Small note on rebuilding as it stands.

[With Darkness and Silence]

I just saw a suggestion about award characters being able to remake. In the past, I had been playing an award character before things like setclass, ability, ect came into play. At the time, I was virtually told the desire is for me to roll my character, so no. And I did eventually roll that character, only to have these features come out on the server not months later. I couldn't be more disappointed at the time.

As it stands, the system has changed, and hopefully the mindset. But there is one thing I will always hate about special races, that I have particularly complained about genasi: And that is a lack of build variance due to starting gift options. And what will remain post character creation: Your gift options.

There is presently an inability to change your gift options, which while I'm aware demonstrates a dramatic change in your character, potentially background tier, we're only disallowing reward characters from changing their gifts.

Honestly, why?

Why let non reward characters do so? I'd say because it's a video game and we should support actions that harmlessly improve fun and enjoyment for the individual.

As it stands, not just award characters, but anyone attempting to rebuild with the same gifts will rebuild into a less improved state as they attempt to form their build around their old gifts. Something about how an old dog can't learn new tricks perhaps?

I think as a human being who has trained in several fighting styles in well under a year, and knowing how many work out routines exist that can completely change your muscle structure to literally be Thor or Morbius, it's not entirely unrealistic. The books say, a wizard and a cleric studies their whole life. But we already let people change this, and I sincerely doubt any irl nerd couldn't learn magic in a year better than any DND wizard with a kind of passion that couldn't be reckoned with.

My TL;DR is that a point was missed. Gifts decide builds.

Unless one can completely remake and change their gifts, they are shoehorned into their build selection, and this is so much more worse for planar races that can't even play many of the high meta builds due to stringent stat requirements, many ruling out anyone who isn't just human. Why not allow an interaction between player and DM to resolve this? Why are we forcing people to choke the life out of their reward characters and not their non reward characters?

I do not think there are good enough reasons.

[The GrumpyCat]

The simple answer to why we do this beyond what's already been discussed (and I will grant, this mostly applies to the greater/major racial awards) is that we want to keep the amount of 'special' characters on arleith low.
Understandably a lot of people don't want to roll their 5% pc, and that's absolutly fair. We don't force that. But to use Vampire as an example, we artificially limit the amount of vamps by making them an application class. Currently we have about 12 active vampires, and a waiting list of people with concepts wanting to play one. It's getting to the point where I'm going to have to start asking people to wait RL years before being able to play their concept. And beyond 'good form' the only mechanical incentive for people to ever roll their vamp is that it may, eventually, get out of step with teh current meta.

Now Vamp/Rakshasa are the only reaces currently kept low via numbers, but the same does apply for a lot of other races. We simply don't want to see the entire server flooded with lots of Kenku, Avariel, Minotaur, Evil Aasimar/Good Tieflings ect. We want these things to be kept at least somewhat rare, and incentivising people to play new concepts, rather than sticking to these old ones, due to mechanical changes isn't a bad way of doing it, at least compared to some other options.

It may be that we implement a way of swapping out gifts in the future, I don't know honestly, that's more for the build team to decide. But as reguards allowing peopele to build without respending the award... (At least for the upper echilons of awards, I can perhaps see us bending on it for minor/normal awards) - I don't think it's going to happen.

[A Mystery Clock]

We want these things to be kept at least somewhat rare, and incentivising people to play new concepts, rather than sticking to these old ones, due to mechanical changes isn't a bad way of doing it, at least compared to some other options.

Excuse me, but that's as appealing an incentive as slapping someone, shouting "NO, BAD" and calling it a gentle nudge.

[The GrumpyCat]

We want these things to be kept at least somewhat rare, and incentivising people to play new concepts, rather than sticking to these old ones, due to mechanical changes isn't a bad way of doing it, at least compared to some other options.

Excuse me, but that's as appealing an incentive as slapping someone, shouting "NO, BAD" and calling it a gentle nudge.

I think compared to an enforced deletion date, or an enforced MoD, it's probably more on the nudge side, yeah.

[A Mystery Clock]

We want these things to be kept at least somewhat rare, and incentivising people to play new concepts, rather than sticking to these old ones, due to mechanical changes isn't a bad way of doing it, at least compared to some other options.

Excuse me, but that's as appealing an incentive as slapping someone, shouting "NO, BAD" and calling it a gentle nudge.

I think compared to an enforced deletion date, or an enforced MoD, it's probably more on the nudge side, yeah.

If we're talking comparisons, of course, a thorough beating is a gentle nudge by comparison to straight up murder. Just because there's an infinitely worse option involved, it doesn't mean that the slightly less bad one is great.

With no disrespect intended, it sounds like special races are allowed through clenched teeth. So why have them at all, instead of allowing the option, making it a high award, and then looking down on people who do play one- and rug pulling under their feet until they give up? That sounds like a recipe to make special races players extremely frustrated and take extended breaks, more than an incentive for them to happily move on to something different.

I feel like while the intended goal is to get people to play other characters, de facto, the obtained result is to get a lot of players to play other games. And I am not talking about myself. I don't want to rebuild at all. But I've seen it happen enough times to point it as an issue.

