In Tasha's Cauldron of Everything, new rules related to player character race were introduced. In an effort to reckon with the history of racial stereotypes in the fantasy genre, and in D&D in particular, WotC has been revisiting some of the old tropes of the game in an effort to approach things in a more modern and inclusive manner.
While human beings in the real world are physiologically very homogenous, without any major advantages or disadvantages that come on a racial-genetic level (as opposed to a cultural-historic level, such as longstanding racial biases in culture and society) the fantasy races of a D&D world are somewhat more distinct. Even if the core races of humans, halflings, dwarves, and elves mostly look like one another except for a pointy ear here or a propensity for beards there, part of the fantastical world in which we adventure does involve physiological differences that are far more pronounced than they are in the real world. Again, even in the core races you have things like an elf's better vision in the dark or a dwarf's resilience against poison, but then when we introduce beings like dragonborn, tieflings, and further out people like warforged, there's a need to address that in game mechanics.
Let's also not forget that a part of the puzzle-box of character-building is playing around with those racial abilities, or playing around the lack thereof (for instance, my Human Warlock was a bit more eager to take Devil's Sight than my Half Elf one, given the lack of darkvision as a man of less diverse ancestry.)
But there are some elements that have been, on one hand, problematic from a social point of view, but also limiting in terms of gameplay. The first and most obvious thing to address is ability score bonuses, and even more, penalties.
As originally published in Volo's Guide to Monsters, Orcs ("pureblooded," rather than the PHB's Half-Orc) had a penalty to Intelligence. Orcs, after all, have historically played the part of the massive, savage horde that invades, murdering and pillaging as they go. But if we are also referring to orcs as a humanoid people, it's a bit disturbing to describe them as inherently stupid. Furthermore, it also makes them less interesting even if they do serve primarily as invading foes. To take an example from a different game, the Orcs in Warcraft I and II were purely bad guys (it wasn't until WCIII that they began to suggest that they were a more nuanced culture that was being misled, and that there was potential for heroism amongst them.) But even though they were just bad guys, the worst of them was Gul'dan, a warlock who was a brilliant genius and subtle manipulator behind the scenes. Indeed, the Orcs in Warcraft, even prior to their revision as people normally capable of honor but misled by demonic manipulation, were filled with intelligent shamans and warlocks alongside the more traditional berserkers. And it made them more interesting as bad guys.
So, the first thing to happen with these changes was the removal of racial ability score penalties. Orcs didn't have to be stupid and Kobolds didn't have to be weaklings.
But the bigger change came a bit later, namely, the freeing up of ability score bonuses. This had two effects, both socially and gameplay-wise, that I think were both fantastic. The rule, as changed, is that any ability score increases could be reassigned to the abilities you want. For example, a Dragonborn get a +2 to Strength and a +1 to Charisma. Under the new rules, if you want to play, say, a Wizard, you could change the +2 to Intelligence and the +1 to Constitution. Most races (sometimes when combined with a subrace) bring with them a +2 and a +1, but there are some exceptions. A Triton, for example, gets +1s to Strength, Con, and Charisma. But if you wanted to play an Arcane Trickster Rogue, for example, you might choose to take bonuses to Dexterity and Intelligence instead of Strength and Charisma.
I'm a huge fan of this change because I think that it's best when every player character can start with at least a +3 to their most important stat, and this way playing, say, a Dwarf Wizard is not going to see you handicapped and not maxing out your Intelligence until level 12 while you sit around with a mostly-useless boost to strength.
The further change, though, has been a broad separation of traits that are physiological versus those that are cultural. As an example, Dwarves have something called Dwarven Weapon Training, which gives them proficiency in various dwarf-themed weapons like warhammers and battleaxes. While this can be really cool in niche cases (thanks to the expanded Monk rules, your Dwarf Monk could fight with a Warhammer) it's also clearly meant to represent something you picked up growing up within a traditional dwarven society. So what happens if you want to play a character who was orphaned and raised by a family of elves? The elves' culture doesn't revolve around these particular techniques, and it's possible you didn't even learn the dwarvish language.
The new rules allow you to account for that by swapping out various proficiencies that come with your race. You might be a stout, bearded little monk, but the language you spoke at home was that of the elves, and so that's what you're comfortable with.
But let's now talk about Lineages.
The three Gothic Lineages that are coming in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft are quite different from other playable races - to the extent that they're not even called races.
I'd argue that there is precedence for this, though: the Simic Hybrid in Ravnica is a "race" that represents those who participated in the Simic Combine guild's Guardian Project. This project, meant to create super-soldiers, basically took (mostly) humans, elves, and vedalken (all common humanoid races in Ravnica) and mutated them, adding things like extra arms with big crab claws, manta-ray-like fins, or other weird animal parts that became part of their bodies.
Like the Gothic Lineages, Simic Hybrids are not born this way, but rather become them (to be fair, some of the Gothic Lineages you can be born that way). The status of a Simic Hybrid is actually almost entirely physiological - you don't even have to be a member of the Simic guild.
Given that these changes are coming several years after the release of 5th Edition, there's a sort of retroactive patch job that needs to be used to alter the rules to work this way. These Lineages, though, are coming out after this philosophical development.
As such, the rules as presented separate out the stuff that's very much for a player to decide. Your Reborn character could have been any existing D&D race, from Halfling to Githyanki. And indeed, you might even be a construct of members of many different races. Because the Reborn lineage takes over all the physiological differences, it becomes a big umbrella to many kinds of people raised from the dead. Meanwhile, as you craft your character backstory, you can assign things like languages known and ability score bonuses based on who that person was before they died, creating that cultural tie to the past.
Racial physiological bonuses are generally not game-breaking, so I think this winds up being well-balanced. Essentially, I think there's no downside to this, and only an upside.
So, what about the future?
Well, I don't think we're going to excise races entirely in the next major update - whether that's a 6th Edition or a 5.5. But I do think we're likely to see a clearer distinction between race and culture. Now, ultimately, I think this might also require Humans to be rebuilt slightly. Granted, I don't know of anyone who doesn't got the variant human route, as that level 1 feat is pretty great. But the flexibility of their ability score bonuses has been a pretty big deal to making them appealing. Now that that's universal, I'm curious to see how humans work in future editions. It's possible they'll remain appealing just because, well, it's the easiest race to "hook" onto. In a lot of ways, I see these changes as just allowing other races to catch up to human flexibility.
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