Examine: Race/sub

[Durvayas]

*Rings a small silver bell for Durvayas*

You rang?

With regards to rebuilding, that's my point: Why aggrieve players with rebuilds when the system isn't adding all that much to the game otherwise (gnomes v halflings being the exception), and already has notable (seemingly arbitrary) exceptions for vampires (who can never be identified as one according to the announcement post, no matter how much lore or spot a character has), for Deep Imaskari (who will always be identified as a deep imaskari if not disguised, no lore needed), and asymmetry between drow and elves (drow are monsters, so will always be identified without needing lore. Elves are not monsters, so will only be identified if the target has 10 lore).

A couple things I feel compelled to point out here.

1) Being able to tell races and subraces at a glance through tracks and otherwise has never not been mercilessly metagamed. You'd have a character dressed head to toe in concealing clothes, with a stoneskin active, a ghostly visage, speaking perfect elvish, complete with a description describing them as elvish, and people would regularly metagame their tracks to out them as a drow even without beating their disguise. The same thing would happen to elves speaking xanalress.

2) As far as I can tell, drow are being considered elves for the system. I'll need to test it with more lore on a PC later. IF the system identifies drow as such without a need for lore, that doesn't make a lick of lovely sense, because drow are the least monstrous of the UD races by appearance. Physically, they are only slightly shorter, black skinned, white haired elves. They don't have horns, they don't have quills in their beards(looking at you, duergar), they are merely recolored elves.

3) Deep imaskari being excempt doesn't make a lot of sense. They'd just be a really pale human who might be an outcast at a glance. They might have a cultural disconnect, but they should really have a much higher lore requirement than ZERO to identify, given how obscure Deep Imaskar is. Most of the UD doesn't know it exists, how would the average joe on the surface know?

Vampires, with their deathly pallor, red eyes, fangs, inability to get tired, total lack of partaking in normal food and drink, and telltale transyvanian accent(I jest about the last one) make much less sense to be exempt. Everyone knows what a vampire is in concept. I fully understand WHY vampires are excempt though, because if a lvl 2 vampire appeared in cordor to start, it would be entirely unplayable. It would last all of five minutes at most before being killbashed. Odds of a vampire PC successfully infiltrating a surface settlement before the entire server knows what they are because the sheer number of spies in the UD(if the lvl 2 vampire started in the UD to begin with) are slim to none. Vampires NEED to be exempt from the system to be viable as a concept.

4)Most importantly, across the board, the lore check needs to go way up to tell these things.
As Feral one said, a lvl 2 with a paltry 3 points in lore(which they might have simply by having 16 int to start, which is quite common) and a lore potion, identify scroll, or a bardic mandolin, all of which are nearly effortless to get (hell, the potions you start with), allows anyone to instantly, and without a point of investment, identify with 100% accuracy the subrace of an individual. Its ridiculous. This system is a mistake and WILL be abused as implemented now. It is in dire need of the -mimic command to work for it, and it is in dire need of the Lore check to increase by a bare minimum of ten across the board.

[Lorkas]

You can tell that it's a surface elf with no lore at all. You just can't distinguish moon vs sun elf--it will just display as "elf".

[If Valor Were Inches]

The complaint about being revealed instantly is sort of resolved with a place like the Skaal village on EE, where everyone is low level and achieving X amount of lore is not as easy, and by the time you depart, you are more than ready to face the world. In my opinion, the lore should solely be skill based determined as well. No skill bonuses going into effect.

Maybe you could even throw in a gift option to make yourself harder to detect, though you shouldn't be impossible by the most dedicated sage, but it would be desirable by those who want to play races that are very much about keeping their traits hidden.

I'm against the idea of a message popping up on examination where you can easily just put such traits in your description as a note for those who see Character name's Subrace. Concerns about metagaming are valid, but 1: We should be optimistic, and 2: We have avenues of resolving abuse.

But the general gist for me on the complaint, beyond the realism of it, seems to be the concern of high levels learning and spreading this information all over. While I think we should have more trust in players, a gated low level area (Skaal) would probably address this and a lot of other high level ganging on concerns out there.

