Races I Can Do Without
Last weekend Random tagged me (offline) as having drunk the 4E Kool-Aid. Ouch! As a reflexive (but recovering) cynic, the gist of his words hit me hard, and it’s taken a few days to consider my response. Here it is:
First, I really do like game systems, the mechanics and the relations thereof. While Wizards’ motives may seem suspect to some (commerce! - they say with a sneer…), few game systems enter the world with so much grandiose scope and playability testing as does a major Wizards release. So here it is, it’s going to be a lot of fun to tinker around with, and hopefully so for quite some time.
Second, I am surprisingly cowardly about performing all but the most minor of house rule tweaks on a game; always have been. I guess I’m a sucker for trusting that a game mostly works out of the box, and if experience shows otherwise, I’ll move onto to something else rather than break out the surgery tools. As such, 4E changes cover a lot of areas that I naggingly felt could use some improvement in 3/3.5 – the whole big ball of classes, skills, feats, and powers is one area; alignment another. I’m sure someone out there (OK, honestly, probably lots of someones) came up with sweeping 3.5 house rules years ago to address some or all of this, but being a coward, I don’t trust it nearly as much if it’s not coming from the publisher. I may also be too lazy to go looking for it very hard. So yea, maybe 4E ultimately messes up just as many things as it fixes? It’s worth trying out to see.
An aside – my idea of something “broken” in 4E is that you can buy twenty pitchers of ale for the cost of a bottle of wine. What’s up with that?
Third, having gotten through most of the PHB, I can certainly pick at some nits to prove that I’m no True Believer. But I’ll just go after my singular biggest disappointment, which is the selection of initial Races.
I have nothing against the Dragonborn per se (OK, even that’s not true, but indulge me), but they have no business in the core PHB. They’ve got expansion book written all over them. It’s actually a net minus on my sense of confidence that Wizards might actually have in the 4E rules themselves that they feel the need to distract the audience with such cheap, shiny baubles. Why not go with lizard-men, or better yet kobolds, who had an established Draconic heritage in 3E? Heck, as much as I hate halvsies, I woulda taken Dragon-Half over these mooks. I haven’t decided yet whether the Dragonborn are going to be heavily or completely marginalized in my campaign world, but you can bet I’m hoping that none of my players go for this race.
As long as they were going for the “totally made-up” route, I would have voted for Dogmen and Catmen as playable races. Now I’ll have to build those up myself…
I agree with Random on the goodness of the Elves returning to a more cheerful and fey demeanor. Elves should mingle with humans only rarely, they should be mysterious and even suspicious and unpredictable, their agendas clearly not ours. I like these elves a lot. Whether they make useful players characters, a bit more of a stretch.
The Eladrin – garbage. The Tolkien heritage is obvious, but aren’t we all just sick to death of these haughty bastards already? Now that we’ve gone through the effort of centrifuging the elves to get back the good, fey ones, can’t we just discard the unwanted pulpy residue that is the Eladrin?
Half-elves – refuge of the indecisive. Mules. All half-elves are sterile. Don’t like ‘em, but no worse than 3E, I guess.
Tiefling – better overall than the Dragonborn, but also much more useful in an expansion book than in the core. A little bothered by how it seems that they are destined to be your campaign world’s Israelites, like it or not. No fan of the Drow myself, so I’ll take the T’s if forced to choose.
Half-orcs – not really missed, not strictly necessary if you want to do the work to open up certain humanoid monster races to playability. I like that idea just fine, as I’m tacking toward a campaign world closer to the world of Wormy from the old Dragon magazine.
Halflings – more direct Tolkienism, but then what’s the point when you’ve so heavily repurposed them? Lose ‘em, I say. You can come up with your own race of little people. But do you really want to?
Gnomes – missing them, well, not too too much. Probably better as NPCs, but I had a role in mind for them in my world and now I have to decide how far to go against the grain to include them. I would have kept them over Halflings due to their broader cultural acceptance.
Dwarves – the old reliables, given very little of the spotlight as the new models arrive, but that’s all right. Like fey elves, they are classics that transcend any single author or even culture, so they are bedrock. I prefer that the keep this low profile rather than being humiliated by some arbitrary Wizard pig-lipsticking imperative.
