Right way to do racial stat modifiers?

[Max_Killjoy]

I'm not a fan of the delivery, but Morphic tide has hit the nail on the head. If you try to fight against strong archetypes, you're not helping your game.

Speaking of delivery issues but nailing the topic at hand
https://theangrygm.com/making-race-and-culture-matter/

(Unfortunately his Mad Adventurers Society rant on the matter appears to be gone now.)

I'll read it, but as it's AngryGM, past experience leads me to expect ranting disdain for everyone else at the table, from his typical self-aggrandizing Gygaxian DMing stance.

Something along the lines of "players are too stupid to deal with nuance, you have to hold their hand and give them easy choices".


EDIT -- read it, and yeah, he's both insulting and simply wrong on every point he tries to make in support of cliches archetypes.

[Democratus]

I'm not a fan of the delivery, but Morphic tide has hit the nail on the head. If you try to fight against strong archetypes, you're not helping your game.

Speaking of delivery issues but nailing the topic at hand
https://theangrygm.com/making-race-and-culture-matter/

(Unfortunately his Mad Adventurers Society rant on the matter appears to be gone now.)

This is good stuff.

He makes great points about storytelling and archetypes. Especially how archetypes are what empowers playing "against type" kinds of characters.

His style of delivery isn't for everyone, but he's dead on with his conclusions.

[Zilong]

Yeah, Angry’s experience with this is about the same as mine in this regard. No group, broadly speaking (there have been a few rare moments), I’ve played with or run has cared all that much about the finer details of any culture that has shown up in game. Every npc and settlement is treated as if the players were talking to some random person from our town unless a strong archetype has already been enforced.

[Keltest]

Yeah, Angry’s experience with this is about the same as mine in this regard. No group, broadly speaking (there have been a few rare moments), I’ve played with or run has cared all that much about the finer details of any culture that has shown up in game. Every npc and settlement is treated as if the players were talking to some random person from our town unless a strong archetype has already been enforced.

Ditto. Stereotypes and exaggerations are necessary simply so the PCs can remember characters that they may not interact with for several real time months.

[ezekielraiden]

Yeah, Angry’s experience with this is about the same as mine in this regard. No group, broadly speaking (there have been a few rare moments), I’ve played with or run has cared all that much about the finer details of any culture that has shown up in game. Every npc and settlement is treated as if the players were talking to some random person from our town unless a strong archetype has already been enforced.


Ditto. Stereotypes and exaggerations are necessary simply so the PCs can remember characters that they may not interact with for several real time months.

That's been exactly the antithesis of my experience. Every player I've worked with has wanted to know things like cuisines, stories, jokes...even pretty deep-level stuff like metaphors and symbolic animals. To give them solely stereotypes with nothing behind them would almost immediately fall flat.

And, just so this is put out there...we don't all have to be Tolkien. We don't have to do the "agonizing labor" (seriously?" agonizing"? really?) of developing every single detail of a culture. It just needs to be more than JUST stereotypes. Every culture that exists for any meaningful length of time is going to HAVE stereotypes, both "internal" ones (norms) and "external" ones (outsiders' perceptions). But to stitch together a "culture" from nothing but stereotypes and subversions is to create a world of Potemkin villages. It is the worldbuilding equivalent of railroading: not allowing the party to know that if they step off the theme-park-ride track, they'll see behind the facade and find these cultures have no there there.

Unless you then off-the-cuff fill in those details, which has its own problems if that's all the work you do. (It's hard to retain historical and logical consistency when you always invent your cultural details on the spot.) And if you then do non-impromptu work to make it all hang together...you're already doing half or more of the work level I'm asking for.

[NichG]

That's been exactly the antithesis of my experience. Every player I've worked with has wanted to know things like cuisines, stories, jokes...even pretty deep-level stuff like metaphors and symbolic animals. To give them solely stereotypes with nothing behind them would almost immediately fall flat.

And, just so this is put out there...we don't all have to be Tolkien. We don't have to do the "agonizing labor" (seriously?" agonizing"? really?) of developing every single detail of a culture. It just needs to be more than JUST stereotypes. Every culture that exists for any meaningful length of time is going to HAVE stereotypes, both "internal" ones (norms) and "external" ones (outsiders' perceptions). But to stitch together a "culture" from nothing but stereotypes and subversions is to create a world of Potemkin villages. It is the worldbuilding equivalent of railroading: not allowing the party to know that if they step off the theme-park-ride track, they'll see behind the facade and find these cultures have no there there.

