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Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Dwarves

I've been considering rewriting the fantasy races, stripping them down the way I did the classes. Part of this would rely on off-loading racial skills to cultural backgrounds, which means that humans raised by elves will have elven skills, dwarves raised by humans will have human skills.

I'm thinking I don't really care about maintaining the enormous dwarven saving throw bonus or some of the other bonuses. I'm tempted to strip it all down to "dwarves are a broad, four-foot tall humanish folk with an innate sense of magnetic north and depth underground" and leave it at that.

Would that seem too stripped down? Do you think it still requires racial level limits, or possibly a hit dice cap?

7 comments:

  1. > Part of this would rely on off-loading racial skills to cultural backgrounds, which means that humans raised by elves will have elven skills, dwarves raised by humans will have human skills.

    Is a bad idea. Game is hard enough to jump into without confusing all the known stero/archetypes.

    >Would that seem too stripped down? Do you think it still requires racial level limits, or possibly a hit dice cap?

    yes, but your adding culture so who cares, no(never did), 9 just like every other race/class/archetype/whatever.

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  2. I don't know if splitting cultural skills from race makes it all that difficult to jump into. Just a note like this:

    "Dwarves are good smiths and engineers of earth and stone works"

    ... and then if a player says "I want a human who was raised by dwarves", the player writes "raised by dwarves" on the character sheet and gets dwarven language and basic smith/engineer knowledge, like a dwarf.

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  3. Just getting back into Oe and found your blog. Love it. Especially the idea of Simplified Classes (having one scalable ability and one fixed general ability). To that end, let me address your questions; No, not at all. Strip it! Take it off! Limits? No, not required, but if they could be implemented easily by a G/DM for specific settings, that would be cool.
    I like, nay, love the idea of doing the same with Race. One scalable and one general would be great IMHO. Then have a list of Cultural Skills/Abilities separate.
    Add 2 Class Abilities + 2 Race Abilities + say 1 Cultural Ability/Skill, roll some Attributes, and bing-bang-boom insta-character. Easy to balance from a G/DM standpoint (yes, I know, there is little room or need for 'balance' in 0e. I blame it on the OCD.) Put this all into a PDF, and I'd buy it!

    Best,
    TB

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  4. Welcome, Bane! Don't shoot a potion!

    I *have* considered a simple two racial abilities solution, although not "1 general, 1 scaled", which I see as being unique to class rather than race. The only problem I have is humans; I don't want them to have a unique human ability. I may have a couple solutions for that.

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  5. [Full disclosure of my biases: I've grown to like D&D's race is class, I try to find players new to RPGs]

    Options overwhelm newbs when they're struggling just figure out this RPG thing. I also think it overwhelms experienced players with choices. Choices that tend to focus them on power gaming (finding the ultimate char build) rather.

    race as class 6 choices.
    race & class 6x6 is that 36? I forget maths.
    race & culture & class 6x6x6 I large number of choices.

    But of course that's all my very opinionated opinion. If everyone agreed with me I'd have to change my mind ;)

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  6. @Norman: a good point, but I'd rather just limit newbs on a case by case basis. Tell 'em they're humans from the home culture and that they can be fighter or a magic-user, pick one. If they say, "but I want to be a ...", make them that. Problem solved.

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  7. Norman, I fully see your meaning, I do. But, I would rather have it there myself and have something as a GM that I can balance quickly and run with and not worry about it being to uber. I like Race as Class myself, and would have probably four to six options for players but I would love to be able to change it up for a difference setting or local in the current setting on the fly if I needed to. I do hope I am not rambling, I have just been wrestling with this very thing in S&W:WB when I wanted to add another Race and failed. I have OCD, and having a quick and dirty method that I am confident with (so I don't start twitching and trying to assign XP values to abilities and such) to build a new Race as a Class and know that it is balanced would really help me. Now, I will say that I HATE balance. I do not believe in balanced encounters, balanced party members (in that if one levels slower I don't mind), but for some gawd awful reason character creation has to balance for me...

    I am rambling ain't I? Maybe I should head off to my blog... = )

    Best,
    TB

    ReplyDelete