The D&D model is that PC types are not very different from human. In AD&D, halflings are -1 Strength and +1 Dexterity, which is only slightly noticeable in the curve. A third of halflings are stronger than the average human. This is a bit of a game device - it's intentional that PCs aren't very different from human.

But in a lot of fantasy fiction and movies, the fantasy folk are much different than human in both look and function. Tolkien has elves who can all walk on snow and run full speed on a tightrope. Willow has the Nelwyn who are more like real-life little people, i.e. much weaker than average humans. Character types like pixies, half-giants, talking animals, and so on are common in a lot of fantasy fiction.

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So I'm curious about thoughts and/or examples of such characters working in people's fantasy games. A few thoughts to start:

1) It's a potential balance problem for race+class selection systems like D&D. If you allow a half-giant with +5 Strength, then why would anyone make a non-half-giant melee fighter? Or why would anyone make a half-giant who is a wizard instead of a fighter?

2) It could work more straightforwardly with race-as-class, but I haven't seen race-as-class adapted to things like flying pixies, half-giants, or talking lions.

3) It could work in point systems, where I've seen the more of these. I had an Action! System game set in Middle Earth that had an elf PC, where most of his point spending went into simply being an elf.

4) It could also work in more minimalist systems. I played in my friend Russell's Crystal Palace game, which didn't have race but had highly differentiated species - using a freeform system called "Strange Brew" which is closest to something like Risus. There were sneaky chameleon-people, talking trees, unicorns, and others - but no humans.

Iirc tall tales of the wee folk for BECMI literally has pixes and i know there are giants in other Mystara books though the only one that immediately comes to mind was the sea giant. While not quite a talking luon, there was a Sphinx race class for BECMI as well

I think Shadow of the Demon Lord handled non-standard races very well. Some races like centaurs and half-giants are considered "powerful" races and have that built into the power balance. In exchange they do not get access to the basic classes as the racial traits replace those abilities. It does help that the races are not simply an afterthought in the system.

Quote from: jhkim on February 15, 2023, 06:54:05 PM
1) It's a potential balance problem for race+class selection systems like D&D. If you allow a half-giant with +5 Strength, then why would anyone make a non-half-giant melee fighter? Or why would anyone make a half-giant who is a wizard instead of a fighter?

Dark Sun was actually D&D that allowed for half-giants. I have no idea what the STR mod was. I'm guessing +4. Half Dwarfs and Thri-Kreen were popular race choices for fighters. I'm not sure why people love dwarfs so much. But the Thri-Kreen, natural attacks and a third arm seemed like pretty understandable reasons why people would choose that over half-giants.

Quote2) It could work more straightforwardly with race-as-class, but I haven't seen race-as-class adapted to things like flying pixies, half-giants, or talking lions.

D&D Hollow World has Brutemen. Which is bigger, stronger, more Brutish than the Orc option they also have. And then they also had a Lizardman race as class. And a mini magical Kobold race.

Quote3) It could work in point systems, where I've seen the more of these. I had an Action! System game set in Middle Earth that had an elf PC, where most of his point spending went into simply being an elf.

4) It could also work in more minimalist systems. I played in my friend Russell's Crystal Palace game, which didn't have race but had highly differentiated species - using a freeform system called "Strange Brew" which is closest to something like Risus. There were sneaky chameleon-people, talking trees, unicorns, and others - but no humans.

I don't really have a whole ton of insight or experience to offer in terms of seeing half-giants of pixies in these sorts of systems. I can speak to the Lejendary Adventure RPG, which is skill-based but has optional class-like structures. They've got Oafs, major and typical, kind of like half-giants. Not literally. But in LA ogres are more powerful than giants, so Oafs is the best match for the missing link between men and giants. They are also really good at surprise/ambush despite their size, and they're good at climbing and brachiating, and so are well-equipped to drop down on you out of nowhere.

Why not be a major oaf fighter? Oafs are not well-rounded enough to be a good fit for most of those optional class-like structures. And even just evaluated on fighting skills alone, while they tend to have a LOT more hit points than your typical human fighter, and a much higher strength damage bonus, because Oafs have low Precision, their hit probability suffers badly. You can begin with extremely high scores in a very limited list of skills, but the remainder will begin very very low.

