Hero of Zero

My stance with "weird" or "impossible" combinations of backgrounds/regions/whatever is that these are the players' stories about their characters. They are stories within a world I helped create, but I have to let players use those building blocks in the way they want to. Maybe their character is from an unusual or unique community of pale elves. Maybe their character is from a displaced group of ocean folk who have lived in an isolated village for generations, maintaining their old ways and customs.

I can't speak for the company, but I don't have any personal interest in being involved in monetization discussions/planning. I am comfortable with making a traditional "buy this" product that someone else will figure out how to price and distribute.

I feel like the more we get into what I would consider "schemes" (sorry) for getting money out of people through shell games instead of a straightforward purchase price, the less happy I am about it. I don't like soaking people for cosmetics or micro DLCs. I don't like the idea of the majority of the user base being gated from premium content that's only accessible by "whales" (gross).

I’m doing something weirder with the Pillars TTRPG now, where Attributes are like little perk packages, but there are still groupings associated with different Species (which is what I’m using instead of Race).  We’re still experimenting with it, so IDK how it’s going to wind up.

I understand why games are moving away from this paradigm, because traditionally fantasy games use the word “race” to define human/elf/dwarf and we use “race” in everyday speech to talk about something more like ethnicity.  Players try to map Earth ethnicities onto fantasy “races” and things drift into The Danger Zone -- or they are intentionally designed around racial supremacy theories.

To be honest, I’m not really concerned about how the lack of attribute bonuses/penalties will affect the distinctiveness of species.  I think it’s one of the weaker ways to distinguish characters since everyone has the ability scores and the bonus/penalty value is typically just adding or removing 1 from the die roll.

Balance-wise, I’m also not concerned about it.  If everyone has the same potential bonuses, the Worst Case Scenario for a min-maxed build doesn’t really change that much.

I do think you will wind up splitting some odd hairs when you have to pass a fairly arbitrary dividing line between playable species and non-playable ones.  It’s easy to fudge a halfling, human, and orc all having the same potential max Strength.  And you might say, “Well, a frost giant is different because it’s SO much bigger, they’re just inherently stronger.”  But where does that leave an ogre, or a troll, or an irda in Dragonlance?  Or, in the other direction, pixies, quicklings, etc.