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I don't understand why this post got so many 'Awesome' tags when it limits roleplay potential. It's easy enough to just state, 'One race will be more dominant, but they can share aspects of the other parent on a superficial level.' Like any other fantasy, sci-fi, or story does. Two humans of different biological backgrounds have a child with a mix of both.
The common theme I've seen recently is a lot of hard stances backed by game mechanics/coding and looking down on creativity and roleplay beyond the hard-coded rules. I don't mean someone pretending to be half-god or more powerful than they can demonstrate, just why deny someone something easily believable as being born from two different races and sharing their physical features?
Just to add to the argument, by this stance on it not being 'possible' any sort of roleplay of blindness, loss of limbs, or other bodily functions should be unallowed by the very nature of the game and cures.
Edit: My point is making hard stances on something that doesn't need it is unfair to the playerbase and creates an atmosphere of elitism where anyone trying something new and unexplored will be shunned until they receive the admin's approval. If they don't have the approval, they'll be discouraged from exploring their roleplay. Admin should be making hard stances on policy, not creativity.
In my experience, I have already met a handful of people who have left Aetolia over being discouraged by other players for their roleplay choices in how they play their character. One wanted to use daggers instead of swords for Templar and was basically bullied into not playing that character. When I tried to roleplay Chirurgery, I was told 'That doesn't exist in Aetolia so stop it,' when it does exist in lore (Domination, Buul, Indorani have a patchwork monstronsity in the guildhall and everything) and I wasn't giving myself super powers, I was using it as a way of expression in a non-game impactful way.
Leana's backstory(back in 2004) has always been half-breed, by the way, so this kinda upset me on a personal level. Born from a Rajamala male and Human female, she was Rajamala base with thinning fur and human extremities.
Edit(because I don't want to doublepost): It's a little late in the game's life to start writing in some hard canon for races. Isn't the goal to get -more- people to play? A better explanation of races is a great idea, but writing law on how a race should be played is going to scare away more than it brings them in. It makes the game boring. I'm for examples and guides, but there's freaking MAGIC in this game. Ease off the hard stances a bit.
IMO it probably got awesome tagged a lot, because having things that are hard canon makes the world more defined, and therefore less irritatingly non-immersive, and less jarring because people don't do as many things out in left field that make no sense to the accepted soft-canon because of RP made possible by ill-defined lore.
Not downing on your RP, for clarity--not everything needs mechanics to be legit. But having a nekokimi roll up and justify it by saying 'my parents were raja and human, so I I'm just a human who has cat ears and a fluffy tail, teehee' is most definitely immersion breaking.
Hard canon gives us a solid ground to build on for RP. It provides a helpful framework and logic within which we can construct said RP.
whether or not you take a minimalist or maximalist approach to design, however, i think you kind of miss your chance to prescribe things once actual practice exists. if you're familiar with the (non-)debate in linguistics about prescriptivism and descriptivism, i think it provides a useful example of what i mean. the good editors of the OED could, hypothetically, shout that "red" means "driving a remote-controlled Volvo station wagon into a trout farm" until they've gone hoarse, but we all know that it doesn't mean that at all. existing usage trumps prescription every time, and at this point, there are numerous characters - some of whom, like Leana, have existed for a very, very long time - whose established stories flatly contradict this post hoc 'canon'. to be meaningful, canon can't come from nowhere; it can only fill a gap where practice doesn't exist or describe existing practice. unless something demonstrably hurts the game or other players' experience, 'canon' that attempts to overwrite things that already exist in-game is deviating from 'the truth' of the game - the RP being overwritten is that 'truth'.
finally, i don't think it does much to establish goodwill between players and admin to legislate every nook and cranny like this. is it sometimes helpful to have some references about what an example of X race might be like? sure. defining all of X race in extremely restrictive ways (e.g. rajamala are all bengal tigers without opposable thumbs)? y'all can miss me with that noise. attempting to place limits long after people have gone beyond them only makes admin look like they can't give a flying funickorns about the players who've done this creative work. you might control mechanics, but you're not the only authors of this game. if you want us to respect your stories, then do us the courtesy of respecting ours.
