A thought struck me while looking at discussion of something else…in Dungeon World (and the other *World games) you can get the functional equivalent racial stat penalties with racial moves.
If you’re from one of the small humanoid species, for instance, you have to do the Now It Fits move on newly acquired weapons and armor or carry forward a penalty on using them, and you get a bonus on that move if you have access to really good tools, a proper workshop, or someone with experience doing it. In other words, being one of those species means a short social scene every so often, with the chance for interesting complications.
Likewise if, say, you come from a species that takes a Charisma penalty in d20 rules for being arrogant bastards. Your move is something like I Bring No Sneer, and you use it in response to provocation to show your willingness to treat others as equals.
As Joel Robinson used to say, what do you think, sirs?
The way I generally look at these things is that there are two kinds of “racial penalty”. One is mechanical, they are penalized because the race deviates in some negative way from the norm (almost always baseline cultural and racial humans though it would be interesting to say that a world is baseline elf and so humans get -2 DEX). With this one, it’s often not worth it in DW because we’re not so much interested in balance. If you want to play a strong halfling, that’s cool, just have a high STR stat. No big.
The other side of the coin is just day-to-day narrative stuff. Like how dwarves can’t wear human armor. There’s lots of ways to handle that. Like maybe, you say “Okay, man, you can put on that magic plate, but it’s made for humans. It’s going to be awkward for you.” and use that to justify bad things happening – you trip on your armor, you lose it more easily, pieces fall off, etc. This covers the racial mistrust / hatred stuff you see between Dwarves and Elves, for example. “Sure, you can parley with the Elf Prince, but first you need to convinve him that you’re worth a damn to begin with. What do you do?” and maybe you’re defying danger and the danger is RACISM.
Cool, right? Of course, you’ve always got options for custom moves if that’s how your group likes to swing it. When you don armor too big for you, roll + DEX. That kind of thing.
Right. I was just pondering after some D&D discussion, how I dislike racial penalties (and am not all that wild about racial bonuses, really), but like narrative hooks, and moves.
I tend to dislike straight penalties myself, like the small characters get for being small in D&D 3.X, if they present both an opportunity and a disadvantage then I am ok with it.
In FATE’s incarnation presented in Legends of Anglerre the Halflings have a move entirely based on their size, they can basically make you miss them once per scene if youa re larger than they are the move is named Miss Me, Big Oaf, if memory serves me. this is the kind of thing I appreciate, it elaborates on being small, and not only makes you hate it.
Yeah, that sounds like fun! Tradeoffs, these make games good to play.
Not only fun to play, but a player is way more likely to be ok with being bullied by larger characters if he can jsut as well turn that against them, isn’t he?
Exactly. Penalties bug me because it’s all just downside. Gives and takes please me.