Do you think when 3PP make new campaign settings, should they have the standard races in the setting or nor and why? Thanks!
It depends on the setting, I suppose. For example, its hardly unexpected that Kaidan features: kappa, tengu, korobokuru, and hengeyokai, in addition to humans. It makes clear sense to not include elves, dwarves, halflings and the other standard non-human races in an oriental setting.
Almost always when I develop a homebrew setting, part of my design process is to choose a range of available races that may be unique to that setting. My goals are never the kitchen sink, so I feel no need to be inclusive of all possible races in a given setting.
While some players might see this as an extreme limitation on their options. I more often see a player that always chooses half-elf when designing any character (and often only playing one favorite class). Having many classes/races available isn't offering options, rather its emphasizing a given player's right to only play their favorite race/class as it is available. So in a setting where not all the races nor classes are available, it forces the single-minded player to look at alternatives, when they normally never do. I'd rather see players experiment with something they've never tried before, rather than letting them play an elf, when elves aren't intrinsic to a given setting for flavor reasons.
I always limit race options in my settings, and sometimes include something completely new.
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Generally I would say "Yes". Since it's better to have a tweak or different take on the standard tropes (like Dark Sun), but have a recognisable species - rather than the entire setting being different. Especially for those who use mini's, since they'd probably still like to use their standard collection.
I think a single 'important' other race could very well define the campaign setting, like in Earthdawn.
Whatever makes a setting most aesthetically cohesive. If there is a reason to include them and it makes sense- go for it. If it would be disruptive, don't do it.
Players are going to use your setting as a toolbox. The choice of races can help inform the players of the tone, but ultimately they are going to do what they want (and they should).
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Generally I would say "Yes". Since it's better to have a tweak or different take on the standard tropes (like Dark Sun), but have a recognisable species - rather than the entire setting being different. Especially for those who use mini's, since they'd probably still like to use their standard collection.
I think a single 'important' other race could very well define the campaign setting, like in Earthdawn.
I agree with most of this. I think it's important to have 3pp settings incorporate the standard races for a few reasons:
1)It broadens the materials available for use in that setting. There's so much material out there for the core races that cutting it off is kind of invalidating other materials a person may own.
2) It leaves you with more room in your campaign setting or whatever you're putting out to explore the world. New or weird races are great, but if there are no traditional races in your world you generally have to spend a pretty substantial amount of page space explaining who hates who, where they all come from, why they are where they are, etc. That tends to be "fluff" and may mean that there are pages and pages of your campaign setting that I will never read because I already have a campaign world I plan on incorporating your materials into. If I only care about 10-20% of a supplement priced as a full 3pp campaign setting, the odds of me buying it go down.
3) Familiarity breeds confidence. If I want to sell a GM, or my players, on a particular body of materials, giving them familiar things they can hook into, even if those familiar things act differently than they expect, makes them more comfortable with the setting. Dark Sun may have had cannibal halflings and street rat elves, but they were still halflings and elves and people got them. Had the cannibal halflings been an entirely new race of small flesh-eaters, they probably wouldn't have been nearly as interesting.
4) This ties in to number 3 a bit, but if your campaign setting requires me to use only your new races, I'll probably never use it. My group and I are going to personalize the world you present anyways, moving things around to accomodate the other 3pp materials we have, adding rivers for planned river boat adventures, etc. If your world and its history are built so tightly around new races that we have trouble incorporating all the other stuff we want to use, we're going to look for another world. Humans, elves, dwarves, etc. are nice because we know where they fit and what to do with them. If everyone in the group has to learn 9 new races and the accompanying feats and abilities, it may just be more work than we're interested in.
I don't believe that you can only have one new race, I'm fine with 5 new races, but it helps if the core is identifiable. Eberron is a really great example to follow. While there were like 4 new races in the setting, they had natural tie-ins to the core races with pretty organic relationships born from simple backstories. You didn't have to have shifters, kalash-tar, warforged, and changelings in Eberron to play the game, but their presence enhanced the setting.
Well regarding Kaidan specifics and both DSXMachina and Ssalarn's concerns. Yes, Kaidan is pretty much restricted to oriental mythic races, but that is only for indigenous populations in Kaidan itself. Kaidan is only a region, an archipelago of islands, it doesn't belong to a specific world, so there may very well be all the core races in lands beyond Kaidan. If your adventurers are visitors from outside Kaidan, they could be any race your GM allows.