just IMHO
I see the 'catgirl' and only negative examples get mentioned and it seems like no one bothered to think this through. They saw 'catgirl' and thought, yep, ban all hybrids because I don't like that. These jokes get tossed around a lot to dismiss the real impact these decisions would make on current and future players. This thinking process is how games lose player bases and suffer declines in activity. As an example, when Ashtan was destroyed, seemingly on a whim of Galleus during a lifestream, a group of people thought it was a great idea. A group didn't and stopped playing. The first group would not have quit the game if Ashtan was left to exist. Removing it had a net loss to the game as a whole. If the city had been allowed to flourish naturally and reaped the circumstances of their choices (being a neutral merchant city) it would have allowed for some fun conflict. Imagine Enorian declaring war on them for tolerating undead? Duiran going after them for overharvesting the wilds for profit? Spinesreach going after them for challenging their industrial superiority? Bloodloch because why not?
@Vyxsis If they could see how we argued in Discord, they wouldn't think you were just supporting me because we're married in game.
Without a record of an event and the ramifications, in either a help scroll, in game book, post, or reachable source, some aspects of Aetolia are left up in the air. When a player decides to act on the knowledge they have gained, such as why there are no rats in Enorian, they're often stopped by an older player saying, 'Oh, that's because of (secret knowledge only a handful of people have) so you're wrong.' Killing the momentum of a roleplay or story arc.
Events posts definitely help, but it doesn't capture everything. Whole swaths of history are being held in the minds of the oldest players of the game and they only speak up when it suits them or the situation goes in a different direction than they interpreted. If you want to work on Canon, make creating a history of Aetolia from launch until now a thing. Leave out too specific details so it's still flexible for RETCONs, future story arcs, and doesn't lock out anything currently being used in guild/city/personal rp. Each guild/city could come up with their own additional books expanding on events from their perspective. It would probably have to be a big forum event, covering 10-100 years at a time. New players could actually catch up in lore and base their roleplay on a world they should be aware.
Something like that could also be used to explain what each village/city/community of the NPCs was up to and help with future characters picking races from these locations.
In a game where players are big on their RP and people want to RP with consistency, there needs to be an answer to the question and the answer decided at some point was "no".
The still-simple but slightly-more complex and mechanical answer is: "No" is the extremely-easier answer. If there were half-breeds, there would realistically need to be mechanics for halfbreeds as well as RP standards for them, and that would become progressively more complex to make happen and keep consistent as you moved down the line of "Half/quarter/eighth/etc". Not to mention someone who's mom was one kind of half-breed, their dad another, now they are four completely unrelated races. "No" is a far easier answer to keep RP consistency.
Due to there being no Heritage when I first started, and got to endgame, (and the nature of the RP I ran Satomi through), Race was more of a fluid concept. I mean, when Tomi was still a teen there was a person who RP'd a literal dragon so the sky was pretty much the limit.
I can see why people want things to be simple and hard lined, but if that were the case then I wouldn't have got to enjoy the RP I've had that resulted in being Horkvali... so I'm on the pro half-breed side, though with obvious limits.. Tengu (raja-tavian) might be cute, but gotta be careful of the people who try making a chimera.
Addressing the need to have mechanics, I disagree. You wouldn't need them because being from two races doesn't inherently make you possess both races abilities. One aspect is always more dominant and so that would be the base race. The same would be said in half/quarter/eighth/sixteenth down the line. One of the sixteen races is going to be more dominant and the rest will serve as superficial physical differences. Like a Kelki with hair or skin or lacking scales or an albino human or a black mhun. Different parentage creates different looks more than 'skills'. Statpacks are no longer connected to race so that aspect of game mechanics isn't even touched. Race is purely roleplay based now.
Though, it probably wouldn't be difficult to implement since we already have a method of gaining skills that are impossible to have. Like flight. I don't want to trivialize the effort coders go through to implement anything in Aetolia, so take what I say next as a theory on implementation not a commentary on ease of implementation.
---The rest of the post is mostly just an idea to make this mechanically possible---
The tutorial would allow for a two-race hybrid choice, where the player picks the dominant race then they select the second race. Based on the combination, they can pick two skills from the dominant race and one skill from the secondary race. It would be explained that they should pick the race which will generally fit the image of what they plan to look like the most, so a catgirl would pick human and then rajamala. I say 'should' but not 'have to', for the same reason I think this whole hard-line stance is a bad idea.
