D&D General How many Races it too much?

[Scott Christian]

Now I just really want to know.

How many races is too many for you DM's out there? (Let's leave sub-races out of it for now.)

I know in my locked continent, there are 8 distinct cultures, 5 distinct races. I have plans for there to be other continents, so more will get added. But for the continent, 8 is as high as I can logically go. The resources for the continent are tapped (in my own head, which is only in my head).

So how many races are we looking at for everyone else and their worlds?

 

[Professor Murder]

So the issue gets complicated by non-pc cultures and how they can also dynamically impact a setting.

 

[tetrasodium]

I run my games in eberron where monsters are "people" too & the "culture" of a lot of creatures depends more on the nation they live in than their race. Personally I think that the phb focuses too much on making sure that every race in forgotten realms in represented as is rather than any of the races & cultures from other settings. With that said, it doesn't matter what I vote because every answer might as well say "N different races from Toril as they exist in the forgotten realms." I'd love to see a large number of mechanically distinct races including some of the monstrous ones but as the horrific volos orcs & goblinoids show it will just be a representation of the race in one specific setting without ever stopping to ask "does this race exist somewhere as something other than a monster & should we draw on that?"

 

[Minigiant]

Depends
I have one setting with 5 races, one with 25, one with 6, one with 16, one with ~20, and one with >47.

 

[Bohandas]

In things like Planescape and Spelljammer it makes a lot more sense to have a lot than to have just a few

 

[BookTenTiger]

I used to be more of a minimalist, but these days I invite the players to play whatever they are into! I then told their character's culture, history, and interests into the campaign world.

For example, my current campaign started with a goliath, a Tortle, an aasimar, and a Tiefling. I decided there were many villages of tortles who were being oppressed by the BBEG.

Then the Tortle died, and the player brought in a gnome artificer. I decided the BBEG kidnaps gnome artisans to work in their castle.

I consider it a fun, creative challenge to bring more into my campaign!

 

[aco175]

I* have always had a hard time seeing how many humanoid raced were able to develop on one world and not kill off most of them. I tend to stick to just the PHB races for PCs, I think the OP was asking this over all races. I also tend to have only one common type of monster in certain regions, like orcs, goblins, and gnolls. I can see the PC races working together more than the monster races can without infighting.

 

[tetrasodium]

I* have always had a hard time seeing how many humanoid raced were able to develop on one world and not kill off most of them. I tend to stick to just the PHB races for PCs, I think the OP was asking this over all races. I also tend to have only one common type of monster in certain regions, like orcs, goblins, and gnolls. I can see the PC races working together more than the monster races can without infighting.

• Fleshwarping in athas(darksun) where more than one race was completely wiped out by the cleansing wars.
• Magebreeding in eberron where some races probably did it to themselves like the Dar wile others like the elves & drow had it done to them. Still others like dwarves gnomes & so on came from other planes like thelanis & risia.
• migration from an infinite number of spheres in spelljammer & planescape
• Victims abducted from an infinite number of spheres by the mists in ravenloft
• Plot armor in forgotten realms
• Plot armor in Greyhawk

 

[NaturalZero]

I don't think my issue is the sheer amount of races as much as the fact that there are a bunch that I feel are conceptually bland, and I'd rather remove them and use something else. As a DM, I'm pretty open to working with players to include what they want if they ask for it but by default, I leave out half-elves, half-orcs, halfings, et al, because they just add noise and filler to a world instead of something more substantial.

If I really wanted to do it my way, I'd chop all of the "alt-human" options that are aesthetically and culturally just humans who identify as other races. Short human 1, short human 2, short human 3, and pointy eared human 1 from the PHB would get replaced by something more fantastical.

 

[Zardnaar]

Much more than 12.