I’m afraid I’m going to get snapped at for this… but saying it anyways. *Bunkers down*
Character registration/limitations need to be fixed. As it stand now, this absolutely crushes creativity unless the write-up of a Race had the forethought to put in a great deal of diversity.
Not all of the Races are written or modeled with the same care as the Moriel Race. Many races lack individuality and diversity to give players options in not only appearance, but background stories and depth. Out of the races I have read, the Moriel have the most wide spanning height options from 4’8” to 6’4” (that’s huge!). They are not limited to one color of eye, or one color of hair.
The Sheyka and the Tribe are the two I see –most- limited by physical description. Hair – white – Eyes - red (tribe) or violet… maybe muted blue (sheyka) ONLY. No other race is so –heavily- limited. **Note - Sheyka are said to have 'other' hair colors, but this is not specified whatsoever**
I’ve heard the line: Grandfathered in characters. But I remember Tsunami changing her race, because she was told as a nymph she couldn’t have a slave. There are I’m sure, other cases, but I don’t know them all.
And if you're grandfather, why does it really matter –that- much. As long as the character is played per Racial Background… which is also rather biased on who made them – why does something so mundane as a variation in eye color matter? **I can go into the fact there needs to be a clean format indicating what is needed for every race to read similarly, but that does not belong in this post**
Now, I’m using an example I was given. I was told a character could not have ‘Indigo colored skin’ because it wasn’t specifically listed as an option in the Racial Characteristics. However, Sheyka are said to be easily mistaken for Moriel. Moriel are allowed skin colors going as out there as dark purples and midnight blues, which coincide with ‘indigo’.
Eye color again, there are freak occurrences when eye colors happen. Does a character not having specifically colored eyes make them less of their race?
I would like to make a character with purple hair, for instance, but have her human. Is it so far out and utterly breaking of my human racial class to say she had run into magic that backfired and caused a permanent change of hair color to the comically unnatural purple? It doesn’t affect dice, it doesn’t make her anything more than odd looking with a funny story to tell about her history.
But I have been told by other players such things are not allowed, regardless that there is an OOB spell – Change Self, that can easily be attributed to a broken artifact made to do such a thing for the owner, that was broken by a careless thief and then –bomf- the backfiring caused a permanent cosmetic alteration.
I don’t know… I’m just saying all this because I find it an odd and ultimately unnecessary stifling of creativity for the sake of ‘keeping true’ to a race. Keeping true to a race, would be staying in their original villages and never coming to Nanthalion. Nanthalion and TLI in general, encourage a character to change and become something different.
So I simply ask – can we not allow some more creative license to this process?