Decline Worst playable fantasy race?

Gnomes as a standard fantasy race are basically just quirky not-halflings that nobody ever bothers to make interesting. Even compared to other races, they have one distinct personality. We never see the gnome homeland. We never hear about their childhoods. If someone wants to make an interesting short character, they pick a halfling, never a gnome. Its telling that the only game to do something interesting with them was Arcanum, which hardly turned them interesting anyway.

 

Bobbit !

 

Nuke everything HP related from orbit just to be sure.

 

Though I like Dark Sun cannibalistic Halflings and super dishonest elves. Though Dark Sun has its own stupid races.

 

The only good gnome ever was Drizbach, one of premade PCs in Wizardry 8.

 

Being black or blackish, not sure what you mean by black humans. If it is « black humans are actually a different race than just black » like in TES or Everquest, yeah that’s incredibly stupid.

 

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It was just a clever decoy to expose the racists, but sure, we'll go with that.

I agree with your point on black people being a seperate race from humans though, always struck me as odd.

 

Racism against rats is not allowed that's why it's not an option, bitch.

 

Granted the constraint that races should be somewhat specialized to one of the main combat archetypes (with particular civic specialties on the side, like "quirky mechanicals"), you can't have both gnomes AND halflings. One or the other.

Also, while I'm in a grumpy mood: the idea of females as frontline fighters is perfectly ridiculous. Female sneaky poisoner assassins maybe, female mages of course; but female frontline fighters or combat rogues? Get outta here. Any race that habitually puts its females on the front line is headed for extinction (although ofc you could get around this with non-mammalian sexual reproduction systems and extreme sexual diamorphism, and that might actually be quite interdasting).

 

In a technical sense, black humans are a different race from white humans, while elves and dwares are not - they're altogether different species.

 

Yeah they are but race is being used as species in a lot of RPG's, dunno why really.

 

Any race that is not Lizard People

 

ur no rat

ur a TWAT

 

You are a zionist, everything you say is a lie.

 

I pretty much agree with this post. People hate on Elves but at least they have some kind of immediately recognizable identity and looks. Who can tell a Gnome from a Dwarf? Gnomes serve an awkward middle position between Dwarves and Halflings. Consequently, they are often omitted from games altogether due to redundancy, people either use Dwarves or Halflings. Sometimes they get some kind of gimmick slapped on, either they are fantasy jews money crazy bankers or something, or quirky scientists and inventors. Usually something over-the-top to compensate for their inherent redundancy. I never found them compelling or interesting and can't remember a single cool Gnome in any game or fantasy book I've read.

 

In a technical sense, it is a very complex topic since defining « races » within a specie is a subjective grouping of genetic differences, so you can probably claim « black » and « white » are two different races, or you could just as well pick the right subset of genetic traits to claim that « Africans and Europeans » are one race but « Irish » is another.

And then there are the quarteron like me.


I propose we leave that specific topic to « general discussion » there is a reason I don’t go there.

 

I think speedy knife rogue females make sense enough to suspend disbelief, but I've always hated females in heavy armor or bastard sword type roles. You can pull it off with a lot of effort, I usually cite the chick in Game of Thrones as a decent example, but you need a beast of a woman to do it. Most RPGs put these pretty little things in heavy armor and call them tanks and it irritates the fuck out of me. This isn't just a mainstream Dragon Age thing either, as Codex incline game extraordinaire Pathfinder Kingmaker did the same thing.

 

Lizards are nice, especially when they aren't just human scalies (TES, I'm looking at you) but their own thing. It's a mystery why we don't see more of them in RPGs. Same thing with amphibians, like frogmen and such, they were neat in Everquest.

I see a lot of hate on Tolkien-esque races in this thread, but I think they are underrated, because if you are making a game with them it means you don't need to spend a lot of time introducing their concept. You don't need to have a party member or NPC to represent what an elf is like since most players already know elves. The worst thing you can do is to make not-Tolkien races to stand in for the stereotypes, like PoE did. If you're going to abandon the generic then you should take it all the way, make it weird! I actually can't think of any RPG that did that, with the exception of Planescape Torment maybe, but that game was D&D based lol.

