On the abundance of races in Fantasy RPGs

[Daredevil]

Ron has just pointed out my number one issue with fantasy. It is true, that the fantastical races are somehow otherwordly and it is in fact this part of their nature that lends them their great power. When reduced to simple character options (in the extreme, into a series of stat modifications and special abilities), they really stop being wondrous and start being mundane.

I've been thinking about this stuff somewhat and the big question for me is : how do we take such an otherworldy figure, make it a player character, and retain that sense of the mysterious?

In fact, my work on Gothic is one take on this, but really belongs to a different genre (sorry for tooting my own horn there, but it fits).

[Daredevil]

Palefire wrote:

Is it because fantasy is more about exploring new things than other types of settings or what? Why can't the next bad guy be an orc too? And the next, and the next and the next? What why does it has to be same old same old? Is it only because the monsters actually lack personal touches and are all the same monster or what?

It doesn't have to be the same old same old -- it really doesn't. It's just a sticky convention bothering many roleplayers everywhere. Why is it such a pervasive curse? Well, D&D for an example, is pretty much just about romping around the setting killing stuff that gets progressively harder to kill as the players get more levels. If the next opponent is always an orc, it gets boring and repetative. Not only are they underpowered, they're also a known quantity and part of the D&D experience is the challenge in figuring out stuff. Oh, trolls can be killed with fire? Damn, that demon obviously can't be hurt with just +1 magical weapons! That kinda thing. The monsters never really were -- looking from the game system level upwards -- anything but puzzles to be solved.

There's another answer to the why, though. For a long time, it was enough. People didn't really know we could have better. Roleplaying -- in this form -- is a rather new hobby. Even when designers (or GMs) were bothered by some elements of game design that were not working well, they tried to build the solutions on the old, out-dated, falling-to-ruin system. I think we're seeing many games going deeper toward the root of it all to fix problems these days, challenging the basic assumptions in these games.

Now, I digressed a bit, so returning back to the topic:

It would be the same for any other game, if the most basic activity in the game would just endlessly repeat itself. What if the mystery in a CoC game would always be the same rough shape? Not very engaging.

The answer is simple, though. Make your game firmly about something else than killing monsters and support this notion within the game. That way the races are no longer merely the objects of slaughter and their other, relevant factors beside their hit points, may actually be brought out.

[Mike Holmes]

This is so silly.

The "problem that such games are hiding" is that they are all about killing monsters. So, to make that interesting, you have to throw different monsters at the players. Otherwise it becomes dull instantly (as opposed to by the end of the night). Imagine if you were to throw the same monster at the party to fight repaeatedly. That would be hella-boring. So you introduce new and moe interesting targets to kill.

So, you have two options.

1. If what you want is less types of monsters, but the same variability in experience, you have to be able to tailor each one. So, what I am suggeting is just what you said, throw only Orcs at them, but make each orc unique. You do this by allowing the GM to customize them by giving them the tools to do so (and possibly an in depth enough discussion of the creatures to get the GMs juices flowing). This is the most important advancement to come out of D&D3E. Took them 25 years to figure it out, but at least you can finally have a 3rd level Orc, and a 5th level Orc. Hey, look at that, variation! The same goes for situation. Orcs in a cave, orcs in a field, orcs in a forest. Variation! Not interesting variation, but better than nothing.

2. The much better solution is, as I said, and many others have said now here, to do the obvious thing, and stop playing D&D, or D&D like games where the game is all about the slaughter of creatures. As soon as the game becomes about... well, anything else, you find that the only "race" you need is humans. Not to say that you can't incorporate other races, but just that they are unnecessary. Because your "problem" no longer exists.

This is why we here are all so worried about your design. In appealing to this "market" which you call standard fantasy, you are putting together a game that has as its central focus the same one that D&D has. Killin'. Which means that you'll have the same problem. And makes the "wonder" that you are looking for all but impossible. The only way out is to make something different.

Fortunately, you have as examples a healthy percentage of extant RPGs. Many games fall into the old killing monsters trap, but there are many other good examples out there of how to create conflict from other sources. I suggest that you not just read one, like your glance at InSpectres, but actually play one. Doesn't even have to be as far from your experience as InSpectres. Try playing, I dunno, Traveller sometime. A game almost as old as D&D and really old-school. Shouldn't throw you at all. Sure it has lots of alien races, but really just for kicks. You can ignore them all you want. Why? Because Traveller is not about killin things quite as much as D&D is. Especially in the adventures produced. The system is still all about killin, but they took steps forward in other ways.

