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

[Maxperson]

I 100% agree with this statement. When you discuss the roleplaying aspects of race/class/background choices a party of 5 human rogues could easily have 5 very distinct characters. Look at any war movie with a squad of soldiers.

But....

When the dice, maps, and minis come out and the stuff on your character sheet starts getting consulted, a party of 5 Human Rogues is going to be pretty one note.

There are three different subclasses in the PHB alone. Right now with Tasha's and Xanathar's, you could do 8 different Rogue subclasses. No need to all be the same.

 

[Maxperson]

"Will no one on this forum of mostly GMs ever think of the poor GMs?!"

This kinda sounds like the GM wants their game to be more about setting tourism and getting high fives for their world-building brilliance than the desired play experience of the players. Maybe the GM should not have done all that world-building in isolation of the players or without considering what the players were actually in the mood to play.

Or else they just want the player to abide by what the player agreed to abide by. When you join a game that's all human, you are violating the social contract and being an arse if you then ask for an elf. By joining you've agreed to be human.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Thanks for giving an example of what people have posted on the past couple of pages never happens.

If you create a new world for every campaign and want to design it by committee, great. I don't. I like it when the DM has a concrete notion of what the world is, I love the feel of discovering that world through the eyes of my PC. It's like picking up a new book or watching a movie I've never seen. Even if the movie is the millionth version of Batman if it's well made I enjoy seeing what twist or nuance has changed.

Don't want to watch another Batman movie? Don't. Don't want to play in my campaign where I tell everyone that it's an established world that has history, depth and limitations on races? Find another game. Want to design by committee? Go for it. In my game I set the stage, make clear what the parameters are before a session 0. What you do on that stage is up to you and your fellow players.

Can you please stop conflating a limitation on races with the world having history and depth. It is a strawman that has been knocked down repeatedly at this point.

I know you personally can't imagine a world with a history and depth and more than six races, but as we showed a few pages ago, Tolkien had somewhere around 13.

FR (as much as you may despise it) has history and depth (even if it isn't easy to find) and has over 20 sentient races

Eberron has tons of depth and history and has over 20 sentient races, possibly even more than that.

You can have history and depth and have a large multitude of races. It has happened, a lot, so please stop putting your personal experience forward as a fact on this matter.

 

[Scott Christian]

I don't like grits

Sacrilege. Butter. A bit of chopped bacon. Dash of salt and pepper. Dang it, now I am hungry.

 

[MGibster]

Play yet another human cleric? In a setting with fighting man, wizard and cleric and everyone is human? I'd rather jam a pen in my left eye. I have zero interest in that game. It sounds mind numbingly boring to me.

I honestly can't imagine restricting player choice that much in D&D. It's one thing to say no drow, kender, or tortles but it's quite another thing to say human only. I wouldn't be interested in that game either and as a player I'm human 90% of the time.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Again, compromise doesn't have to mean giving the player the race he wants. No dragonborn will ever grace my game. However, I will work with the player to find/create something else just as fun or more fun to play.

This is basically all I've been saying, with one odd detail.

Is Dragonborn the only thing you have as a limit, or is it the only hard limit? I ask because it is the only thing you mention consistently, and it makes me wonder if you are willing to compromise on multiple fronts, and this is just the one thing you won't compromise on, or if you have only one thing that would require compromise and you won't compromise on it. Or do you see having a variant lizardfolk race with a breath weapon as a compromise on Dragonborn, basically just changing the name and the origin.

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Badwringfun is short for you must do it this way or the DM has to consent to the player.

It's an informal term conveying an idea.

Why do so many people keep seeing the word "compromise" and reading it as "I must give in to all demands"? That isn't what that word means, so why does it keep coming up again and again?

If you think our position is kowtowing to the player, and that is what you object to.... congratulations, that isn't our position.

If you want to follow that up with "Great, my position and power to do anything I want remains absolute and unchallenged".... No, it isn't. That is going to get pushback and an advocation for.... Compromise.

And then we return back to the first paragraph of my response.

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I really do not understand this. You can't see two human clerics who follow the same deity being different characters? With different backgrounds, personalities, psychologies, mannerisms, etc.? All of the stuff that makes a character a character?


Culture is not character. Otherwise, it wouldn't be possible to run an all-Viking campaign or an all-samurai campaign or an Arthurian knights campaign….

Can you please highlight the section where I said they can't be different characters? Or maybe the point that they couldn't have different personalities? In fact, I remember explicitly stating that they COULD have different personalities.

However, none of that changes that you have written large swaths of my character. NOT ALL OF IT. I am not saying you wrote all of it. but LARGE PARTS.