Unless you then off-the-cuff fill in those details, which has its own problems if that's all the work you do. (It's hard to retain historical and logical consistency when you always invent your cultural details on the spot.) And if you then do non-impromptu work to make it all hang together...you're already doing half or more of the work level I'm asking for.

Games as played are living things. So you start with very strong impressions, and as the character/place/culture becomes more important to the players (via their continued interactions, investment of time and spotlight, etc), you refine the details and backstories and variations and create reasons behind the particular extremes. First a brawny orc brawler who responds with extreme and sudden aggression to enemies but drags their friends into contests and bragging rounds and trials of strength and the like. If he's still around in another two sessions, someone finds out that he's really into poetry by an obscure halfling author and has views of it that are on the surface total misinterpretations but with more thought seem to actually be somewhat insightful (maybe crib a bit from Einhar from Path of Exile for that). If that's where it ends, fine; if a player is interested in digging deeper, they find that the halfling's poems were what inspired the orc to learn Common, after a particular nostalgic passage about the nature of home happened to have a strong resonance with an event where the orc's parents' tribe was forced to move due to hunting grounds shifting (tied indirectly to, say, the action of another adventuring group in emptying out a lich's lair and destroying the lich's phylactery but in the process releasing a lot of negative energy bound up in some experiments the lich was undertaking, another couple of stereotypes). And so on.

[Satinavian]

Stereotypes are a tool.

They are not the only tool nor are they appropriate for all situations. They should be used quite sparingly in a rich and engaging world.

[Max_Killjoy]

That's been exactly the antithesis of my experience. Every player I've worked with has wanted to know things like cuisines, stories, jokes...even pretty deep-level stuff like metaphors and symbolic animals. To give them solely stereotypes with nothing behind them would almost immediately fall flat.

And, just so this is put out there...we don't all have to be Tolkien. We don't have to do the "agonizing labor" (seriously?" agonizing"? really?) of developing every single detail of a culture. It just needs to be more than JUST stereotypes. Every culture that exists for any meaningful length of time is going to HAVE stereotypes, both "internal" ones (norms) and "external" ones (outsiders' perceptions). But to stitch together a "culture" from nothing but stereotypes and subversions is to create a world of Potemkin villages. It is the worldbuilding equivalent of railroading: not allowing the party to know that if they step off the theme-park-ride track, they'll see behind the facade and find these cultures have no there there.

Unless you then off-the-cuff fill in those details, which has its own problems if that's all the work you do. (It's hard to retain historical and logical consistency when you always invent your cultural details on the spot.) And if you then do non-impromptu work to make it all hang together...you're already doing half or more of the work level I'm asking for.



That's also been my experience, as well. Since college, mumble years ago, everyone I've gamed with has loved those details, has wanted to feel like their characters were living in a "real" world. Cardboard Dwarf #219 would not have given those gamers what they want, and it would have frankly been embarrassing for me as a GM to put that in front of them.

And personally, I have no interest in cardboard cultures or Potemkin villages. GMing or playing one PC, they simply wouldn't give me what I want out of an RPG. (Or fiction, for that matter.)


As for "agonizing labor"... I'd add that, one, it's not agonizing, it's sometimes the best part of writing or GMing... two, "years" is an exaggeration, especially if we're talking about time spent before the campaign begins.

[Xervous]

That's also been my experience, as well. Since college, mumble years ago, everyone I've gamed with has loved those details, has wanted to feel like their characters were living in a "real" world. Cardboard Dwarf #219 would not have given those gamers what they want, and it would have frankly been embarrassing for me as a GM to put that in front of them.

And personally, I have no interest in cardboard cultures or Potemkin villages. GMing or playing one PC, they simply wouldn't give me what I want out of an RPG. (Or fiction, for that matter.)


As for "agonizing labor"... I'd add that, one, it's not agonizing, it's sometimes the best part of writing or GMing... two, "years" is an exaggeration, especially if we're talking about time spent before the campaign begins.

If you had to write up the game system you used, with your setting as the presumed default, would the intricacies of all the cultures show up in the phb or be deferred to a later splat? How much pagecount would it all get if in the phb?

[Willie the Duck]

That's been exactly the antithesis of my experience. Every player I've worked with has wanted to know things like cuisines, stories, jokes...even pretty deep-level stuff like metaphors and symbolic animals. To give them solely stereotypes with nothing behind them would almost immediately fall flat.