Here's an example: I want to be a lizard with wings. I pick Xoran and get cold-blooded and fire breathing (I can't pick chameleon because of the wings and I lose endurance regeneration because of Atavian's frail physique). Then I pick flight (because hover requires flight and is automatically disqualified if Atavian is a secondary race, along with air stability and blood regeneration) and you've got a race! If you want to be nicer than I am, allow for blood regeneration or endurance regeneration to give them four skills, but I think the ability to mix/match deserves a bit of a malus.
'She is an agile Xorani and Atavian hybrid ...' or 'She is an agile hybrid of Xorani and Atavian heritage...' or 'She is an agile Idreth of hybrid Xorani and Atavian heritage'
A kid of theirs would have to choose their future. Are they going to be a hybrid too? A mix of the two most dominant parts or mostly one and hint at the varied ancestry in their description? It would be acceptable either way as just because you have a mixed race child doesn't mean it's a perfect 50/50 split. Biology is not math.
---End idea---
I feel bad for the players who have played the half-breed/more in the past, though, because the lack of access to this information has lead to the problem we have now of people who didn't know and now feel like their RP has been dumped on when it wasn't their fault that no one just made a help file explaining this for players who would have happily stuck with lore cannon if they'd had clear guidelines to follow.
edited for clarity and to add:
*This is my understanding after talking to a couple admin on the topic - admin please correct me if wrong.
even assuming it's true that somebody somewhere took a hardline "halfies don't exist" stance but just never bothered disseminating the knowledge, it's kinda too late to implement it now, as i said before. "secret canon" functionally doesn't exist, especially not in a multi-author game, and it's absolutely ludicrous to expect anyone to respect it when it's been a secret for over a decade. the boat has sailed on half breeds - they exist, and the man behind the curtain just looks a fool trying to assert they never have.
Look at vampires having kids/reproducing for example. In the early days, that was something that happened by a smaller segment, players rolled their eyes about it, administration got involved and drew a line saying "Hey yeah no, let's not do that" and it was unpopular. ...But it worked. Were there some growing pains involved for those that went that route and tried to roleplay it? Yes, without a doubt. But I think the game ended up better as a result.
All of that aside, I think there's an issue here from a biological perspective too. We're looking at race from an outside the game perspective when comparing radically different concepts here, I think. This isn't a Filipino man and a Mexican woman get together and have beautiful babies that are wonderful mixes of both (while both still being human).
I've always seen races in Aetolia as a poor word choice, when a better would be species. We're not talking two humans from different backgrounds/ethnicities, we're talking winged human with brittle bones and insectoid that lays eggs. To say there's different reproductive mechanisms at work there between would be... an understatement. Why does any 14 year old that strolls into the game get to play as if they have a more intimate knowledge of the reproductive cycles of the accompanying races in the game than, well.. anything else?
So, if it boils down to that, we run into the issue of "Well Atavians and Humans have enough physically in common, including reproductive cycles, that maybe it'd be feasible." What about Horkval and Atavian? Kelki and Xoran? Where do you draw the line?
Maybe this isn't an argument that's the best, but rather than forcing the administration to roll through and define biological components of every single race and how they reproduce, they went with the easier option of just saying "Yeah let's just avoid that big can of worms." New players don't have to be inundated with a genetic chart that shows "OK so you want to play a mixed race, you can have X and Y, but not B and C because B and C can't work but C and E can, but A and X absolutely can't, and A and Y will work for the first time, but the offspring afterwards will be sterile.." and so on.
what harm, then, is it for people to roleplay mixed-heritage characters without attempting to assert such mechanical advantages? what harm is there, how does it effect anyone negatively, for someone to say their character is mixed and only mean "well, they look mostly human but have a few scales|cat ears|whatever"? none, really. there's just no harm in it, unless the precedent that admin are trying to set is that half breeds exist, but only for people who pay to purchase racial relics. such a stance would be much more harmful than simply allowing people to self-describe as possessing multiple race-associated traits.
(apologies to @Satomi, btw - this post isn't really directed at you. it just seemed like the quote helped contextualize my thoughts so that i didn't appear to be ranting about racial abilities out of nowhere)
I've literally never encountered anyone that didn't treat relics as if they were just a bit of magic they could do, if they addressed being able to do them at all. I'm not saying a person who does doesn't exist, only that I've never seen someone with the underwater breathing RP having gills, and I've never seen someone with the Spinneret walking around with a spider butt. And if we're supposed to...good lord, what kind of amalgamation of eldritch horror must people like Fezzik and Tina look like. O.o 57 different racial relics.
