The Gaming Den

Thinking about the "all characters have X chakra slots to attune, monstrous characters like a pixie have slots already taken up by their natural abilities like flying" idea that's been thrown around here as a way to stick monster characters in RPGs with humans. There should be an in-setting explanation why humans can attune to more magical artifacts than others.

The conclusion I hit was "The races of the world were created in a big dawn war, then one of the gods created a blank slate race with the versatility to attune to magical items of his creation"

Thus explaining why a pixe won't be iron manning it up as much as his human party member with the flying boots, invisibility cloak, flame shooting sword, teleportation armor, and circlet of true seeing.

Think that's a good enough excuse? Got better ideas?

It won't work in 5E where you can only be attuned to one item at a time, but I like the concept.

Implying anything will particularly work about 5E. Other than the general idea of rolling dice to resolve matters.

Humans, and all hominids in D&D-land are hyper-evolved snakes. Not only are Yuan-Ti in the D&D hominid family (along with Elves, Orcs, and Ogres, but not Goblins or Dwarves), but if you hit Humans with "devolution magic" they turn into Ophidians.

In the simple Chakra balance model, all creatures have the same number of Chakra whether they are Beholders or Halflings. In the level-based Chakra balance model, creatures have a number of Chakra set by their power level - meaning that a Beholder has more Chakra than a young Halfling, even if more of those Chakra are full and they have less "open" Chakra. Creatures like Frost Giants would probably have more Open Chakra than basic Humans in the level-based model because they only have a couple Chakra filled with their racial badassery and come into adulthood with a much higher power level than "1."

From a "why were hominids created?" standpoint, I'm pretty sure that the answer is that Humans are a failed experiment to make a slave race too weak to rebel. From an appearance standpoint, hominids are freaky chimerae with the heads of Naga and the arms of Ophidians. In the time before the development of sorcery and enchanting, Humans didn't have inherent Incarnum and had no magic powers at all. Once they learned to extract power from astral diamonds and create mix-n-match magic items, they were very versatile - but as originally created they were very weak indeed.

-Username17

Well IIRC the human form is the ultimate evolutionary spiral energy form.
And you need spiral energy to pilot giant mecha.

Where does "devolve into ophidian scaly people" come from anyways? In Howard's Conan apes could pokevolve into humans if they advanced enough, and vice versa for regression, but horrible snake-men does sound like Conan too.

I believe it's the backstory of the Ophidians.

OgreBattle wrote:Thinking about the "all characters have X chakra slots to attune, monstrous characters like a pixie have slots already taken up by their natural abilities like flying" idea that's been thrown around here as a way to stick monster characters in RPGs with humans.

Flavor justifications aside, has anyone actually sat down and tried to sketch out such a system, whether they've posted it here or not?

I've seen it mentioned plenty of times, but nobody seems to have actually figured out which sorts of abilities become chakra bound, how to break down a vampire or werewolf template into individual "items," how to normalize item costs to standardize crafting monster items into real items, and so forth. I'd love to implement such a system for my games, but y'all are way better at monster and item balancing than I am so I'd rather not start from scratch if anyone has a good outline for it.

Emerald wrote:Flavor justifications aside, has anyone actually sat down and tried to sketch out such a system, whether they've posted it here or not?

I've seen it mentioned plenty of times, but nobody seems to have actually figured out which sorts of abilities become chakra bound, how to break down a vampire or werewolf template into individual "items," how to normalize item costs to standardize crafting monster items into real items, and so forth. I'd love to implement such a system for my games, but y'all are way better at monster and item balancing than I am so I'd rather not start from scratch if anyone has a good outline for it.

I have. I even had some posts about it a while back, although I stopped bothering to post as feedback dropped off (and also I've spent a lot of time wrestling with how to make giants work).

OgreBattle wrote:Where does "devolve into ophidian scaly people" come from anyways? In Howard's Conan apes could pokevolve into humans if they advanced enough, and vice versa for regression, but horrible snake-men does sound like Conan too.