 

Ratcism, you mean.

In fantasy it makes perfect sense. Even in relatively cosmopolitan empires you are going to have distinct populations of various human races with their own culture, archetypes, valued skills and other traits, making for a separate race in gameplay mechanics sense.
In Sci-Fi, yes, you can (and most likely should, unless the setting is some thinly veiled nazi-sue wankery OR there are good reasons not to) expect humans (at least baseline, modified - high G, spacer, belter, etc. human population may reflect traits of small population of founders) to be a mixed bag of races (or, in some settings, a homogenous, most likely mixed race), but in fantasy you should either have separate, mechanically distinct races (if only because their culture, magical arts, fighting style and so on are different) or have only one, single colour race of choice - having just evenly mixed bag of humans of various random colours and physiognomies with no background for those differences is just woke nonsense when applied to fantasy.

Mapping races to archetypes just makes races or classes obsolete mechanically.
Better have each race realize its unique take or set of takes on each of the archetypes.
It makes sense too as each of those races is meant to create a plausible society, you can't have a race of just warriors, or just thieves, or just priests, or just scholars, just like having separate races of just cobblers and just bakers would be ridiculous.

Individual female combatants are ok, but they should be minority in fantasy settings for any reasonably human-like race. Substantially different races may differ in that regard, but need to make sense.

 

TES argonians are pretty cool, especially in Morrowind where they actually have their own full body models, rather than looking like escapees from a furry convention.

 

I thought Khajiits were also pretty well done in TES until ESO turned them into furries.

 

Duh, of course you'd say that, lizard. It was pretty sweet that they were mechanically different, with not being able to wear shoes and some helmets IIRC, but I still feel they were waaay too close to being humans. Reptiles should think and act entirely different. Arcanum did that right.

 

Yeah Brienne of Tarth is an awesome character, and quite realistically drawn. But of course an extreme anomaly. There's like a handful of notable female fighters in history (Joan of Arc isn't one - the one I'm thinking of is actually a fairly rogueish archetype from the 19th century, forget her name, but she killed several men in duels, both pistols and fencing). I remember a program on UK tv about a prehistoric village where there had been a massacre and the archaeologists reckoned that the village's females had gone down fighting, and it's plausible that sort of thing might have happened in extremis, as a last resort.

Another interesting example is from the history of Taijiquan (Tai Chi). In Chen village, where the art's origins can be traced back to the 16th century, the Chen clan, which was locally known for sending its most skilled scions off to earn good money as caravan bodyguards (interestingly the weapon of choice for that sort of thing was halberd-type weapons), females were also trained in the art, and in the clan's historical lore, some reached a high level of skill. But by the end of the 18th century, after one of the clan patriarch's daughters had been killed in a fight, the clan decided that while females of the clan could still learn the art for health and general self-defense, they were no longer allowed to participate as actual fighters. The really interesting thing about this is that the so-called "internal" ("qi"-based) arts like Taijiquan rely less on muscle mass and momentum, and more on the integration of several factors, such as clever leverage, a trained method of transmitting the solidity of the ground to a point of contact, and a particular way of conditioning the body's "fascial web" using breathing practices; so actually it was (and is) something possible for females to excel in.

A side-gripe is that these kinds of "qi"-based skills have never been faithfully implemented in RPGs or CRPGs because they're thought of as quasi-magical, where actually they're just physical skills, albeit of a recondite kind. To be sure, the idea of "internal" arts had a quasi-magical connotation even in China and Japan, but that was just from the fact that high level skill can look "magical" to the layperson. But it's hard to think of how to actually realize "qi"-based skills in a CRPG. The fighting techniques are all mostly based around very close-range fighting, a cross between wrestling, judo and very short-range striking with extraordinarily high impulse, but all delivered in a relaxed way. (It's a little bit like the Bruce Lee "one inch punch" - although that's actually a different technique, but the impact on the observer is similar, it looks surprising because there's zero windup or obvious use of hips or anything like that.) Also, it should be noted that the barehand training was always just a foundation, the ultimate aim was melee weapons, and Taijiquan still preserves several weapons forms (sword, spear, halberd, mace, IIRC).