I’m working on a comedy skit making fun of modern day hero groups where you have people playing as all these exotic races, where you don’t see a single human, dwarf, elf or gnome, where every hero group you hear of is also this bizarre mix of oddities, some of which the average person has never heard of (like the collection of Pathfinder 2e ‘ancestries’ (races)).
I don’t want to offend, but I do also admit that I’m personally frustrated with how rare it is to see a party where most people take traditional races and instead opt for strange beings that go beyond even goblins and orcs.
I recognize that it’s got to be hard to make this joke and hope it lands especially if people are themselves excitedly choosing exotic races; I feel like they’d take it as an attack, which it’s not intended to be but is understandable if people interpret it that way.
I also don’t want people to think this is supposed to reflect real world racism on my part, like racist 40k fans who barely disguise their racism by talking about ‘Xenos’ and fantasizing about war crimes (which nothing best reflects as when you have 40k fans in youtube comments talking about the military invading other countries and how they should be allowed to commit war crimes).
Honestly I’m not even sure why I’m asking as I already feel that it would come off as mean spirited and probably shouldn’t make this; I guess I’m hoping I’m just overestimating how this skit would come across.
I’m thinking maybe one way of making this joke land is if I have one of the heroes point out that humans, elves and dwarves all traveling together is SUPPOSED to be weird because you don’t usually see these races befriending each other, or that historically they’ve warred with each other.
It really depends on what your perspective is based on. One thing that is true about DnD, is that the game that is discribed in the books, and the box sets, is NOT the game being played at the table. This is true now and true historically. So when you’re taking the position on modern day hero groups, what is that perspective based on? Is it based on things like Dimension 20, Critical Role, or any of the thousands of less popular lets-play series? Is it based on your personal experience running games in your friends group, town, or region? Is it based on what you see in form posts?
Ancestries are also highly contingent on the DMs preference. I haven’t DMd in a number of years but when building my world/setting I usually pick a selection of available ancestry choices from the source books I have as the “available” or “common” choices. So what is the broad sentiment among DMs? Are they truely so open that they allow all these diverse options, and thus end up with very diverse parties?
One thing that can also be true is that often the traditional Ancestries (dwarf, human, elf, halfling, orc, tiefling, etc) can suffer from simplicity in their mechanical design as they are often the first Ancestries designed and can be geared for “beginners”. This can cause “power creap” in Ancestries created for later source material. This is driven by a need to differentiate these new Ancestries from the previous ones, to both entice players to pick them but also buy the source books.
DnD 5.5 tried to address this and it’s unclear to me of they succeeded in that goal. I don’t have the 5.5e source books and I haven’t played with those rules.
I can see the premise working though, as long as its juxaposed in a humorous way. If the setup is that the party needs to be discreet as they operate within a town / city full of humans, and the party consists of Magic Robot, a Bugbear, a literal Angle, a Fire Elemental, and a Psyonic Subspace Pirate from the manifolds of the Multiverse, you could imagine a whole host of humorous situations they might be involved in.