Also, re: firebreathing humans, I DID specify sans endgame shenanigans. Endgame gives you a lot of leeway to do a lot of things. I have characters of dual heritage whose endgame form reflects that heritage physicially where their non-endgame form was purely human, because that endgame form is at least partially defined by how you see yourself (or at least that's always how I understood it).
Just because a player does something doesn't mean it's supported by the lore. If I did "DESCRIBE SELF , and she is literally made of disco balls", would you be behind that just because a player had done it and an admin asserting otherwise would erase my contribution to the game?
Second, you mention roleplay that establishes it prior - I don't necessarily think that individual players can just create lore in that sense. We have a character in game that has 3 heads and 9 tails, one of which is a scorpion, and another that just ends in a bell. How'd it get there? A hand-wavey explanation of "I experimented on myself."
Should that become a standard/canon just because somebody typed words in their description?
Regarding seeing this as making "arbitrary rules for everything" - creating a consistent environment is important for the game and the roleplay associated with it. It's the same reason I can't roll a Shaman and make up my own roleplay stating that since Shamans commune with spirits I can imbue a tree with a spirit and make it talk and tell jokes to passerby. It's just not how it works. By setting boundaries and guidelines we're given enough of a space to creatively play with and have fun, while still ensuring the limits are uniform.
Finally, again, biology plays a role. I get that the game's a fantasy game, but we need some barriers to keep things in line. Just like I can't go out and breed an eagle and a squid to make a squeagle (because that's crazy and impossible and makes no sense), some common sense boundaries when it comes to biological function and reproductive systems helps to keep an air of realism and encourages immersion.
this reads to me as basically saying: "this isn't a good example because i don't agree with the point it demonstrates." which, uh, is not a very useful thing to say. the example was given to show that there are in-game precedents for taking a hands-off approach to the question of reproduction, and this one is pretty dang recent. i'd call it relevant support for my point.
idk if you seriously believe what you're saying here. biology plays a role? squid and eagle can't even engage in something like copulation due to their physiology, but you're going to tell me that in-game races are too different to have mixed children when (1) people mudsex all the time and (2) this sometimes leads to pregnancy & then child RP? do you not see, like, a bajillion salient differences here? clearly, in-game races can interbreed. to jump, then, to the conclusion that somehow... despite their ability to bear offspring together... said offspring can only be one or the other... because realism??? there's nothing realistic about that. individuals that can successfully produce offspring together do not have offspring that is only one parent or the other. we all know that, right?
... right?
i think i know what you mean, and i agree, to a point. firebreathing needn't involve any particular physical features because... nothing we know of can actually breathe fire. it's obviously magic. however, some of the relics are quite literally nothing but extra appendages. the 'aquatic lamellae' let you use an emote that refers to your gills - presumably because it gave you gills. the mandibles relic lets you use two emotes that refer to mandibles - again, presumably because it gave you mandibles. relics that, when used, involve flavor text that explicitly states the use of some body part or another don't strike me as 'just some magic'.
also, since koda mentioned someone specific who has integrated various racial relics into their character's appearance...
this is a case of someone actually acknowledging as part of their RP that they have various relics, and it's way more plausible than just ignoring how weird it is that someone can spit acid and jab you with a scorpion tail. considering all the bizarre things that exist in the game - literal chimeras, amalgamations of corpses, talking trees, etc etc etc - it's almost more bizarre to suggest this character you've referenced is an example of player abuse.
since meaning is socially constructed, and since aetolia is not a closed single-author medium, the conclusion that players contribute to the game's lore and our contributions should not be simply overwritten seems glaringly obvious to me. in case it's not clear, my argument is not that admin need to canonize every last thing any given player has done, but that groups of players ought not to be subject to the idiosyncratic whims of admin. admin are, in this case, the OED insisting red is the Volvo in the trout farm.
i also meant to touch on this statement in particular:
i mean, no, not necessarily? my whole argument is driving at two interrelated points: (1) meaning is constructed socially, and (2) we ought to resist the urge to canonize every last thing. there's no need to make this canon or not-canon. why not simply take the position that so long as something is relatively plausible (e.g. players aren't gods, people of mixed heritage generally present some measure of characteristics of both parents, etc) and doesn't godmode anyone, then it should be permitted? why take the position that we must designate one thing "real" and another "not-real" in a world that's all made up? it seems mean-spirited to me, to put it mildly.