I also, for the record, don't think vampires should be exempt, nor drow even, simply higher lore checks.

[Lorkas]

I'm not sure what's meant by metagaming in the last few posts, I confess. If the information is granted to a character by an in-game system, then it is not metagaming for the character to know that information. It's up to the two players involved to work collaboratively to tell the story, but it isn't metagaming for someone to know that you're a tiefling if an in-game system tells them that you're a tiefling.

Ultimately the value of this system as I see it is this: you can tell an orog apart from a half-orc, drow apart from an elf, and duergar apart from a dwarf. This is for the benefit of those monster races as much as anything--when I was playing my orog, it was highly frustrating that we couldn't in any way tell the difference between orogs and half-orcs if the player didn't put that information in their description.

I'm willing to concede that there are times when it doesn't make sense for tiefling/aasimar traits to be visible by examine, but the above cases absolutely should be distinguishable (except perhaps arguably duergar/dwarf... the other two examples have differences in body shape that would be apparent if not well-hidden).

Ultimately though my point was this: regardless of whether or not it should be visible in game, it is visible in game right now, and our job in game is to make sense of that. I think Stath and some others have misinterpreted this claim of mine as a statement about how the system should be rather than a statement about how we should react ICly given that it is, in fact, how it is right now. It was a response to the sentiment that it's the spotter's responsibility to make up details that outed a character as a tiefling/aasimar.

[caldura firebourne]

honestly, one thing I've never seen happen, though I think would solve alot of unnecessary angst if it did, is a situation like this

Person A (disguised) walks through a city
Person B examines and breaks disguise

Person B then proceeds to send a tell along the lines of "I broke your disguise, any particular traits or features I would notice?"

thus collaborative storytelling begins, and Person A (disguised) does not feel like he/she just got god-emoted into a flaw in their disguise

[Liareth]

I agree with a lot of the feedback in this thread. I was always against making race visible in the examine window because I don't like how it gamifies an aspect of character interaction I feel should be discovered naturally through RP.

There are absolutely upsides to the system - the ability to easily tell apart a dwarf and duergar or an orc and orog without having that knowledge as a player. But there are downsides, too - it makes it impossible to hide your race without investing heavily in bluff, and no matter how hidden your visible racial features are, anybody with some lore is going to be able to see that racial birth mark hidden on your inner thigh.

In many of the situations where a drow might want to hide their race, e.g. surface raids, using the disguise check to detect race might make sense. But let's say that a drow adopts a disguise and trades with some folks from the surface. The surfacers have broken the disguise through passive examination (right click examine). It's down to interpretation what that means - but to me, since the drow's skin was completely covered up the entire time, I wouldn't play that as having cracked their race. I would recognise the drow only if I'd seen them before. I would recognise their drow identity as 'that elven trader' if that was the identity I'd seen first.

In the example of an aasimar or a tiefling, they can be almost indistinguishable from to their base race. It doesn't make sense for these races to use disguise to hide their race. I've played both an aasimar and a tiefling on Arelith. The aasimar concealed her race by downplaying the physical signs of her heritage (silver hair, golden eyes, dat otherworldly waifu beauty) by always wearing a hood and hiding her hair in it, and keeping her gaze averted whenever possible. The tiefling didn't even really know or understand her heritage - she smelled awfully like sulphur and fire and brimstone and her skin was a bit warm, which was conveniently explained by the fact that she was a mage and alchemist and obsessed with fire and batshit crazy.

Now that race is clearly displayed in the examine window it becomes almost mandatory to act on that information, because if the game has given it to you, that means your character is meant to know it.

tl;dr: I don't like that the examine window displays race now because it gamifies racial detection and makes the check a binary 0/1 rather than a fluid and dynamic RP thing which I believe it should be. Also I loved placing little hints to my characters' heritage in RP and I can't do that any more because everyone will just know.

[Xanos950]

Never ever has any of my characters race been metagamed before, really no clue why so many ppl are alarmed for no apparent reason.

