There's so much discussion about new material for 5th.
I think part of the problem is that 5th is such a flexible system... much of the existing material availble can be used for the new game, at least in terms of adventures, campaign supplements, setting guides... etc. It's difficult to come up with any really truely new releases, new concepts, new challenges based in the existing settings.
I was wondering if it might be more interesting to take the system back to the beginning... not of Role Playing Games... but of the multiverse.
Rather than just another re-hash of an RPG system/setting that has players using the stock races... Elves, Dwarves, Halflings and Humans... And the stock classes of fighter, mage, thief and cleric... maybe we could give the players a truely revolutionary setting.
Let's go back to a time before Humanoids even existed... Back to the primordial conflicts that formed the multiverse.
I envsion a setting where the players select one of three 'teams'... the Primordials, the Divinities or the Fiends.
The 'races' for the system would be Elemental or Dragon for the Primordials, Angel or Archon for the Divinities and Demon or Devil for the Fiends. I'm sort of envisioning a system sort of like World of Darkness... you'd have three Player Handbooks... one for each 'team'... and three Monster Manuals... one for each team. So if your group wanted to play a game where the players were Elementals and/or Dragons battling against the 'Gods'... you'd buy the Primordial Player's Handbook and the Divinities Monster Manual. There could be one Dungeon Master's Guide that would sort of be a Setting Book as well... presenting the primordial 'world' as well as suggesting ways to create specific settings and adventures.
I think the system could use the 5th ed 'engine'... but might be even more suited to a 4e approach. It certainly would give an interesting concept for both video gaming as well as TTRPG... and a tabletop miniatures system too... like Warmachine or Warhammer.
Kaz,
That is an interesting idea. I would like to play in something like that.
Kazadvorn wrote:
I wish I had the time and talent to develop this concept.
It started with the June Survey, where WotC was asking about re-visiting some of the Races dropped from 5th... and the various posts about 'what's next' and the 5th release schedule and "what do you want in the next splat book for 5th.
My first thought was a Race that represented actual Elementals. Obviously... 4 sub-races, one for each classic element. You'd start as a 'Small Elemental' with some basic powers and abilities and then progress in both size and power as you advanced in level. Not sure how 'Classes' would meld with this concept. I could see a 'two path' system where the Elemental could choose new abilities from either a 'martial concept'... which would improve the PC's physical combat ablities... or an 'arcane concept' which would provide the Elemental with more spell-like abilites (not just attacks but other 'utility' spells).
From there, I took the idea back in time - to the primordial struggles... Who would the Elementals be fighting? Well the forces of the 'gods' ofcourse... represented by Angels and Archons. That made me think about more bad guys... so Daemons and Devils were the next logical step.
Now I had two 'enemies' with two representative races each.,. so I thought that the 'Elemental Team' needed some more variety. I had always viewed Dragons as a sort of physical representation of elemental forces, so I added them to the Elemental team.
Now, why restrict a player to only one 'race'?... people always want options to play characters that are based on traditional 'Monsters'... Lycanthropes, Goblinoids, Gnolls... etc...So, why not let every 'race' be a playable selection.
Once I got this far, it occured to me that the whole concept fit the 4e 'engine' better than the more traditional D&D 5th Ed structure.
Then, thinking in terms of the 4e combat... and how it really emulates a tabletop skirmish miniatures system... I thought... "Could this work as game like Warmachine, Malifaux or Warhammer?"... and how would this look on x-box?
'Sigh...' always dreaming, never doing.
If everyone took the time they spent belly-aching about lack of products and contributed instead to an online collaborative setting/rulebook, then we'd have plenty of extra content by now, we'd be overflowing in it. But alas...
Wuzzard wrote:
Kazadvorn wrote:
Have you thought about to get any ideas from the background of the AD&D sourcebook "Chronomancer"?
I am not certain why you want to.
The reason we use humanoid races is because we are humans. And even if those other races aren't "technically" humans, they really, actually are.
Yes, even the Kobolds.
They are different depictions of humanity-- of how we see ourselves and how we see different groups of people, different tribes of the world, in hopefully very exaggerated forms.
Dwarfs as they are in D&D started off in Tolkien's books as more or less exaggerated Jewish stereotypes... Gnomes in some depictions are even more clearly that....
Halflings have changed from being the depiction of small, English and Irish commoners who basically live their whole lives in a 10 mile radius and have a very simple, grounded view of the world where they can't see the big pictures, but also because of that they have a clearer focus of what is really important in life... and how any common man can rise up to become a hero.... At this point they seem to be drawing more inspiration from stereotypes of gypsies (thanks to the Kender).
Much could be said of how the Goblins and Orcs in D&D represent the "savage" natives that the Europeans generally steamrolled and ultimately ether wiped out or subjegated, but came across as frightning, unholy, animalistic, even demonic upon first encounter.
Hobgoblins could have been mixed right in there, but since early D&D days there has been a mix of Asiastic warrior culture to their foreigness-- part mongol, part samurai. Although their religion seems more inspired by Norse than anything else (where they go to an eternal battle against demons after they die).
Yeah, realizing all this kind of reveals the ugliness at the root of it all, but well-- obviously steps have been taken to mitigate and distance this a bit.
But, ultimately, the point is when you are dealing with humanoids, they have emotions, goals, ambitions, drives and stories we can understand. Their conflicts reflect the conflicts that we have in real life. They are relatable-- you can tell their stories easily because their stories are the stories of our species, just super exaggerated and utterly one-sided depicting the opponents as definably evil rather than admitting they have their own motives and that we might well act the same if we had lived their lives... which is done in every war. Just check out the coverage in any story about ISIS right now.
But you go to primordials? Elementals? Angels? Archons? Demons? Devils?
A lot of those things are very 1-note with unbelievably simple yet eternal ambitions and drives. Either you have to take major steps to make them more complex like humans, or you keep them without the spark of humanity and thus you are left with very few stories worth telling. Yes, the grand canyon was formed by a river flowing through it for thousands of years and while it is impressive-- there is nothing any segment of that story on any scale would be a quite boring one to tell indeed. That that is ultimately what the clash between primordials and elementals amounts to.
I don't know... the first things that jumped to mind were...
Dragons... certainly they have personalities... perhaps it would be a challenge to 'think like a Dragon'... but challenge can be a good thing.
Angels... the concepts of Angels in religion reveal that they have very different personalities, motivations and ambitions.
I was trying to think ouside the box... not just the same settings, with the same races and the same classes.
One of my favorite settings is Dark Sun... because it moved D&D out of the traditional Medieval/Greco-Roman/Arabian Nights milieu.
I've been rpg'ing various humaniod races for 40 years now... If we really want something new and different, I think we have to move the game to a very different place.
chadjustice wrote: