Re: [Bell of Lost Souls] D&D 2024 Edition Heads Back To Greyhawk, Makes Aasimar A Default Option

On 5/17/2024 10:44 PM, Spalls Hurgenson wrote:

On Fri, 17 May 2024 07:53:37 -0700, Justisaur <justisaur@yahoo.com>
wrote:
 

On 5/17/2024 12:58 AM, Kyonshi wrote:

So... Aasimar, Goliaths, and Orcs now become player races, and Greyhawk
might be a standard setting?
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Ugh.  I'm all for weird PC races, but they don't belong in the PHB.
It's like pulling teeth to try to ban/change anything in there.

 I never had a problem saying no to PCs in that regard (just because
it's in the core book doesn't mean I have to use it in my campaign).
It is a bit more problematic because players have more of an
expectation that tieflings/etc. will be available, and are sometimes
disappointed that they can't use those critters.
 But my campaigns tend to be fairly low-fantasy/low-magic and those
races don't really fit into the feel of the game world. I'm generally
not opposed to orcs, except any player who choses them should expect a
much rougher time of it, since they WILL be disadvantaged by their
choice of race in a human-dominated world.
 (in fairness, elves don't fare much better ;-)

I actually would call Goliaths rather low-fantasy. They basically are juts the archetype of the big brutish guy.
I could imagine a game where you limit the choice of races to only dwarves, humans, and goliaths.
The problem with them is that they were introduced in a 3e supplement, and since then they always have been an also-ran of a race. I mean, who really wants to play a goliath in the first place when there's other things available. They are literally just big brutish guys. Which of course leads them to be played as barbarians because what else are you gonna do with them?
I find the choice of goliaths a bit weird. I would have thought they'd choose something they can trademark, but I doubt you can properly trademark a character type based on a biblical story, wihthout even the name changed.
Aasimar on the other hand I could also see in some games. They are the other end of the deal with the tieflings. But together with all the other races it kind of ends in some indistinguishable blend. Especially if they decide to present them in such a bland way as 5e did to the tieflings.
I also can see a game with those: just imagine a game where your options are aasimar, human, and tiefling. I think you could do a lot with that duality.

 

I was never a Greyhawk fan.  I tried to use it once or twice, but it
didn't do anything for me.

 Yeah. I don't think WOTC is going to have much success. I don't think
Greyhawk is the type of gameworld most people like.
 Well, unless WOTC radically changes everything about Greyhawk,
stripping away everything that made the game unloveable (and unique).
In which case... why bother?

>

 

They most likely are trying to do the same thing as they did with third edition, which in my opinion failed pretty badly. Greyhawk was the "standard" setting for that edition, because it's all so vanilla (after all DnD/ADnD was built on that setting), and then they fail to give people any guidance of how to actually use that setting. I think the only proper stuff for Greyhawk from the 3e times were the RPGA things for their living campaign, with all the other stuff about Greyhawk just isolated mentions in the middle of their rulebooks. I think most people went for FR or Eberron instead, because those at least had campaign guides.