Heaven forbid you actually play someting like InSpectres where there are no special rules for killin. If you did, you'd see how easy it is to avoid this "problem".

Mike

P.S. obviously this took me more than the nine minutes difference to between my and DDs post to put together. Or, rather, the similarities in our posts are coincidental. Which should say something.

[Bankuei]

I think what we're talking about here is that the races provided aren't really races as much as walking stats and xp bags.  A people of any kind come with a culture, whereas the monsters come with only a psuedo-ecology, allowing them to neither exist as a culture nor as magical, mythic beings.

What is the ecology of an angel?  Of a ghost?  What is their cultures?  Should these things have either, or should they just be?  D&D took magical creatures that just exist in mythology and attempted to explain them.  Now their not magical.  They're just animals like everything else in D&D.  

What made a gelfling magical?  The rock monster from Never Ending Story?  Most of everything out of Labrynth? Here the sense of wonder is maintained by not explaining everything, sometimes things just are.

What is the culture of the Bene Gesserit?  The Fremen?  Here you have groups that actually have cultural goals, a great source of conflict.  Have you ever tried reading the Simillarion?(if you have, read the Necronomicon after, it'll make your head stop ringing :P).  

What we have in traditional fantasy is a clear understanding behind cultural races and magical races and not trying to mix the two.  Let's remember, fantasy=fantastic, non logical, outside the realm of reason.  Go pick up Dr. Seuss books, that's fantasy right there.

Chris

[Lance D. Allen]

Another, very old-school game to check out would be Gamma World (specifically 4th Ed.) While it uses almost exactly the same system as D&D basic for combat resolution, and most of the character information is aimed toward conflict, the game manages somehow, despite these handicaps, to be about something other than killing monsters and robots. It's possible to play it as straight kill-and-loot, but the game feels wrong that way.

Then again, perhaps it was just me... But I doubt it. Having been on an E-group devoted to the various incarnations of Gamma World, and having read the stories which other people were playing, it was rather unlike D&D, which it essentially clones. By fortunate accident, it also failed it's original premise (D&D with mutants in a post-apocalyptic future), but only to be something better.

Okay, this wasn't intended as an advertisement for a game which went out of print ages ago, but I think it applies to the point, at least in some roundabout fashion.

Or maybe I just need sleep.

[Blake Hutchins]

I agree with Ron in every particular.  I'll just add that Tolkien's work has strong race themes running through it, some of them bearing a disturbing parallel to the ideas of racial purity espoused by Hitler and that ilk.  That's not to say Tolkien shared the idea of an Aryan master race or other Nazi ideology, but the Numenoreans -- though part of that otherworldly heritage that finds its final flower in Aragorn -- do bring the concept of racial hierarchies to the foreground of Lord of the Rings.

More on point to the topic, it drives me nuts to see the proliferation of the "standard" fantasy races in various and sundry DnD clones, especially in the computer games industry.  I've talked to industry designers and producers who claim that the only way to get the mass market with a fantasy game is to invoke the formula of elves, dwarves, etc., because "that's what people think fantasy is."  It's a circular argument, ultimately, but it continues to have tremendous power in the computer gaming world.  Moreover, not a few players assert they won't play humans, period.  The longing for the exotic reinforces the perceived demand for easy DnD-style race classification, while relegating poor, dull humans to the vanilla bin.

Excuse me while I go shriek and gesticulate wildly at the heavens.

Best,

Blake

[Christoffer Lernö]

Yes, D&D does have killing things as it's primary goal, but blaming all on that can't be the whole of the answer.

When I started to consider counter-examples, I thought of Robotech. I played a long great campaign in "Return of the Masters". The only foes we met were Invids. One race, a few different mechas but ultimately pretty much the same thing over and over again.
It was always, oh we find out Invids are doing this or that and we try to help people out.

"Return of the Masters" could easily be converted into a fantasy setting where the heroes are fighting some other race that has conquered their home lands.

Let's take the familiar race of Orcs.

Let's pretend the premise of the story is to fight orcs that has conquered your homeland. 50 adventures of fighting nothing but orcs. Would it not seem like "same old same old"?

Unless of course, the motifs of the orcs were not quite clear, that there was secrets you didn't know about the orcs. They were not clearly labled with "what they could do" and "what they can't do". In a way this ties into what Walt talked about "protagonizing the setting"

Maybe it's easier to see what I mean if we replace orcs with humans. Look at the old Westerns... If the indians were like europeans only they liked to kill people for no particular reason but to take their stuff, then indians would pretty soon become a boring source for stories. But if indians were those weird savages who had a thoroughly alien culture and religion, who occasionally might seem reasonable and occasionally cruel and evil - don't they make much more interesting adversaries?