If I'm not mistaken, Atavians are the result of Atav + Human genetics. Mhun just seem to be humans who decided to live in a cave for a few centuries (whether or not this is true is.. well.. read HELP MHUN ORIGIN. That thing is like reading ancient English. Just so butchery sounding).
I'm just saying that there is some precedent, if my memory isn't failing me and just meshing various IRE muds together.
For all I can remember, Atavians are just Atav who have been integrated into Sapience Society, while Atav are just jerks. I genuinely can't remember. You really should check out the Origin scrolls, though, pretty awesome stuff.
Edit 1: Also, Pypo is the best monstrosity ever. A true Chimera. So proud!
Edit 2: Oh, and um... the only reason I can think of interbreeding producing only one or the other is magic. Godly will. Same reason why in Achaea, when a Siren or Satyr has a baby with someone, it's either a Siren/Satyr baby, or the race of the father/mother. It even says it in the help files, offspring are either the race of the mother, or the father. I mean, in a world of magic it isn't hard to make that sort of grand decision but it'd be nice to have it referenced somewhere.. maybe HELP RACE?
Quoted from HELP SIREN: Like satyrs, children born of a siren may be either a siren or the race of the father.
Guess we just need the big Severn to clear things up for us :P
"why take the position that we must designate one thing "real" and another "not-real" in a world that's all made up? it seems mean-spirited to me, to put it mildly."
There is nothing mean-spirited about players who want to play a fantasy game wanting there to be rules and guidelines to their fantasy game, because in a pretend world, having guidelines of what "is" and "isn't" is essential for players to feel more immersed within it. To make the pretend world feel more real, you need more rules explaining how that pretend world works.
Guidelines aren't directed at anyone or intended to hurt anyone or wound anyone. This specific RP/Lore guideline is the way it has been supposed to be, but because of the dearth of information available to players we have players now feeling like their characters' histories and backstories are being attacked or now made to look illegitimate and that is very unfortunate because for plenty of those players - they didn't have any way to know any better and it isn't their fault. As was mentioned, there is even confusingly mildly contradictory stuff in those HELP ORIGINS files - the parent folder is labeled 'mythos', but it isn't really abundantly clear that this is mythos TO the characters, not "the mythos of aetolia" (when you throw the word 'mythology into a fantasy world, it gets confusing).
However, at the end of the day, in a role-play-heavy and immersion-heavy game that also relies on those aspects having mechanical effects: you need guidelines and this is the one that has been chosen. It is both the simplest to hold up mechanically while giving RP freedom (doesn't stop you from boinking whoever you want and having a happy/dramatic/tragic family). It isn't intended to be mean-spirited or diminish your RP or anyone else's. The line just needed to be drawn somewhere and this is where it is for better or worse.
Meaning in a game, however, is arbitrated by its creators and administrators. The current, prevailing stance, explicitly spelled out three years ago, is the one I've cited, and the one most players hold by.
This stance was created because of a preponderance of mutually contradictory player stances on the subject, and because crossrace characters tended to produce immersion-breaking results that suggested outside concepts, or - in Kaurcer's case - were absurd. Yes, he was a Mhun/Horkval. Yes, that was ridiculous.
This is something we largely accept, as players, because having rules and standards is a good thing that keeps everyone on the same page. I am explaining this to you - not arguing, explaining - because per admin ruling, the discussion is basically over, it has been for years, and the playerbase has agreed on the present approach.
You can feel free to keep treating it like a debate, but it's not really one. I suspect you know this, which is why you are performing debate conventions and academic language toward the end of creating that expectation.
All I can say is that I've heard the Admin have this stance throughout my playtime, and it's not been a one-time mentioning in a random context either. I just don't have the time or inclination to chase down quotes to back it up.
The Admin has once again stated that this is their stance on half-breeds, which is to say there are none. A dominant trait determines the race of the child of parents of different races. It is up to the parents themselves to determine which one this will be. It also makes sense from the character creation point of view, since one has to specify a race to play, not a combination. It brings consistency to the game in a way, so I agree with their stance.
Canonizing things means people have something to lean back against, or something to use as a guide as they develop their characters. It brings stability and less uncertainty to the game, making the world seem more real and easier to immerse oneself.
Besides, all games have rules, you know?