D&D 5E What is the appeal of the weird fantasy races?

[Minigiant]

But that isn't accurate. Nor does it follow. If they were just hobbits with more curiosity...that would make them more likely than humans to go adventuring.

most of the race's description is about them is about them prefering to be home with family and friends. The game even suggest halfling rely on human and dwarven aid for their safety.

I'm not saying the race wouldn't produce adventurers.

I'm saying a race of happy homebodies would produce fewer adventurers than the many exotic D&D races that are warrior culture, wild cultures, and/or shunned loners.

The only racial cultures that are less adventurous by default are the coward races: goblins, kobolds,

A halfling fighter is literally at least as good in a one on one fight as a human fighter. Not using polearms limits them from exactly one build. Meanwhile, they're better at the rapier and shield build.

Humans were way better fighters than halflings in almost every edition, I believe.

None of this makes any sense. Curiosity and wanderlust are a basic and fundamental part of the identity of the race. Not just in DnD, but just as much in Tolkien. I mean...have any of you read the books!? Bilbo ain't the first hobbit to go on an adventure, and when he does other hobbits follow in his footsteps, and pretty much every hobbit that gets called to go on an adventure, whatever the impetus, ends up going about it with gusto. Hobbits love adventure. They just also love good food and comfortable houses, and forget their joy of adventure the more comfortable they are.

5e Halflings are explicitly, canonically, less included to ignore adventure than that.

And like hell they're not mechanically built for it! LOL are you joking? They're built exactly for adventuring. They're built for getting in and out, for not getting caught by terrible luck and dying for it, for avoiding danger,

There's a big leap between "I want to try new foods" or "I want to see what's in that ruin" and "I'mma go into that tower of a dead evil mage full of traps, horrors, and demons to see if there's treasure."

And the PHB say halfling travel but that hurl themselves into danger not for glory or gold but defense. So by default humans, dwarves, elves, and the like have 2 more reasons to leap into a known pit of terror. A halflingy halfling is doing it to defend his or her friend and family. If F&F are safe, they might go back on the Pie Tour or to the next fashion show. Because halfling ambition is all tied up in family, friends, and home. A halfling doing anything else is playing against type.

what part of adventuring do you think they're ill suited for, exactly?

the combat part

 

[Maxperson]

The example given was not "they asked if they could split off and he gave permission." The example given was that the DM established what he intended to do, and the players straight-up no-saled it and went in a completely different direction. They didn't ask for anything. They simply did it and expected him to generate an adventure to fit. How is that not the DM bowing to group will?

Yes. You gave a flawed example. Since the DM has ultimate authority to allow them to split or not, they tacitly asked for permission by their declaration and the DM tacitly gave them permission with his authority. There is no player authority in your example at all. None. Zilch. Nada. Nil.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

Amongst this sea of halflings, gnomes, dwarves, Dragonborn and elves, I just wanna say that Tiefling is easily the least out-there of the obscure races, physically and socially. They're just regular humans with horns and tails, and you could bet that "realism" would put a bunch of half 'lings out there if their Internet presence is anything to go by. I think devil-people may be one of the oldest fantasy races, as old as Devils in general. With that said, half-human half-animals are also extremely old concepts predating modern interpretations of fantasy races, so in that sense these aren't any more obscure than the rest.

Any race with sufficient world building won't have any more problems that the others. I don't think that a Tabaxi would turn any more heads than an Elf in a world where people know those exist and have existed for much of history.

Merlin is a tiefling (or a cambion, rather). Since he was baptised at birth, his demonic ancestry isn't seen to be the issue. (See the common thread with stories from medieval times? It is less "that guy looks different" and more "He's in with Jesus, right?")

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Yes. You gave a flawed example. Since the DM has ultimate authority to allow them to split or not, they tacitly asked for permission by their declaration and the DM tacitly gave them permission with his authority. There is no player authority in your example at all. None. Zilch. Nada. Nil.