I guess this is what Chris is talking about as well.

So I'd say it's not so much in what the game is about, nor is it entirely about how the race is described, but rather what is hinted at.

If you write up a forest in a game setting without making any exact drawings but providing plenty of rumours and legends about it, it's much easier to use it in adventures, isn't it?

Or maybe that's what all of you meant all a long :)

[Reimer Behrends]

Can anyone say that they've never (at some time or another) ever looked through the monster section in some fantasy rpg thinking: "oh, they already met that and that monster, what new thing should I let them face off against today?"

As a matter of fact, I've always vastly prefered to use standard fantasy tropes over exotic material: use of odd things (like exotic monsters) requires additional effort on exposition and background (not to mention justification), and provides little context for me to work with. They float in a narrative void, and unless it's a special case (like a "First Contact" scenario), are likely not worth the effort.

Symptoms in RPGs are an abundance of different player races and/or monsters. Why do we need them?

Different player races are essentially different archetypes reflected in their phenotype (you may have noticed that non-human races tend to very homogenous and monocultural, much like Star Trek's "planet of the week").

Different monsters fulfill two needs: instant sense of wonder (but, as Paracelsus says, dosis facit venenum), and tactical uncertainty (assuming that the players haven't memorized the monster manual). In addition, if you encounter something only as cannon fodder, then phenotypical distinction is pretty much all you can use to differentiate them.

Conversely, if you stick to a relatively small set of established creatures, you have immediate context: You can connect the dots, you have established stereotypes that you can vary and break, you can create relationships more effectively, and a whole lot more things. But it requires some work.

So it's a problem embedded deep in the very layout of fantasy rpgs. Can you help me unravel the problem?

It is, I think, essentially overcompensation for lack of other characterization, and going for the quick'n'dirty solution to the problem of differentiation and sense of wonder.

-- Reimer Behrends

[contracycle]

Unless of course, the motifs of the orcs were not quite clear, that there was secrets you didn't know about the orcs. They were not clearly labled with "what they could do" and "what they can't do". In a way this ties into what Walt talked about "protagonizing the setting"

Yes but: then why use "orcs"?  Why not use humans?

Sure, you can use orcs if you like.  But don;t be too suprised if the players never even think that orcs might have secrets and the like - they are, after all, orcs.

[Lance D. Allen]

This suddenly reminds me of the Ultima series of games. I've only played in depth 2 of the 9 games in the series, these two being Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar, and Ultima IX: Ascension. In both there is a definite focus on solve the puzzle, get the item, and fix the problem, move on to next problem, repeat. However, the emphasis on combat in the two is rather different. In Ultima IV you've your typical random encounters, where you must slay the faceless masses, with a little bit of tactical maneuvering thrown in. In Ultima IX, it's different. It's possible (though difficult) for a beginner to slay a mighty dragon, or a dreaded gazer with the right tactics. I know, I've done it. There aren't really random encounters.. Oh, sure you'll run into goblins here and there, rats and spiders all over the place, but these are mostly just filler, to keep you on your toes, and to give you something to swing at as you're running through the dungeons.

But that's not exactly the point. What I'm trying to point out here is that, in U9, there is at least some minimal attempt at making certain "joe-schmoe" monsters interesting in some way. I remember at one point, I came up some stairs to rescue the mayors daughter from goblins, and heard "Must protect pretty lady" in some broken, slurred voice which I'd learned to identify as goblin, just before I saw the bugger and had to smash my axe into his skull repeatedly. I didn't have time to think about it beforehand (in 3-D, they can come up on you awfully suddenly) but when I was looking over the goblin, I had to wonder if I'd done something wrong. (Note: To my disappointment on trying it again later, it was just flavor with no substance...) Another time is the troll I'd killed various times before from a distance. One time I went up to him to see how tough he was in hand-to-hand, and he accosted me, surprising the hell out of me. I ended up bluffing my way past him instead of having to kill him.