And, just so this is put out there...we don't all have to be Tolkien. We don't have to do the "agonizing labor" (seriously?" agonizing"? really?) of developing every single detail of a culture. It just needs to be more than JUST stereotypes. Every culture that exists for any meaningful length of time is going to HAVE stereotypes, both "internal" ones (norms) and "external" ones (outsiders' perceptions). But to stitch together a "culture" from nothing but stereotypes and subversions is to create a world of Potemkin villages. It is the worldbuilding equivalent of railroading: not allowing the party to know that if they step off the theme-park-ride track, they'll see behind the facade and find these cultures have no there there.

Unless you then off-the-cuff fill in those details, which has its own problems if that's all the work you do. (It's hard to retain historical and logical consistency when you always invent your cultural details on the spot.) And if you then do non-impromptu work to make it all hang together...you're already doing half or more of the work level I'm asking for.

Overall, I don't want the characters I create in my game world to be stereotypes. The local cleric, who happens to be a goblin, isn't just a stereotypical cleric, and isn't just a stereotypical goblin. Instead, he's a failed adventurer whose buddy lost a leg and a loved one in the last foray into the local Dungeon of Undead and really doesn't like the idea of the PC party going down there (because they very well could be killed, or best case scenario come back having cleared the place and expecting him to come un-desecrate it when he already has so much on his plate, etc. etc. etc.). GMs fill in detail where it is needed.

It's really not clear where we are going with this or what people are arguing towards (in particular since this is a side tangent of a side tangent), but I get the impression that there was a subtheme of being upset that fantasy games include the stereotype. That I'm not mad about. That's their job, AFAIC. They give the bulk trends and I'll build the detailed world to the level that meets my personal verisimilitude.

[Max_Killjoy]

If you had to write up the game system you used, with your setting as the presumed default, would the intricacies of all the cultures show up in the phb or be deferred to a later splat? How much pagecount would it all get if in the phb?


The Dark Eye does this, and spends, let's see... about 40 pages of a 400 page book on races and cultures (latest edition, English version). But there's also a sense that things are missing, I'm told that TDE has a LOT of material built up over several editions' and many years' worth of living-world worldbuilding.

Looking at the amount of info I'd want to fit in, I'd probably need about 50 pages combined, if formatted in the same way.

The 5e PHB spends about 26 pages on "races", but differences in formatting and more space given to art means it would take up (rough guesstimate) 15 pages in TDE's formatting... and more of it is rules-side information.

[ezekielraiden]

But unless you want non-humans to just be mentally and emotionally humans with variant art and stats

You say this as though races with the dizzying variety and breadth of humanity is a bad thing.

[Keltest]

You say this as though races with the dizzying variety and breadth of humanity is a bad thing.

If the point is to make something that isnt human, then yeah it kind of is. Nothing wrong with having them be a flavor of humans in and of itself, but if you dont want Dwarves to just be short hairy humans with alcohol poisoning, then you do need SOMETHING more than that. Typically this something is that they actually like living underground and enjoy hard work, but not always.

[Max_Killjoy]

If the point is to make something that isnt human, then yeah it kind of is. Nothing wrong with having them be a flavor of humans in and of itself, but if you dont want Dwarves to just be short hairy humans with alcohol poisoning, then you do need SOMETHING more than that. Typically this something is that they actually like living underground and enjoy hard work, but not always.

Part of the problem is that these things rarely presented as "dwarves tend to be" and usually presented as "dwarves are".

And the question of whether they tend to like living underground and enjoy hard work is because they're wired differently, or because they're raised with it, or some combination, is almost never asked, at least in D&D.

Pratchett's Carrot, while done for comedy, is a better look at species/culture than many RPGs ever manage to present.

[Keltest]

Part of the problem is that these things rarely presented as "dwarves tend to be" and usually presented as "dwarves are".

And the question of whether they tend to like living underground and enjoy hard work is because they're wired differently, or because they're raised with it, or some combination, is almost never asked, at least in D&D.

Pratchett's Carrot, while done for comedy, is a better look at species/culture than many RPGs ever manage to present.

Its never asked because A: any given answer is meaningless, changing between groups, and B: very few people actually care. The important part is that they like being underground. Thats the part thats going to affect their behavior and societies, and thats the part that people are going to take into consideration when they create their characters. A DM is unlikely to say "no, you cannot play a dwarf who likes the surface and hates the underground, because theyre universally magically compelled to hate the sky" unless theyre doing something unusual with the setting.

As for the presentation, im pretty sure thats just you reading something literally that isnt meant to be taken literally. Very few people, when describing a civilization or culture in broad strokes, are actually intending to be literally all-inclusive with their descriptions. If somebody says "dwarves are" then its implicitly understood that they mean "most dwarves are" unless they go out of their way to clarify that "no, 100% of dwarves like to be underground because they are forced to be that way by the gods."