I like the change because it's more immersive and logical to be able to tell someones races or sub-race. Some races are blatantly obvious for example... Orog, Duergar, Drow, Aasimar, Tiefling etc.

It's common knowledge (or should be at least) throughout FR what those are, too. So there really is no excuse for the rather low lore check.

[The GrumpyCat]

I've no great feelings upon this honestly, except to say that: I think that whilst there is a reasonable argument that Subraces, especially plane touched, should not be viewable, I can't see a good reason why base races (e.g. Human, elf, dwarf, halforc, gnome, halfling...) should not generally be viewable. I mean I suppose maybe there are a few cases where a halfelf might be eager to hide their heritage, but I think it's pretty nieche.

Then again - just to stress my own opinion - i have no great thoughts either way. I can see the downsides of it, I can see the upsides too.

[Seekeepeek]

Great update unlike the old *looks* this new system has parameters that can be fiddled with. Iam sure the Devs will tweak with this new system if it get silly. customizing for the win.

[Thanatosis]

Liareth's post summed up how I feel about this better than any of my two-line snark at Lorkas ever could.

[Lorkas]

...I don't really disagree with much of what Liareth says, two-line snark aside. As I've said many times, my posts were a reaction to one player basically saying they're going to refuse to take part in the in-game system, and said posts shouldn't be read as anything other than a reaction to that "I-don't-like-this-system-so-I'm-ignoring-it" attitude. Talk on the forums about how you want the systems to change, but refusing to acknowledge an in-game system because you don't like it is inappropriate.

[BegoneThoth]

I agree with a lot of the feedback in this thread. I was always against making race visible in the examine window because I don't like how it gamifies an aspect of character interaction I feel should be discovered naturally through RP.

There are absolutely upsides to the system - the ability to easily tell apart a dwarf and duergar or an orc and orog without having that knowledge as a player. But there are downsides, too - it makes it impossible to hide your race without investing heavily in bluff, and no matter how hidden your visible racial features are, anybody with some lore is going to be able to see that racial birth mark hidden on your inner thigh.

In many of the situations where a drow might want to hide their race, e.g. surface raids, using the disguise check to detect race might make sense. But let's say that a drow adopts a disguise and trades with some folks from the surface. The surfacers have broken the disguise through passive examination (right click examine). It's down to interpretation what that means - but to me, since the drow's skin was completely covered up the entire time, I wouldn't play that as having cracked their race. I would recognise the drow only if I'd seen them before. I would recognise their drow identity as 'that elven trader' if that was the identity I'd seen first.

In the example of an aasimar or a tiefling, they can be almost indistinguishable from to their base race. It doesn't make sense for these races to use disguise to hide their race. I've played both an aasimar and a tiefling on Arelith. The aasimar concealed her race by downplaying the physical signs of her heritage (silver hair, golden eyes, dat otherworldly waifu beauty) by always wearing a hood and hiding her hair in it, and keeping her gaze averted whenever possible. The tiefling didn't even really know or understand her heritage - she smelled awfully like sulphur and fire and brimstone and her skin was a bit warm, which was conveniently explained by the fact that she was a mage and alchemist and obsessed with fire and batshit crazy.

Now that race is clearly displayed in the examine window it becomes almost mandatory to act on that information, because if the game has given it to you, that means your character is meant to know it.

tl;dr: I don't like that the examine window displays race now because it gamifies racial detection and makes the check a binary 0/1 rather than a fluid and dynamic RP thing which I believe it should be. Also I loved placing little hints to my characters' heritage in RP and I can't do that any more because everyone will just know.

That's all cool stuff that you did, but what about the people that have totally blank descriptions and you would never ever know they're literal hellspawn until you killbash them and check the skull?

Also, I don't really consider full progression of a skill 'heavy.' I would say heavy is gift + full ranks + gear + skill feats, and that's not needed. You can get by with crossclassing, you can get by with just 15 or so ranks and some gear even, so you do not need 'heavy' skill investment.

