@Bellyon Oh I fully agree! Multiple interpretations are great! I am obsessive with Star Wars species and while I don't always agree with how FFG stats them out, I still enjoy seeing them. I love when I'm surprised by an ability that I would have never thought of. Balance is very important though.

I have an opinion that elves of LOTR are like Jedi in Star Wars. No one will ever be able to perfectly stat them out where we all agree because realistically they are just unbalanced and that's kind of their point. They are the myths and legends of their worlds. However if enough people posted their thoughts, each individual could collaboratively pick and choose what works for their games. I do apologize, rereading my post I do seem to be discrediting your build. Your builds are very good at breaking them down to the 3 for a 1 Genesys racial stats that should be the norm and would be far more balanced at a table. I am very curious how unbalanced it would be to push the elves a little farther since Genesys is such a narrative system. Which is why I enjoy the idea of a race better then the rest of the races while still being a playable race at the table. It's an interesting roleplaying conundrum.

Another idea I was kicking around is raising their starting skill cap a little higher then the other races to represent their immortality. Like to a three at the start of play. This could represent how the average elf seems better at things then all other races but in play over time this benefit would go away. The only thing is Munchkins could take advantage of this and break the game potentially by finding a few ways to get something like ranged light as skill a few times or something else crazy. But again not sure how damaging something like this would be. Probably too damaging.

I love the ideas though!

So, I'll admit that I didn't read the entire thread, but I had an idea that I'd thought I'd share. You could give elves all the cool things that they have, and a standard amount of starting XP.

Then, indicate that elf characters should only be used in a "Heroic Level" (i.e. Knight Level from the Star Wars RPG) campaign, and should not get the bonus XP.

Basically, give Elves as a species +150 xp worth of stuff, but other races get to start with 150 post-chargen xp. I was thinking of doing the same thing with the dragons in my personal setting. They're really great at a lot of stuff, and while they have major downsides, those are mostly narrative in function, so I was thinking of giving all non-dragons in a campaign with a dragon PC the Knight level bonus.

Also, I really like the idea of the Fading ability. Maybe the opposite of the super-characteristics, in a way? Any time an elf rolls a Despair, it can be spent to add a new Challenge die to the pool?

Perhaps Elves get an extra Ability dice when they spend a Story Point rather than upgrading the check?

That idea of a Knight level or advanced play species is a great idea.

@Drig thank you for the feedback I'm in this forum always trying to help and I really love game designing. My fear is, having one ore two stronger species for the players, it would create an unhealthy game... So, like I've said, I tried to show how it's possible to create balanced options, with a lot of abilities and a lot of xp to customize the charater, what I consider a good thing.

The immortality I don't think was relevant to appear as an ability. Like droids. Who know elves know it, but no hero would die from age effects. They should die from damage, a heroic sacrifice, etc. I have no problem with elves eith 100 or 500 years old, the same for droids or any kind of immortal specie. It's just a fluffy, not a game breaker.

But, I've avoided the elf trait of need few hours to sleep to recover the energy. I don't think is rellevant enought also...

This is a good example of a common problem when recreating a character type from it’s source material. Elves as written in LotR are simply better. It’s the same with elves in WFRP, or Space Marines in 40k. Note that there has never been an (official) elf splat book for WFRP across three editions of the game; they are just too good to put the same emphasis on as with other races.

The way to handle this challenge in my experience is to give the race some kind of down-side which is supported by the game system, or accept that everyone else hanging with the elves is a significantly-above-average member of their group. The second option is pretty much what @Absol197 suggested up thread, and only allow elves in high-point games

Option 1 really needs some other kind of penalties that can be applied to a species, and Gensys doesn’t give us many of these, yet (we need a companion book...). Maybe Elves are more vulnerable to some kinds of damage or bouts of melancholy - I’m not a big enough Tolkien Scholar to suggest what these should be.

On another tack, I was thinking perhaps Elves should have 2 in every stat but always get a Boost dice; that would make them measurably ‘better’ than humans without having higher stats. I wonder what level of points that would be worth? Pretty high...

@dbm_ you saw my version of them here? I've tried to create them balanced, with a clear focus. Knowledge and Metalurgy, for the Noldors. They are good doing more things also, but they have a focus.

Of Course, another option is to just not allow elf PCs. In Tolkien’s works, at least after the 1st age, the only player character elf is Legalos. Pretty much every other elf from the books is clearly an NPC, and (half of) the fellowship is also clearly very high level.

Before I put my LotR-clone effort on hold once RoT was officially announced, I was settling on simply giving elves 232222 and +20XP of abilities and then using the rules for Experienced Characters (p. 44) for everyone else. The goal being to give the flavor without it becoming too complicated or having wild disparities in XP totals.