Why would an oaf do anything other than fight? Well, they can use what you might call "cleric magic" in D&D terms. It's going to begin at a very terrible rating. But there is reason you might want to do it. The Speed stat reflects both physical and neural speed, and so this is one of the main stats for determining how many "spell points" you will be able to use. Because Oafs begin with such low speed, when it comes to avoiding physical attacks (think "saving throws"), they are granted a bonus speed multiplier to reflect that they are quite physically capable. This means if you sink a lot of points into Speed, as you scale it up, it scales up with the benefit of the bonus multiplier. And if you follow that path, you'll be able to have a lot of spell points. And that might make it worth working on their cleric spell casting skill.

LA's also got kobolds. They are super fast (able to attack twice in a combat round), have an innate strength bonus, innate armor, innate magical or psychogenic ability, and the ability to turn invisible at will. Does that qualify as majorly different? The tricky thing about that is they're built to make awesome fighters. And awesome spell casters (mages, clerics, and other). And also awesome thieves, what with innate invisibility and automatically beginning with Stealth ability. With them the bigger question is why play anything else.

Two reasons you can get just from analyzing the rules. first is NPCs tend not to like them, just for being kobolds. It's kind of understandable when you think about a creature who can innately turn invisible at will and tends to be good at stealing. Second, while they are moderately good at fitting into several of the class-like structures, by being good at everything, they're basically spread too thin to make great specialists in any one thing, and there's extra red tape as a consequence when it comes to following one of those paths.

A third reason that comes up in play is, it turns out that their advantages often gets them elected to take on some of the most dangerous tasks. At the level of what's good for the party, it's hard not to automatically assign the kobold to walk point, what with their stealth and invisibility. They're the ones you want scouting ahead. Meaning they're the first to face many of the dangers, and will be going it alone more often than most party members. Second is that super-fast ability to get extra attacks has them sticking their neck out just by virtue of fighting. Combine that with the fact that if their only statistical weakness is in "hit points" it can be a recipe for doom.

Quote from: Lunamancer on February 15, 2023, 08:05:06 PM
Dark Sun was actually D&D that allowed for half-giants. I have no idea what the STR mod was. I'm guessing +4. Half Dwarfs and Thri-Kreen were popular race choices for fighters. I'm not sure why people love dwarfs so much. But the Thri-Kreen, natural attacks and a third arm seemed like pretty understandable reasons why people would choose that over half-giants.

It was a +4, but Dark Sun attributes were rolled on 4d4+4, not 3d6, and Half-Giants had to have a 17 or better to qualify for the race. Add four, and you're starting at 21. And 21 does a lot of damage on mêlée...

Thri-Kreen were fine for stuff like psionicists, since they had good natural defense and could use psychometab powers to boost their mêlée power even further. But for fighters, the fact that they couldn't wear armor even custom-fit caused some trouble for them. I expect that in 3e they'd be a shoo-in for monks, though.

Muls ("half-Dwarves") had some bonus for force marching and stuff, but were actually not nearly as good as half-Giants or Thri-Kreen. I guess the meme of them being raised especially for gladiatorial combat got into people's heads; remember, this was before easy access to the Internet to get access to char-op boards. I guess at least they weren't level-limited in Gladiator class, so there's that.

Quote from: Wtrmute on February 15, 2023, 08:31:01 PM
It was a +4, but Dark Sun attributes were rolled on 4d4+4, not 3d6, and Half-Giants had to have a 17 or better to qualify for the race. Add four, and you're starting at 21. And 21 does a lot of damage on mêlée...

Thri-Kreen were fine for stuff like psionicists, since they had good natural defense and could use psychometab powers to boost their mêlée power even further. But for fighters, the fact that they couldn't wear armor even custom-fit caused some trouble for them. I expect that in 3e they'd be a shoo-in for monks, though.

I really only got a ton of play in Dark Sun on my Bard character. The DM played up material scarcity quite a bit. I don't recall anyone really having much armor, so the natural armor of the Thri-Kreen was a lot more of an asset than a liability.

I remember I also rolled up a cleric with a 20 Strength. Clerics as it is are already pretty decent fighters. Of all the advantages fighters have at fighting over clerics, the exceptional strength is the biggest one. But since Dark Sun made it possible to get stats over 18, exceptional strength suddenly isn't that big a deal. Not when you can have a 19 or a 20. And right there would be a good reason to play an other-than-fighter for a half giant. Their innate strength negates the value of one of the fighter class's biggest advantages. Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?