I think the most ideal situation would be to just force the players of these planar races to have -something- in their bio and not just disguise themselves w/o taking ranks of disguise. But that would be very hands on so it isn't likely, so now everyone can know, unless you take bluff.

[flower]

And to what point is it exactly an obstacle for you a person having blank decription?

[One Two Three Five]

Like the hypothetical outcasts in Cordor needing brands or whatever, the concept of other players 'getting away with' stuff that you feel entitled to know/act on automatically really upsets some people.

Of course, this sort of automatic RP was something we were moving away from, for the better, for a long while, because the sort of people who need to do this sort of thing are also the sort of people who think a good method of storytelling is

killbash them and check the skull

But you know, whatever. If that's the quality the devs want, that's the quality they want. I still feel like we need an expanded mimic function, and that this update will feel incomplete and frankly rather cheesy and lazy from a player perspective without it, but I'm sure there's a lot on the dev team's plate (Which begs the question of why bother doing this, but hey.)

[DirtyDeity]

Just today meeting with a random group, we had an Aasimar in our group, and she was referred to as 'our Aasimar friend', when we were surrounded by demons and devils in Avernus, during combat, without a single word actually exchanged between the player and the Aasimar.

The fact that players are mechanically encouraged to behave that way because the game spits that information in their faces is lame, and destroys all the intrigue about playing plane-touched races.

Now it doesn't matter what type of demon/devil/angel blood the planetouched possesses. It doesn't matter how much of it. It doesn't matter if they embrace it or resent it. It doesn't matter if they hide it or flaunt it. They're either a Tiefling, or an Aasimar. And it encourages biased, one-dimentional roleplay.

I'm definitely on the against side.

THAT SAID... It's really nice to see creature types on monsters and mobs around the island.

[DirtyDeity]

That's all cool stuff that you did, but what about the people that have totally blank descriptions and you would never ever know they're literal hellspawn until you killbash them and check the skull?

Also, I don't really consider full progression of a skill 'heavy.' I would say heavy is gift + full ranks + gear + skill feats, and that's not needed. You can get by with crossclassing, you can get by with just 15 or so ranks and some gear even, so you do not need 'heavy' skill investment.

I think the most ideal situation would be to just force the players of these planar races to have -something- in their bio and not just disguise themselves w/o taking ranks of disguise. But that would be very hands on so it isn't likely, so now everyone can know, unless you take bluff.

I've seen some several messages on your side advocating 'get bluff if you don't want people to know you're a tiefling or aasimar', but that's so crooked, because you start the game at level 3, and without gear.

By the time you've gotten far enough in levels, even if you're a class that HAS bluff as a class skill (only 2 base classes), the entire island will already know you're planetouched, and the entire point is completely redundant.

[WanderingPoet]

Of course, this sort of automatic RP was something we were moving away from, for the better, for a long while, because the sort of people who need to do this sort of thing are also the sort of people who think a good method of storytelling is

killbash them and check the skull

Not at all. The sort of people who 'need' this are those that can't tell a moon elf from a sun elf by character model alone. Or those that can't tell a gnome from a halfling. This sort of change reduces the need to metagame by allowing your character to know something they should know. This isn't 'automatic' RP so much as it is giving you information that your character already knows and helps bypass an engine limitation.

This change likely came because people were asking for this feature and have been for months.

I do agree that planetouched should show up as their base race - if you can't figure out they're planetouched by the RP then it likely isn't so easily noticeable that they are planetouched.

But Drow, duergar, orogs and what have you? Just wearing a helm/armour shouldn't be enough to automatically be impossible to tell from another. You should have to invest in bluff in order to disguise.

[Irongron]

I've seen some several messages on your side advocating 'get bluff if you don't want people to know you're a tiefling or aasimar', but that's so crooked, because you start the game at level 3, and without gear.

By the time you've gotten far enough in levels, even if you're a class that HAS bluff as a class skill (only 2 base classes), the entire island will already know you're planetouched, and the entire point is completely redundant.

