Divorcing stats from race

Eladrian

Race switching has always rubbed me the wrong way, tbh. IRL, I can change my name, and I can change where I live and what organizations I belong to, but that logic doesn't really translate into a human becoming a bug person -- at least, not to me. And I do think that cheapens racial roleplay, not to mention the possibility of imbuing races with history, and making race an indicator, to some degree, of the experiences that a character has had and where they come from.

I get that race change is justified by IG lore, but I also do think that that isn't as analogous to real life, and to me, that does make it cheapen a lot of what I see as interesting RP. You can say, "But magic exists!" But the existence of the supernatural in a fantasy game doesn't at all reduce the extent to which I want the world my character lives and acts in to be a relatable one. The absence of race changing was one of my favorite things about MKO, TBH.

That said, @Telinus, I do think history and the majority are inevitably always gonna be against us here in Achaea, even if I do 100% agree with your viewpoint. It's just the culture here at this point, I feel like, which I can roll with.

Shirszae

Its up to you to make your character's race matter in your roleplay. Limiting what other people can or cannot do has no bearing in that. Also, limiting people's ability to change race is not going to magically make people roleplay their race or by itself make race matter. It'll just make people get stuck with a race they might decide they have no interest in playing, and hence role-playing. Which would actually worsen the problem.

As always, comparing anything in a game to rl doesnt really make much sense. Changing race, while not my favourite thing either, makes about as much sense as everything else in the setting.

Minifie

to be fair I still have my free reincarnation and a gem of reincarnation, I've always been Siren. It's almost ingrained to Minifie now. I feel changing it would lose her character. So you can still make it matter.

Keorin

I feel like race changing compounds on the problems of having racial stat disparities, myself. If race only had abilities that were there for flavour, then everyone would settle on a race they liked, or change when they decided they want to play something new. If we had racial disparities, but race couldn't be changed, then it would feel like a bigger part of your character, as you'd have to deal with your character's strengths and limitations with whatever skills you pursued.

But since you can do both, changing races lets people swap around their race just to get the right mechanical boost, which I think devalues the roleplay component of picking that race in a lot of cases (some people, I'm sure, roleplay it out, but many don't). This leads to race feeling like a pretty meaningless aspect of the world in a lot of cases.

Gwynrii

The main issue is that the people who play races for OOC reasons will always be against divorcing stats from race as it would give them a disadvantage, and apparently OOC mechanics is how Achaea chooses to balance itself nowadays, because fuck RP amirite?

Farrah

No. Not really.

Opposition to divorcing stats from races tends to be for RP reasons.

Sobriquet

Gwynrii said:

The main issue is that the people who play races for OOC reasons will always be against divorcing stats from race as it would give them a disadvantage, and apparently OOC mechanics is how Achaea chooses to balance itself nowadays, because fuck RP amirite?

I don't think you could be more wrong unless you were trying to stop the Titanic sinking using a colander 

Asmodron

Gwynrii said:

The main issue is that the people who play races for OOC reasons will always be against divorcing stats from race as it would give them a disadvantage, and apparently OOC mechanics is how Achaea chooses to balance itself nowadays, because fuck RP amirite?

You definitely have this backwards. Combat folk dont care either way, so long as stats are balanced in some fashion. It is the RP folk that are being iffy about it (myself included) based on the idea that making stats equal across the board could remove flavor to a race concept. It's hard to picture a troll and a grook on the same level of strength.


That said, some wiggle room is acceptable.