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In a slightly less likely-to-be deleted post, what if we use 'essence' and 'upbringing'. Essence is literally what you are and upbringing is what shaped you as an individual.
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ICON uses "Kin".
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What if we did Heritage and Culture(s).
Your Heritage is what you inherited from your parents and/or whoever built you.
Your Cultures are all the external forces that shaped you as you were growing up, you'd inherit one for free from your Heritage (e.g. if your parents are Dwarves, you've been exposed to Dwarfy ideas) but you will have more. You choose the analogue to ancestry feats with an access requirement of a Culture, but some might require a Heritage as well. For example, if you happen to be venomous because of your parents, and you grew up among those people, you probably learned how to control and use your venom from your people. You wouldn't learn to control your venom as a Dwarf, but might as an Anadi.
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This starts to sound like quite a lot of complexity for relatively little gain.
Other words that one could use:
- Bloodline
- Body
- Breed
- Corpus
- Clade
- Subtype (literally how we identify them on the monster side)
- Source
- Origin
- Lineage
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The basic problem with Orcs, is that historically Orcs have been presented throughout fantasy as a people with very little to recommend them- mean, ugly, stupid, producing nothing of value, and seldom the brains behind the organization; you kill them on sight and don't think twice about it. This sucks both from the perspective of "it doesn't feel like this is a real culture- real cultures have things like aesthetic sensibilities, art, music, sports, etc." and also from a "basically anything humanoid with a mind and free will is something a player character might want to play as, and there ought to be more and better prompts for the person inhabiting the character" perspective.
The very idea that "some people have less value and are prone to do bad things simply because of what they look like/who their parents were" is an inherently racist idea, so we should do our best to eliminate that from the hobby.
If you want to fix orcs, you need to figure out what's positive about orcs and provide a balanced portrayal of both the good parts and the less good parts.
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The very idea that "some people have less value and are prone to do bad things simply because of what they look like/who their parents were" is an inherently racist idea, so we should do our best to eliminate that from the hobby.
If you want to fix orcs, you need to figure out what's positive about orcs and provide a balanced portrayal of both the good parts and the less good parts.
Many have done this... and yet the issue remains.
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Paizo has done an alright job with orcs I think.
I agree, but I would not be against even more orc options. :)
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I think the thing is that for sure some societies are bad or destructive and people are influenced by growing up in those societies. But whenever that happens there are always people within the society that are trying to fix whatever is bad or destructive about it (in large part because they care about the good parts of what their people have going on.) When you have a "these people are bad because of how they were raised" thing going on, there should be some attention paid to "how do the people within that society think about this." If so many people's children end up dying in wars that don't accomplish much, people are eventually going to come to the conclusion "we shouldn't do so much of that."
So when you have a society that is thousands of years old (or older) and hasn't actually made any serious effort to solve problems or address either changing circumstances or destructive patterns feels weird to me. When bad people assume power it's difficult to remove them, but there are always people who are.
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I think the thesis of The Lord of the Rings is that "individuals matter more than race (or culture)". At the end of the day, hobbits can be heroes, elves and dwarves can be friends, and, more importantly, the small good actions make the world a better place.
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Tolkien and/or Gygax may or may not be irredeemable, but I'm starting to think this thread might be... There aren't enough hours in the day...
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I think the nature of Ancestry feats shows that ultimately that most of what you get from your ancestry *is* cultural or at least based on "you were raised in this culture and you know other people from this culture who can teach you things that they might not share with outsiders".
Since like "as an Elf you are genetically predisposed to knowing how to use a longbow, and maybe at some point in your adulthood you will become an expert at it because of your Elf genes" is a much weirder and unnatural explanation than "You're an Elf, other Elves taught you to use the longbow."
So a lot of ancestry feats *could* be easily rolled into "background feats" if we wanted to make Backgrounds more important and Ancestries (or the analogue therof) less important.
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The solution for versatile heritage is to just do what PF1 did. Make each a unique ancestry and then ask what is your parentage to determine feat access. So you get a half-elf (ancestry) with a human and elf (parentage) and either the human, elf, or half-elf (heritage).
I do like that PF2 has established that you can be a Gnome Tiefling and as a result have both Gnome traits and Tiefling traits. The PF1 way where you could be a Gnome Tiefling but there was nothing mechanically gnomey about you except your size sat wrong with me.
So maybe the solution is to make Backgrounds modular, where you get a certain number of choices, where some are mandated to fit in a certain box (like "how your backstory ties into the campaign" in the AP player's guide) and some are free. So if you wanted to be a Dwarf Duskwalker you would use one of your free choices to be a Duskwalker who is also a Dwarf while a Dwarf who is not a Duskwalker would get to pick an additional thing instead.