D&D General Does Your Fantasy Race Really Matter In Game? (The Gnome Problem)

What irks me is that Gnomes can have as high strength as half orcs! Should be capped at 12 or something, in my opinion

doctorbadwolf said:

I’m always flummoxed by folks having a hard time seeing a place for Gnomes.

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In my particular case it was gnomes this time. It could have just as easily been dwarf, elf, or tiefling. A tiefling assumes certain metaphysical truths that may not apply to every fantasy campaign.

I’m curious. What is your general conception of the identity of the Gnome race?

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If I'm kicking it old school they were thief/illusionist. But thanks mostly to World of Warcraft I see them as tinkerers who engineer mechanical wonders.

im also curious about your conception of the races in
general. Do you simply view halflings as “the game’s main short race?” And half-orcs as “the big tough/‘savage’ race”? Ie, do you view them primarily as a what niche they fill narratively?

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Dwarfs are the main short race. But I pretty much view everything in the game as having the purpose to fill some narrative importance otherwise it doesn't matter if it's in the game or not.

Morrus said:

We did a skit about that in last week's podcast, with a player suggesting more and more outlandish races, starting with deep gnomes and tieflings, through aaracokra and minotaurs, to mind flayers and dragons, to daleks and Borg Queens, to, eventually, V'ger.

The idea of somebody playing V'ger as a PC still cracks me up.

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Non-stop orifice jokes I'm sure.

Tony Vargas said:

Sure. Anything other than human and race tended to loom large.

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In what way? It doesn't loom large in most of the published adventures. Keep on the Borderlands, Ravenloft (up to and including Cruse of Strahd), and Ghosts of Saltmarsh aren't a substantially different experience for those who play an elf or a gnome from those who play a human. I'm starting to think that the most important facet about race in D&D is how it shapes the perception a player has for their character. Which actually carries a lot of weight with me.

Morrus said:

The idea of somebody playing V'ger as a PC still cracks me up.

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Take me to the creator!

MGibster said:

I just don't think having a plethora of available races necessarily adds much of anything to the setting. Anyone with me or am I out on a limb here?

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Completely agree. I've run many games when a player wanted to be a certain race and I told them no. I don't have any problem enforcing that or if a DM tells me I can't play something in their game. In our current game, a player wanted to make a Goliath or something not in the PHB, and the DM just said the race won't fit in the current setting. He did explain that such a character might be allowed later on after the players had left the region we were starting in.

Personally, for my next game I was thinking about running an all-human game, something more based in a swords & sorcery setting than fantasy. As long as everyone knows the setting and such at the beginning and agrees to play, any restrictions should be okay IMO.

When it comes to world building the DM RULES. The DM does not have to give a great reason why a race is banned. Just say it is banned. Then the whiners will whine either “BUT BUT BUT it is an official race in an official book. “ Or “You are a rotten DM, I can’t player my character if you ban X race. Whimper Whine.”
In my homebrew gnomes have cornered the market on gems. All gnomes are suspect of belonging to the Gem Gnomes Group. Think of them as the Big Three Industrial Leaders of gem market. It is rumored they assassinate people who undercut their prices.
But what I thought this topic was going to be about was how race does not matter in most games. In organized play it does not matter what your race is. If you are a PC you are welcome inside the castle to get your orders for the adventure. Does not matter if you are Orc , the plot and npcs totally ignore the fact the orc raids from last week.
Ok DMs, Have you made any race a scape goat/unwanted in certain towns?

MGibster said:

I want you to step in the way back machine and think about all the Dungeons & Dragons games you've participate in. Did it really matter what fantasy race a player chose for his or her character? Obviously there were mechanical reasons to chose one race over another for attribute bonuses, special abilities, and access to kits or prestige classes but what difference did it make in the campaign? Would there be a noticeable difference in the campaign had your human Fighter been a goliath, an elf, or a dragonborn?

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100% yes, because I make it matter. In fact, I consider it one of my primary jobs as the DM to take the story hooks that the players have given me for their characters and figure out how to use them. If a player is playing an gnome in my game, then gnomes are somehow going to be in the foreground of my game. If nobody is playing an gnome, then it doesn't matter and gnomes will regress into the background and maybe never show up at all because some other collection of people are going to be taking center stage.