Historically, Kaidan, like Shogunate Japan, was a closed society, though Kaidan has had closed borders for over 700 years, only recently (2 years ago) were the borders opened for outsiders to do trade with, which makes the absence of the core races a reasonable assumption. Also Kaidan society is humanocentric, with the non-human races living in the wilderness and fringes of society, looked at with disdain by the ruling classes and even hunted with bounties on their heads if they make themselves too visible.
When we did Dragon Tiger Ox, we included setting-appropriate variants on races as well as new races (pardon the name drop, just using it as an example).
We had humans, vanara and aasimar but they were distinct from their traditional role in a normal game (in both lore and mechanics). Guaiwu, samebito, and shishi were all new races. We also included a number of comments about "foreign" races (and even included mechanical support for them) to allow them to be easily integrated into a DTO game. Each race was selected to reinforce the flavor and theme of the setting.
Design is often a matter of exclusion as much as it is about incision. What races (or classes, or items, etc) ARE in your game are as important as what races would be considered unacceptable in it. Necropunk only has humans (but a verity of factions) to reinforce the "humanist" element, for example.
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Have them available, but make space for other things too. Some of us want more than the Standard Seven.
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Have them available, but make space for other things too. Some of us want more than the Standard Seven.
My own games tend to be pretty open on what race a character wants to play. The standard 7 are like the safety net that players can fall into when they just don't have a direction they want to go with; there's always something familiar to fall back on. But I do usually leave plenty of space for whatever other characters want to play; one of our home games has several desert themed anthromorphs including camel, hawk, and crocodile men, who all have some relation to one or more of the core races.
In Kaidan, there's specific races appropriate to the story of that region, but with room for other races to be introduced easily. I think if the story demands a certain flavor or regional element to the races, that's a good way to handle it.
As I think about it, probably more important than anything else is "Don't shoehorn in new races just because you want new races". If they're organic to the setting and don't contain exclusionary elements, they're probably fine.
I think it depends on what you are drawing on for inspiration. I think if you are going for something in the standard Quasi-European Fantasy genre, then you should probably have the core races, although perhaps tweaked. If you are drawing on completely different inspirations, than you might want to limit the core races used, and provide useful substitutions.
Kaidan I would say is a good model of a setting that works better with noncore races.
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Depending on the needs of your setting, you might want to go as far as to eliminate all races except humans. Remember that differences in lifespan and other factors will force cultural differences among the races, which might not be desirable if those differences don't fit the flavor of the setting.
No settings should spend any time detailing what races it contains.
For you, perhaps that's true, but that doesn't mean a developer shouldn't detail the races of a given setting.
I've read those settings and it just doesn't end up mattering to me. Races are good as a fashion choice and should exist to be such, but beyond that I just don't care and would rather the space be spent on more information about something else.
What if a multi-century war between dwarves and elves (for example) is a major plot point in a given setting, where the elven lands have been scoured and burned, and the current situation on the continent is entirely dependant on such a history. For a setting like that, details on the races and their relationships with each other might be at the center of the entire setting's design. By not detailing such races, there might be huge holes in the setting and filling it with something else just make it incomplete.
I certainly could see many settings that really don't need race details, but that shouldn't apply to every setting created. Races aren't always a fashion choice, it could actually be intrinsic to a setting concept.
At least speaking for myself, I'm with Silvercat and Scott. Nine times out of ten, I'm likely to ignore the as-written race limitations of a setting to open it up to my personal preferences, which are often a much wider array than most settings account for.
Granted, I buy setting stuff more for things to pick out and add to my own homebrew than to actually run the setting itself as written, so I'm likely not the target audience.
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Since I'm primarily a cartographer, creating the lay of the land is relatively easy for me, but its the races involved that make the setting something to behold.
Its like saying for a fantasy novel, the characters, their relationships and history in the storyline is a fashion choice, and only minutia concerning the environment has any value in the prose. (Which is complete nonsense, since the story is about the characters, not really the environment.) For me, the land of a setting is the environment, and the races are the characters of the novel and the only important subject in the setting itself.