[ezekielraiden]

and B: very few people actually care.

[Citation needed]

As noted, there are radically different experiences about how much players value the background information of a world. The popularity of, and where they're absent/incomplete the frequent requests for, "gazetteers" and "guides" etc. for various campaign worlds--ones that go into geography, history, and culture, not just mechanics--would seem to imply that even if a majority do not care, it is not true that "very few" DO care.

I mean, just to give two simple examples, people frequently complain about the metaplot of Dark Sun induced by the Prism Pentad, but often gush excitedly about all the lore stuff in the world; and Planescape is deeply beloved, even though many agree that certain elements (like the exact nature and power balance of the factions) weren't always well-executed. At least a sizable minority likes setting lore. I doubt the Wildemount book would exist if there weren't such interested people. At the very least, it would've been a far thinner volume.


As for the presentation, im pretty sure thats just you reading something literally that isnt meant to be taken literally. Very few people, when describing a civilization or culture in broad strokes, are actually intending to be literally all-inclusive with their descriptions. If somebody says "dwarves are" then its implicitly understood that they mean "most dwarves are" unless they go out of their way to clarify that "no, 100% of dwarves like to be underground because they are forced to be that way by the gods."

The big problem, again, is that if you start from broad strokes, you are making Potemkin cultures. I think we agree that Potemkin cultures are bad unless your players literally 100% could not care less, which I freely admit is a playstyle, beer-and-pretzels gaming. But evidence suggests it's not so common that a Potemkin-ified setting is going to work for most groups.

If you start from the broad strokes and then fill in, you either do so exclusively spontaneously (and risk contradictions and excessive nonsensical elements*), or you do at least some non-spontaneous prep work...which is already most of what's being asked. You're doing work away from the table to keep things consistent. Sure, you're mixing impromptu with prewritten, but you are doing the work of explaining trends and embracing variety outside of the monist "there's a stereotype" or dualist "there's a stereotype, and there's specifically rejecting the stereotype."

And if you construct or figure out the broad strokes as a result of having already done reasonable groundwork.....you're literally doing exactly what is being asked for. You're NOT making cardboard-cutout cultures, you're making at least reasonably-grounded ones that have some amount of depth and "there" to them, and then extrapolating internal and external stereotypes (norms and outsider perceptions) from that.

I just don't see how we don't end up at this point, unless it so incredibly, vastly common that player groups totally and completely ignore cultural and historical details in play. I've seen no evidence that indicates that such an attitude is that common. I recognize that it is, in a sense, being "roleplay casual" (as opposed to "rules casual," which is usually what people mean by "casual players"), and there's literally nothing wrong with that--I pass no judgment by my use of these terms. But such a casual attitude regarding setting, lore, and culture is FAR from "most players" in my experience.

*Every culture has SOME contradictions or nonsense elements in it, that's sort of how cultures work. But brute-fact contraditions are a problem, e.g. "all dwarves live underground" only to later have a happy, prosperous, centuries-old village of surface dwarves, and nonsense elements like "all dwarves live underground" followed by "dwarves are famous for their zeppelin piloting skills" are even worse. Obviously these are invented examples and meant to be stark differences, but I've seen this sort of thing happen "live." We worked it out and it led to new and interesting stuff, but it's easy to run into that famous Scottish maxim: "Oh what a tangled web we weave/When first we practice to deceive!" In this case, the deception being that there really is a culture behind the broad strokes, when there isn't.

[PhoenixPhyre]

If the point is to make something that isnt human, then yeah it kind of is. Nothing wrong with having them be a flavor of humans in and of itself, but if you dont want Dwarves to just be short hairy humans with alcohol poisoning, then you do need SOMETHING more than that. Typically this something is that they actually like living underground and enjoy hard work, but not always.

Except that there are humans (and valid human cultures) that are short, hairy, like living underground and working hard. Those aren't special to dwarves. You've not met your goal.

If a race is alien enough to need strong archetypes to encapsulate it, there are two ways it can be:
* Physically. A 3-armed, asexually-reproducing race is alien on its own.
* Culturally/psychologically. This one is hard, because if it's alien enough that humans can't mimic it in their own cultures, then it's going to be nearly impossible to actually play. Let alone have in a mixed-race group. CF Kender on the shallow side.

To use a term from the Ender series (https://enderverse.fandom.com/wiki/Hierarchy_of_Foreignness):
We want ramen, not varelse. Things we can recognize as people, despite being non-human. Not things that are actually alien and incomprehensible. And the line for fictional characters is really really narrow. Especially RPG characters.