Does Genesys have a knight-level equivalent? I think that's a great way to put elves on equal footing! I like the idea of knight level play for LOTR. Epic characters for an epic setting. Because who realistically wants to make the elf baker who specializes in lembas bread? Hmm.. actually sounds like a cool character... The point is that people who make elves generally want to make something with some high ability be it the best archer, singer, talker, etc. When I asked my group of 5 about LOTR, I got 1 player wanting to make a hobbit, 1 player for human, and 3 elves. I think this will be common among a lot of groups.

I've been thinking about this since it was posted and here's my two cents:

I think the error lies in the idea that it must be a gameable set of advantages, because Elves are just so much better than the average human. But my thinking goes, the PC's are all way above average as well. What it seems to me is trying to make Elves above the average PC rather than just GM fiat flat-out "Elves are better than the standard human, don't bother rolling the dice". Does that makes sense? If it were me, I'd handwave any comparison between Elves and regular humans, but there's no reason in my mind to make Elves out of the box superior to the rest of the PC's too.

Look who was gathered at the council of Elrond — a whole bunch of kick-*** superior people from all the Kinds (Dwarves, Humans, Elves, Hobbits as it turns out) of Middle Earth and they each in turn were able to do something the others could not. That's a bunch of PC's in my mind.

Anyway, I just thought I'd throw this out there for a ponder.

@theReplicant I love it. Love love love it. My players would have issues with it as they are the kinds who prefer to play clone wars jedi every time we play star wars. As much as I would love to see them presented as above average just because they are Lord of the Ring elves, stating them with all 2s and just spending the extra starting xp to give them a few racial abilities would be simple enough and work well in game. I feel that too many would not find that to be enough. I think I need to put together my own stats pretty soon. I will probably cherry pick some of the ideas here. I loved this discussion btw.

I wish I could ask Sam Stewart what he thought LOTR elves should have as racial stats lol. His answers on Order 66 surprise me sometimes but in good ways. I am pulling back on just how special I feel they need to be though.

On 2018-03-09 at 11:25 AM, Johan Marek Phoenix Knight said:

Elves are said to all have inhuman grace and dexterity, so a 3 in Agility makes sense. But then the various subraces each seem that they would have something else with a 3, unique to them. The Noldor are impossibly skilled craftsmen, so they would have a 3 in Intellect, and Sindar are especially clever, making them have a 3 in Cunning. The biggest thing here is that the elves are not bad at anything. There is no characteristic that they could have 1 in. They are so good at everything that they would either have only 50-60 starting experience, or they would be overpowered. Does anyone have ideas on how to deal with this issue?

Late to the party here, but Tolkien spells out in the Silmarillion that Elves were far more subject to Fate than Men. Their road in some sense was already travelled. Men on the other hand had far more options, they could ignore Fate more easily and pursue their own paths. Yes, Elves might have been superior in almost every way, but they also had fewer options. So I think setting initial attributes higher and dropping initial XP down to a reasonable level is a fair way to go. In some ways, if you want to play an Elf, you already know what you're getting.

6 hours ago, Drig said:

@theReplicant I love it. Love love love it. My players would have issues with it as they are the kinds who prefer to play clone wars jedi every time we play star wars. As much as I would love to see them presented as above average just because they are Lord of the Ring elves, stating them with all 2s and just spending the extra starting xp to give them a few racial abilities would be simple enough and work well in game. I feel that too many would not find that to be enough. I think I need to put together my own stats pretty soon. I will probably cherry pick some of the ideas here. I loved this discussion btw.

I wish I could ask Sam Stewart what he thought LOTR elves should have as racial stats lol. His answers on Order 66 surprise me sometimes but in good ways. I am pulling back on just how special I feel they need to be though.

Ah, I'm glad I explained it well enough! Sure, many players would be fine with it and I'm sure there are those who would love to stat out the Elves as just all around better. As mentioned earlier (I'm sorry I forgot who said it), if I was forced to make Elves better stat-wise, then I'd assign the stats and Talents as already suggested here, but with the XP-offset. That way, the Elves are demonstrably better as a base template, but would have less XPs to play with at first. Again, my feeling is that all the PC's should be equal in overall ability, even if some shine in one area over another.

I have played games, however, where there is an actual numerical discrepancy between players. One memorable one was in a Vampire: the Masquerade game (whatever the first edition was called), where the GM threw out the idea that one of the players would be the Prince of the city we all inhabited, while the rest of us played the normal 13th gen beginning characters. Since we were all on board with it, it worked very well; the GM put way more pressure on the Prince because he could take it better than the rest of us. The challenges were commensurate with our relative level of ability, IOW.

