So, in attempt to explore what I think and feel about the recent reveal by Wizards of the Coast regarding new mechanics for choosing races, I'm working on this blog post.
Let's start with the good bits:
- The language and formatting make it far more explicit that backgrounds are malleable.
- Ability Scores are no longer tied to race, but rather to background.
- The section on mixed races makes it clear that physical description is entirely cosmetic.
- Races no longer provide a languages.
- Everybody starting with a Feat and Feats being flavorful.
- Simplified grapple rules and adoption of common house rules.
Starting with the least important of these to get out of the way. Backgrounds have always been malleable. The current 5e PHB already has a section about making your own backgrounds or modifying them to be more exactly what you desire. However, the language now lists building your own as the first option, so it is clear right from the get go. This is very important for a audience that is used to choosing from a menu rather than making their own thing. Equally important is the fact that there is still a large list of pre-written backgrounds provided. The biggest mistake generic RPGs do is failing to provide pre-written examples and templates that let people just plug and play. So, all in all, this isn't a change, but a clarification.
The next section addresses some of the past issues of bioessentialism that the game has dealt with. A lot of the RPG industry is moving away from lineage as a mechanical thing and I find this to be a largely positive change. As it stands, the upper ranges available to PCs already stretches credulity, not because of the upper limits possible but because of the consistency with which that performance is achieved. The fact we're already into performance that defies practical neurological and musculature limits makes the older insistence that this is tied to species even more odd.
Now, as to the physical characteristics being cosmetic. There's a lot about the mixed race bit that is irritating, but I'll get to that later. For now, we'll focus on this. What the section says is that a character with mixed blood can choose elements from either side of their heritage to describe their appearance. This is basically something you could always do, but it is good to see it in print. Now, I kind of wish that they'd just gone further with this and made it clear that you can do this with any of the lineages of the book. I am generally going to push for narrative and mechanics to be unpinned from each other. So, if say someone wanted to play a dryad it would relatively easy to do that by pairing elf or eladrin stats with druid or ranger by modifying some of the descriptive text involved.
No one is born speaking a language under normal circumstances. This is something that has to be learned over time. Now there are cases where this is a phenomenon that makes sense, such as with many elves and tieflings, but those can be handled just by using that explanation for why they might have a particular language. As such the fact that languages are no longer attached to race is great.
Getting a Feat at first level is very cool and something that I've played in home-games quite often. Feats are great, they can provide such a lot of personality to a character. Especially in combination with some of the reworked feats presented here. There's a couple examples here of Feats that have been modified from existing versions, such as defining Lucky granting Advantage or Disadvantage, meaning that it is no longer is useful to spend more than one Luck point on a single roll since Advantage and Disadvantage don't stack. Or Tavern Brawler now being useful. The only Feat of the presented group that remains underwhelming is Savage Attacker which has neither a compelling mechanical advantage nor roleplaying element to entice me to be interested in it.
Also included here is a simplification of how grapple and shove works. Either can now be used in the place of an unarmed strike and on hit, it just happens. This will vastly speed things up for people that want to use grapple, grappling itself is now more effective, inflicting disadvantage on attacks against someone other than the person grappling you and granting grappled people a chance at the end of each turn to escape without needing to spend an action. This also comes with a lot of common household rules being brought in like 1s being an instant fail and 20s being an instant success. This is with the written caveat that it doesn't make impossible things happen. They've made an effort to be very clear on what is going on and it is the clarity I most appreciate.
So, those out of the way, let's hit some of the things that I'm a bit dissatisfied with.
- Inspiration is still kind of bleh. Moreso now that you can't stack it.
- Languages should have all been attached to backgrounds or all on their own.
- Racial languages are still a thing.
- Lifespan is unnecessary
- Half-Elf and Half-orc have been removed.
- Dragonborn don't need a rework given Fizban already was designed on these philosophies.
- The approach to mixed ancestry feels a bit lazy and stumbles into some distasteful implications.