1. Not my example. You even replied to @Neonchameleon when they gave it!

2. Pardon me, I got my fallacies mixed up. This is exactly the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. (The archetypal example being that a serial murderer is caught in another country, and a Glasgow native says "no Scotsman would ever do such a thing!" Then, when given an example of a Scotsman who did that exact thing, the Glasgow native responds with, "No true Scotsman would ever do such a thing!" Arbitrarily changing the definition so that counter-examples don't count.)

You asked for exceptions, someone offered one. You then claimed that that example was not such a thing by introducing this notion that the players asked for permission. Now you have changed the rules such that tacitly asking for permission is a thing? No, sorry, don't buy it. The players made a decision, and the DM had a choice: flip the table, or accept the players' desire not to play the thing set before them. They had not "asked for permission," tacitly or otherwise, and the very idea of "tacitly" asking for permission is hogwash.

But here, I'll give you examples, from my own real actual game, where I am the DM and so I can tell you exactly what my thought process was. I'm running a game in Dungeon World with an Arabian Nights aesthetic/tone. I made a cool monster that I hoped would provide a pitched but winnable fight for the party, specifically a molten-obsidian golem with mithril claws (it had resulted from the accidental combination of shadowy mechano-spiders that spewed alchemical fire with blood obsidian sand used by necromantic druids to trap the souls of the living).

The party instead chose to draw the monster back to a waterlogged spike trap. I could have stood my ground and said the monster doesn't follow them, or that its internal heat prevented it from solidifying, or whatever, but I could tell from my players' voices that they were jazzed about such a simple solution to a dangerous problem. I could have done the thing I actually really wanted to do, and have it fight them somehow anyway--maybe burrowing through the ground (a thing the spiders were capable of doing). But I understood that that wasn't what my players wanted, and accepted their solution. I emphatically was not "granting permission" for their solution to work--I was 100% admitting that I had failed to foresee a perfectly reasonable explanation, and that my players had outsmarted me. This remains a highlight of the game for reasons completely other than the ones I intended.

For another example: There's an NPC in my game who is secretly a gold dragon, summoned from his faraway homeland of Yuxia. Being a gold dragon, Shen is of course very powerful, but he is trying to keep his true identity a secret, as he is hunting a black dragon (also from Yuxia, but who arrived centuries ago). If things escalated into open dragon-on-dragon combat, innocent people would almost surely die. If that doesn't happen it almost surely means the black dragon ran away, meaning the chase would start all over again and he'd really rather not be hunting this dragon for another two centuries.

I had feared my players would dislike this NPC (or worse, see him as a DMPC, since I love dragons so much), but they actually really like him. Then they threw me a curveball: they asked Shen if he would help them on their adventuring, what with being a powerful champion of all that is good and righteous and such. All my DM instincts told me "no, don't do it, you're taking their adventure away from them." But I ignored those instincts and looked for a way to satisfy their request without compromising their ownership of their successes and failures. I did not "grant permission" for them to have what they wanted. I relented and accepted the players' united interest in having Shen's help. They have thus far not chosen to make use of the proverbial get-out-of-jail-free card he gave them, keeping it for a rainy day. They got what they wanted, and I had to change my plans--and I'm perfectly happy with that, because it made my players happy.

So yeah. I have absolutely had situations where my players were not--tacitly or otherwise--asking for permission. They were declaring their intent, and waiting for me to respond to it. I could have been a petulant child and told them what they wanted was bad, but I chose not to, and instead listened to them. My authority was not absolute--and is not. I always approach play as a negotiation, not as princeps writing laws with the occasional (but unnecessary) advice of a defunct Senate.

 

[Jack Daniel]

Umm, just a couple posts above yours is @Zardnaar saying core 4. Note, while I did quote you in my post, it's not like you are the only person posting in the thread.

Fair enough, but then maybe leave what I said out of your argument, lest it cause undue confusion.

Case in point…

Yeah, it doesn't come across as "you do you," it comes across as ignoring any possible value non-Tolkienesque races might have other than being "weird"/"freaky"/"furry role-play."

Don't even try to pin me to that position. I accord no special status to the Tolkien races. My position is this: every race—including humans—may be banned from a given campaign by the DM for any reason the DM likes. The DM's authority over their own table always exceeds that of the rulebooks. (Whether or not that authority is "derived from the consent of the governed," i.e. the players, is mostly irrelevant to what I'm talking about here. Some folks in this thread are apparently having that conversation too, but I don't care.)

Like...seriously? For absolute realsies? Someone at least trying to meet you in the middle--offering to adapt the character as necessary, or find some alternative solution that satisfies their interest without running afoul of the DM's preferences--means "being more than a bit of a tool" to you?

I honestly have no idea how to respond to that. You have literally just demonstrated what I spoke of earlier, that some folks will refuse to have an adult conversation about it.

I don't know what to tell you, beyond offering an example. You've mentioned that you like playing dragonborn. Cool; I like 'em too.

I typically run my campaigns in one of three settings that I've created. Setting number one has a long list of playable races, including a militaristic dragonman race (called drachen) that very clearly both exists in the setting and is explicitly allowed as a default playable option. If you come to my table wanting to play a dragonborn, and I happen to be running a typical, setting-default campaign (i.e. one with no special restrictions or unusual theme) at the time, hey presto and kismet, we have no problems.

Setting number two is a deliberate Middle-Earth pastiche. The only playable races that exist in this setting are (the local equivalents of) humans, halflings, elves, dwarves, and orcs—period—and even then, I usually only allow human and halfling PCs when I'm running it, because that sets the tone for the game as I run it. If a player wants to bring a dragonborn into this game-world, they're simply out of luck. Dragonborn do not exist in the setting, end of story, and there is no "adult conversation" to be had about it. There are, however, plenty of hypothetical childish conversations that will all end with, "No; either make a character appropriate to the game, or feel free to play at someone else's table." (Pre-pandemic, my FLGS was always very crowded on the weekends; there was never a shortage of tables.)

In setting number three, dragonborn aren't a thing, but world-hopping totally is. So even though dragonborn aren't on the list of options for starting player characters, if a player wanted to play one, the answer would be maybe—it all depends on whether the player is cool with their dragonborn character being a stranded spaceman or planar traveler with no deep ties to the setting, and whether or not the campaign going on at the time would be disrupted by including such elements.

Why does it matter?

Why should it matter if the player says, "Hey, I know you said gnomes aren't whitelisted for this game, but I'd really like to play one. Can we talk about it?" WHY is that a bad thing? I just cannot understand how it is offensive to you for someone to express genuine interest in something that isn't officially greenlit, and thus investigate what options might be had to find a compromise. This is exactly what those of us who raise our eyebrows at talk of DMs being the "Ultimate Authority," Capitalization Included, are skeptical of--people who turn even the idea of discussion into a reason to be offended or kick the player out!

In this particular, hypothetical instance? If I've banned gnomes from the campaign, I've done so for a reason. Probably because the setting doesn't include them—and the setting always precedes the game. The setting is the raison d'être for the game—not the other way around. The worldbuilder(s) define(s) the milieu, the milieu defines the rules, and the rules define the characters.

If you (in the general sense, meaning "any player," not you personally) sit down at my table and ask to redefine some element of my setting, we can have a conversation about that. Just like we could have a conversation about playing in a different setting, playing a different edition of D&D, playing a different RPG altogether, or abolishing one of my house-rules. But it would have to be a damned amazing conversation to move me, because I'm generally not interested in changing editions, changing games, changing settings, or altering either rules or setting elements to accommodate the whims of one new player. What incentive do I have to even consider such requests? I've got a campaign going on, and I'm busy accommodating the players who are all invested in the setting and the game as they already exist.

