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Species and Fantasy Races in RPGs

Introduction

What this post isn't

I'm not here to talk about how inherently evil races are problematic, or how dicey and eugenics-y stat changes can be. I'm not here to explain that monocultural fantasy races reflect how people treat ethnic or cultural groups they're not part of in real life. This is cohost; you knew that. You're probably tired of hearing it and a million people have said it better than I would.

I'm here because the D&Default way of handling it is boring.

Stats aren't interesting, and single abilities that aren't very impactful are barely flavor. Monolithic cultures by race are also boring as world-building goes, and they're extremely restrictive from a character/scenario design perspective.

The goal here to come up with a philosophy for actually constructing fantasy races for an RPG.

Usual caveats up front about my experience not being universal etc.

I am particularly tuned to the way that black people (the skin-color-based over-broad non-ethnicity) and Black people (the American cultural group) are treated, seeing as I am one. I know I will have blind spots to other types of experience.

mossball
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in reply to @smuonsneutrino's post:

ceryl
@ceryl

The "humans as a case study" is particularly useful, here, and a great addition.

One thing I've always thought of as incredibly important is physical senses, since they affect how we experience, and thus react to the world. Like you said, it can be hard to create and maintain playing an alien mindset, and I feel like it's slightly easier to imagine the different ways specific senses "see", and how that might reinforce or diminish how a player might approach something.

Awesome writing overall. Hopefully you enjoy le rest, I'm curious to see the followups (but take your time)!

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Inumo
@Inumo

Greatly appreciate this post! I've been thinking about the "complex understanding of biology/sociology vs people wanting to Just Say They're An Elf" problem for one of my own projects, and while I have a basic system in mind this is giving me some good ideas about what I can fill that system with/how to regulate it a bit.

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Twinkee
@Twinkee

Love this. Echoes a lot of my thoughts on the matter.

My one nitpick is mechanical bonuses that become necessity. Take the throwing bonus in the example. By making it a species bonus, anyone that wants to make a character that good at throwing weapons is going to be at a disadvantage if they don't choose a species with that bonus.

In contrast, the social bonus from alcohol is great because it's not a necessity for characters that build around social ability, but it does incentivize players to play towards that bonus.

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smuonsneutrino
@smuonsneutrino

To your nitpick: I've actually gone back and forth on this in the past, and here's where I currently stand:

I think with hyper-specific bonuses it's usually not too bad to give them to species-- especially since in those cases it's not like it impacts the viability of playing entire classes (e.g. it was hard to justify orc wizards in D&D untl the recent racial stat rules update in 5e) or entire playstyles (thrown weapons are but one of four categories of ranged weapon alongside magic staves, guns and bows).

Unarmed builds are inherently better on Minotaurs thanks to their horns and size; thrown weapon builds are better on humans thanks to their arms. As long as there are ways to supplement (fist spikes and for non-horned characters to get an edge in fisticuffs, atlatls and slings for those who need a throwing range boost), I don't worry about it too much. In practice, ttrpgs only need to be balanced to general viability for "pve"; it's not like there's a competitive scene or people are going to be speedrunning your game for optimal efficiency. In D&D it feels bad to be rolling worse than you should be-- with niche bonuses like the throwing range, it's usually a nice-to-have that you can play fine without.

TL;DR I think that it's more important not to have any species be (in gamer-ass parlence) "below B-tier" at any particular playstyle than it is to make sure that every species can be "S-tier" at everything, since in practice for a TTRPG it won't matter unless the GM and players are on like 10 layers of overtuning/optimizing.

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smuonsneutrino
@smuonsneutrino

(I just realized that a wall of text usually comes off as defensive, so I'd like to clarify that my position is not super solid and could change; I really appreciate gentle pushback like this. I just wanted to make my complete thoughts available to be discussed/challenged/argued with)

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