Including Tolkien races in a fantasy RPG is just as overdone and uninspired as making an early-access survival game...

Only if you have notelves and notdwarves.

My donut steel setting has 4-armed dudes, winged dudes, 8-foot giants, horned sheepmen and eel people.

Literally none of those are dwarfy or elfy.

>horned sheepmen
Sheepataurs? Cool, I mean BaAaaAAa

But what if you combined those two things and made a fantasy RPG survival game with zombiefied Tolkien races? That still never leaves early access.

Not necessarily, it's just a shorthand, easily relatable way to describe fantasy cultures. For example, you could describe Dwarves as somewhat Nordic/Viking-ish.

If I don't have an elf race, how will my players who can't be assed to read the backstory know who they're supposed to hate right away?

Dumb post. Sharing cultural and aesthetic inspirations is one of the fastest and easiest ways to communicate fictional cultures. If you were running a game in the LotR Jacksonverse, you'd describe one or two men of rohan, but you'd tell the players they have a generally dark-age viking-celtic look to them.

Nothing is original, embrace that fact rather than trying to hide it.

You know what Tolkien race I don't see enough of in games? Ents. Fantasycraft is the only one I know of where you can play a tree dude.

Dryads aren't that rare. PC races are generally more in the humanoid mold in terms of size and shape, because ents are very very strong. Also it's tough to get a 18-foot treeman into a dungeon or through a town gate.

That being said, I'd fucking allow it.

They're usually considered too monstrous.

To some people they are. The bar for elf has been brought as low as "has pointy ears". It is stupid, but here we are. It is best to accept the fact and continue to produce what you want to see regardless.

By playing the game and encountering other douches.
That is like asking how am I supposed to register heat when I touch fire instead of the stove.
Good old "show don't tell".

And all of those are a bitch to balanced for player characters.

People having using those races in fiction since long before Tolkien, because they're less a specific species than an archetype that speaks to us as humans on a fundamental level. They're varied enough to be reinterpreted a million and one ways, they're (usually) similar enough to humans that they don't whirl your setting into a jarringly unbelievable place, and they can include a wide range of characters, whereas most OC donut steel races are pretty much just one racial stereotype pasta'd over and over.

There's nothing wrong with excluding them, but there's nothing wrong with including them either. Elves and dwarves have persisted as a varied, robust fictional template for over six centuries for a reason.

Stuff like is no more original anyway. Giants and beastfolk are hardly new ideas.

Fuck that. We've got too many potential player race options in countless monster manuals and critter compendiums to just disregard them because "urrr monsters".

Horned Sheepmen and Eelmen don't sound hard to balance at all.

Not at all. I run GURPS. You literally just have a shopping list of racial features that come out of your usual point allowance with a 10% discount.

>no more original

Objectively incorrect, friend.

I'd accept that they're not original, because you're right in that most of the unique features do appear in a fair amount of settings. However to be 'no more original' than elfdorfhobbit would actually be an impressive feat. You have to really work to find a high-fantasy RPG with a prebaked setting that /doesnt/ feature them, and the handful you'll find are going to be human only settings. It's not a new frontier in the tabletop genre, but it's something.

>I run GURPS

So it's everything is extremely samey and boring then.

Elaborate.

In order to balance let's say, a normal human with your four armed dudes, you'll need to add so many negative traits to the four armed dudes it just comes down to making a crippled idiot savant just for the flavour.

Things like Dwarves and elves are very human like and don't need to stray so dramatically from the same generic power base.

>In order to balance let's say, a normal human with your four armed dudes, you'll need to add so many negative traits to the four armed dudes it just comes down to making a crippled idiot savant just for the flavour.
That's wrong dummy.

Two extra arms are 20 points, adding the other bits the template comes to around 50 points. The other races are around the same, there is no 'standard human' race in the setting.

Moreso than that tho, the standard dwarfelfhobbit templates in splats are around the same cost.

So what's the problem?

So how the fuck do you balance someone being able to literally fly over a normal human?

How the fuck is being able to fly or use multiple weapons balanced over being a fucking sheep person?

This is why I don't understand GURPS autists, It literally cannot be balance by concept.

They have 30 less points to spend on skills and other advantages.