Humans in rubber suits is what we're going to get, psychologically. So let's at least make a nod toward giving them diversity of culture and thought instead of slicing off anything that might be interesting and stretching the rest into the mold of a "strong archetype" (that's really just a lazy fantasy stereotype).

And even a small passage about how the races presented are generic examples and you should expect much more diversity of culture and thought in-game, like they do with humans (in 5e's presentation anyway), would move towards that goal. Separating the physical from the cultural for subraces (and actually giving humans sub-races so they fit the same pattern) would go even further. That doesn't actually take more space, merely a re-arrangement of what's already there.

[NichG]

Good, strongly flavored setting lore is great. Setting lore with lots of redundancies and obligate detail is less so. I love Planescape's lore because it's capacity for alienness and weirdness is enough that it can contain so many things without repeating. Silver pieces a bad idea because they literally sting the hands of customers whose moral compass compels them to rip off your skin to write down their complaints to your manager? Great! If every locale had text on the range of the local culture's opinions on different precious metals and currencies, that could be very tedious.

[ezekielraiden]

Separating the physical from the cultural for subraces (and actually giving humans sub-races so they fit the same pattern) would go even further.

While I do agree with this sentiment, doing such a thing must be done with INCREDIBLE care and caution, lest it turn the whole effort into a total dumpster fire.

I tried, very hard, to come up with just three human subraces besides the "standard human." I failed. I was only able to come up with two, and one was kind of a cop-out: Dual-Blooded, aka the catch-all for any character part-human and part-something-else (elf, orc, dwarf, etc.) The other was Starbound, for humans who have travelled outside the spatial circles of the mortal world--not to other planes, but far enough into the vast and unknowable stars above that it has changed them (or they grew up there and are thus Different). The Starbound would cover concepts like Asimov's Foundation-era Solarians, A.E. van Voigt's slan, E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen, and certain types of supers (such as Kryptonians).

If you can come up with a fourth option that won't risk implying racist stuff, believe me, I'm all ears.

[PhoenixPhyre]

While I do agree with this sentiment, doing such a thing must be done with INCREDIBLE care and caution, lest it turn the whole effort into a total dumpster fire.

I tried, very hard, to come up with just three human subraces besides the "standard human." I failed. I was only able to come up with two, and one was kind of a cop-out: Dual-Blooded, aka the catch-all for any character part-human and part-something-else (elf, orc, dwarf, etc.) The other was Starbound, for humans who have travelled outside the spatial circles of the mortal world--not to other planes, but far enough into the vast and unknowable stars above that it has changed them (or they grew up there and are thus Different). The Starbound would cover concepts like Asimov's Foundation-era Solarians, A.E. van Voigt's slan, E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen, and certain types of supers (such as Kryptonians).

If you can come up with a fourth option that won't risk implying racist stuff, believe me, I'm all ears.

Those sub-races (of the generic published variety, not the setting-specific ones) would be generic cultures under this proposal (since cultures would map to sub-races).

So a "theocratic" sub-race (Religion proficiency and maybe a cleric cantrip), a "maritime" sub-race (swim speed/breath holding, water vehicles proficiency), a "nomad" sub-race (animal handling and survival), etc.

The published ones can be very generic, and can even have overlaps. Ideally, these cultural sub-races would get de-coupled entirely and be applicable across races, but that's a much bigger ask.

My current plan is to have a bunch of cultures, where cultures have tags (short adjective statements) and those tags map onto a spectrum of proficiencies and features. So if you make a culture tagged "mountainous, martial, self-sufficient", they might have something related to altitude adjustment, weapon and/or armor proficiency, and survival proficiency.

[Pex]

Culture is world building. That falls to the DM, so talk about Culture would be in the DMG, unless like Pathfinder Player-centric and DM-centric stuff are in one book. For player perspective they can only have any relevant game mechanics the cultures give and offer a few suggestions of different roleplaying ideas. They would have to be told to work with your DM to create a character that works within the gameworld. It is the DM's job to create the world and its cultures. The Game could offer advice and different ideas, but ultimately the DM has to do it if he chooses to run in his own made-up world. The Game can't do the culture work for the DM unless it's A) The one and only permissable world for that particular game system or B) Offer supplemental books each dedicated to a specific world where culture can be developed which can be different than what another supplemental book offers. D&D uses method B. A dwarf in Forgotten Realms is distinctly different than a dwarf in Eberron who is distinctly different than a dwarf in Theros who is distincly different than a dwarf in the homebrew game world of a DM two towns away from where you live. However, they all use the Mountain Dwarf and Hill Dwarf statistics of the PHB.