But DnD is designed to have dozens upon dozens of cultures in it. People expect to run into monsters that are intelligent and deadly foes. And limiting the game to the extent of having humans, and that is it, is incredibly hard to actually do in practice.

Because DnD isn't that sort of Fantasy. It never has been. Someone up thread posted a story about a player for Gary Gygax who played a Balor. There is not a single DnD setting with only four sentient races in it. We don't have those worlds in DnD.

That's not even wrong.

Most players I know come to the table with a vague idea of what they want to play. And they generally then would go to the DM with the question, because they have an idea, and they liked there idea and they want to try and make it work.

And most players I know want to hear about the campaign before they start coming up with character ideas. Then, being reasonable adults, they channel their ideas in the direction of characters that will fit the setting. Maybe a player has an initial idea that doesn't work and the referee has to shut it down; and the player, still being a reasonable adult, alters or discards it as appropriate. ("50s sci-fi game? Cool! Can I play a graylien with a flying saucer?" "Eh, I was thinking more along the lines of B-movie, aliens-are-monsters." "Oh, right. Okay, how about an eccentric ufologist, then?" "Yeah, that'll work.")

But the hypothetical naughty word who wants to play an elf cleric in my 50s B-movie campaign? Screw that guy. That's the functional equivalent of a player who wants to play a rakasta warlock in a D&D campaign where the setting doesn't have rakastas or warlocks. (I get the sense that some folks here don't agree, and if so, I'm curious as to why.)

 

[Chaosmancer]

There is no fantasy racism going on here.

Max, that is literally what the "Doesn't it make sense that Humans would be freaked out if a Tabaxi walked into the inn" is. It is literally a "We don't serve your kind here" homage.

It is Fantasy Racism, hiding behind the "But wouldn't it be reasonable? We don't see monster people in our world, so it would freak us out" pastiche of ignoring the alternative history of the fantasy worlds. The ones where they know such people exist and are people.

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1. Not my example. You even replied to @Neonchameleon when they gave it!

2. Pardon me, I got my fallacies mixed up. This is exactly the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. (The archetypal example being that a serial murderer is caught in another country, and a Glasgow native says "no Scotsman would ever do such a thing!" Then, when given an example of a Scotsman who did that exact thing, the Glasgow native responds with, "No true Scotsman would ever do such a thing!" Arbitrarily changing the definition so that counter-examples don't count.)

You asked for exceptions, someone offered one. You then claimed that that example was not such a thing by introducing this notion that the players asked for permission. Now you have changed the rules such that tacitly asking for permission is a thing? No, sorry, don't buy it. The players made a decision, and the DM had a choice: flip the table, or accept the players' desire not to play the thing set before them. They had not "asked for permission," tacitly or otherwise, and the very idea of "tacitly" asking for permission is hogwash.

But here, I'll give you examples, from my own real actual game, where I am the DM and so I can tell you exactly what my thought process was. I'm running a game in Dungeon World with an Arabian Nights aesthetic/tone. I made a cool monster that I hoped would provide a pitched but winnable fight for the party, specifically a molten-obsidian golem with mithril claws (it had resulted from the accidental combination of shadowy mechano-spiders that spewed alchemical fire with blood obsidian sand used by necromantic druids to trap the souls of the living).

The party instead chose to draw the monster back to a waterlogged spike trap. I could have stood my ground and said the monster doesn't follow them, or that its internal heat prevented it from solidifying, or whatever, but I could tell from my players' voices that they were jazzed about such a simple solution to a dangerous problem. I could have done the thing I actually really wanted to do, and have it fight them somehow anyway--maybe burrowing through the ground (a thing the spiders were capable of doing). But I understood that that wasn't what my players wanted, and accepted their solution. I emphatically was not "granting permission" for their solution to work--I was 100% admitting that I had failed to foresee a perfectly reasonable explanation, and that my players had outsmarted me. This remains a highlight of the game for reasons completely other than the ones I intended.