As always, Inspiration feels like a tacked on, easily forgettable mechanic. I've played with a lot of games that use meta-currency in narratively exciting ways and this feels like it was put together in half-an-hour by somebody that heard about meta-currency. This mechanic currently is the one I've least seen in operation and the easiest to forget. The apparent solution they've had to getting people to remember this exists is to further undermine its poorly implemented intention to encourage roleplay by granting it autotmatically on a natural 20. This isn't to say that meta-currency rewards on a roll can't be done well. Momentum getting rewards on a failed roll is an extremely potent tool convincing people to try difficult things. But this change amounts to "if nobody's buying the candy, we should just put it in everybody's bag".
Regarding languages, I can sort of see what they were doing by having Background give one language with Common and a third language just being picked on their own. It feels like they were trying to account for the guy who was a soldier for one country, but also picked up a second language due to some thing unrelated to soldiering. But it feels very unnecessary. For the purpose of worldbuilding, you might want to have a background like "Knight of Grindlekeep" having a language specific to what is spoken in Grindlekeep, or maybe a language used in the courtly rituals there. That makes perfect sense. But for a lot of more generic backgrounds like "Soldier" or "Artisan" it doesn't make sense to name a particular language.
In addition, the existence of racial languages is an understandable business decision with its weight of tradition, this is said with all the weight of cynicism towards companies placing good taste and morality on a back shelf. Because this is very deeply unsatisfying. This is less of a problem in settings like Krynn or Greyhawk where the lineages are heavily isolationist from each other and communities that have heavy mixing are rare. It is stands out as incredibly odd in a setting with such cosmopolitan cities as Waterdeep, Silverymoon, Luskan, or Neverwinter. It makes even less sense for several of the nations of Eberron. Even in cases where there is an extremely homogenized nation such as the Talenta halflings in Eberron or Evereska in Faerun, you'd expect those societies not to call their language "Halfling" and "Elven". The sad part is that in some cases the racial language has a proper name. Espuar is the proper name for Elvish in Faerun and Krynn has two or three dialects of Elvish. Some will note that it's easier to remember "Elvish" over "Espuar" but that's not really the case, it's just a matter of using the word enough times for it to stick in memory. So that's a non-argument.
I'm not seeing the practical use of having proscribed lifespans. This is entirely a cosmetic affair, and there are numerous examples in the fiction of where these averages are blown out of the water. Granted most of them are those that have encountered or were born with some major magical influence. Such as Dove Falconhand, a human ranger who is practically one of the daughters of Mystra and generally ageless. Having walked around the Realms for centuries. This is a repeat problem that D&D does: hey, look at this cool character concept which you have no way to even come close to reproducing as a playable PC. It gets extremely frustrating. Especially for a stat that has next to zero impact on the game. And someone might bring up the handful of effects that cause aging. The answer to that is to treat unnatural aging as a condition, perhaps as levels of exhaustion that can only be removed via Greater Restoration. There's no need to have lifespan be a stat.
A casualty of the approach of mixed races taken here is the elimination of half-elves and half-orcs. Now, I certainly support renaming these groups, but I think they should be included. Half-elves and half-orcs have always felt had a distinct identity of their own and it's odd that there aren't entire cities and communities that are predominantly one or the other of these two people. Look to Silverymoon, where the elves and humans have lived among each for so long. That city should be predominantly half-elven. There are similar areas that should have a large number of half-orcs as well. These people have different metaphysical involvement with the world at large than the other three people, and perceive the world in very different ways. Renaming these two races absolutely makes sense because the names are very cringe-worthy, but keep them around.
On the other hand, the rework of Dragonborn isn't really necessary because they recently received a full workover in Fizban's. Especially since the version included in the UA is a bland, reductive version of what was in Fizban's. A reprint is not a bad idea so that people aren't required to get Fizban's, but completely invalidating the very recently punished Fizban's is in bad taste.
Now, back to mixed races. As some other people have said, it looks as if Wizards has tried to correct one problem by stumbling headlong into another. On the one hand, the approach they took of saying to just choose one of the two parent kinds as the game stats and modify the physical description to taste. I'm going to be honest here and say "take stats and apply your own fluff" is a thing I've done for the entirety of my TTRPG experiences, as I started with HERO System back in the late 80s (I'd read through a lot of AD&D stuff and watched brothers play, but the first game I played was Champions). And this sort of approach is exactly how Narrative games sort of do it. But it just feels different when a game that includes very specific racial character packages as official does it. Especially when this means you'll be taking traits that don't feel appropriate to your character concept.