You're really struggling with point-buy huh?

In the setting in question, all the races are roughly the same cost, with different features.

But even assuming your hypothetical, the worse races get more points to spend on other things.

I really dont understand your objection, user.

So then it IS literally being more retarded at the advantage of having four arms.

Which is stupid as fuck.

How does a race with four arms somehow become less skilled than a fucking sheep person. Have you ever seen a sheep? They are quite possibly the most retarded animals ever invented.

THIS is why GURPS is flawed, it's fucking retarded.

Weirdness is a currency with which writers/world-builders obtain setting-depth. That is to say, the more new and original things in your world, the more players need to learn before they can understand what's going on, but the more room you have to play around with interesting themes outside of cliches. In TTRPGs, this often works alongside a similar rule for using rules-complexity to obtain system-depth; both of these have to do with how much information you require players to learn before they can really enjoy your system.

As a result, depending on the needs of the designer, it's important to consider where you're going to spend your limited "stuff to learn" resources. Tolkien races have very strong cultural presence as per and as such act as a shortcut for the "races" section of a given game, if the races aren't something you want to focus on and thus aren't an area you want to devote your limited new-info capacity on. That said, if you're using vanilla races, you better be doing something else original with your game to warrant it being played or discussed at all.

Because of mechanical balance? If you're playing a more powerful race, you're going to be playing a less experienced or less trained member of said race.

But I'll say it again because apparently you're really struggling, the sheep people and the four armed people have the same point costs; as do the other races in the setting. It's been specifically designed so that all the player characters can be roughly as competent as one another despite their racial background.

I actually don't want to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're just making le epin jokes, because I'd rather believe that you're just a retard. So I'm going to do just that, retard.

>How does a race with four arms somehow become less skilled than a fucking sheep person.

>Fourarms have a rigid caste system, divided by profession and skillset without a lot of room for learning other trades.
>Fourarms are nomadic/tribal, having very little centralized education systems for the teaching of skills.
>Fourarms have trouble learning trades from other races in general, due to a combination of a language barrier and difficulty reading facial expressions (they have none)

The secret to balance is mixing crunch with fluff.

>variety and de rigueur are mutually exclusive re:quality

when you surpass the age of 12 you will learn how to enjoy all of it

until then, try not to knock the gruel and white noise. you'll come to find it's pretty good you massive summerfaggot

I'm going to be running a game in a full donut steel setting. Instead of giving the players a big primer and a 50 minute lecture, I'm going to give them a slip with the races they can choose from and a super bookended version of the cultures they can choose. After chargen, the game is going to start at the moment the party's memories are wiped by a slaver party who have captured them.

Then they get to see the world through fresh eyes and be ignorant and learn IC while they learn OOC.

So the secret is making excuses for GURPS autistic system?

Here is a hint, I have never met a single person who plays GURPS who wasn't a raging autist.

Not including fantasy races like elves and dwarves in a fantasy game is like not including zombies in a zombie game.

You can absolutely have a "zombie" game with werewolves (like that movie), or rage-people (like that other movie), or mutants (like that video game). And you can have fantasy without elves and dwarves.

But there's nothing wrong with having them.

>s-stop it!
>playing the same game repeatedly is good!
>I bet you're 12!!
>STOP SAYING I SHOULD TRY NEW THINGS I'M NOT LEAVING THE HOUSE MOM LEAVE ME ALONE RUNESCAPE IS BETTER THAN OUTSIDE

Have you looked in a mirror recently? Because the only raging autist here is you. Go have a juicebox and a nap and come back when you settle down.

>I'll take a condesending tone because someone pointed out the stupid flaws in my autistic GURPs game.

Nothing you could have added would have made sense for Sheep people to have any logical equal advantage to a person with wings.

>Guy who supports the idea of no elves or Dwarves because "I made them in gurps and they're a bunch of freaky mongoloids
>not the most autistic fucker ever.

Gurps literally quantifies having four arms into a point value.

That's fucking autistic.

No, I'm taking a condescending tone because you're gibbering like a retard who doesn't understand the utter fundamentals of game mechanics and literally all you've got as fuel is the ability to call people autistic.

