it's just their culture that makes this race quantifiably dumber than the civilised races. Definitely nothing problematic there and it definitely has no parallels to real world attitudes with horrible historical real world outcomes we're still finding new mass graves of to this day.

Halloween Jack posted:

The Internet is Highlander and when I catch someone doing something bad they go away forever as I absorb all of their power

Mendrian posted:

I think if you're dead set on giving your fantasy species cool unique traits you should just give them unique magical traits (including humans) rather than trying to ascribe fundamental ability boni.

Like it's way cooler if elves can recall skills known by their past lives, which functionally makes them more intelligent without the danger of real world parallels. That danger still exists depending on how racist the designer of your magic traits happens to be but at least it's not fundamentally broken.

Leperflesh posted:

the pig-animal-people are dumber than us but the owl-animal-people are wiser, right?

Silver2195 posted:

More seriously, though, there are trade-offs here. Once you’ve removed the concept of “my character has a higher smartness than another character” from an RPG, you’ve removed part of the appeal of playing a wizard or a psychic or a detective or whatever.

Silver2195 posted:

More seriously, though, there are trade-offs here. Once you’ve removed the concept of “my character has a higher smartness than another character” from an RPG, you’ve removed part of the appeal of playing a wizard or a psychic or a detective or whatever.

Len Lakofka posted:

There will be four major groups in which women may enter. They may be FIGHTERS, MAGIC USERS, THIEVES and CLERICS. They may progress to the level of men in the area of magic and, in some ways, surpass men as thieves. Elven women may rise especially to high levels in clerics to the elves. Only as fighters are women clearly behind men in all
cases but even they have attributes that their male counterparts do not!

Characteristics:
Strength 18 sided die and 1 six sided die.
Wisdom, Intelligence, Dexterity and Constitution all use 3 6 sided dice.

(Any woman scoring 13 or 14 in strength may add 1 to her constitution score.)

Instead of Charisma BEAUTY is rated on 2 20 sided dice numbered 1- 10 (so the range is 2-20, not 2-40.)

Prime Requisites
Wisdom for clerics
Intelligence for Magic Users
Strength for Fighters (except that ‘average’ is not 7-10 and not 9-12)
Dexterity for Thieves
Intelligence is important to upper level thieves when magic is used

Beauty and exceptional Beauty (15-18) (19-20) are important to thieves, fighters and magic users. Clerics may not use beauty if they are lawful or neutral. Chaotic Clerics may use their beauty score.

Fighting Women
Fighting Women (warriors) may incorporate the spells of Seduction, Charm Men or Charm Humanoid Monster depending on their level and beauty scores (see spells of seduction, et al). Women’s strength scores range from 2-14. Thus some weaponry and types of armor are too difficult for them to wield/bear without undue fatigue. Women are allowed 1000 points of encumbrance plus 50 times Strength rating at no movement loss. Anything over that weight reduces figure to half speed. Maximum load is 1.8 times encumbrance score. Women of ST 10 or lower wield Flail Battle Axes, Morning Stars at -1; Pole Arms, Halberd, Pike and Two Handed Sword at -2. Women of ST 12 or lower wield only the latter group at -1. Plate armor has a 20% greater fatigue rating in women of ST 10 or lower 10% in ST 11 or 12. Chainmail has a 10% greater fatigue factor in women of ST 11 or lower. ALL WOMEN wield a dagger at an additional +1.

Splicer posted:

You mean like this?

Kestral posted:

Is it your position that all fictional creatures must be exactly as intelligent as one another, and anything else is a moral failing on someone's part?

Jimbozig posted:

Yes! I wasn't disagreeing with you. I was drawing a connection between what you were saying and what Kestral was asking by way of getting a bit deeper into what a +2 INT even means in D&D vs what "intelligence" means (or doesn't mean) IRL.

Kestral, you weren't directing your question to me, but I've been thinking about it seriously because I think it's a good question and I think it deserves an answer. And I would rather people just answer it than try to dodge the question while being hostile. I liked Nessus' answer.

For me, I don't think it's a moral failing, but I think that assuming it's not intentional racism, it's either a failure of understanding (failing to understand what intelligence is and isn't, falling back on a kind of shared cultural understanding without reflecting on the culture that produced that understanding) or a failure to connect that understanding to their design (probably because they are just doing cargo cult design, or starting with D&D and tweaking without examining the meaning and implication of design elements).

As for the first, I would not pass moral judgement because we all have blind spots, unexamined assumptions, and opinions we absorbed from our surroundings. And frankly, some people don't have the knowledge necessary to really understand what they're getting into - that doesn't make them bad. We can all learn more.

As for the second, I would not pass moral judgement because "making a hack of a thing I like" is perfectly fine morally, and there are plenty of very good reasons to not reinvent the wheel. I might question their taste in liking that particular thing, but not their morality.

But I want to ask you a couple of questions: what does it mean to you for a fantasy species to have lower intelligence? If a player decides to play one, what specifically will they find their character unable to do? Are we talking about portraying them as being similar to humans who have intellectual disabilities?

I think that people mostly instinctually already know that's wrong (or at least very fraught). When I think of popular portrayals of "stupid" characters, what comes to mind is people playing their character as having an anti-intellectual attitude. What I mean is that it's always "Rargh! Gorb hate books!" and never "Gorb sad and embarrassed because Gorb can't read." That there are people who want to understand the things we do but can't because of disability is a sad thought and one that people would mostly rather avoid when playing elves and orcs with their pals.

Jimbozig posted:

ninjoatse.cx posted:

Even in the early fanzines, they pointed out that intelligence doesn't really make a character intelligent, it was just a limiter on spell casting ability. If you define intelligent as "avoids doing dumb things" and "able to deduce things quickly", most RPG's implementation of intelligence doesn't assist them at all, compared to the strength attribute which lets them actually lift heavier rocks (or gives them a higher probable chance of lifting heavier rocks lol).

Nessus posted:

So, Diablerie?