Quote from: jhkim on February 15, 2023, 06:54:05 PM1) It's a potential balance problem for race+class selection systems like D&D. If you allow a half-giant with +5 Strength, then why would anyone make a non-half-giant melee fighter? Or why would anyone make a half-giant who is a wizard instead of a fighter?

2) It could work more straightforwardly with race-as-class, but I haven't seen race-as-class adapted to things like flying pixies, half-giants, or talking lions.

This is the primary reason for switching to race-as-class (although I prefer the term "racial class") for my OD&D game. I avoided strange PC races all through my AD&D years but in my 3x campaign I wanted to increase the diversity of race options. Fortunately, that game had a Savage Species book (a totally not PC name that wouldn't fly today) but it had the problem you specified. Races had to be balanced for their most optimal class choice. That's why the relatively weak Kobold had a one level penalty to take it despite being absolutely terrible in every class except Sorcerer in which it excelled.

Race-as-class allows the DM to adjust any XP penalty individually for any race and class combo this avoiding all min-maxing issues with race+class. I include things like ogres, goblins, and pixies as standard choices in my OD&D game.

Another factor is balancing the bonuses and penalties of very large and very small characters. D&D 3e handles this well by giving large characters a penalty to hit and to be hit but a bonus to damage. Small characters get the inverse. The effects cancel each other out so two characters of the same size fight at normal (non-penalized) values.

I also use this size modifiers whenever they would logically apply: tiny characters using the modifier as a bonus to Stealth type skills whereas large character use the modifier as a bonus to things like Intimidation (while getting a penalty for Stealth, naturally).

Quote from: Lunamancer on February 15, 2023, 08:43:37 PM
I really only got a ton of play in Dark Sun on my Bard character. The DM played up material scarcity quite a bit. I don't recall anyone really having much armor, so the natural armor of the Thri-Kreen was a lot more of an asset than a liability.

Fair enough. Our campaigns weren't particularly focused on raw desert survival past the early levels (we bought some lifeshaping splatbooks, so adventures naturally veered in that direction) but we fought enough Braxats to get leather for AC3 armour to anyone who could use it by level 10 or 12. Tough bastards, though.

Quote from: Lunamancer on February 15, 2023, 08:43:37 PM
I remember I also rolled up a cleric with a 20 Strength. Clerics as it is are already pretty decent fighters. Of all the advantages fighters have at fighting over clerics, the exceptional strength is the biggest one. But since Dark Sun made it possible to get stats over 18, exceptional strength suddenly isn't that big a deal. Not when you can have a 19 or a 20. And right there would be a good reason to play an other-than-fighter for a half giant. Their innate strength negates the value of one of the fighter class's biggest advantages. Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?

I never thought that exceptional strength was actually worth much, because back then we still rolled 3d6 for attributes, so less than 0.5% of fighters even got an 18 in Strength (and when I did, I would roll a 12 or 33 for exceptional strength. Figures). For me, the biggest advantage the Fighter had over the Cleric was really weapon specialisation and attack frequency.

Of course, you can always play some other class with a half-Giant, but usually their level limits for other classes were crap anyway, so you might as well go Fighter.

Quote from: Slambo on February 15, 2023, 07:08:41 PM
Iirc tall tales of the wee folk for BECMI literally has pixes and i know there are giants in other Mystara books though the only one that immediately comes to mind was the sea giant. While not quite a talking luon, there was a Sphinx race class for BECMI as well

Yes, there was a huge variety of race options for BECMI. Not all were well made but they ran the gamut from pixies, to ogres, to werewolves.

Someone made of list of them all and their sources.
http://www.pandius.com/becmicls.html

Fantasy Hero handles it by each race having to pay for its abilities out of the points, same as any other character.

I don't often want to run particularly strong or weak races, because I usually run campaigns where the starting characters being roughly equivalent to humans gives a nice contrast to the nasty things out in the wild.  If I did now, I think I'd simply use the Dragon Quest solution in a skills-based game.