I mean user for real this shit isn't hard to understand. My 10 year old brother could literally grasp this concept in 30 seconds of explanation, but you're struggling.

Any RPG on the market today quantifies the damage a sword can do to a person into a dice roll. Your statement means literally nothing, and your logic is deeply flawed.

If you did have other things in your setting to spend your "weirdness capacity" on, I don't understand why you would use Elves/Dwarfs at all. You don't need them, people just throw them in for no other reason than because that's what people expect. Why cater your game to dumb-dumbs who can't comprehend/enjoy fantasy if it doesn't have the cliches from "duh elf movies" in it?

>b-b-b
>y-you're autistic!!!!

Give me 15 points, GM, because this guy is turning me into a Sadist.

Hiding behind insults won't prove GURPS is a retarded setting.

You cannot balanced having fucking WINGS over being a retarded sheep person.

Build-a-bear races are always ramshod and unbalanced.

GURPS idea that you suddenly gain points for negative things leads to people trying to stack stupid shit to get more points.

It's a retarded system.

Why is it so important to you to have perfect balance with races? So these guys can fly, these guys can expert-headbutt, big fn deal. The birdmen aren't going to enjoy delving in a dungeon and the sheepataurs won't like the airship travel. sofa king wut.

>Not including fantasy races like elves and dwarves in a fantasy game is like not including zombies in a zombie game.

What the fuck is this drivel? Dwarves and elves don't define fantasy. Maybe in the eyes of the masses whose only exposure is through pop-culture, but shouldn't we try to be a little better than that?

This is definitely a solution; you just need to be very careful about the rate at which you feed players new information so they don't get overwhelmed. I hope it goes well for you!

What if you specifically want your setting to use those recognizable races in a new or interesting way or context? Shadowrun, for example, has races which are pretty clearly standard fantasy races, but play into Shadowrun's way of re-imagining classic fantasy tropes in a cyberpunk setting.

Hey einstein.

GURPS isn't a setting.

The older I get, the more I prefer human-only settings. Where it's just us against the world.
Oh, you can have your elves and shit, but they're monsters, they're the other, you don't socialize with them.

Draphs from Granblue kek

>Pretending things will be good just because they're new and just because something isn't original it's bad

I would rather go with the tried & true then something that can claim it's only merit is originality.

Needing everything to be perfectly balanced is literally a symptom of autism. Not in the way you're slinging it around as a tired insult, like you might genuinely be on the spectrum if you are bothered by something like this.

>Hiding behind insults won't prove GURPS is a retarded setting.
GURPS isn't a setting by itself. It's a system for running games in any setting you please.
>You cannot balanced having fucking WINGS over being a retarded sheep person.
You can. It's been proven. Scroll up.
>Build-a-bear races are always ramshod and unbalanced.
Blatantly false.
>GURPS idea that you suddenly gain points for negative things leads to people trying to stack stupid shit to get more points.
GURPS isn't the one who invented the concept of perks and flaws. They've been doing it for years, and some systems pull it off pretty well. Also, don't play with min-maxers.
>It's a retarded system.
No, it's just a system you don't like. Cut the crap and just say you don't like GURPS instead of presenting your opinions as facts.

>I get scared and overwhelmed outside my comfort zone
>I am over the age of 18 and legally considered an adult

okay nigger, wow us with your awe-inspiring and completely original PC races

Hey retarded. one incorrect word doesn't discredit an argument. I meant system

Thanks for proving GURPS players are fucking invalids though.

desu I don't think I've ever met a player that actually likes gonzo settings with a hundred different bizarre races.

Same. Might be why I enjoy the old Sword and Sorcery stories so much.

I'm not the one adding points values to fucking attributes.

Again, stop trying to hide behind insults and read you fucking inbred.

Literally no system ever has done perks and flaws correctly.

And yes, build-a-bear races are always conceptually awful.

GURPS is a terrible system because it promotes making stupid choices to get stupid advantages.

And no, you didn't prove sheep men could be in any way more advantaged than fucking FLYING PEOPLE.

Especially when he claimed they were balanced without the need for dipping into skills.

>I'm literally so far up my ass I no longer care about the quality of a product but merely how it breaks the idea
Next you're going to say that just because something is on the "cutting edge" of society that it must be good.

