D&D 5E Do you use all of the P.C. races and classes from the PHB?

Ganymede81 said:

I've been running Curse of Strahd with my group and have allowed them to use whatever race they want from the PHB. The party ended up being pretty exotic: a half orc, two tieflings, a dragonborn, a half-elf, and a human.

Using mostly exotic races really wasn't a problem. It let me start the campaign by having them all rounded up by an unscrupulous carnival master interested in stocking his freak show, and the denizens of Barovia are used to a slow trickle of weird foreigners.

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I think having the denizens of Barovia respond appropriately like that is a great way to make that sort of thing work. It's when someone brings that party to Ravenloft and they just wander around and get treated more or less like normal people that I realize I'm just not even playing the same game as that group.

schnee said:

Understood, but slightly misses my point.

He's saying those things "as everyday characters in anything approaching a standard DND setting is just absurd. Total fanboi crap that just can't seem to be avoided it seems."

He can make the game as 'serious' and 'sensible' as he wants. It's his prerogative.

But he's wrong. From the beginning, 'standard DND' has been really weird and odd and stupid. The makers of the game made it that way.

It added earthly religions from every continent and era all together in the same place and time. It mashed together monsters and creatures from thousands of years of radically different cultures - Rakshasas alongside the Penanggalan and the Sprite and the Balor. And it pulled in character stereotypes from all over the place in literature from medieval poetry to modern pulp fantasy.

His idea of 'standard' is not what the game has ever been.

I admit, it is verging on hair-splitting, but I feel it's worth saying.

KEEP D&D WEIRD

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The world of Mystara has a spaceship's reactor as a source of magic and I believe one of the wizards in Glantri has a magic L shaped wand which is totally just a ray gun. D&D is totally bonkers.

My 'default' is "All races in the player's handbook, except for gnomes and halflings"

I hate halflings. Banned them sometime in the early 1990s. If you want a short race, go with gnomes. They have at least some vague personality. Tinker gnomes die, though. Seriously. The second a gnome touches tech, they get the "thumb of God". I don't even try to pretend. Yes. I was around D&D before Dragonlance.

Otherwise, dragonborn have grown on me, so they're in. Tieflings aren't so much a separate race, but back to their planetouched state.

Drow suck. This is not up for debate. If you want to play one, it's probably better that you find a new table than a new character. I've already lost too much respect for you to take anything you say seriously.

Classes? Sure. Whatever. They're just stat blocks. Just keep in mind that I do things like have organizations called "the Rangers" who count a good number of mages in their number. Paladins are a military order that can be any class. I get your game terms. Just don't use them in character, unless it makes sense without the game rules in place.

My personal philosophy is that the DM not a novelist or a film director. Obviously I should get to have fun and indulge myself, but part of that fun comes from bouncing off of the players. Generally I build a rough sketch of the kind of campaign I wanna run, then I ask the players what kind of characters they would wanna play IN that world. Afterward I fill in the blanks and flesh the world out with their ideas incorporated.

Players can be whatever they want in my games. We have a Tiefling and a Warforged in the current campaign. Both of which are unique and "one of a kind" characters whose nature and origins are plot hooks that I worked with the players to tie into the world and then I took those ideas and got excited about them adding to the history and lore. Following the creative threads the players gave me, I found a mutual villain and a central mystery I never would have came up with in a vacuum.

I wouldn't judge anyone for doing it another way, but for me, if I wanted to do something that warranted knocking certain classes and races off the menu I can usually think of a different system better suited to those stories and worlds. For D&D, if I a player wants to be a Bard and I don't imagine my world having Bards I just go "Okay, but you are unique. You are the only one who can turn art into magic. Let's figure out why."

Most of my games focus on a group concept first, which tends to encourage players to create characters that fit together. This usually means common races for a shared background.

No Gnomes ever! End of story. Don't even ask.

Dragonborn are not a player option. I could see maybe using them for certain stories or settings, but only as NPCS.

No full Drows, but Half-Drow could be possible.

No monstrous races unless I am running a story for a full group of monstrous PCs.

I have no problem with any of the standard classes.

The only homebrew I use is stuff that I create. Sometimes I am inspired by somebody's homebrew, but I almost always modify it to suit my taste.