A Land Far Away

Hello everyone. I would like to open a discussion regarding how we approach the planetouched races in ALFA for NWN2. The current plan, developed months ago and approved by fluff and I (IIRC) is to allow aasimar and tieflings as PCs, with no restrictions. There are some other questions though:

(a) should we allow other planetouched races?

(b) If so, which ones? Genasi seem to be a favorite people are calling for, Fey'ri too, though they might be hard to implement and it might not be possible at all to implement the ones with high-LA value. What about half-celestials/half-fiends, or is their LA value (+4) too high? Allowing half-celestials or half-fiends might be too much, but what about tannaruks? Too monstrous?

(c) Assuming we allow planetouched races, should we leave them open to anyone who wants to play them? Or, should we restrict their availability?

(d) IF we restrict the availibility of planetouched races, HOW do we do that fairly? Application system? Character-trade in (i.e. play a normal PC until level X then "trade it in" for access to a planetouched race)? Lottery style? What do you think?

Alright, so, please keep the discussion civil. In the interest of making this a constructive dialogue, I will personally moderate this thread and if I see people going astray (i.e. off topic or SPAM) I will delete posts, and if folks make flaming posts, I reserve the right to pour a little water on them (i.e. edit as I see fit to make them less heated).

OK, thanks folks - now - lets talk.

I think I recall seeing that the gensai will be part of the next expansion so I don't see any reason to disable them.

Fey’ri are a bit trickier, gensai are scattered about the realms and are less a race than the descendents of random couplings with elemental forces (the less said about the mechanics of such couplings the better) while the Fey’ri are more or less the tiefling and half fiend descendents of a specific bloodline (not positive haven't read recent elf novels). I’d lean towards treating the tiefling Fey’ri as typical tieflings and avoid the half fiends all together.

I'd disallow the half fiends and celestials not so much because of power concerns than because of RP concerns. The mindsets of such creatures are so alien and bizarre (and in the case of fiends evil to an unthinkable extreme) that I can't see them being able to interact on an everyday basis with other characters, not without being worshipped as gods or ending in murder.

Since we don't allow orcs I can't see allowing tannaruks and I don't believe we would have appropriate models anyhow (thats an issue with the half breeds as well).

I need to think about the other concerns and the level issue could be tied into the debate about starting level.

(a) We should allow planetouched races.

(b) We should only allow planetouched races packaged with NWN2.

(c) Anyone should be allowed to play a planetouched race (or alternatively, no one should).

(d) NA.

Burt wrote:(a) We should allow planetouched races.

(b) We should only allow planetouched races packaged with NWN2.

(c) Anyone should be allowed to play a planetouched race (or alternatively, no one should).

(d) NA.

This came up from time to time and did when I was Lead. I said then, what we all had basically come to a consensus on before, there will be planetouched. So, lemme echo what Burt has said. Forget all the half-fiends and fey'ri and all that. We play what's in the FRCS as playable races. That makes it really simple. We've had drow, duergar, and smurfs up to this point that anybody could play, no reason to change anything for LA +1 races now.

I think in this regard it is useful to rely upon the FRCS as a basis of allowable races. This has the virtue of being consistent with the races that Obsidian will be implementing as playable anyway, meaning less work for us and there's plenty on our plate already.

On principle, I'd say any race greater than EL+2 should be disallowed in the interest of general equity. This would mean disabling svirfs. EL+4 is insane, no thank you. I am in general opposed to monsterous races because of the playability complications they present for themselves and others, but more important is keeping away from higher EL ones.

A system of OOC restrictions on who can take what race will add a layer of burden we do not currently have, and will almost inevitably be decried as unfair. I'd say leave it open. If it should turn out that we have over half of all PCs ending up plane-touched, then we can revisit the issue. Otherwise, unless a problem presents itself, let players choose how they will.

Burt wrote:(a) We should allow planetouched races.

(b) We should only allow planetouched races packaged with NWN2.

(c) Anyone should be allowed to play a planetouched race (or alternatively, no one should).

(d) NA.