Having said that - nobody in any of my current games is playing a gnome, and honestly nobody in the last 20 years I've DM'd has expressed an interest in playing a gnome, so gnomes don't have a real role in any of the three games I'm running and only ever mattered in one game that I ran decades ago that used some vague stuff about gnomes from the Basic Set as a springboard for a few adventures. OTOH, one of my games has a dwarf in it so the dwarf kingdom is very important in that game, while my other two groups that have no dwarves haven't had a single reason to interact with dwarves at all and have been going down different paths. All of my groups have elves in them, and honestly every game I've run ever has had at least one elf or half-elf in it, so in just about every campaign I've ever run the elves have some kind of recurring influence that I've had to think out (and in two out of the three current games, elven dynastic politics is a major plot point because they both contain players who are elven nobility of some kind - kids love their elven princes and princesses, I guess). One group has a dragonborn in it and another has a warforged (or "forgeborn" really, since it's the 13A game), and so dragonborn are "important" in the former but not in the latter and warforged are the opposite.

MGibster said:

If you've got a setting where demons don't mate with demi-humans then tieflings probably won't work. At least not as written and then why bother having tieflings in the first place?

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As an aside - tieflings do not have to be half-demons. When I've had them in the game, we've played them as the descendants of some other group whose ancestors were "blessed/cursed" with demonic power (which IIRC was the 4e explanation of them). No actual demon in their heritage, just a visible mark of the foul things their ancestors did.

Similarly, "half-orcs" in any game I runs never have any actual orc in their heritage - because orcs in my settings are never naturalistic creatures that breed with each other let alone with humans. They are always supernatural infections of some sort that reproduce through some suitably horrific means (which varies from campaign to campaign where orcs matter, but often either something like how the aliens in Alien do it, or a spawning pit if I want something less nightmare inducing). I use this background for orcs in all of my games - even if I'm running them in a published campaign setting - partly because I like to have something to distinguish hobgoblins and orcs from each other, but mostly because I like there to be some things that my players don't have to have any moral qualms about slaughtering (having been scarred by old-school modules where you enter a cave with 50 orc women and children, I suppose). When I had a player who wanted to play a "civilized goblin" we used the half-orc and he was a hobgoblin with a unique background, because if I have a player who wants to try out something for its mechanical benefits but isn't interested in the story aspects of it, or if the story aspects conflict with our established lore for a game, we work together to reskin it to something that both of us will enjoy having in the game.

MGibster said:

I just don't think having a plethora of available races necessarily adds much of anything to the setting. Anyone with me or am I out on a limb here?

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My attitude is always "see what kind of world my players want to play in, then shape the world around that". But I have a strong preference for gonzo worlds where anything goes, so I know other folks' mileage will vary.

It's a question that I've struggled with on occasion as well. Every time I decide on a new campaign and I start going through the lists of races, backgrounds and classes the list keeps getting larger and larger with more and more overlap in identity and ideas until it just becomes the Mos Eisley Cantina again. And I keep trying to find ways to shrink things down but it never seems to work.

Quite honestly, I think my best bet in the future is to try and actually just run a Basic Rules game one time. It scares the crap out of me because I like the idea of the various clerical domains for all the gods, and the eight wizarding schools, and the larger number of backgrounds found in the PHB and so forth... but at the same time jumping in feet-first into a game where there are just one type of only Humans, Dwarves, Elves, and Haflings, there are only four "non-subclassed" Classes (I say "non-subclassed" because we are supposed to consider the Champion, Thief, Life, and Evocation as generic parts of the generic class) and a few basic backgrounds to select from (which is the one place where I'd probably add in a few ones from the PHB that aren't in the Basic Rules because at the very least Outlander should be included so you could create the Core Four version of the ranger-lite and druid-lite.)

Whether or not I ever actually try and run a game using these rules I don't know, but the idea does keep tugging at me as a way to make things simpler on both ends of the game for both players and myself.

MGibster said:

It's just kind of expected, isn't it? If I invited you over to play some D&D it would not be unreasonable of you to expect to play any one of the races from the Player's Handbook.

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I just don't think having a plethora of available races necessarily adds much of anything to the setting.

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You're right, they don't really add anything, and you're also right that the only reason they exist is tradition, going all the way back to OD&D (1974). And the reason they were in OD&D is simple - Tolkien.