The Ophidians first came into being in the Monster Manual 2 back in 1983. They were short, thick bodied snakes with human arms sticking off the sides. They also had a weird venomous bite that would cause humans and related creatures to slowly turn into Ophidians and other creatures to die. Later books referred to this process as "degeneration" or "devolution." I think the important thing to take away is that Gygax often wrote up a couple of variations on the same theme - like the Drow and the Derro. And so it is that in the Monster Manual 2, Gygax wrote up two races of degenerate snake men who were once Human. Seriously: the Yuan-Ti are from the same book.

Now, some of that might be simple hedging. Yuan-Ti got their real monster entry in Gygax's Monster Manual 2, but they got their first writeup in the adventure Dwellers of the Forbidden City by Zeb Cook. So this might be a She Hulk thing, where Gygax was writing his own degenerate snake men who were once Human in case Zeb ever took control of the Yuan Ti brand back from TSR (oh, the irony).

It's just one of those weird things about D&D-land. Apparently if you degenerate Humans, they turn into snake people. I assume this applies to all the various people who are closely related to Humans like the Elves, Orcs, Ogres, Azurin, Gith, Illumians, Aventi, Tieflings, and so on. All of those things breed true with Humans and are closely related to Humans, so I'm guessing that when they "degenerate" they also turn "back" into snakes.

Of course, not everything is related to Humans. After the big "Goblinoid" split in 3rd edition (when Goblins stopped being related to Orcs and by obvious extension - to Humans), there is a quite sizable number of races that are all related to each other yet not at all related to Humans. These are the Goblins, Hobgoblins, Bugbears, Snow Goblins, Fire Goblins, Bhukas, Amitok, Vril, Norkers, Vaetti, Bakemono, Dekanters, Varag, Forest Kith, Tasloi, Koalinths, Blues, and so on. Those are all Goblinids rather than Hominids. And since the more "degenerate" of them (such as Tasloi and Varag) are long armed knuckle draggers, I think these guys actually did evolve from the local apes.


I could see this thing being in the same evolutionary clade as Goblins.

Now we get into some weirdness with the Dwarves. In Dark Sun, Dwarves are just hominids. They interbreed with Humans poorly, but do so in a way which is in no way special. The Muls prove that Dwarves and Humans are part of the same branch of the tree of life. But in every other setting, Muls don't exist and Dwarves aren't related to Humans. What they are related to are Fire Giants and Azer - two creatures who are very notably on fire, but otherwise extremely Dwarfy in appearance. D&D never bothers saying, but I imagine that Dwarves have a body temperature much higher than hominids or goblinids.

Then there are Kobolds. They've bounced around a lot. Back in AD&D days, Kobolds were explicitly interbreedable with Goblins, who in turn could interbreed with Orcs who in turn could interbreed with Humans. Barring some ring species shenanigans, it seemed that despite having identifiable rat and lizard traits, Kobolds were simply Hominids. With the Goblinoid split, Kobolds are very definitely no longer part of a family with Goblins. That in turn means that Xvarts don't exist anymore, not that there aren't fan conversions because reasons. Kobolds also became more overtly reptilian, which because of the whole Yuan-Ti connection does not disqualify Kobolds from being closely related to Humans. It's unclear, but there's actually no particular reason to believe that you can't have a Kobold/Human hybrid even though Kobolds lay eggs.

Stranger still are the Halflings. The basic Halfling flavors of Hairfoot, Stout, and Tallfellow are really obviously intended to be Halflings with more Human, Dwarvish, and Elvish traits, respectively. But despite that, Half-Halflings have only ever happened in non-canon joke pieces. A Hal-Halfling is of course a Quarterling, but those only appear in spoof literature, never "for real." So while Halflings are similar to Humans and Elves and Dwarves, they do not appear to actually be related in any way. Convergent evolution or something.

-Username17