DQ unabashedly has some races particularly stronger than others, includes Middle-earth style Elves, Giants, and even occasionally Lycanthropes.  DQ is not exactly wide-open skills based.  Some skills are in packages that you must buy together (e.g. Assassin skills) and others have opportunity costs (e.g. only 1 college of magic allowed per character, and there's a progression of basic spells before you get to the really good ones).  Anyway, the rules take advantage of this structure to limit races in two ways:

1. You must roll to qualify for a race.  If you don't get your first three choices, you must play human.  And you must set all of your characteristics before rolling for races.  Which means unless you play human, you don't know for a fact what your race will be when you set those characteristics.  The racial bonuses/penalties are steep.

2. All non-human races have an XP factor applied to everything they buy--weapons, spells, skill packages, etc.  The better the race, the steeper the cost.  Most of them have a few niche things where they get a discount to mitigate the factor.  So if you go against type with a race, you pay through the nose, and if you don't, you still pay a lot.

It's a nice way of simulating the slower progression and level limits of AD&D or BEMCI/RC without the hard cut offs.  It is some discouragement from playing non-humans but not so bad that no one will try, which will make parties often human-centric.  Meanwhile, when someone does play a non-human, they have some nifty features out of the gate that embodies the race.

I'm very much in favor of more differentiation between character races. I really dislike the homogenization that you get with different player races being simply +1/-1 of each other.

It takes a certain amount of maturity from the players to avoid munchkinization -- No matter how well thought-out the system, there are going to be more-optimal character builds. However, playing mechanically-optimal characters isn't usually where the greatest fun lies for TTRPGs (for most players).

I'm perfectly willing to accept being mechanically non-optimal if my race choice provides interesting situational benefits and drawbacks. I want to feel like I'm playing something non-human, that relates to the world in a way distinctive from other characters. I think it's tough to really pull that off without a DM that cooperates with you on distinguishing your character -- A game system complex enough to represent all the different mechanical ways fantasy races might differ is going to be overbearing. Way easier to describe a race as being "Superhumanly Agile" and then when that comes up in play, let the players & DMs work out what that means in context.

Dungeons and Delvers Dice Pool handles it with special abilities.   Three per race.  You pick one at character creation.  Even humans. 

A human could pick Perseverance (free re-roll), Skilled (higher than normal skill including combat skill), or Talented (get an extra class ability). 

A Beastman could pick Claws (no need for a weapon), Heightened Senses (bonus to track skill), or Long Strider (bonus to movement speed).

With this setup you could have two players use the same race, but still be unique.  My beastman is a walking wolf with Heightened Senses, while yours is a Lion-man with claws. 

Quote from: jhkim on February 15, 2023, 06:54:05 PM
The D&D model is that PC types are not very different from human. In AD&D, halflings are -1 Strength and +1 Dexterity, which is only slightly noticeable in the curve. A third of halflings are stronger than the average human. This is a bit of a game device - it's intentional that PCs aren't very different from human.

But in a lot of fantasy fiction and movies, the fantasy folk are much different than human in both look and function. Tolkien has elves who can all walk on snow and run full speed on a tightrope. Willow has the Nelwyn who are more like real-life little people, i.e. much weaker than average humans. Character types like pixies, half-giants, talking animals, and so on are common in a lot of fantasy fiction.

I'm not sure its intentional. I am pretty sure the point was lost somewhere post-2e, as the 3e and alter only mimed 1e/2e and put little fare (at least from WotC - I wouldn't apply this to 3rd party developers) that extrapolated on the numbers and mechanics of races more than the context. This muting of context has continued until what we have now - where race is just a costume for mechanics.

I'm *always* enforcing the cultural norms of my world on my players. Including subdivisions of cultures - High Elves and Wood Elves don't view the world the same, and the troubles of one group of High Elves in a region aren't the same as troubles of another. Same is true of humans, halflings, gnomes etc. And I certainly don't pretend everything is a "cosmopolitan mixed-cultural happyland" in large metropolis-sized cities without justifiable reason and cultural fractures that would and do exist.

What this means for their mechanical stats/abilities are precisely what the setting demands. And it's the job of the GM to fully contextualize them otherwise you get the Human in the Rubber suit - much like in Star Trek.