So in theory, I wouldn't mind being in a campaign where the Elves (or Dwarves or whatever) were, oh... 100 XP's ahead of the other players when beginning the game; maybe after discussing it with the players, they would be on board with it too. I also love the idea of the Elves having some specific negatives as well, with the Fates or perhaps because they're longing to leave Middle Earth, some related down side. There have been some superb suggestions in this thread on how to go about dealing with this topic, so thank you everyone for participating! And it's not even my thread!

On 13/03/2018 at 3:05 PM, Bellyon said:

@dbm_ you saw my version of them here? I've tried to create them balanced, with a clear focus. Knowledge and Metalurgy, for the Noldors. They are good doing more things also, but they have a focus.

They are interesting, and could be a good way of representing the races. The tricky bit is still how to cost them.

The climate adaption is really quite powerful compared to the example in the book (which only removes one set back in one environment for -5XP). Your version should be somewhere in the -20XP range, I would suggest.

Racial abilities are also tricky to price; as far as I can see the book gives absolutely no guidance in this aspect of design.

8 hours ago, dbm_ said:

They are interesting, and could be a good way of representing the races. The tricky bit is still how to cost them.

The climate adaption is really quite powerful compared to the example in the book (which only removes one set back in one environment for -5XP). Your version should be somewhere in the -20XP range, I would suggest.

Racial abilities are also tricky to price; as far as I can see the book gives absolutely no guidance in this aspect of design.

Oh, thank you @dbm_

I'll share here my thougts about this, so we can talk better about this cost and why I think it's ok.

First I remembered the Twi'lek's ability, they may remove 1 setback due hot climate. It's a good base point, but elfs have this both to warm and cold climate.

I haven't found this talent in the core rulebook but I've found the Forager (tier 1) talent. So with 5 XP we can remove 2 setbacks from any skill check to find food, water, shelter, etc. And these checks are done in half of the regular time.

I think it's a very useful talent for 5 XP, you know? And in my mind, -2 setbacks in 2 specific situations are something with equal power.

But reduce to -1 setback for both I guess would be good as well.

And there's something else I've thought thinking in this ability: I could be wrong, but hot or cold environments aren't that popular in Lord of the Rings, which makes the talent less powerful than it should be in a different setting, you know?

EDIT: I've reduced to 1 setback for all the variants.

Everything is relative to the campaign, and I agree that it’s down to how much you will move around different climates. The suggested version of this power for races is on p193.

On 3/13/2018 at 5:15 PM, whafrog said:

Late to the party here, but Tolkien spells out in the Silmarillion that Elves were far more subject to Fate than Men. Their road in some sense was already travelled. Men on the other hand had far more options, they could ignore Fate more easily and pursue their own paths. Yes, Elves might have been superior in almost every way, but they also had fewer options. So I think setting initial attributes higher and dropping initial XP down to a reasonable level is a fair way to go.

Using the idea of elves being more tied to fate, could their higher stats be balanced with some sort of fated/fading ability involving story point usage?

Perhaps something like this.

Fated: A character with this ability can only spend story points to activate talents.

Feels like it plays into the tied to fate idea and of the power/morale of elves having been reduced over the ages.

2 minutes ago, GiantDad219 said:

Using the idea of elves being more tied to fate, could their higher stats be balanced with some sort of fated/fading ability involving story point usage?

Perhaps something like this.

Fated: A character with this ability can only spend story points to activate talents.

Feels like it plays into the tied to fate idea and of the power/morale of elves having been reduced over the ages.

If you look at the completed pdf, I added Fading of the Firstborn and the Doom of Mandos as negative racial abilities to show this.

I didn't read through the entire thread, so this idea might have been mentioned in some form of another. But just go with the flow. Allow it. If the elves are off balance because they would have too many skills, or talents, or too high attributes... meh.

In The Lord of the Rings, Legolas allied himself to, and banded with, a bunch of hobbits who themselves had to commemorate the fact that they had reached a new milestone in how far they went away from home... while still in the Shire fields... Not all characters in those books are equal. Not an elf, but even Aragorn had been around for some time and showed far superior fighting skills to the hobbits.

Let's not mention what Gandalf truly was, by the way. ;-)

Perhaps, in your campaign you have (reasonably) mature players who would like to portray such differences. Perhaps the superior, old, wise elf can form a bond with another character like that of a mentor/apprentice bond. You might limit the amount of elves in the party to one or two at most, asuming you play during the latest eras, where the elves feel the call and travel to the West. If things do seem to go awry, just remove the elves due to that call, and have backup characters ready. I know some players who would love to try out something like that, even knowing that their superior character could be taken away at any time if they would start to endanger the fun aspect of gaming together.

Characters with different levels of power would be handled in Fate (the RPG) by different levels of refresh (i.e. how many Fate points a character refreshes to). This is tricky to do with Genesys as the story point pool is shared. If elves were significantly more powerful you could maybe say that they need to spend two story points when a character would usually require just one?

