Okay, I'm spending way too many brain cycles thinking about a book for a setting I don't even like, but this morning something else occurred to me.
In 4E, the game designers have taken what I call the
Lake Wobegon approach to redesigning the races: all the gnomes are strong, the half-orcs are good looking, and all the races are above average.
No race has any real penalties. There are no negative attribute modifiers. Gone is half-elf angst... instead of being "the child of two worlds belonging to neither", a half-elf is now "the child of two worlds and a really
swell person". Half-orcs are specified to embody only the best parts of humans and orcs.
Likewise, no race has boatloads of extra special abilities and powers necessitating some kind of level-adjustment penalty. They've all got more or less the same thing: a couple attribute bonuses, a couple skill bonuses, an extra encounter power, a defense bonus. Extra racial abilities are present but they take feat slots... to develop your race's natural abilities further, you give up the potential to branch out into wider types of abilities.
Another system or design iteration might have felt compelled to give the dragonborn a breath weapon plus claws plus a tail attack plus wings plus an AC/HP bonus to account for their scales. This system just gives them a breath weapon. That's their Big Deal. If you want to embrace the draconian nature of the character, you take the racial paragon path and you grow into the wings. Or you become a dragonsouled sorcerer and develop a series of dragon-emulating powers. Or both.
This is all a sound approach to design insofar as it helps avoid the situation where one race is regarded as unplayable or so powerful as to dwarf (no offense, dwarves) all the others. But as much as I talk up and defend the focus on the flash in 4E, I have always had a bit of a hard time reconciling the idea that all these races... and there are more of them all the time... are all approximately equally powerful. "Every race has their strong points" is one thing. To have them be so precisely balanced? Well, you could explain it by invoking gods who had strict rules for their creations or who were watching each other to make sure that one's favored children weren't more powerful than another's, or whatever. Or you could say that's just the way it was and that's why no one race rules the world, it could have just as easily not been the case but this is how things worked out.
But where any explanation seemed to fall apart is the Warforged, the golem-robot-thingies of Eberron. Again, another system probably would have piled on the advantages and modifiers for these guys. They'd have a passel of extra immunities, huge AC bonuses, huge damage bonuses, they're fricking magitek robot suits of armor. But in this system, they're simply an alternative to humans and elves. That would work fine, but the Warforged were not created by gods and they did not evolve or grow or come into being with the other races... they were created by the other races to act as soldiers for war.
Now, the fact that they don't need food and the fact that they are legitimately harder to kill than most races are both advantages for a soldier, but for a warring power to do the research on techniques to create these incredibly complex pseudoliving golem thingies, set up a factory (because you don't want a
soldier, you want an
army), and use manpower and magic and resources that could be going to the war effort to create these things instead...
Well, I'd expect the result to be something
really impressive, something that could mow down flesh and blood human (or equivalent) soldiers like blades of grass while soaking up way more damage than a normal human (or equivalent) can take...
And then this morning it fell into place: that's also a good description of a Player Character. When stacked up against common soldiers (especially given that in a large-scale conflict, most of the ordinary troops would count as minions), the Warforged
are exceptional, they
are impressive.
Viewing it on a meta-level, their creators were cranking out PCs. Within the context of the game world, it's not so much that Humans and Elves and Halflings and the
Professor and Mary Anne rest are all equally as impressive as Warforged, it's that the Warforged are equally impressive as the most capable and exceptional members of their races. There are no Warforged commoners, peasants, etc. They're all magically constructed supersoldiers.
And realizing that helped everything else fall into place. It's not that all the races are balanced against each other:
all the PCs are.
Humans don't naturally acquire extra skills, extra feats, and an extra way to stab/throw magic at people as a matter of course... those "racial abilities" represent the exceptional nature of a Human PC, who has to stand apart from the crowd to be a fighter alongside a "warrior-born" race like a Dwarf.
Gnomes aren't universally equally as puissant as half-orcs, but if one can survive as the buttmonkeys of the Feywild or a tiny exiled minority in a natural world full of huge and strong things it's not so ridiculous to imagine that one as a fighter just as capable as a member of a larger race.
And by the same token, we can assume that a Dwarf who embraces a martial path is not quite as an exceptional a member of his or her race initially... their own natural physical abilities and cultural upbringing are simply part of the package.
The more out-there races... stuff like Tieflings, Dragonborn, Devas, Genasi... are more like the Warforged: there are comparatively fewer civilians and unremarkable individuals out and about, at least in the human-dense parts of the world.
Really, the end result is a lot like it would be with a point-based system such as GURPS.
In GURPS, if you want to play a fricking magitek robot, you can (assuming it fits the setting/GM says so)... you just buy all the necessary and logical abilities that would come from that, but at the end you have the same points to spend as everybody playing a squishy human.
That means the humans are going to have more skills and more diverse advantages than you do, and the way combat plays out in GURPS skills are a big part of avoiding fatal things like swords and spears in combat... there's none of this 200 HP stuff, a couple sword wounds will end a human character... so your human allies won't have damage-absorbing plate metal skin but they will be able to parry and dodge better than you, with an end result that evens out to you both have a way of staying alive.
If you want to play as a fantasy race in GURPS, there will be a template you buy that represents their abilities (and drawbacks) in the game setting... if those abilities are worth 32 points out of 150 starting points, you have 32 fewer points to customize your character. You might have an ability or two that a human can't justify taking without resorting to magic/divine intervention (and GM approval), but at the end of the day your human allies will be just as powerful as you. Not because the Sparkle Elves of the Green Forest have some racial weakness that prevents them from learning as diverse skills as humans do, but because the nature of the game dictates that all the members of the adventuring party happen to be equally capable. :P The Humans are as badass as they need to be stand shoulder-to-shoulder with a Sparkle Elf.
So, anyway... don't know if that will be half as interesting to anyone else as it was to me. Or maybe it's something that was painfully obvious to most people, or something they never even bothered to think about. But it was what was in my head when I got out of bed this morning.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}