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Confused, Race change and it's Lore.
whoregut
Banned Users Posts: 0 Arc User
This has got me all confused. I am trying to understand why a race change would ruin the game and compromise the lore. If at current time all races can be all classes, how does a race change corrupted the lore? I understand you might have to change your back round story, but that's it. If a race you wanted to be was not available at the time you made your character, but is now and can be your class. How does this violate on going lore?
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You should be able to change your race after all this is a game based on magic and if there are items that can change your sex (maybe not in this game yet; man that would be funny, cursed items) why not change your race.
Forgotten realms has several examples of a polymorph spell that changed a being from one thing into another forever. So it is not lorebreaking. This is fairly rare, however, not a "what gender/race/class/?" do I want to be today sort of thing. One of the NWN games even had an official class that could change shape at will many times per day, and druids can do it as well to a lesser extent. I remember playing most of the way thru the game as a minotaur.
People get mad about anything on the internet. Sure as you ask someone will come in here to explain why I am wrong and it IS supposedly lore-breaking, even if I hold up clacker as an example.
in lore, though, changing race is possible via wishes, miracles, and reincarnation spells, so that pretty much shuts down lore arguments right there. That being said, such things are rare and very very powerful, high level things, so not everybody is going to have access to them, and regular people will likely never know anyone who has done it, but it still can be done.
and as another poster in this thread pointed out, a god sure could do it, too, if he/she were so inclined.
I just don't get it. Shrug, I guess it's a good thing I am not a developer just a stock holder for Hasbro.
the big benefit is of course for the people with the placeholder characters all those dark skinned white haired, pale black-haired, and golden-haired tan wood elves out there can now truly been the race they intended, Next we got to get the races in for the extremely short Halfling(gnome) and the dragony tieflings,(dragon born)
My suspicion is the real people who didn't want race change is more so the power gamers and pvpers because people might be able to reroll starter stats. and would feel "Obligated" to change race for a 0.00001% extra dps or crit or something.
if people are worried about moonelves wearing the cloak of the half elf (the racial quest reward) thatcan always be auto changed when they change race.
I'm not saying I subscribe to the above, but if you're keeping a stricter definition of what can be done, when, and why, a race change shouldn't be as simple as buying a token and "poofing" right in PE...
"Is it better to be feared or respected? I say, is it too much to ask for both?" -Tony Stark
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If they make it an OOC out of game thing, then it doesn't really. The player just rewrites the character history. As far as the game would be concerned, they were always the new race. As a game mechanic I don't think it hurts. The main worry I have is that they might try to add something to the lore to allow it.
As far as the mechanics go... I'm all for it now. I admit, I wasn't at first. But if they work out the stuff to make a race change possible. That means we will likely be able to reroll our starting stats as well. And with new paragon paths eventually coming out. That is something I think needs to happen.
Its not just a small boost that they are getting....
Its a MASSSIVE
advantage and its not fair to the rest of us.
and I could do it too if the devs would allow for a race change. Its not fair. if I even knew what that meant or the implications of my choice when I started playing there would be no way I would ever choose my current race.
(plus my horns just look plain silly in all rogue gear)
I have very specific rules of what I define as D&D.
There isn't a decent DM in the world who would simply allow you to take your character sheet, erase your race and right down a new one. They will make you spend an arm and a leg in effort to change your race and will make it hard on you almost to the point of saying it's not worth the effort.
If Cryptic was to introduce a race change I am very adamant it should be a monstrosity of a quest-line which taxed heavilly on your gameplay and made you work for it. Not simply a magic eraser.
D&D is all about accepting your choices. Sure I pity those people who chose a race purely because another race was not available at the time but I also couldn't care less because the same rules apply in PnP which consistently adds new races as well.
If you want to change your race then spend an arm and a leg. Rare is rare and just because this game is an MMO doesn't mean toss out everything that is D&D. That's not elitist. That's D&D.
Polymorph is a visual only effect. It can be permanent visual and even mind altering visual but the effect itself is still nothing more than a visual change of your body and psychological effect on the mind.
For instance if you're turned into an animal your mind can develop two different persona's and end up fighting for dominance. Sort of similar to the typical werewolf syndom where people lose their humanity.
