Talk:Selachinoid (5e Race)

JAWSOME!!! --Kydo (talk) 21:07, 20 September 2016 (MDT)

If anyone is going to edit this page besides me, first contact me at freezeman1463@gmail.com. If you are to make a change without a clear description, your change will be reverted. --Pope Francaisco (talk) 9:30, 6 October 2016 (MDT)

Actually, no, it doesn't include the use of maintenance templates. I have left a message on your talk page. --Kydo (talk) 22:54, 6 October 2016 (MDT)

Oh, I almost forgot, the standards the work is being judged against can be found at 5e Race Design Guide. Happy editing! --Kydo (talk) 23:01, 6 October 2016 (MDT)

Please complete the categories at the bottom of the page. --Kydo (talk) 02:44, 9 October 2016 (MDT)

OK, let's do this.

Physical Description

Generally, writing in the first person is unprofessional. I won't criticize it much, because I do it pretty much all the time myself. I do not wish to call the kettle black. Perhaps give a bit more detail as to their shape and how their anatomy is sorted out. For instance, are they shaped like street-sharks, a giant shark-head with arms and legs? Are they more like a full shark which happens to have arms and legs in the place of its pectoral and pelvic fins? Is it more like a lycanthrope; a human body with shagreen skin and a shark's head? Are the spikes on their elbows vestigial fleshy/cartilaginous fins, or are they actual spines? If they are spines, why do they have them, if neither of their root organisms have such a thing? You might also want to talk about their physical needs. Like, being amphibious, do they need to return to the water regularly, or could they live on land indefinitely? The same question can be asked the other way around; are they able to live indefinitely underwater? Do they have dietary needs which can only be met through an amphibious lifestyle? Can they function in fresh water just as well as salt water? (Most animals can not)

History

The problem here is that you're assuming earth-history and fantasy-history are typically interchangeable. Generally, this is not the case. Most fantasy settings rely on the concept of intelligent design as the root of life, as the gods are assumed to be real and physically present beings, so few settings contain the concept of evolution, and the core books for D&D include stat-blocks for dinosaurs, implying that the generic D&D setting has them co-existing with humans. A more appropriate turn of phrase may be to describe them as being prehistoric, predating both dragons and elves, or having record of when they appeared according to one of those races. (In most settings, one of these two will be marked as "the first smart guys the gods made".) You may want to include their creation myth, or the creation myth attributed to them by other races. I would recommend adding some things about whether there has been any degree of war in their past, how much their race divides itself into cultures, whether there are any important interactions with non-specific "gods", or that kind of stuff. Anything that could give a DM some hints on where these guys could fit into their world. Anything that could give a character some sort of heritage to have thoughts about.

Society

The society section, as currently written, encourages an antisocial style of play. It validates the "My guy wouldn't do that" mentality that grinds gameplay to a halt. I would recommend changing it. Implying an isolationist society, without any relevance to a particular individual's behavior, would be preferable. It would give players an understanding of the type of upbringing their character may have had, and thus give them something for their character to have memories and opinions about. It would also give the DM ideas on how interactions with selachinoid communities might go down. You might also want to include other information about their community, such as the place of the arts, politics, sciences, what role magic and spellcasters play in society, whether they are religious and how religious they might be, etc. You may also want to include a quick racial relations guide, describing the stereotypes their society generally attributes to the other races, particularly the core races.

Names

That's just lazy. With a shark's mouth, they would create very unique sounds, would likely have a very interesting language, and would also likely have an interesting collection of names. Being amphibious, their civilizations would be very different than any land-based culture, so they would likely have very different impetus for name creation. For instance, names would need to be useful under water as well as above-water. They may incorporate sign-language into their common tongue; or their common tongue may even be a sign-language, with speech being something they only do to communicate with other land people!

ASI

Not much to say. Having the ASIs depend entirely on subrace seems a little extreme to me in this case, because there really isn't much different from one subrace to the next, anatomically. I feel you are putting way too much effort in representing subtle aesthetic variations with distinct mechanics in an effort to make each variant as exciting on its own as possible. That really isn't necessary, a subrace can be exciting on its own, without providing any game mechanics whatsoever.

Age

Surprisingly, the longest-lived vertebrate is the greenland shark, at 400 years... But it takes 150 years to reach maturity. You should take their age and maturity range into consideration when writing information about their history and society. A race which matures early and has a long life span would have massive living families. You could have hundreds of generations of a single bloodline living together. Leadership would likely be slow to change, as any given political system would likely have the majority of the living population in support of it. Cultural change would be slow, as it would be met with high resistance from previous generations who are just fine with how things always were- unless they don't think like humans. They may personally value change a great deal! They may not track bloodlines they way we do, because they have long enough memories to understand that such a thing doesn't actually exist, or they may just lack the instinctive drive to sustain complex familial units! There's a lot of inspiration that can be gleaned from those two numbers.

Alignment

Do they, as a race, actually tend toward true neutrality, (which would be a very alien value system to a human) or are they more like animals, who are unaligned? Or were you intending they be more like humans, who tend toward any and all alignments?

Speed

Describe the swim speed as "You also have 60ft swimming speed". It's just more standard to state in clear, black-and-white terms that a 5 year old could understand.

OK, that's all the fluff. I need to go to sleep now, as I have a nigh shift. I'll get to the mechanics if I have some spare time at work tonight. (Please don't take any of this as demands or insults, only suggestions. You may see a deficiency I recognized and come up with a better solution of your own- in fact, I encourage that, as I made up my solutions on the spot as I was reading.) Later. --Kydo (talk) 14:52, 26 October 2016 (MDT)

I was actually working on creating a diagram for the anatomy of Selachnoids. Pope Francaisco (talk) 23:10, 26 October 2016 (MDT)

That's a great idea! An image is necessary for a page to qualify for Featured Article status. --Kydo (talk) 01:49, 27 October 2016 (MDT)