Anybody can create a map and call it X, that to me is window dressing, the races, the relationships between them, the factions within each and their histories are the only necessary component of the setting design, and is the heart of what is a setting. Its the people, not the places that matter.
The question isn't "What's in the developer's best interest", the question is "What do you think".
Did you even read the OP?
Lets' reword it. "Do you think that when the developer makes new campaign settings, should the developer have standard races in the setting or not and why?
The question is asking what you think is in the best interests of a developer's design choice for your use and why. So the OP question is exactly what you say its not.
Certainly you could say its race X vs. race Y or Japanese vs. Portuguese. You could most likely swap any given race for something else, that is certainly true.
To me, the physical biology of a given race is only one tiny aspect of race, and not the definition of race. The definition of race is what they are, what is their social hierarchy, how they treat members not from their society, where they originated, how they got to where they are now, and what it their impact in the world - its all that that defines "race". No matter what the being looks like is almost meaningless, however, all the other details of who, what and why is what defines a race. If you don't include the complete ecology of a given race, its not a race, just a name of some recognizeable physical form.
If your setting is missing that detail, you don't have a setting at all.
To me the culture, beliefs, history as well as their physical features defines race, not just some limited biological description. I think we have differing definitions of race, and that's the crux of our disagreement.
And regarding your point about the question of the OP, yes, the question definitely is seeking the thoughts of those who aren't the developer, but the question regards how your thoughts impact what the developer is planning to include. The developer is not excluded from the question, both "you" and the "developer" are necessary components in the OP question.
If you look up any "race" in the bestiaries, there's more detail than what they look like. Here's a link to the d20pfsrd.com page on "elf". As you can see, the details is more than pointy earred, androgenous humanoid. That entire page is the total definition of the race "elf" and is the reason when I discuss race, I include the whole concept, not just physical description. If you leave out that detail, you haven't defined the race "elf". Hence, this is what I mean by race, which is the inclusion of all things in their culture, as well as biology.
I can agree that this is only a generalization of elf, but it does define them. While an individual can be non-conformist and thus be different than the defined race, all those sociological details are still intrinsic to the race and thus its definition, despite the outlier member of a given PC/NPC elf being different. There has to be a base definition, otherwise being "different" is meaningless.
And as I said in my first response to your comments in the thread - "and to you perhaps this is true" still applies. However, you stated "No settings should spend any time detailing what races it contains." Had you qualified that statement specifically with this thought applying to the way you play games (versus how anyone else does), I would not have contradicted your statements. As if applying to everyone's needs that developers should never detail races in their settings - which is the only real thing I am debating here.
Whenever I respond to a thread, if my opinion is likely different from the majority, I always qualify my answer with "at my table" I may or may not do things differently. I never make blanket generalizations that are unqualified to state what developers should do or not do...
Also, while I am admittedly a cartographer, as I said, for most settings cartography is window dressing. When I play, I really don't need a map of the world ever, as I tend to play within a small region, and if I make a map at all, its to help others playing the game know where they are. Do they really "need" the map? Probably not, but it helps to detail the environment which most players want to know. Since, at least our group relies on the PFRPG mechanics of movement in combat, having some kind of encounter scale map (even if its marker on white board with a grid). Maps are still important, in that aspect.
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To clarify the OP:
If a third party publisher puts out a campaign setting, should the standard fantasy races (dwarves, elves, etc.) be a part of the campaign setting?
For example, Midgard uses most of the standard races found in the Core Rulebook. However, NeoExodus does not. It has its own races, whose mechanics can be found in the setting material.
So to elaborate on the question, would you as a potential buyer be more inclined to buy a setting that has inclusions for the standard races (not necessarily new/different mechanics, but saying "yes, elves exist here, living in these areas and...") or would you be willing to go for a setting where their inclusion isn't explicitly mentioned in the setting book?
Okay, maybe I misinterpreted what you meant.
What I mean is I don't care about those details. I just can't seem to make them be important compared to an individual character. So I have no use for them. If I have no use for them then I don't need them in a setting product.
I don't need them. Whether or not a product should have them independent of what I think I don't care.
Do you buy setting material? Because the vast majority of it is going to be descriptions nations, regions, and plot events. I don't know how you can produce that without incorporating race specific information. Sure there is some crunch, but I don't know if that is the major draw.