You can see an example of that in Clacker who was a Pech turned into a Hook Horror. While his scales did add mild protection and his mind faltered and fought to remain pech over hook horror he was, under the shell, a psychologically disturbed Pech with an exoskeletion.
However polymorph doesn't effect racial stats. A human who is polymorphed into a drow would still be a human. They do not gain magic resistance, darkvision or any other racial bonuses.
And to go back to dear Clacker, even though he was in the form of a Hook Horror he still maintained, at the times and even up to his death, the Pech ability to alter the rock and earth around him.
Dear DM, I would like to completely change my entire powerset and feat choices, essentially rebuilding myself from the ground up.
"Well, that's a tremendous change, with momentous consequences.....so that'll be 600 zen plz. I also accept astral diamonds (for feats only). Though I recommend you change your AD for zen, it's probably better and cheaper."
Point is: the game is already hugely "f2p MMO-esque" and not very D&D-esque, so I really don't see race changes being that much worse.
Well dang, I guess I am a ****ty DM, thanks guy. I started playing when I was a Boy Scout about 1992. WoW, 20 some years of not knowing what I am doing.
I would let people change their race if something else changed. Like losing a player to real life and getting a new one. To keep a balance, sometime you well do something like that. I would let them change aliment as well. I can't really let two Chaotic Evil players in the same group. I also can't just quite the campaign because of changes brought on by real world events.
D&D is not about submission or as you put it "accepting your choices". There is NO table top RPG that forces you to into yes or no game play. That isn't RPG. It is about creative, and unique problem solving.
Anyway, Neverwinter has the D&D tag. It is "loosely" based on it. It is also a Free to Play game, in turn must make money to stay on. I have yet to see how a race change token is a bad idea and defiles game lore. The lore is already screwed up.
Here is your Cursed Girdle of Opposite Gender. Now go to the Whistling Tree Tavern and dance your OCD away.
I know that none of my DMs would have made such a change a walk in the park, nor would I allow it to be an easy change when running a game. We tended to have low magic settings though.
Anyway, that's more of a personal thing as to how a DM chooses to run his campaign. Right now, the Neverwinter "DM" isn't allowing any race changes. We'll see if it gets added in later.
I personally don't care one way or the other.
You wouldn't want me in charge. I either wouldn't have them, would only ever allow you to do it after gameplay changes or would charge a minimum of 20 dollars for a respec just to punish you for using such a horrendous feature.
In eight years of playing on various NWN Servers not one server allowed players to "respec." Any server that wasn't an "Action," "Complete Hack and Slash," "PvP" style server basically followed that ruling. If you felt like you messed up you recreated the character. No exceptions. No DM intervention.
And it took at least five times as long to go from level 1-20 in most servers as it does here.
That's D&D. Anybody who cared about the game passed the basic mechanics of "look mom, I can kill a dragon" put strict emphasis on how much it was up to you to create and define your own character.
With this game...well, it's not even hewing terribly close to the version of D&D it's ostensibly based on: HP totals are in the tens of thousands, stats do entirely different things (and this varies from class to class), half the powers/feats say things like "stuns enemy for a significantly longer period" rather than, say, providing an actual NUMBER, and an awful lot of powers and feats either work entirely differently from their tooltip anyway, or simply don't work at all.
AND you don't even get a chance to see any of this fairly inadequate information until you've already made a character, and for some of the feats/powers, not until you've played said character right up to at least 50.
In NWN you made gimpy characters because you wanted to. In this game it can happen by accident because the mechanics don't make any sense and aren't explained properly. It's a significant difference.
Also, of course, you've noted that
and this game is both action, hack and slash, AND has PvP.
the AD&D DM guide says that if a player is simply unhappy with their character, you find a way to help them so they enjoy playing rather than have them stop playing or try to die or something. That is, it recommends not forcing someone to play a character they do not like. Some of that is about stats --- for example rolling all 5s and 6s for your stats and only being able to be one class and poor at everything --- but the theme repeats in discussions about character creation.
At the same time, the guide encourages dms to not allow players to max/min or rulemonger to exploit in order to "win" or become super powerful from some unforseen combination of rules etc. Such things are to be nipped in the bud and the dm simply says "no, I won't allow that".