Quote from: jhkim on February 15, 2023, 06:54:05 PMSo I'm curious about thoughts and/or examples of such characters working in people's fantasy games. A few thoughts to start:

1) It's a potential balance problem for race+class selection systems like D&D. If you allow a half-giant with +5 Strength, then why would anyone make a non-half-giant melee fighter? Or why would anyone make a half-giant who is a wizard instead of a fighter?

One of the problems of D&D is, again, the context of race to the setting in question. Since D&D doesn't really promote settings as deeply as before, everyone assumes all races are on the table. A deeper problem is that there is no real attempt at mechanically balancing races outside of meta-narratives that you point out:

Do Half-giants even EXIST in this setting the GM is running? If so why? And beyond that, why is the assumption that just because Half-giants exist because of the presumed biological reality they have +5 strength, there is ZERO cultural context to the race other than "Big Strength Fighter Race"?

The D&D system only pretends the way it allows races/classes/abilities/Feats/spells to be constructed is "balanced". It's not balanced by mechanical means or even by narrative ones. The problem is it PRETENDS to be. There are two simple options: Create a matrix of race building options with Stat/Ability bonuses AND Penalties and let the GM's have a field day with a point-cost cap (and rebalance all races along these lines). Or toss "balance" out the window and put heavy cultural context to each race on why they exist and in what fashion they interact with others, to justify their commonality in any specific place. Preferably you can do the latter with the former.

But the GM should always be there to say "NO" to players in any case depending on what they're running for a game or campaign.

Quote from: jhkim on February 15, 2023, 06:54:05 PM2) It could work more straightforwardly with race-as-class, but I haven't seen race-as-class adapted to things like flying pixies, half-giants, or talking lions.

Assuming you play a class based game. Sure. But then it makes races a monolithic experience. Which again is cementing the lack of context for your campaign. If you're running one-shots, who cares? Does it matter?

Quote from: jhkim on February 15, 2023, 06:54:05 PM3) It could work in point systems, where I've seen the more of these. I had an Action! System game set in Middle Earth that had an elf PC, where most of his point spending went into simply being an elf.

See Savage Worlds. GO CRAZY. And it's exactly as balanced as you want it to be. You can literally make anything you want however you want to conceive it. Cultural distinctions that matter can be codified into the mechanics and force context in almost any imaginable way, as you see fit.

Quote from: jhkim on February 15, 2023, 06:54:05 PM4) It could also work in more minimalist systems. I played in my friend Russell's Crystal Palace game, which didn't have race but had highly differentiated species - using a freeform system called "Strange Brew" which is closest to something like Risus. There were sneaky chameleon-people, talking trees, unicorns, and others - but no humans.

/shrug sure. The question remains - are setting demands required to justify race distinction? I believe it is.

Mutant Crawl Classics (MCC) does different races fairly well.  It uses race as class. Mutants can have 2 heads, stuff like that. Manimals have wings, claws, etc. Plantients are similarly weird. There are also cultural problems between the races.

The problem is the GM and players have to really buy in. If your mutant has 6 legs, that's a strong defining characteristic and you and the GM have to consider it in most interactions. Can you even climb a ladder? If it's session #5 and you're just now recalling that you have 6 legs, you and the GM have failed and you should have just played a human.

The problem with bonuses/penalties to common attributes (half-giant has Str +5) is that they're boring and the underlying reason is quickly forgotten. Lazy players just want the +5. Lazy GMs will not raise any RP issues. "We go to the tavern." Do you even fit through the fucking door and why haven't the townspeople killed you on sight?

So, yeah, race as class is the only way to do this effectively. Once people start thinking in terms of differentials from human, they're just playing a Star Trek alien aka a human with face paint, silly clothing, and forehead FX.

Unsupported assertion I'm just going to throw out there for discussion:  In a given setting, some substantial distinctions in racial abilities are just flat going to work much better than others. 

Examples:  Elves allergic to cold iron.  Elves as plant creatures.  Elves as 2-foot tall cookie makers (OK, maybe not).  Elves as unusually perceptive and good with bows.  Elves as moderately long-lived versus extremely long-lived versus immortals.

In my current campaign, elves are allergic to cold iron, are mammals, are slightly smaller than humans, aren't particularly noted for any weapons or skills, and max out at around 250 years old.  All of those things were set that way for reasons, and would be a worse fit if they were changed.  In another campaign, maybe not.