Lockout: Apparently My Thoughts On Sam's Race/Feat Question Were Too Long For A Comment

As such, I will make them a post!

First, I very much appreciate the consistent feedback! It's nice to have to think about my posts summat after I make them.

I ported some of the racial stuff over from another campaign I wrote, specifically the coloration of the dragonborn and the orcish feats. I'm not sure if you noted that the Greenblood grants half-orcs access to the orcish feats (which include an always-active weapon feat, though at present some of the others require the orc racial, which I might grant half-orcs another feat to take). I also understand that the expertise-style feats are big, but every 4e game I've played in for the last year or so has adopted the policy of just handing out expertise (now versatile expertise) for free, based on the thousands of internet-spawned words churned out about the combat gap issue. So the first part of my reason for including that sort of feat is, yes, an expectation that players will be allowed to make some more flavourful choices when less interesting things like expertise are already provided.

The second part of specific inclusions like that is setting related, for the half-elves and half-orcs. It's important to stress that there are no humans in my setting, effectively. Humans exist, but only in the swamps, mountains, and woods...they're all near-savages, and the vast majority of "humans" one meets are going to be closer to a shifter at the very least (with most of what you find in a human tribe actually being a reskinned gnoll, minotaur, goliath, squirrelman, etc). That's crucial because I'm not for one second trying to buy into the 4e revisionist half-orc bullshit where they're a "separate race." That's ridiculous. A half-orc comes about when a mommy or daddy orc and a mommy or daddy something else bump one ugly with one not-so-ugly. In the Tran empire, orcs have opportunity to breed with elves or dwarves (I could possibly see opening hobgoblins and bugbears up there too). If it's the former, though, it's going to be the result of military conquest, since the main thing orcs are doing other than fighting beastmen is trying to kill off those darn independent elves. Elves wouldn't raise a half-orc, so the creature is much more likely to take Greenblood and be a hulking savage who is perhaps a mite more graceful than his companions. Dwarven camp followers might give birth to a half-orc child, and occasionally a dwarven ranger might fall in love or lust with an orc and raise a dwarf/orc hybrid, which would actually find itself fairly well accepted in frontier Tran society. However, because the options are so very limited in terms of genetic mixing, I wanted to ensure that players were making their choice of parentage a significant part of their backstory.

It's the same with the half-elves. Again, with no humans to breed with, half-elves on the Tran continent are elf/dwarf hybrids exclusively. Some elves trade peacefully with the Tran, and elves are hot, so it's all sensible. In the Silken Kingdoms, since all the races represent the same core race (elves) further altered due to magical specialization/experimentation, mixing two already hybridized races produces offspring who favor one side of their parentage alongside the elven blood that they still retain. They can't take human feats (it wouldn't make any sense) so I wanted them to have an option whereby they can explore some races' feat trees...hence the dilettante swapping.

The third reason for my choice of feats like Greenblood is that I do expect the specific players I anticipate playing in my game to jump for this because I'm not a man with patience for min-maxery. Perfectly optimizing a sheet is fine for a delve or convention, where you may be on a timer and you're sure to be up against some utterly brutal encounters. However, in the 16+ years I've been playing DnD I've never gone in for character optimizaiton; I've always preferred character realization (was that lame? Perhaps!). That's true no matter what kind of game I'm running, but since I'm incorporating some rules into this specific campaign that make situations a mite less lethal (players have resources at their disposal to skip particularly dangerous encounters, though doing so will limit their options in other areas) there's even less call for the maximized approach. A half-orc in the Tran empire is going to be viewed a certain way and reacted to a certain way; I want her to have options regarding how much of that view and reaction is founded, and how much of each racial heritage is displayed.