Humans – obviously essential. I guess humans, elves, and dwarves will always be the Big Three for me.
Another aside – I know I skimmed a lot in places, but did I miss the rules for mounted combat? And just how long will we need to wait for the Cavalier class?
So that’s that. Realistically it’s easy to discard unwanted races and lose very little, and not too much harder to create new ones; so mostly I lament the misuse of the wasted paper in that chapter.
Your thoughts?
Posted on June 24th, 2008 at 5:02 pm. About 'Races I Can Do Without'.
Let’s see - mounted combat gets about a page or so somewhere in the DMG, if memory serves.
Did you see the listing of “temp” race writeups at the end of the Monster Manual? Did you see the full online writeup for the Warforged Race that they posted online?
If you don’t like a race, drop it from your campaign world. ‘Nuff said.
Half-orc got dropped because of unpleasant “lineage” issues. They needed a “strong” race to replace them. Why not lizardfolk? In point of fact, they were going for a playable, balanced half-dragon that you could actually use at first level. If you prefer lizardfolk in your world, then you can hack something together pretty quickly (look at the MM appendix and write up a few extra feats - should be good to go).
In the 3.5 rules, you had dozens of races that were theoretically available as player races, but which were completely useless in practice because of level adjustment rules, which weren’t really fair and balanced - gaining spell resistance is good, but not at a cost of two levels. The model in 4e takes away a few “broken” racial abilities but makes a LOT more races actually playable at first level.
We’ll get plenty more races over time with full writeups. The selection for now is just fine.
Posted on June 24th, 2008 at 5:30 pm. About 'Races I Can Do Without'.
I’m not against the idea of overhauling the core D&D races, it’s just that I don’t like the choices they made.
I’m a Tolkien geek, but I’m just sick of the bastardized cliche his races have become in the D&D universe. Going into 4th edition, I had been playing around with a 3.5 world without any of the Tolkien-inspired races and none of the standard D&D ones, but never settled on something I wanted to actually run. I’ve had great fun playing elves and dwarves over the years, but I wanted a different focus in my future games.
I didn’t expect the core races to change as radically as I would prefer, but I did think that they could reduce redundant races and racial variants, eliminate half-races, and introduce some core races adapted from common humanoid monsters to create some non-Tolkien diversity. Starting with the typical core races (elf, dwarf, halfling, half-elf, human, gnome, and sometimes half-orcs):
*Eliminate half-elf and half-orc *Avoid drow for a core race because one elf is enough. *Combine the three small-stature races (dwarf, gnome, halfling) into one. If Wizards had followed this strategy, they’d have called the remaining race a dwarf. To be contrary, I’d get rid of dwarves and halflings and keep gnomes. *Change the flavor description of elves and dwarves/gnomes to put greater emphasis on non-Tolkien ideas. Both races should be connected to nature and fey spirits rather than noble lineages. *Don’t pigeonhole races into single cultural variants. While elves are connected to water and the forests, they should have settlements outside of the forest and pretty much everywhere except the remote desert. While dwarves are connected to earth spirits, they should not be consigned to live only in mountain fortresses, and should only eschew an entirely aquatic lifestyle. *Add at least two and possibly as many four humanoid races without a strong Tolkien lineage. Good choices would be a reptilian race such as lizardfolk, kobolds, troglodytes; hill giants (so that there’s one large-sized race); hobgoblins (so that there’s one goblinoid race that doesn’t evoke Tolkien); and possibly one or more lycanthropes. *Add other races in future books as thematic groups, possibly including some as NPC races from the beginnings. Examples include aquatic races (sahuagin, kuo-toa, locathah), flying races, and extra-planar races (gith, tiefling, illithid).
So call it human, elf, gnome, lizardman, hill giant, hobgoblin.
The actual 4th edition races disappoint because I have little interest in the two new-to-core races, hate that the half-elf is still around, and am bored that halflings and dwarves are the same as always. Oddly enough, I consider the elf and eladrin to be high points, because at least that takes one cliche race and makes it two different ones, and for some reason the eladrin come off less like Noldor and more like the fairy folk of mythological tradition.