[With Darkness and Silence]

The simple answer to why we do this beyond what's already been discussed (and I will grant, this mostly applies to the greater/major racial awards) is that we want to keep the amount of 'special' characters on arleith low.
Understandably a lot of people don't want to roll their 5% pc, and that's absolutly fair. We don't force that. But to use Vampire as an example, we artificially limit the amount of vamps by making them an application class. Currently we have about 12 active vampires, and a waiting list of people with concepts wanting to play one. It's getting to the point where I'm going to have to start asking people to wait RL years before being able to play their concept. And beyond 'good form' the only mechanical incentive for people to ever roll their vamp is that it may, eventually, get out of step with teh current meta.

Now Vamp/Rakshasa are the only reaces currently kept low via numbers, but the same does apply for a lot of other races. We simply don't want to see the entire server flooded with lots of Kenku, Avariel, Minotaur, Evil Aasimar/Good Tieflings ect. We want these things to be kept at least somewhat rare, and incentivising people to play new concepts, rather than sticking to these old ones, due to mechanical changes isn't a bad way of doing it, at least compared to some other options.

It may be that we implement a way of swapping out gifts in the future, I don't know honestly, that's more for the build team to decide. But as reguards allowing peopele to build without respending the award... (At least for the upper echilons of awards, I can perhaps see us bending on it for minor/normal awards) - I don't think it's going to happen.

I believe it would leave the population of special characters entirely unchanged if this were allowed.

I understand you have statistics to rely upon, but statistics are a lense through which one's perception of reality can be altered.

How much active time do people spend not being seen?

And how many of those special races are permanently shelved, quite literally never to be seen again, while the player has moved onto many, many much more versatile builds and is having a good time not stressing about the roleplay involved in playing a tiefling, or a vampire, or a rakshasa?

The population seems like it must remain largely static. (And personally, I have always thought more cool is cooler, so I wish it weren't.) In my experience, people generally have a special race character or a normal race character at any given time in their vault that they like to whip out.

And they will, of all reasons to delete those characters, likely do it to replace them with a brand new character of the exact same category, causing no real change to the population.

Though, you said it is up to the build team to make this sort of decision? Then it seems I must hope they see our discussion here and have something to chew on for a while. I know changes don't come fast in Arelith, but I really think there is a lot of decades old smoke and mirrors ideas that people hype themselves up about over the special races being around and about rebuilding of this nature.

I mean really. Why does there need to be coercive techniques of breaking down people's will to play their characters? Why would there need to be enforced deletions? Forced MoD?

We're just on a roleplaying game together. Just as people shouldn't be bullied out of playing their characters (as happens far too often on this server,) why should we actually have a need to rely on natural selection of people's enjoyment through making builds unplayable or forcing them to stick with something they didn't understand was a bad decision for their enjoyment of their character until they hit 30 and realized they didn't even know the class before they picked the race and it feels wrong for their concept.

It does seem like a bit of teeth gritting over special races at this point, that again, I find completely unnecessary. Population controls itself. People see too many special races and proceed to make the coolest non special race characters they can because they see the need for it, and people drift away from special races before two months or even one month so much it is would be wild to base statistics on them.

Truly, flavor comes from all food. Variety is the spice of life.

[The GrumpyCat]

The award system exists for three reasons

1) To allow players to play special/unusual characters and concepts
2) To Keep such concepts rare
3) To encourage players to give up characters, so that the server maintains a healthy turnover.

These are the three essentail pillars of it, and these are three thingse that I don't feel we can stray too far from. As I've alraedy explained, allowing major/greaters to remake without an award would be braching the second two of those pillars = it would make such conetps a lot more common over time, and it would no longer encourage such pcs to eventually pass on from that concept, to others.

For myself I can't say that I've ever held any contempt for reward characters, - I've a few in my vault. There are those who would like to see the entire award system scrapped and no special races avaiable at all. Just look at some prior discussions for that. I don't count myself in that camp, but I recognise that keeping such races limited, and encouraging rolling (though not enforcing it) is a good idea.

I realize this negativly effects a few players who are increadibly close to certain concepts, special ones at that - and I am sorry about that, but I have to consider the over all wellbeing of the server.

I feel like while the intended goal is to get people to play other characters, de facto, the obtained result is to get a lot of players to play other games. And I am not talking about myself. I don't want to rebuild at all. But I've seen it happen enough times to point it as an issue.

If that's the case then, well that's the case. It's a real shame, but I wish those players best of luck in the future. Thise I think is one of those things that isn't going to change in the near future. It is what it is. This is kinda like saying 'I think that Arelith would get and keep more players if it allowed age 18+ roleplay.' I mean - we definatly would yeah. We'd get LOT of people that way. But it'd also be a massive and fundamental change in what Arelith is. And I think what you are wanting, whilst not as fundamental a change, is still pretty close to it. A change in a very basic pillar of how part of the system works.

So yeah - this a fundamental bit of Arelith that I really don't see changing any time soon.

Because we're arguing against something that would really be a very fundamental change in the spirit of how this system works, I'm going to lock this for now. That said, I will bring Irongrons attention to this and if he decides that you're right and we should change on this? Fair enough. For myself I don't see it happening though.