>By playing the game and encountering other douches

So what, the PCs are pasttess voids with no knowledge of their own world going in?

He wasn't insulting you. He was literally saying that you probably have autism, and considering what he said he's probably right.

If you've not been diagnosed, see a doctor maybe. Treatment probably helps idk.

I feel like those settings are usually the result of published systems with a million splats, intended for use one-at-a-time, or kitchen sink settings by GMs who dont know when to stop.

No, it was quite clearly an insult because the retard cannot read.

I am not trying to argue for balance based on mechanical prose, that's his stupid stance based on him using GURPS.

i am pointing out you literally cannot balance things like that, and GURPS is a stupid system for trying.

Everything has to be the same, right?

Do you get frustrated with certain colours or sounds, user?

My argument, if you fucking tried reading anything but me being against you.

You'd understand I'm saying you CAN'T fucking balance them without going into the idiot savant mode, where huge crippling flaws are there just to make up the "power" of having say; flight.

And ultimately that's what makes GURPS flawed, the autistic stance to balance everything means every perk must have a flaw to countermand it.

But you're the fucking dumbass unable to read a fucking page to understand the argument, so you resort to trying to insult me because you can't defend your own fucking stance.

We have defended our stance. Repeatedly. You've just screeched about it and said that it's wrong and that we can't do it for some reason. You're being so autistic that we can't possibly argue with you on any legitimate terms, so we get to make fun of you instead.

So the GM tosses them the info when relevant, like he tosses all other info. Not a big deal.

>Getting 30 less points to spend makes someone an idiot savant
Have you even played a game like, ever?

No. You are a consumer of fantasy. You are "the mass."

Also how do you be "better" than it? Like should we be better story-tellers than the masters of the genre who invented it and filled it with dwarves and elves for the last thousand years? 'Cuz spoiler alert: we're not gonna be better than those guys. We're gonna play some games loosely based on the genre they created. You are not too good for things, just because you refuse to use those things. You just have delusions of grandeur.

>We have defended our stance.

No, you explained how GURPS works, you then went on to "Nuh-uh" every point I made about how stupid that is.

The fact is I am entirely fucking right that GURPS effectively works like a fucking balancing act, slapping as many flaws as you can or weaknesses to get your best bang for you buck.

The best example is clearly Flying, because Flying is fucking AMAZING in both a real life AND a fantasy world. How do you balance being able to LITERALLY SHAKE OFF THE EARTHLY BONDS to being a sheep person.

It must be considering only 30 points gets you FUCKING FLYING.

Not really. The more complicated your setting is the longer it will take players to learn about it and several orders of magnitude longer before they actually roleplay properly with that information in mind. It doesn't matter if it's races or classes or magic or whatever, it all requires people to learn something totally new about the world of the story.

Having 'standard' races cuts down on loads of reading and lets players fall back on stereotypes many of them have been learning and using for decades. Everyone's seen The Lord of the Rings, so when you use that as your baseline for culture it speeds up the process of understanding how to accurately roleplay your character.

There's also merit to going completely non-standard but it's rarely successful. Look up a TRPG called 'Mechanical Dream' if you want to see a game that takes zero inspiration from Tolkien, or anyone else for that matter. It's also a goddamn mess of a book because you have to read 50 pages to understand what all 10 races are like and where they fit into society, which is itself another 50 pages, and that's not even getting to the mechanics of it all. The game has people with organic suits of armour, short doll-like people that occasionally go insane after dark, a genetically engineered soldier race, and a hyper-powered nomad race that turns into Cthuhlu mixed with a Balor when they get angry. It's an excellent example of how weird, in itself, is not necessarily good for your game or your product.

This guy gets it.

Inventing a fictional creature with a somewhat different array of traits to traditional ones is not some herculean task, especially when there is no absolute objective standard to measure quality. Likewise it is not arrogance. It is like making your own PC instead of using the premade. Declaring something as basic and innocent as inventing fiction with debatable amount of difference to established material "delusions of grandeur" is absurdly negative. I find it a strange view to hold for someone in this hobby.

Very well put.

Also each consumer is different how much attention he is willing to spend and how easily he handles change from area to area.

