So as was pointed out to me recently, this book is now available, even if only in a bundle. Has anyone purchased it? I think most of the player options in it are reprints of the player races; I wonder if there are any changes vs. the existing versions from the various books.
If so, I think we want to keep the originals intact, and add in MMotM as additional options. What does everyone think?
There is a thread on dndleaks reddit with compiled list of changes (can be found on the subreddit's main page) and there are plenty of them. I agree that the originals should be kept as they are or at least they should be left on the page with some tag like these from UA.
Every race in the book has had changes applied to it, with the main one being they no longer have score increases and are now "Add 2 to a stat and 1 to another or add 1 to 3 different stats"
The main thing im concerned about is the book now differentiate some previous subraces as their own races, examples being Deep Gnome, Shadar-Kai, Duergar and Eladrin. I'm wondering if we will be making them into specific pages or keep them as subsections of existing pages?
I didn't realize they had moved some sub-races to their own races, that makes things more complicated in my head.
The nice thing about this page, to me, has always been that I can use it for quick reference instead of paging through the books. Not everyone is going to have MMotM so leaving the races as they are from the original books is important imo.
Another thing to note is that Satyrs, Changelings and Shifters appear in the book, thus are no longer setting specific, wondering if we will be moving them to exotic races and having the setting specific variants as the alternate one?
MMOM really does throw a wrench in our whole organization of these pages. one solution may be to make new pages for the MMOM races, but if we don't clarify the difference between the long-standing 5e races and the MMOM races, it could get really confusing really quickly. maybe making a new section above the races that has the MMOM versions and marking the current race section as something else (it really does suck because I don't want to say "archive the old races" or "declare they're outdated" since 1) not all of the races were updated, and even if they were, 2) it's not like the old races were suddenly made irrelevant by the release of MMOM, especially since it's only available in that overpriced bundle for the next 3 months).
i also want to make sure that whatever we do, it's not going to make things harder as WOTC releases new content (i was going to suggest making pages for the new races just titled "MMOM-elf" or whatever, but if every future book follows the same format or they make updates for other races, then we're shooting ourselves in the foot by labelling everything as "new"). a solution that will take a lot of work but could be the best of all worlds is making pages for each race from each publication and grouping them as such (dmg-elf, e:rflw-warforged, wbw-fairy, UA78-kobald, etc). the problem is that this could easily bloat the races page, especially given the tendency to release subraces in UA or some setting-specific books (just look at the sheer amount of elves we'd have to make pages for, plus how would we handle subraces like the lotusden halfling? put all of the info for halflings on that page but add the subrace details too? that's a lot of redundant text when you're covering every single race)
in summary, i have no idea how we should handle this and i'd love feedback from y'all, and while i like where WOTC is going by rebalancing (sub)races and stuff, they really made this tricky and frustrating for anyone trying to catalogue 5e content for public use, especially when you don't want to throw out everything that's not the most cutting-edge content. it's the reason why i really like our archived UA pages: it preserves earlier versions of subclasses that people may have found interesting. for example, we make the mystic class available and don't just throw it away just because we ended up getting the psi warrior and aberrant soul subclasses out of it, and i like that we have the psychic warrior and the psi knight even though the psi warrior ended up being what was released
in any case, the main page or individual race pages are probably going to get a lot more confusing in the coming future
I'm an idiot… does the new layout with the Lineage pages I set up fix this issue?
Each sub-race or book gets it's own unique page, then the full race page gets built using those individual ones. We can just create new pages for the MMoM changes, then include them in here under a new header.
So for example here's the link for the master lineage page for human:
http://dnd5e.wikidot.com/lineage:human
Under there are these individual pages that are used to build the main page:
http://dnd5e.wikidot.com/lineage:human-standard
http://dnd5e.wikidot.com/lineage:human-variant
etc.
If we create new pages like '…/lineage:human-mmom' we can just include them on master lineage page. Under a category specific to that book.
We'll have to make some changes to the main page, but that's not a huge deal. And we can play around with creating new lineage pages for races like the Shadar-Kai that is considered a separate lineage now and include the original on both the master Elf page and the Shadar-Kai page.
Will we be keeping the Exotic/Monstrous Races labels?
All the races that feature in the book are under the label "Fantastical Races", so wondering if we will be recategorizing them using that?
They are unified by the fact they all have Ability score bonuses that you choose (2 to a stat and 1 to another or 1 to 3 different stats) and they all speak Common and another language of choice
Perhaps we could have the category prefixed with a similar page to Custom Lineage?
fredbob, the lineage pages look perfect (especially the general page at http://dnd5e.wikidot.com/lineage once we get the MMOM versions put up), i guess the only question is how we'll format it on the main page. as amazing as that general page is, it's a bit bulky to transfer to the main page in its entirety unless we only include the links to the "lineage:___" pages. in any case, i didn't know you were working on that already and having that sort of masterpost really makes the whole process easier (even if we need to make new pages for stuff like duregar and shadar-kai and whatever)
cclover, i think the origin of categorizing by standard/exotic/monstrous came from separating the page into stuff from the phb, volo's guide, and other exotic sources. i don't have the full list of MMOM's races, but we can probably take what was updated and declare them as Fantastical Races and leave the other categories until either they're updated as well or there's not enough to separate Standard, Fantastical, Setting-Specific (setting books, plane shift, etc), and Other
edit: just found a page that has most of the info in the book (https://5e.tools/book.html#mpmm,-1), considering the book seems to only differentiate "human" and "fantastical races", we'll probably just keep our Standard/Exotic/Monstrous distinctions since grouping every other race into the category "Not-Human" doesn't seem like it'll be useful
Ill drop my own quick thoughts into this, that we could just treat these as we'd do with any other new subrace? For example, with the Astral Elf, it was classified as its own race rather than a subrace, however we listed it in the Elf page in full since well, its an elf. For about 95% of the races here, thats the easiest thing to do for the frontpage. The only ones that would need a bit more thought would be the Changeling and Satyr, though the easiest option for that would be to list them twice? Once in setting specific, and once again in exotic? and then have the exotic one have a '(MoTM)' next to it, and then the link leads to the changeling page auto scrolled to the MoTM version
Its no where near as clever or well thought out as the lineages pages and other ideas we could go down, but its definitely the most quick fix we have for it
Though yeah, we might just need to rework the whole race section of the frontpage at some point.
My thought on a rework is that maybe we set it up like we did the Heroic Chronicle, with the big text, text beneath it, and then links? And then from the links, we probably have 1 general link for all races, and then maybe smaller focused links for say, Unearthed Arcana ones, and Setting Specific
Also, yeah most of the races will probably need to be listed seperately, since a majority of them are different to their previous printings