Which, finally (I hope) brings me to the point. GMs are capable of taking even the monsters in the MM interesting and unique. We've been fighting nothing but goblins and gnolls so far, but it's not grown stale. They're different than just faceless bad guys (except in combat, in which case they are "little guys" and "big guys" {or 1 hit kills, and multi-hit kills}) The issue here (aside from those who think human foes are enough without races) is how game design can encourage this, though. Some prefer to get rid of other "races" and make the variety of humanity do for it, whereas others (like myself) happen to like the elf-dwarf-orc-etc. variations, and would prefer to protagonize the setting with them. I think though that the real solution for those who like the races, is to figure out how to protagonize the races, and make them more than just cardboard figures to knock down, or in the case of PC races, "normal people with att. mods"

[Christoffer Lernö]

Which, finally (I hope) brings me to the point. GMs are capable of taking even the monsters in the MM interesting and unique. We've been fighting nothing but goblins and gnolls so far, but it's not grown stale. They're different than just faceless bad guys (except in combat, in which case they are "little guys" and "big guys" {or 1 hit kills, and multi-hit kills}) The issue here (aside from those who think human foes are enough without races) is how game design can encourage this, though. Some prefer to get rid of other "races" and make the variety of humanity do for it, whereas others (like myself) happen to like the elf-dwarf-orc-etc. variations, and would prefer to protagonize the setting with them. I think though that the real solution for those who like the races, is to figure out how to protagonize the races, and make them more than just cardboard figures to knock down, or in the case of PC races, "normal people with att. mods"

Ah, you've nailed down my real question better than I was able to do:

How can one construct a game so that it encourages the GM to make monsters into more than faceless bad guys?

Like Lance I like a variety of races so I definately want to have them. But how how can they be prevented from being other than "normal people with att. mods"?

Is it enough to give plenty of background on the races? Or is more required? Maybe sample heroes and famous examples?

But most importantly, is it possible to design a game so that the goblin is likely to actually say things like "must protect the pretty lady"?

Maybe even a table of character-traits for monsters would be a good start :)

[Balbinus]

Like Lance I like a variety of races so I definately want to have them. start :)

Quick question, why?  What is it about them that makes you want to have them?  Once that is clear it should be possible to do something good with them, but there is a fundamental question of why you wish them in your game.

In my Scottish game the races are there to provide magic and mystery.  This is why they are powerful and reclusive.  I have goals for them and those goals determined how many races I had and what they were like.

What are the goals you seek to achieve by including many races?

[contracycle]

How can one construct a game so that it encourages the GM to make monsters into more than faceless bad guys?

By making them Not Monsters.  For villains to be interesting, the audience has to be able at least to sympathise with some of their motives or goals.  If you cannot sympathise with it, it is just a target.

[Walt Freitag]

Daredevil wrote:

I've been thinking about this stuff somewhat and the big question for me is: how do we take such an otherworldy figure, make it a player character, and retain that sense of the mysterious?

In fact, my work on Gothic is one take on this, but really belongs to a different genre (sorry for tooting my own horn there, but it fits).

I don't know of any way to do this effectively, except under one special condition (which coincidentally is a hallmark of Gothic characters): when the character himself doesn't know his own nature and determining it is his personal premise. The elf raised by humans in total ignorance of elvish culture, for example. Sure, this is a cliche, but unlike some conventions of "modern" fantasy, it can actually work. Also a staple of the superhero genre.

- Walt

[Paul Czege]

Hey Lance,

...others (like myself) happen to like the elf-dwarf-orc-etc. variations, and would prefer to protagonize the setting with them. I think though that the real solution for those who like the races, is to figure out how to protagonize the races, and make them more than just cardboard figures to knock down, or in the case of PC races, "normal people with att. mods"

I think I know what you mean by this. I just want to point out how what you wrote might be confusing to others. Protagonize/protagonism has a very specific meaning in conversations on The Forge, a meaning that echoes what a protagonist is in a work of fiction. A protagonist is a character whose choices and actions deliver the theme of the story to the audience by providing an answer to a question of broad human interest. That question is called the Premise.

By saying that you want to "protagonize the setting," you're saying you want to somehow have the setting deal with conflict, make difficult decisions and choices, deal with antagonists, and through that author a theme that's delivered to the audience (which would have to be the players). I can't help but think all that would have the effect of deprotagonizing the player characters. You'd be telling a story to the players, and their characters would, at best, be supporting cast.

Similarly, if you protagonize nonhuman NPC's, characters who in my mind should be supporting cast (antagonists, significant foils, etc.) to the player character protagonists, you're likely to undermine the thematic significance of the actions and decisions the players take with their characters, and ultimately eclipse the protagonism of their characters with all the thematic stuff you're doing with the NPC's.

I think instead what you want to pursue is the notion of rendering setting and NPC's in such a way (as antagonists, as significant foils) that they engage the players and provoke character protagonising play from them.

Right?

Paul