So yes... a good dm would allow a race change, gender change, class change, etc if things were just not working out and the player hated the character. Or if it is bad enough allows a re-roll, the old character wanders off or dies and the new one happens to be in the area and meets the group and they happen to have all the other guy's stuff since he (died, ran off, something)ed and left it behind. Because your players are your friends, usually, and its a game --- if someone is miserable, you find a way to fix it (unless their misery comes from not being god-like).
What other reason would you pay zen for race change than to min-max? Generally people that are RP'ing don't care as much about stats and choose the race they want to be for RP purposes right? I played PnP D&D and while I never changed my race there I very much support race changes in this game.
In PnP D&D you had an entire book outlining everything that a class had, all of its skills, the exact way the stats effected them, basically you got 20-20 vision of how your choices would affect "end-game" levels. When I rolled my GWF in April I saw a melee DPS that used Str for damage, Con for survivability, and Dex for Crit. That wasn't my first character so at least I was smart enough to look at the feats/powers first and I noticed that for a DPS class I would like to have 3 extra feats so I went human. I also rolled my stats and applied my +2 to make my character balanced, 16/16/14.
Now months down the road, after realizing that Con = ArP, and after nerfs that make only a tanky build viable IMO I have a human with 3 wasted feats, wasted extra points in str, lower con/dex than I wanted. If I were able to change race I would also be able to re-roll initial stat rolls I would think. This is not just min/maxing I would gain 4 con, 2 dex, 4% deflect, 10% cc reduction, 2% crit, 8% hp, 4% ArP just by switching to a Half-ling. I can't achieve those kinds of numbers via gear without upgrading to R10 enchants, and even then it would be hard.
This is not just min/maxing, I did not have a clear view of what my character was going to be, as I never thought based on what the game described a GWF as being, that I would want to be a tank with lower str and higher con/dex. You would need a crystal ball to know that...
It's another way to sell zen so I don't see the downside for the devs either. Just don't make it insane like 2k zen or they will never sell
We are definitely dominating, and we are always about to win.
That's more or less how I've seen this handled, and handled it myself, in my own tabletop gaming going back all the way to the 80's. Sometimes, a character doesn't work for the player (or his/her fellow players). Sometimes, it can make things not fun for the player, or more often the whole group. It's not entirely out of place to write a character out of the show, so to speak, and then introduce a new one that's similarly levelled and geared to the rest. It's not much different than what (almost) every DM/GM I've ever known does when a PC dies permanently.
For situations like that, a race change token (again, if combined with a rename) could represent the rerolling of a new, high level character to keep up with the rest of the group.
Now, personally, I'm usually more inclined to just reroll a new character from scratch, since I am an altoholic who actually likes to level (don't get me started on the ridiculous levelling rate in this game, I hate it and wish they would at least take XP off of invocations), but even for me, there have been times in other MMOs where I have hated a character enough that it needed to be changed completely, and I did not want to erase my effort. Especially when one does not have more character slots and/or can't afford them.
As much as I would like to see a rename with a race change token, I don't think it would happen. If you split the two you can get more money. As we have seen, it's not about you or your enjoyment. It's about how much money they can get from you before it dies.
Well, um that is a matter of opinion on YOUR part as to what is a decent DM, Almost every "Decent" DM I have ever known with the exception of tournament GMs but in that case you had your character for 4 hours tops and were typically dealing with pregens. would allow character sheet changes within reason. Name change race change (as long as the character race was not plot related) appearance changes, were all basically fine if out of character reasons called for it.
ie I once had a dwarf that was changed INTO a pixie via plot. that one I couldn't change. Be cause it wasn't my choice. One time I had a real Snot of a DM, who delighted in torturing us... He would have given us a difficult time if we had dared asked...though it was hard enough keeping our characters the way we made them with him.
He was the kinda guy who would give us a choice and both choices were a death trap. the kinda guy who put a red dragon against level 3 chars and had his npc save us when it went bad. after it burnt of the avarial elf's wings. The kinda gm who kept attacking the party drow with shapeshifting bunny rabbits till he was afraid of bunnies.
My point is saying NO decent GM would allow it would be like me saying only a Cruddy DM would not allow it. Either way is a broad generalization that is a matter of personal opinion. Also D&D is ABOUT having fun with your friends sharing a communal story where everyone contributes.