A Short and Potentially Unqualified Discussion of the VMAs

I think it's VMAs? Maybe MTV VMAs? I don't know. I haven't given a shit about MTV, or its awards show, since the Smashing Pumpkins were promoting Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. I feel so ancient when I think about MTV, because I gripe about how MTV used to show music videos, but they'd all but stopped by the time I was in high school. My brother, six years younger than me, never really experienced an MTV that showed actual musical content. I suppose he had compensatory access to a slew of other channels, like MTV 2-Googleplex, Fuse, and BET. But since we're from Wyoming, we didn't actually have access to any of that, and I'm pretty sure by the time he lived in Colorado (and my parents put down for fancy cable) all of those channels were pretty much identical to MTV, albeit with theme-appropriate palette swaps.

The current excitement eating up the web would be completely opaque to me if not for my girlfriend, who has cable, a television on which to watch it, and reliable internet connectivity and cellphone batteries with which to communicate important things which occur to me. I'm talking, of course, about Kanye West interrupting Taylor Swift's acceptance speech. Please note, my gentle readers, I really wanted to call that link something else. I wanted to make some clever reference to another time when someone interrupted someone else while they were accepting an award for something. But I don't watch award shows. I don't care about awards for most things, and I instinctively mistrust the entire voting block concept which exists to dole these prizes out. Spike TV started a video game awards show, and I clocked out. Call me when there's a gala event to hand out prizes for most compelling homebrew campaign and best use of a fighter encounter power.

Those are Dungeons and Dragons references, intended to give you a firm grounding in my level of pop-culture integration.

I'll leave the key implications of Kanye's latest act (apparently this is a habitual thing for him?), professional and social, to E! and VH1 and, presumably, MTV (do they air programming that isn't some sort of reality program or something involving Puck?) (Apologies if Puck is dead.). I will, however, say this: As an erudite and articulate mulatto gentleman, it saddens me to see Kanye do this embarassing thing. I liked having a high-profile, articulate and entertaining hip-hop artist- someone who, at least at one point in his career, had the sensibility to apologize for discussing "money, hoes, and rims again". I wasn't taken in by Slow Jams or Through the Wire when they first dropped, but when I actually took the time to listen to the first album (courtesy of my much more plugged-in younger brother) I found a lot to love. I've consistently found Kanye's work more engaging and entertaining than nearly any other mainstream rapper- by which I mean no offense to the other artists I really enjoy and perhaps should consider mainstream. However, the album sales and publicity Kanye enjoys just don't seem to be available to Atmosphere, Astronautalis, Lupe Fiasco, Black Prez, Del the Funkee Homosapien, Hieroglyphics, or Aesop Rock. I could have continued waggling my indie cred but it was wearying to Google every name to ensure I was spelling it correctly- independent and alternative hip-hop loves to play with the organization of letters!

So Kanye was out there, and I felt like he was doing it for the thinkers, at least in some way. By contrast, I have almost zero personal stock in Taylor Swift. Despite being from Wyoming, I don't listen to a lot of country. I was impressed to learn that Taylor is actually from Wyomissing, and the puns therein write themselves. I do think the young woman has a deliciously vulpine cast to her face, which is a good thing- but I always felt guilty thinking that until about a month ago when I realized that Taylor is almost 20 years old, and thus it's not a sin to find her attractive. I watched a video she had posted on MySpace (about five minutes before the aforementioned revelation, note) and was entertained. And I realized (or decided, depending on how much you want to credit my opinions) that part of her popularity is sourced in her writing Emo music for young women. But that's it...compare the size of this paragraph to the preceding one.

All that said, shame on Kanye. I can't fall down on him as hard as the majority of internet pundits probably will, because I can sort of glimpse where he might possibly be coming from with the whole stunt. As a black entertainer operating at that high level of visibility, any time another black entertainer is passed over, especially an august member of the industry known for her own innovations, it probably rankles. Unfortunately, rushing a stage is never a solution. It didn't work for Gamecock and it doesn't work here. It only draws attention to the immaturity of the act, not the deep and intractable societal schisms and feelings of inequality which may or may not have spurred the act.

But what I think is the most unfortunate consequence of the show's events is that much, much more attention will be focused on Kanye's treatment of Taylor than Beyonce's grace and tact regarding the same.