I don't know how you can produce that without incorporating race specific information.I don't actually know either, but that doesn't mean I wouldn't like someone to try.
So to elaborate on the question, would you as a potential buyer be more inclined to buy a setting that has inclusions for the standard races (not necessarily new/different mechanics, but saying "yes, elves exist here, living in these areas and...") or would you be willing to go for a setting where their inclusion isn't explicitly mentioned in the setting book?I'd be more inclined to buy a setting where "race" is treated as minor window-dressing.
Count me in on this as well. Such would make anything this setting has to offer easier to incorporate into my own homebrew project, which would be the primary reason I'd buy such a product in the first place.
Then what would replace the ractial content, yet still make if valid setting worth paying any money for? Setting content isn't only racial data, but a significant amount of the setting is, so without racial data, its half a setting or less. What am I buying if there's no racial data? What replacement content adds enough value to make it viable? Is there a history of the setting with race "X" as the missing data, even though I don't know what race "X" represents - since you want the user to decide?
I'm sorry, but if you were the developer of this new kind of experimental setting that is missing all racial data, I would be the buyer that doesn't buy anything from you. Show me one setting that doesn't have such data and still works as a viable setting - I don't think such a setting exists, nor could.
Do you think when 3PP make new campaign settings, should they have the standard races in the setting or nor and why? Thanks!
Since I started this thread I guess I should give more detail on what I was looking for asking this question.
A while ago I was speaking to another game designer about my campaign setting, NeoExodus. He said to me that he didn't get the setting. I asked why and he said the main issue where the races. For him, the races were no traditional fantasy, so that caused issue for him. He wanted to play more traditional races in the setting. I said you could play those races in NeoExodus but those races were not native to the setting. He once again commented for that reason he would not be playing int he setting. When I built NeoExodus the reason I did not want to use the standard race was due to the perception of what they were and what you expected from them. I wanted the setting to be new and different from the typical fantasy you always see. On top of them players are always clamoring for new races to play, so I though this would be a win-win. But the biggest resistance I keep hearing, No standard races, then I don't want to play it.
Am I missing something here?
A while ago I was speaking to another game designer about my campaign setting, NeoExodus. He said to me that he didn't get the setting. I asked why and he said the main issue where the races. For him, the races were no traditional fantasy, so that caused issue for him. He wanted to play more traditional races in the setting. I said you could play those races in NeoExodus but those races were not native to the setting. He once again commented for that reason he would not be playing int he setting. When I built NeoExodus the reason I did not want to use the standard race was due to the perception of what they were and what you expected from them. I wanted the setting to be new and different from the typical fantasy you always see. On top of them players are always clamoring for new races to play, so I though this would be a win-win. But the biggest resistance I keep hearing, No standard races, then I don't want to play it.
Am I missing something here?
Well you can't please everyone, and that shouldn't even be a goal - its unattainable. To me settings that only include the core races are a dime a dozen - most settings use traditional fantasy concepts. Its difficult to stand out and sell your setting product when you compete with a hundred other settings that are practically the same thing. Granted settings can still be nuanced to be different even using the same ingredients, but is that nuance enough to be desireable/sellable?
When I conceived of Kaidan, I knew that it was primarily an oriental setting, which means its niche. There are certainly fans of oriental settings, at the same time, however, there is core of gamers that cannot stand oriental (nor other real world comparable niche cultures). Further Kaidan is a horror setting, so oriental and horror - its a niche of a niche. Being niche means it knowingly targets a smaller audience. I knew from the start that there was a large chunk of gamers that would never be the target market - and I'm fine with that. I didn't design Kaidan for them, rather I believed there were no settings focused on Asian horror - and I wanted to be the first, and do the best job I could in achieving that. For those gamers looking from something different, Kaidan is definitely different. I think I did pretty well in achieving my goals.
And while, like you, I'd really like more people to give my setting a try. If there is even slight interest in an oriental and horror setting, if someone were to give the setting a shot, I'm sure it would scratch a unique itch and I'd get a fan. Some reviewers have stated that Kaidan is their favorite Pathfinder setting over all others. So I know I can please the right kind of fan, but also realize I can't please everyone - nor would I try.