>You have to really work to find a high-fantasy RPG with a prebaked setting that /doesnt/ feature them

Doesn't matter.

Beastmen aren't an original concept. Giants aren't an original concept. Unless you do something unique or interesting with them, they're just as unoriginal as elves or dwarves, and it's equally possible to do something atypical with the Tolkien races.

I'd argue that they're often LESS original, to be honest, since beast races and giants and the like tend to be extremely myopic in terms of characterization. Meanwhile, there is an absolute fuckton of variation when it comes to elves.

Tolkein didn't invent Elves, Orcs, and Dwarves. And even if you used the mythological basis of them instead of the Tolkein inspired regulations it'll still sound like Tolkein because his work was all inspired by that shit to begin with anyways. The only difference is Elves would be sociopaths and Dwarves would be more judgemental than you are about Tolkein. Orcs would be the same. Now get over it you edgelord/furry/Elder Scrolls baby.

>there is an absolute fuckton of variation when it comes to elves

Just out of curiosity, I'm going to join in on this shit show of a debate and ask what all of a dwarf or elf's racial abilities are vs all of the four-armed races racial abilities.

I ask because I get what that one guy is saying. I think. I'm pretty sure that what he's saying is "If all of the races have the same or nearly the same point-cost, then the race that has four arms must spend a lot of points to get those four arms, which leaves them less to spend on skills and attributes and whatnot, which means they have to be less skilled by necessity than the other races, which is counter-intuitive since having four arms should give them an advantage with most skills."

I'm guessing that dwarves or elves have something like night-vision or magic resistance or something else that's really strong (maybe even on par with having four arms), but I don't have GURPS books, so I don't know.

Not all races cost the same number of points in GURPS. If you play a race that costs less you get more points to spend on stuff.

>And even if you used the mythological basis of them instead of the Tolkein inspired regulations

So murderous, weird earth spirits with a complete lack of human morals, a people with the talent to make magical shit but who aren't much use for anything else, and kender

I guess I mostly just take issue with the massive creative stranglehold that Tolkien has on the genre. Especially considering how much of an inspiration other fantasy sources (Robert E. Howard and company) had on the creators of RPGs.

* were to the creators of RPGs.

> edgelord/furry/Elder Scrolls baby
> I can't accurately understand his viewpoint so I'll just throw out every insult I know and see what sticks.

There are other fantasy races than the ones Tolkien used, if you didn't know. Look at any mythology from any culture, not all of them can be described as elves/dwarves/etc., those are just the ones that have been beaten into our head for the last century. There are also fictional worlds that only feature human races if you weren't aware.

Lets be for real every "unique" fantasy race falls under the notElves or notDwarves made out of magical crystals of made out of spirit energy or whatever.

You have to be fantasy illiterate to suggest otherwise.

Please try to tell me that dunmer are the same as WHBH high elves are the same as Lorwyn elves.

>The best example is clearly Flying, because Flying is fucking AMAZING in both a real life AND a fantasy world. How do you balance being able to LITERALLY SHAKE OFF THE EARTHLY BONDS to being a sheep person.

Wool is warm though

>My donut steel setting has 4-armed dudes, winged dudes, 8-foot giants, horned sheepmen and eel people.
LOL that sounds like the most autistic shit ever. By the way, none of that is interesting or original. Most settings have giants and winged races, the others are just anthropomorphics, and 4-armed dudes already exist but are the most interesting of the ones you posted. But yeah your setting sounds like raw crap.

He can't enlighten us because he has nothing interesting to replace them.

That's fucking retarded. They are recluses who live in the forest. Not everything needs to be a player race.

>Objectively incorrect, friend.
No, faggot, they are not any more original. Stop thinking originality is a goal. Stop thinking that just because your setting has "original" races, that it is any good. Stop thinking that elf-dwarf-orc settings are bad just because they contain elf-dwarf-orcs. If race choice is what matters to you in D&D, then you probably suck at roleplaying.

Oh, I see. Then I guess that guy actually has a point. That's just as bad as Level Adjustment in 3e.

>4-armed elves, winged elves, 8-foot dwarves, horned sheepdwarves and eelves
Nice originality.