D&D General How To Reconcile the Settings

[Zardnaar]

With some imagination a Dm may find a solution to include any race in its seting.
Tiefling may look human and explain racial power by a possession, family tree or a like.
i like your mutant explanation, it can also be arcane experiment that has go wrong, a curse, bug in plane travel. It can be cool to be a unique racial member.

Uniques fine it's when you get a whole party.

Athas has mutants so any race as a on off can work, I would just ban things like warforged.

 

[uzirath]

When I had more time to devote to world-building, I was far more serious about the whole affair—limiting races, rationalizing castles and magic and dragons (those tiny wings!) and food chains, contemplating game balance considerations at every turn. This was awesome. I loved it. My players were into it.

Now, with far less time on my hands, I take my lead from my current players. My current Saltmarsh group consists of a mermaid bard, a faerie-dragon wizard, a dragonborn elementalist, an elf swashbuckler, a half-orc knight, and a human cleric. There was a pixie in the mix for a while, too. Every tavern looks like Mos Eisley's cantina. And, like Star Wars, the world is really, really fun.

 

[Urriak Uruk]

I am assuming biology works in a fashion similar to earth. I'm also assuming that even if there is more landmass, that it's not exponentially larger than earth. I assume almost all races need to eat.

Don't want to make those assumptions? More power to you. Just explaining how I run my campaign and why. If I set up a planescape or spelljammer type campaign set in some sort of nexus of different worlds? Or a riff on Niven's Ringworld (land mass hundreds of times the size of earth)? Any race could walk through the door. But I don't so I've made limitations that make sense to my world.

I've never really cared much for the kitchen sink approach that FR takes, it never made a lot of sense to me. It's just a personal preference.

I almost never agree with @gyor on anything, but he's mostly right here. The population of Europe in 1300 (Medieval) was 79,000,000 people. If you have 100 different races (which is a hell of a lot of playable races), you still have 790,000 of that race running around the continent, not an insignificant number and well above what the UN would consider "endangered" for species of humanoid size.

In addition, you're ignoring that if you are including Underdark and undersea races, you're just ignoring two additional biomes of food-production that can support larger populations, and by extension more races.

Plus, this is just Europe. I'm literally leaving out other continents which brought up the global population to 360-432 million.

So the idea that a medieval fantasy land can't support many races through agriculture is a weak one, unless you've just arbitrarily decided to inflate all the races population size. And if you're doing that, it's on you.

 

[Urriak Uruk]

Question to the OP, what's the purpose of this thread? It's hard to find a specific point or question in your original post, so I'm largely trying to find something beyond you stating what races you allow in your personal homebrew. Are you advocating for something?

 

[Nellisir]

Low opinion of 2E GH material ymmv.

Except for Nebelun, literally none of that was 2e. EGG had a pretty wonky campaign. And advocated for hand-waving the ecology in favor of fun. (1e DMG)

 

[Nellisir]

Seriously, though, I may just have gotten a little tired of the outsider concept some decades ago - it's a too-facile, unexamined, way of making a PC 'interesting' - break an expectation or even get an exception to a rule so you'll be 'unique,' and therefore a cool/interesting/special character, without having to put any actual thought into it, or engage in any character development.

Sometimes, for fun, I make a rule that every character must have at least one surviving parent and sibling. The orphaned angsty outsider schtick gets really old.

(Plus I can kill the family later.)

 

[PsyzhranV2]

(Plus I can kill the family later.)

I mean... that's part of sometimes why people decide to skip the family thing. Not because they're so "KEWL" and edgy as the blade of their overdesigned dagger, but because they look playing characters free of attachments, whether for roleplaying or metagame reasons.

 

[Arnwolf666]

Sometimes I just use the races as variant humans for someone that just wants the racial abilities. I normally take away dark vision/low light vision and increase movement back to 30.

 

[Tony Vargas]

It's also easy to play an outsider without putting a rubber mask on playing an unusual race.

You can play an outsider without reaching 'outside' the setting/theme of the campaign, yes. Any given culture has numerous social factors that you could be on the wrong side of....

 

[Oofta]

I mean... that's part of sometimes why people decide to skip the family thing. Not because they're so "KEWL" and edgy as the blade of their overdesigned dagger, but because they look playing characters free of attachments, whether for roleplaying or metagame reasons.

I tend to resurrect the family of orphans and make them part of the story. Then kill them off in some messy and painful way that is the fault of the PC of course. Doesn't every DM?