For another example: There's an NPC in my game who is secretly a gold dragon, summoned from his faraway homeland of Yuxia. Being a gold dragon, Shen is of course very powerful, but he is trying to keep his true identity a secret, as he is hunting a black dragon (also from Yuxia, but who arrived centuries ago). If things escalated into open dragon-on-dragon combat, innocent people would almost surely die. If that doesn't happen it almost surely means the black dragon ran away, meaning the chase would start all over again and he'd really rather not be hunting this dragon for another two centuries.

I had feared my players would dislike this NPC (or worse, see him as a DMPC, since I love dragons so much), but they actually really like him. Then they threw me a curveball: they asked Shen if he would help them on their adventuring, what with being a powerful champion of all that is good and righteous and such. All my DM instincts told me "no, don't do it, you're taking their adventure away from them." But I ignored those instincts and looked for a way to satisfy their request without compromising their ownership of their successes and failures. I did not "grant permission" for them to have what they wanted. I relented and accepted the players' united interest in having Shen's help. They have thus far not chosen to make use of the proverbial get-out-of-jail-free card he gave them, keeping it for a rainy day. They got what they wanted, and I had to change my plans--and I'm perfectly happy with that, because it made my players happy.

So yeah. I have absolutely had situations where my players were not--tacitly or otherwise--asking for permission. They were declaring their intent, and waiting for me to respond to it. I could have been a petulant child and told them what they wanted was bad, but I chose not to, and instead listened to them. My authority was not absolute--and is not. I always approach play as a negotiation, not as princeps writing laws with the occasional (but unnecessary) advice of a defunct Senate.

I love you examples, and agree with you, but I have argued with Max on more than one occasion and I can already see what he is likely to say to your examples.

And that is that in the example of the Golem, you could have chosen to not move the golem. And since it was your choice to move the golem, it was still your ultimate authority that existed, because the players could not move the golem for you.


Which, I think is a poor and limited way of looking at the game, to say that nothing moves in the game world except that the DM says it does, and then using that to declare ultimate authority in all things. I mean, by this same argument the Goliath can't pick a sword without the DM allowing it. They can just say "No, you don't pick up the sword, it refuses to budge."

I personally think it leads to this.... false face. This presentation that the DM is somehow special, and not just the referee for the game. And I think that has led to some actually toxic and harmful events in the games history and present, but it is there, whether we like it or not. Some people will declare they have ultimate authority, even as they sit alone with a pile of notes and no one to talk to.

 

[Chaosmancer]

(I get the sense that some folks here don't agree, and if so, I'm curious as to why.)

I think it is because there is a sense that it doesn't matter whether or not the DM is being unreasonable.

From your position, it doesn't matter what the DM has done or said, they can never be the naughty word. They are never the one who has to compromise their position. The player is the only one who can be an naughty word. I mean, just look at your example you gave me.

And most players I know want to hear about the campaign before they start coming up with character ideas. Then, being reasonable adults, they channel their ideas in the direction of characters that will fit the setting. Maybe a player has an initial idea that doesn't work and the referee has to shut it down; and the player, still being a reasonable adult, alters or discards it as appropriate. ("50s sci-fi game? Cool! Can I play a graylien with a flying saucer?" "Eh, I was thinking more along the lines of B-movie, aliens-are-monsters." "Oh, right. Okay, how about an eccentric ufologist, then?" "Yeah, that'll work.")

The referee shut down their concept. And there is to be no questioning of that. The why is meaningless to your position. They have spoken, and that is all that matters.

Now all weight of being reasonable falls on the player to alter their position until it is acceptable to the referee, or they leave the game.

I mean, take your quick example up there. We've gone from an alien pilot in a strange world to an "eccentric ufologist" which is a huge departure. But, the player wanted a saucer, so maybe they are picturing themselves as a scientist who studies UFOs and has solid theories on the working of UFO engines.

But, the DM, they think the player is playing a crackpot who has no real idea about aliens, they are more a redneck conspiracy theoriest. And so when the player brings their engineering scientist working on rebuilding a UFO, the DM says "Sorry, you don't actually know anything about UFOs, this is more a horror thing, with the Monster Aliens being inexplicable."

