Annoying races - Was: WoW - I wonder....

From: "Michael Shell" <FenrysStar@???.com>
Sent: Monday, August 28, 2006 4:58 PM
Subject: Re: [SPELLJAMMER] WoW - I wonder....


>I don't know, I find humanity increasingly annoying.

Is that real life humanity or RPG humanity?

> In any case I find kender, tinker gnomes and gully dwarves to be highly
> amusing.

If you look at Lord of the Rings (which is a better crafted book than 
everything from TSR and WotC added together) you can see that with careful 
plot building an apparantly comical race can be turned around and made into 
something very interesting.

I initially thought that Kender seemed to be a bit pointless, as they like 
to steal for the sake of seeing things. However having read a little bit of 
stuff about the back story of The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings, it seems 
that Kender are more like Hobbits than Halflings are. Bilbo Baggins was 
supposed to be a burgler (or bag man). So if Tolkein can turn Hobbits into 
heros it should be possible to do the same with Kender.

I was actually quite impressed by Gaeadrelle Goldring (Gaye) from the 
Cloakmaster novels. She mostly went against the steriotype, as although a 
few things fell into her pockets, she didn't pointlessly steal everything 
that she saw.

(It was also interesting to see that Teldin Moore (a groundling from Krynn) 
had a prejudice against Kender yet the captain and crew of the Probe were 
willing to accept Gaye as a crew member. It makes you think that the 
brotherhood of wildspace is fairly strong and that spacefarers would 
integrate much better than groundlings. Perhaps one of the reasons that 
spacefarers look down on groundlings is that they dislike their racist views 
of other races.)

Tinker gnomes like Kender are only annoying if played as a corny steriotype. 
If you create a valid reason for a tinker gnome to get involved with a 
spelljamming crew then they would do their best to pull their weight. A 
tinker gnome might occasionally get on the nerves of other crew members, but 
they wouldn't do this deleberately. I think that an all tinker gnome party, 
with a shared life quest, could make an excelent idea for an SJ gaming 
group. The life quest would give the players a reason to go hunting for 
things and to take part in adventures.

As for gully dwarves. One way to play a gully dwarf, that isn't annoying, is 
to start of from the point of view that everything written about gully 
dwarves is racist comments made by other dwarven races. You can then play a 
gully dwarf that has come from a poor background and is trying to work his 
way up in the world despite discrimination. I don't think I ever recall 
seeing a gaming product that shows a positive picture of gully dwarves. 
Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing for political correctness in games, but 
the race must have *some* advantages to it.

The main problem with these "amusing races" is that certain TSR authors (and 
game designers) haven't bothered to display all the good points of these 
races. If they didn't have good points they would have become extinct 
centuries ago.

David "Big Mac" Shepheard
Virtual Eclipse Role Playing Club
http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/virtualeclipselrp/links/d20_system_001071937434/Spelljammer_001071430476
http://virtualeclipse.aboho.com/