>Fantasy game
>Each race has dozens of sub-races
Good idea? Bad idea?
>>48301882
It's fine provided the sub-races can interbreed and don't actually have much of a difference beyond culture and slight physical appearance traits.
What shits me is, Oh it's a fantasy game... I MUST HAVE ALL THE RACES! And then make a whole bundle of races with little care for how they fit together in the setting.
>>48301882
>humans have 10000000000+ subraces
>they are literally identical save skin-tone
Immersive, or immersion-breaking?
>>48302069
You forget temperament.
>>48301882
Just give them different cultures.
>>48302074
No, I meant exactly what I said, and asked the opinion on stated idea.
However, as I am not a frothing retard and can read, that means it breaks your immersion.
>>48301882
I personally like it because it gives flexibility on what you can play and also have it be functional.
You can play X race sub type from a racial group you like, and still be effective, and don't have to play Y race which tends to be better at these things and you'd rather not because you don't like their fluff.
So yes, good idea.
>>48301882
Why not.
You will just have a hard time imagining their background and what differs them from others overall.
>>48302310
The smartest Orc subrace is still going to be dumber than the dumbest Elf subrace.
>>48301882
>All that shit
How the fuck can anyone tell what sub-race they are?
It's literally 'Your head looks slightly different from other white people, trust me bro'.
Besides, you fucking know SOMEONE's gonna start up a shitstorm when people start talking about mental race modifiers.
Add in minmaxing munchkineers and for the love of God, no.
Do cultural/background modifiers if you really want, there are a fuckton you can make up and easily distinguish from one another.
>>48302364
>How the fuck can anyone tell what sub-race they are?
Measuring instruments of various sorts among other things.
>>48302347
DEpEnDs oN tHE SeTtInG
>>48302392
But that just tells your head shape. Race is determined by genetics. All brits are essentially the same no matter what they look like.
>>48301882
>Fantasy game
>Each race has dozens of sub-races
Pretty good
>They're all mechanically different
Fuck off
>>48301882
As long as it's done properly it's pretty cool because it gives the races some diversity.
But if your setting is just dwarfs, orks, gnomes, high elf, low elfs, wood elfs, brown elf, beige elfs, sea elfs, dark elfs, etc. it just gets boring.
The last book I read had elfs on their own plane with pretty much the usual sub-race sans drow, but those cultures were actually more than three buzzwords and the characters from there deviated from the stereotypes.
It's natural that people will change according to their environment and after enough time look a bit different. But what players/writers do too often is putting together a sub-race as a stat block or stereotypical represenation of a real world culture and then they forget that the characters from these cultures are still individuals. You somehow get straight representations of the most common attitudes of that cultures, and that character would be the most boring guy ever to his own culture. Do all these elf derivatives exile people for not being interesting enough or what?
And in worldbuilding sub-races are frequently just "dropped in". You have high elves in the plains and wood elves in the woods to the west, and nothing in between. No border regions, no migration, no more and less dominant cultures.
>TLDR; Good writers let you observe their sub-races as they live. Bad writers put them on a pedastal and walk you through a museum.
>>48302428
Look at the skulls of the five extant human species, anon.
>>48302428
If any country has a stupid dumb amount of subraces in their country its britain considering the amount of times its been invaded and pillaged by genetically different invaders from all over europe
>>48301882
D&D already has this. It's even in the core PHB for 5e.
>>48303001
This. Having a wide variety of distinct cultures and subraces, so that it's not just "the elf kingdom" and "the dwarf kingdom," is good. Having fifteen squillion different options for race at chargen is impossible to balance and takes ages to sort through the first few times you make a character in that system. I don't really like the road 5e is taking with this. The subraces presented in the core book are manageable, but it only takes one Races of Bullshit splatbook before it goes berserk.
>>48301882
>Whitey looking all the same
top kek
>>48303168
There's only one extant human species: Homo Sapiens Sapiens.
>>48303257
That's probably because you have both species and culture in the race field of your character sheet.
It would probably be a better idea to split the race mechanics into biology and culture. You have maybe 5 races that give different stats, while the different cultures give boni to skills or saving throws.
For example, all elves get +2 DEX. But the elves from the Urkasian woods put much importance on hunting, so they are generally good at tracking. Meanwhile, the Urkasian child of a merchant that spent most of his life with the noble elves from the argent coast gets their usual bonus to diplomacy.
Obviously this doesn't work with DnD style settings that just throw in everything that comes to mind. It would just be an more work to balance all the splatbooks than it must already be. But it could work just fine for your five standard races with 4ish backgrounds each. You don't even have to make new subraces for this system. You could have a race be caste based or have different clans with different traditions.
>>48301882
Depends on the setting, could work might not. >>48302069
Forgetting body structure, as well as a disposition to various genetic conditions and slight differences in some metabolic pathways. It's more than skin color but less than subspecies.
They aren't races, they are species. And those are not sub-races they are races of the species.
>>48301882
Dozens are not fine. Six or seven human races are more than enough. Three or four dwarven clans, elvish tribes and orcish races are more than enough.
Just avoid shit like moon elves, sun elves, iron dwarves, and blood orcs. There's absolutely nothing less imaginative or stupid.
>>48301882
Having several different sub races is good assuming they have different stat distributions. It means that if I where to play a character that, for whatever reason needed high Intelligence, but I wanted to play an Orc, I could pick a sub race that has a bonus to intelligence or at least no penalty to it.
Even if they don't alter the stats, it can still be beneficial to flesh out a world with more cultures.
The biggest issue I could see occurring is that I know some players would define their entire character around their sub race's fluff rather than coming up with anything new. Also having dozens of sub races per species would probably result in some being very similar or uninspired. The best you could do is probably just copying real human races, and even then I don't think you'd have enough to have dozens of sub races for the standard 6+ races most fantasy games have.
TL:DR, kinda both a good and bad idea, unless you reeled it back and only had about 5 sub races of each species. Then it'd probably work out alright.
>>48303182
What, you mean essentially three times?
Genetically the Brits - all of them, not just the English - are mostly Celtic that's practically identical to Irish (so proto-Basque plus incoming continental Celts, giving us two) and some level of Northern Germanic (Saxons, Jutes, Norwegians).
Normans had no genetic footprint. Romans had no genetic footprint.
Compare France, which literally has three separate ethnicities they only tied together with aggressively Francophone schooling from the 19th century, discounting the literal British immigrants in Brittany.
>>48301882
How the fuck would that even play? The GM describes the full ethnical background of every single NPC with a slightly broader forehead or nose?
>>48302133
>However, as I am not a frothing retard
That's up for debate, but I don't debate with frothing retards.
>>48301882
A normal idea, which means it needs good execution. Also that chart isn't really based on good theory. It's cool and it gets some of the differing face types within an ethnicity, but it limits itself and the sub-ethnic angle is largely false.
>>48305274
In fact, scratch update those criticisms - I just saw the labels, and wow, they are nothing. Also no sample sizes are given, and some of the portraits clearly have much smaller sizes than others.
>>48303182
Britbong that looks more like a Norwegian than another bong is still closer to another bong than a norwegian on a genomewide level. Unless you count pakis etc
>>48301882
I don't mean to sound racist, but they all look the same to me in that pic.
I'm one of them, though, so it's okay if I say it.