+1. My reasoning is that we already have too much work and not enough workers. Lets let Bioware do the work and focus on getting mods together. Doesn't matter what race you are if there are no servers to play on.

As a practical matter, I agree with Ayergo. But as a matter of policy, having unique opportunities for Role Play vis a vis playable races would help distinguish ALFA from other projects/gaming communities. If players are really looking for a place to role play their hearts out, they may well enjoy a community with lots of creative freedom, and only a private RP community could offer that kind of experience without enduring hordes of half-titan PGers. It makes the application system so much more worthwhile.

On the other hand, if our player population is not sufficiently large, it can't possibly sustain excessive racial diversity while preserving good role play, so as with everything, a measured approach is probably best.

Nevertheless, I think this is a good idea in principle. With NWN as old as it is, we ought to be thinking about ways to attract new AND old role players to ALFA.

I have no problem with planetouched races. I also do not have a problem with allowing players being able to play monsterous races, although, someone would have to actually build them. I personally am in favor of Lizardfolk, Half-Dragon, Dragonborn races. Especially, the dragon races. They are well represented in the Cold Lands as part of the Church of Bahamut as his Dragon Reborn Knights. (paladins with Dragon abilities/characteristics)

I wish we had some folks in the community that knew how to model and develop races. Besides playing here I am watching other communties and the Avlis project has developed a ton of home grown races. Their building their world from the ground up and not set in Faerun so they have an easier time accounting for them, but they do have folks working on them.

I play a half celestial paladin in my PnP campaign and would love to see them added. I agree with Nyar that they can sometimes be difficult to represent.

All and all I am for whatever the project decides, but we would be more attractive to Rpers if we have more than the basic choices built into the game engine. We just need a team to work on them and get them into our world.

Call me old fashioned, but I would prefer to leave plane-touched / celestials/ monstrous races etc as NPCs only.

Leave the players to paly traditional player races. I have no desire to see a thread titled "Starting a tiefling player group in Daggerdale" a year from now.

As long as things are played out properly IG I see really no problem with allowing no restrictions on races. If you did get a large group of tieflings in Daggerdale, for example, I'm sure it wouldn't be long before the locals band together to either kill these monsters or at least banish their evil from the town - I mean who really wants a person with goat horns and a tail as their neighbour? However, if we do start to see every second person playing a planetouched (or a drow or svirf or manner other things for that matter), and find them selfs treated no differently in society, then maybe we do have a problem. But until then, let's use the KISS principle.

+1 for planetouched from live
+1 for those packaged with the game from live

Any others could only be implemented effectively by the technical team with hours of arduous work to get the balance right. Also appropriate models are needed for a lot of them.. this is an even bigger body of work. I mean just think about the diversity of Fey'ri appearances, it all depends on the fiend in the bloodline.

IMO there are bigger priorities but maybe other races can be looked at after we are rolling live for 6-12 months or so, to refresh the game so to speak.

I dont think we need to worry about whether alfans will roleplay them effectively. If in people's enthusiasm they do get out of control, we can then set a hard limit of no more than X per server but I think we should trust the players first up.

a. no
b. not applicable
c. not applicable
d. not applicable


[EDIT: Maxcell had a number of substantially duplicative posts, presumably caused by technical problems. I have removed these posts accordingly as this post sums up his position on the questions posed. -Mikayla]

I can see the CvC whining already.

Personally, I don't have a problem with whatever peeps want to play, but let's make sure they all start at level 1, not level 1++.

We need a better way of treating levels for plane touched, and writing script cluges to account for them won't work because somewhere someone is going to forget and we'll get mega farming issues.

I say that whatever plane touched level you are, you start at a stat and hp level equivilant to regular level 1 first. To get to your plane touched eqivilant level, you need as much exp as it would a regular PC to get to level 3, or 4, or whatever planetouched level equivilancy it is. Then from there the regular leveling. This would be easier to script.

After we work out the details for planetouched, we can begin the scripting for my dual-halberd wielding vampire were-dragon.

Seriously:

I see no reason to disallow anything that already comes with the game engine.

Beyond that, there are many things to take into consideration that we don't have good answers for yet, that I think it is something that should be addressed in the future.