As adverse HERO or Fate, where the game says "here are mechanics, make what you want", D&D is a game that says: "here are elf stats, if you want to take elf stats and pretend you're something else, cool, but mechancially you're an elf"... and that just feels terrible. It's like a pat on the head to a child playing pretend.
Going to ideas on some things I'd suggest.
Acknowledge Fizban and Monsters of the Multiverse: Make sure to inform people that those lineages are perfectly suited to being used and give a mild sidebar on converting, which is basically a matter of moving the ASIs from Lineage to Background.- This is actually in the UA document.
- Languages: The current flagship setting is Faerun which has around ten language families, some of which have subfamilies. Discuss the concept of naming languages for the different nations and regions and use a sampling of Faerunian languages as an example of this.
- Establish Common as "a language that is shared by everybody in the party" rather than a Common tongue spoken by everybody in the world. Between the players decide on a language from the setting which they all speak. Then each player chooses two other languages.
- Establish this an option for people that want more interaction with languages. For other tables note that it's fine to just ignore language entirely if you don't want to deal with it.
- Sidebar on Optional Lifespan: Have a sidebar noting lifespans as entirely cosmetic and optional. If you want to have a human that's been around a thousand years, go for it, that's a very interesting story hook. What have they been doing all that time? This is also, as I've already said, a story-note that has been used several times in the D&D fiction. This could be a matter of 20-30 words just to bring it to the players attention as a thing that they can do.
The mixed race issue is a more difficult issue. There's no real easy way to handle this that won't step on some sticky issues that people deal with in real life. There was a suggestion to have a list of traits to pick and choose from, in which case I would perceive the core lineages in the same way as the pre-written Backgrounds as helpful templates showing how to build a lineage. In this case, I would suggest bringing back the "Custom Lineage" with a 2nd ed Skills & Powers-esque list of traits to include, but there's a problem with that. Maybe call them "Heritage Feats" or "Lineage Feats" that you can only take when building your lineage or heritage.
Dungeons and Dragons lacks something that generic games or narrative games have that makes this build your own approach very prone to problems and requiring lots of GM involvement and oversight. There's no central benchmark from which all lineages and classes are built. Every class and every lineage is built by eyeball and testing. It's not just a matter of plug and playing different modules to get the flavor desired because the modules are not equivalent. Try to value each of the traits available would be hugely complex and require a long list. I again point back in time at Skills & Powers toward the end of 2nd edition.
I wish I didn't have to say this, but it is a factor: such a heavy overhaul would also impact their bottom line as it would upset many people that would feel it invalidate recently purchased books like MotM, Van Richten's, or Fizban's. Others would find it overhauls their expectations of the game far too much and if handled poorly you'd have a repeat of the situation with 4e where a perfectly good and fun game received an undeservedly bad reputation.
That said, it does cover other things. Looking to elves again. It is canonical that not all elves do the trance. The trance thing is specifically connected to those elves that are among the souls that are constantly reincarnating out of Avandor to come to the prime material planes to handle things going on here. Elves that have cut themselves off from the Seldarine do not trance, they sleep. Half-elves, sleep, not trance. So, where trance is very specifically something that not all elves do within the fiction (there are several examples within the novels), why is it an assumed situation with all PC elves? If you were to somehow do the modular situation, you'd be able to address the situation of non-Seldarine elves more easily. At the very least it feels like a side-bar or section about homebrewing variants is called for.
I would also like to note that the game mechanic functionality of Trance is pretty much identical to a portion of "Deathless Nature" from the Reborn. So it's not like WotC isn't taking modules and plugging them in as they fit. They do the same for Fey Ancestry on goblins and elves, Powerful Build on several creatures, and a few other things. Again, though, I don't see WotC making a list of "Lineage traits/feats" and adapting a Custom Lineage that allows you to take around 3 Lineage traits as a way of handling mixed blood or supporting ease of homebrewing. For the simple fact that they're a large company by the standards of the hobby (they're pretty tiny on the wide scale, though) and they're terrified of losing customer base.
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