I think is a really crucial point. Word spreads (unfortunately also on OOC channels) and I don't really see a situation, whatever the check value, that anyone would be able to keep this kind of information a secret in the long term. It also makes a poor story resolution when the 'big reveal' comes not as the culmination of a larger narrative, but because someone happened to pass a roll at a specific time.

It actually brings the Decks of Stars to mind, which is kind of the opposite. Information learned from that feels significant due to the nature of the object. It feels 'special' where passing a lore check on examine does not.

For plenty of people this is an advtantage, as stated above, but for others it effectively entirely shuts down one avenue of RP. This really is one of those situations where some people are happy, and others are not, while yet others are just putting their faith in the team and trusting the judgement of those involved in the decision.

Aside from what I said above I will remain as impartial as I can be, but will definitely be giving this situation some further thought.

[The Rambling Midget]

I've been having a mixed experience since this all started. Of course, the majority of players either don't care or are too absorbed in their own play to notice. Of those who've interacted, the majority have treated suspected or possibly known planetouched with suspicion and fear, apprehension, intrigue, and all of that great stuff that you suffer through the stigma for. But, it only takes one to ruin everything, and that's what I saw, next. Some slobbering oaf shouting to everyone around him, "Hey, everyone! Look! That's a [planetouched]!"

We could've had some really fun and interesting expository roleplay...

[BegoneThoth]

There's been lame stuff going on either way you do it. From the no bio unknown race until dead, to the "guys I found a tiefling!" cries in Cordor.

Alas!

[DirtyDeity]

But the lame calling someone out in the middle of Cordor and then the whole island knows he's a tiefling can ruin someone's character straight out.

And some person having no bio and just playing a tiefling as a human hurts... No one? Seriously, so he has 2 more STR. Wowser. It really doesn't hurt anyone. It's just a shame on him for ignoring a possibly enriching facet of his character, and no one is the wiser.

One can ruin people's character, the other doesn't really affect anybody. I think it's clear what kind of lameness is preferable.

[Feral One]

But the lame calling someone out in the middle of Cordor and then the whole island knows he's a tiefling can ruin someone's character straight out.

And some person having no bio and just playing a tiefling as a human hurts... No one? Seriously, so he has 2 more STR. Wowser. It really doesn't hurt anyone. It's just a shame on him for ignoring a possibly enriching facet of his character, and no one is the wiser.

One can ruin people's character, the other doesn't really affect anybody. I think it's clear what kind of lameness is preferable.

*Echoes* This right here.

[Griefmaker]

I am still an advocate of this change from the subrace standpoint of moon elves/sun elves/gold dwarves/shield dwarves, etc. Things like that which with even a modicum of lore should be well known by many in the realms since that is not exactly "hidden information".

The planetouched I can definitely see it as an issue, but think that a mechanical system is not exactly bad. Assuming the requirements to beat it are significantly high so each John and Jane cannot simply expose the secret.

To that point, I think something like a medium-high spot (after breaking a disguise, if the character is disguised) should be able to detect that something is off about a character, but a very high lore would be needed to actually know what they are looking at. I like one of the suggestions I saw too about taking a gift to try and hide your subrace. I think a substantial buff (read: Not +6 to bluff...but something like +25 or something like that, but only in regards to hiding subrace) would be a great way to start.

Yes, there are OOC issues with people metagaming, especially in Discord or tells, but will happen regardless and unfortunately is one of the prices for taking something "special" like the planetouched, or even RDD/pale master/vampire/etc. And yes, I agree that things like that should be included as well in the list. There is to be expected a lot of IC angst over such things because they are not common and typically not the sort of thing anyone would want about /ICly/. Even Aasimar are regarded with suspicion in FR by the large majority of people...because they are different. Different in FR is bad.

Overall, I think this change could be a good thing if done properly. I wish I could say we can simply trust the playerbase to do what is right, but sadly that is like playing Russian Roulette but in reverse...with five bullets and only one empty chamber.

[BegoneThoth]

I also, for what it's worth, think the pm/rdd and other classes that develop physical features should go into the bio automatically.

[Tarkus the dog]

I think that they shouldn't.