Maybe elves could automatically have one threat in all skill checks they make? That could represent how they are bound to fate and have to strive against it?

In The One Ring, there is a mechanic called "Hope". All other races especially hobbit's use it to do extraordinary things. It is hard to heal or get back unless they witness positive hopeful events. Elves particularly suffer and once their hope reaches low levels they head West. If any other race reaches 0 then they die forlorn and distraught.

This would be a great mechanic for having Elves be more powerful. If they sacrifice themselves and catch Despair or Shadow they cannot heal it as easily and thus cannot last in a campaign as long. The Dunedain suffer this as well, just not as hard as the Elves.

On 3/12/2018 at 11:49 PM, Absol197 said:

So, I'll admit that I didn't read the entire thread, but I had an idea that I'd thought I'd share. You could give elves all the cool things that they have, and a standard amount of starting XP.

Then, indicate that elf characters should only be used in a "Heroic Level" (i.e. Knight Level from the Star Wars RPG) campaign, and should not get the bonus XP.

Basically, give Elves as a species +150 xp worth of stuff, but other races get to start with 150 post-chargen xp. I was thinking of doing the same thing with the dragons in my personal setting. They're really great at a lot of stuff, and while they have major downsides, those are mostly narrative in function, so I was thinking of giving all non-dragons in a campaign with a dragon PC the Knight level bonus.

Also, I really like the idea of the Fading ability. Maybe the opposite of the super-characteristics, in a way? Any time an elf rolls a Despair, it can be spent to add a new Challenge die to the pool?

Dragons? In your personal setting???? I want to see this...

4 hours ago, Daeglan said:

Dragons? In your personal setting???? I want to see this...

Aww, shucks ! I've not actually been able to find a good way to design my setting into an RPG system yet, because of the differential in power between the species that would need to be playable. Normals humans are tough to balance against human Willcrafters (i.e. wizards), elves, half-elves, half-dragons, therians (various werepeoples), and full dragons. Finding a good way to do scale is rather important.

Also the magic part. Genesys magic just doesn't work for my setting - the Craft is exceptionally subtle, and actual direct attacking "spells" are the purview of rare masters focused on just that sort of thing. I'm still trying to get it to fit somewhere, but I haven't found the right system, yet! I'd love some help, though .

If you want to read about the setting, you can check out my Deviant Art (same username as I use here), although the majority of the cool stuff that I know exists there isn't in the tiny little story-slices I've added to my DA, so sorry about that .

EDIT: Oh, and my weird tangent about mimetics in the Unlimited Power thread was partially because mimetic creatures/entities are a major threat in that world, especially now that the Internet is a thing...

@Absol197 what social stigma is tied to the non human races in your setting? Is it possible that Humans benefit from not being ostracised as much as half-dragons? Can they benefit from interacting with most of the population without racism and stigma getting in the way?

You can think of it like droids in Star Wars, by all mathematical analysis Droids suck, yet they have some significant narrative benefits that make them really viable. Those benefits are very different to this situation, but the concept could still fit.

58 minutes ago, Richardbuxton said:

@Absol197 what social stigma is tied to the non human races in your setting? Is it possible that Humans benefit from not being ostracised as much as half-dragons? Can they benefit from interacting with most of the population without racism and stigma getting in the way?

You can think of it like droids in Star Wars, by all mathematical analysis Droids suck, yet they have some significant narrative benefits that make them really viable. Those benefits are very different to this situation, but the concept could still fit.

Sort of. It's an "urban fantasy" setting, similar to the Dresden Files, where the supernatural is real, but isn't widely known. So yes, the non-human races do suffer from not being able to display their true nature in most circumstances, for varying reasons. But that's kinda the opposite of what you're getting at - non-humans gain a benefit from being assumed to be human, allowing them to do things that would be denied them if their true nature was known (there's no way the Secret Service would allow a dragon on a tour of the White House if they knew what she was, but since they don't she can go on the tour, getting close enough to read the President's mind).

For people "in the know," however, there are lots of prejudices. Most of them involve the eladrin (elves). They're very much elitist jerks, and coupled with their general assumption that everything "lesser" than them (read: everything that is not them) is fair game to manipulate how they please, most others dislike them, and would be at the least wary when they meet one.

But that still doesn't solve the major problem, which is that the Mauna (dragons) are really powerful! Now, the Mauna do have a major drawback, similar to the Fading we've been discussing here with the LotR elves in that they are the setting's equivalent to angels. They have to act nobly and for the good of others, and permanently lose their divine super-powers if they don't. But it's not an exceptionally strict thing, so as long as they don't act selfishly at the expense of others, they're free to be jerks, too.