If you've written, heck, let us say 60% of my character, isn't that a bit too much? 50%? You've laid out some pretty strict guidelines.



Or maybe the issue is you don't understand what is meant by Monoculture? I mean, your example of an "all samurai game" kind of indicates that, because there were multiple different types of samurai. Look at @Minigiant 's post again. A samurai from the Tokugawa clan would have had a fairly different culture than one from Nanbu, which is on the other end of the country. They also would be very different between Samurai that were Shinto and those that were Buddhist. To fairly distinct subcultures.

Heck, take America for a second. You would never claim that a person from Boston and Los Angeles would share identical cultures. We aren't a Monoculture. No actual place is that homogenized.

An All samurai game works because it isn't a monoculture. There is variation. The people of this city are different than that city, there are factions with different beliefs, subcultures.

By stating you wanted a Monoculture, you stripped all of that out. We have a single culture, a single set of shared values, a single set of beliefs. If that isn't what you meant... then I apologize but that is what a Monoculture is.

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Look at some of the real world religions with just one God. They are not one church or one culture and do not hold all the same beliefs, even though all are human. Some of those churches following the same God are in opposition to one another.

I imagine it could be the same in his game.

If it is not one culture, then it is not a Monoculture, which Jack Daniel said it was.

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That's not how cultures work though. I'm an American, a Southerner living in Arkansas to be specific, and while I share many cultural touchstones with my fellow countrymen we don't all have the same beliefs or habits. I don't like grits, have refused chocolate gravy for breakfast anytime it's offered, would rather own a car than a pickup truck, I spend my Sundays sleeping in, and I don't use Coke to refer to any soda pop I only use it when referring to Coca-Cola. (And I use the word soda pop which is weird down here.)

For one of my campaigns, I modeled the pantheon off of those wacky Greeks. There was one pantheon in the setting. Gnomes, elves, orcs, humans, etc., etc. all worshiped the same gods, though they might favor and be favored by one particular god. And priests dedicated to the same god didn't have to be alike. There was a difference between the LG priest of the storm god who did his best to placate the angry god and the CE priest of that same storm god who sought to unleash his destruction on others.

1000% agree.

But America is not a Monoculture. Neither is the American South. Neither is the American South in Arkansas. Neither is the City of Little Rock.

But Jack Daniel specifically said it was a Monoculture. That means it is one note. If you lived in a Monoculture, you would like grits, have chocolate gravy and drive a pick-up truck. Because there is only one culture and you all share it.

That is the point. If you are going to limit things down to a very small level, then you have more work to do to introduce more subcultures and differing experiences, because a single monoculture is not only not realistic, but too constraining.

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How so? How do you suppose then that writers manage it when they tell a story set within the bounds of one culture? Why, their characters don't even have stats to distinguish one from another…

Yeah, your issue is you meant "Culture" but you said "Monoculture" which is a different concept.

I don't play an edition that uses ideals, bonds, flaws, etc. Mechanizing that sort of thing strikes me personally as a ghastly notion. But supposing that I did… why in the world would you imagine that they'd all have to be the same for every member of a party of samurai? Culture is not character. Do you think that in an Arthurian setting, Lancelot and Gawain and Galahad have all the same personality traits because they're all Arthur's knights? That in an Ancient Greek setting, Achilles and Odysseus and Agamemnon (who are all human fighters who share a culture, a language, a pantheon) are somehow similar characters!?

Hmm, let me see here.

Achilles was from the City-State (basically country) of Phthia.
Odysseus was from the City-State (basically country) of Ithaca
Agamemnon was from the City-State (basically country) of Mycenae

So... shock of all shocks, they didn't really share a Culture. Your argument here is basically like saying that Kenya, Ethiopia and Somalia all have the same culture, because they are near each other.

This is the problem. You said Monoculture, but you didn't mean an actual Monoculuture. You meant a cultural region.

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There are three different subclasses in the PHB alone. Right now with Tasha's and Xanathar's, you could do 8 different Rogue subclasses. No need to all be the same.

But they share a lot of abilities, in fact they share the majority of their abilities. Which was the point being made. They share so much in terms of how they approach problems that they will end up feeling very samey.

I personally experienced this. Had a game with three rogues, a Swashbuckler, Assassin and a Thief. They felt fairly similar. Not exact, but it was noticeable

 

[Minigiant]

A DM doesn't have to justify their choices to you or anyone.

They don't have to.
However if they do, the players will understand the tone and theme of the world better.

There you go again. Where is "from different parts of the world" written? I think you have an unexamined bias here.

Unless you are running an anime-like kingdom where are the people live in the one sole kingdom, the elflands and the dwarfland are seperate. NoTEngland and NotGermany and NotTurkey are in different place.