At that point, I might very well have to ask the DM "Okay, what am I allowed to play?" because clearly when they pitched an alien sci-fi story, I was picturing actually interacting with aliens and using alien tech, and they were picturing a horror movie with a bunch of patsies.

And maybe we find a compromise, and then we start playing, and my player wants to open up the ship and study how it works. And the DM says "Well, you can't, the Ship's defenses can't be breached." And then it is "Well, you can't understand the language, so you can't figure out how to work the computer" And then it is "Well, the ships controls were designed to work with a specific limb set up, so you can't fly it."

At what point did you think the player was the problem? What would it take for you to think the DM is the problem?


That is why some of us have a hard time agreeing with you, because some of us have seen this attitude in practice. "I'm not the problem, you are the problem, you are ruining my game and refusing to compromise. I don't need to compromise, I'm the Dungeon Master. If you don't like it, there's the door."

And sometimes, it is the player. I'm not going to say the player is never the problem. But it is like pulling teeth from a rabid lion to get some people to admit that maybe, just maybe, sometimes the DM is the problem.

 

[zarionofarabel]

"Okay, what am I allowed to play?"

This is a fantastic question for players to ask before formulating a character concept!

Because clearly when they pitched an alien sci-fi story, I was picturing actually interacting with aliens and using alien tech, and they were picturing a horror movie with a bunch of patsies.

This could be avoided by having a Session Zero wherein the actual premise of the campaign is discussed before the player begins formulating a character concept.

And maybe we find a compromise, and then we start playing, and my player wants to open up the ship and study how it works. And the DM says "Well, you can't, the Ship's defenses can't be breached." And then it is "Well, you can't understand the language, so you can't figure out how to work the computer" And then it is "Well, the ships controls were designed to work with a specific limb set up, so you can't fly it."

At what point did you think the player was the problem? What would it take for you to think the DM is the problem?

It would depend heavily on the compromise that was reached. If the player agreed to play a patsie in a horror show, then as soon as the player decided they should have the right to understand alien tech. If the compromise included the player being able to understand alien tech on some level, then the DM is the problem.

That is why some of us have a hard time agreeing with you, because some of us have seen this attitude in practice. "I'm not the problem, you are the problem, you are ruining my game and refusing to compromise. I don't need to compromise, I'm the Dungeon Master. If you don't like it, there's the door."

And sometimes, it is the player. I'm not going to say the player is never the problem. But it is like pulling teeth from a rabid lion to get some people to admit that maybe, just maybe, sometimes the DM is the problem.

Sometimes the DM is! I know whenever I pitch a Pendragon campaign I am the problem because I've never found players that wanted to play so I drop that idea and pitch something else.

 

[Maxperson]

Max, that is literally what the "Doesn't it make sense that Humans would be freaked out if a Tabaxi walked into the inn" is. It is literally a "We don't serve your kind here" homage.

Or, it could just be fear of the unknown. It doesn't have to be racism.

 

[Maxperson]

1. Not my example. You even replied to @Neonchameleon when they gave it!

Fair enough. Not your. What I said is still correct.

2. Pardon me, I got my fallacies mixed up. This is exactly the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. (The archetypal example being that a serial murderer is caught in another country, and a Glasgow native says "no Scotsman would ever do such a thing!" Then, when given an example of a Scotsman who did that exact thing, the Glasgow native responds with, "No true Scotsman would ever do such a thing!" Arbitrarily changing the definition so that counter-examples don't count.)

It's not at all a "No True Scotsman." There's nothing about that fallacy that comes anywhere close to applying. The DMG gives the DM complete control over the game and the only way he can lose it is if he gives it away like some DMs do. It's quite literally impossible for the players to wrest any of that control away from the DM. At best the players can leave the game and go start a game of their own, but that doesn't remove any power over the DMs game.