Hell Wales is not layered on top of England. It's a whole seperate place.

Seriously!?

Seriously.
Many stories are not D&D style adventures. You often have to alter the premise of a storyworld to make it so.

D&D Adventurers was not a normal job in real life nor myth.

Sure. But not every D&D campaign needs to be like that either. Narrow concept campaigns are fine, it just needs everyone to accept the premise. I can easily imagine a Knights of the Round Table inspired campaign where all characters are human knights, mostly represented by various paladin and fighter builds. Sure, it would be super limited on the long run, but for a one campaign with four or five players it would work just fine.

Then why are you playing D&D.

If you break the base assumptions of the game so much to make another type of game, it's 10000% understandable for players to question the setting. That's when I'd expect the players to question things and worry if they don't. Becuse they'll murderhobo my "holy knights" game up.

 

[Scott Christian]

There's another point to remember here too. 5e has been around for about 5 years now. It's entirely possible for a player to have already played the core races, at least once each, and is looking for something different. My own group has run 7 campaigns since 5e started, which means everyone in the group has played at least 7 different characters. And I know that three of the players also play in other groups as well, meaning they've played, probably, close to 15 different PC's since 5e came out.

Never minding old farts like me who've been gaming for close to 40 years.

I would add this is very table specific. I mean, there was a poll on here a while ago that sked how long campaigns lasted. Many were for years. Others were six months. Even a year average would take you to five races. Six or seven if the DM killed some off. In my experience, I have played 5e since it came out. Played in three separate campaigns, with three separate groups of players. I have played a total of eight characters:

1. Half-Orc wizard
2. Halfling bard
3. Wood elf barbarian
4. Drow rogue
5. Half-elf warlock
6. Human fighter
7. Dwarven fighter
8. Dwarven Cleric

The halfling died. The human retired mid campaign and was replaced by the dwarf (the group needed a fighter). The first four made it to around level 7 or 8. The half-elf and dwarven fighter made it to level 20. The cleric is level 5. The point is - I still haven't touched on most of the content inside the PHB. Probably not even a hundredth of the combinations.

Play yet another human cleric? In a setting with fighting man, wizard and cleric and everyone is human? I'd rather jam a pen in my left eye. I have zero interest in that game. It sounds mind numbingly boring to me.

Dang man, c'mon. That is beyond pessimistic. You mean you couldn't sit down with friends and hang out four hours a week and enjoy playing a human cleric? Or was that hyperbole?

If I'm going to play an all Arthurian Knights game, I'm certainly not going to be playing D&D to do it. I'd much rather break out something like Pendragon which is actually tailor made for that kind of game rather than taking this massive 5e game and ripping out 99% of the material. No thanks.

100% agree.

I think DM's who never play forget that while we DM's get to play all sorts of different stuff every week, the players don't. We get to be dragons and vampires and barkeeps and everything else under the sun. We get to stretch our creative legs all the time. That player has one character. That's it. And, for the DM to then say, "Well, yeah, sorry, your creative ideas just aren't good enough to play in my game" and then go ahead and play all the things that the players are forbidden from playing tends to lead to some pretty hard feelings after a while.

I think this is a great point. I also think it goes back to the point earlier about DM's, some like to dig deep and continue to explore the same area, just digging deeper and deeper each time. Other DM's like to scratch the surface then scratch the surface somewhere else. The same is true for players. There are a multitude of ways to play a druid. Exploring those different facets is very fun for some. For others they want something different.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Then why are you playing D&D.

If you break the base assumptions of the game so much to make another type of game, it's 10000% understandable for players to question the setting. That's when I'd expect the players to question things and worry if they don't. Becuse they'll murderhobo my "holy knights" game up.

D&D is is just a rule system You can do a lot of different things with it. Sure, it mainly supports action-adventure, but that' pretty broad category. A lot of people might not want to buy and learn a completely new system system just for one campaign. (Personally I don't mind learning new systems, but that's just a matter of preference.)

 

[Scott Christian]

"Will no one on this forum of mostly GMs ever think of the poor GMs?!"

This kinda sounds like the GM wants their game to be more about setting tourism and getting high fives for their world-building brilliance than the desired play experience of the players. Maybe the GM should not have done all that world-building in isolation of the players or without considering what the players were actually in the mood to play.

For this, I think it varies by tables. Some players want to just show up, roll dice, and roleplay. They don't want to be part of the world building anymore than a reader wants to build the world of the book they are reading. They want to interact with the world. They want the ability to alter and shape it. They don't want to create it because it might spoil the mystery of exploring.