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

[Oofta]

Oh, you mean the people covered under my statement in the god damn post you quoted that such things do happen IRL?

So such things happen in real life, but they didn't always happen so they should never happen in a campaign? It should be up to the DM to do what makes sense. Someone of German descent is not easily distinguishable from the rest of the populace (although I reject the theory that they were not in at least some cases stigmatized). A drow, much like people of Japanese descent, would clearly different.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I might say "sexist" rather than "misogynist" but that's skittering awfully close to tomayto-tomahto territory and I'm not going to argue in favor of table rules I don't agree with (though, as I said, it's their table).

Yeah, I'm probably more willing to judge people for their behavior than the average person is. I'm okay with that.

And if we get too much into the distinction points between sexism and misogyny, we will end up in a "political" discussion and get mod text all over the thread.

 

[Zardnaar]

5e PHB Citation? Not seeing it.

Right after the 4 races it mentions the exotic ones.

Ask DM.

All the splatbooks optional and basic rules only 4 classes.

 

[Swarmkeeper]

The other point I brought up that I haven't seen addressed as it got buried before a tangent:

There are maybe 100 PC races/subraces in the game (I didn't bother counting the actual number - someone feel free to cite the actual number). In a typical game, you might have 4 to 8 players at the table. The DM decides what NPC and monster races the PCs will encounter in the game world. What harm would it be to have up to 8 very different individuals as PCs in the game world?

I guess what I'm getting at is the false notion that "kitchen sink" means some kind of cartoonish circus world with upwards of 100 NPC races represented. The PCs can be unique while the rest of the game world is limited in whatever way the DM sees fit.

Is that a worthy compromise? The PCs can be different than what exists in the game world because... reasons. Those reasons can be hashed out in session 0 so that everyone is on the same page for what that means. Heck, the DM can warn the players that their "weird" PCs might be at a disadvantage out of the gate in social interactions until they can build some good will or whatever.

Note that I'm not saying the DM can't or shouldn't limit the menu of player options for good reasons with player buy-in (e.g. to keep things simpler for beginners or because the theme of the campaign is all halflings from the same shire or all clerics from the same interfaith temple or... whatever). I'm just positing that a handful of "weird-raced" PCs are truly not going to break a DM's world vision.

 

[Oofta]

I limit races but it's not out of vindictiveness or because a PC playing deep gnome destroyed my carefully plotted campaign. First, the odds of any DM making that decision are so vanishingly small that it effectively never happens. Same with a DM doing it just to "lord their power" over the puny players, browbeat players into accepting their godhood or any of the other strawmen. There are bad DMs, it has little or nothing to do with limiting races.

I establish what races are allowed when I open up my game to new people before a session 0. I try to work with players, but yes there are some hard limits. So why do I limit races?

• I have an ongoing campaign world that I've been running for decades. It has an established history. I don't want to retcon that history to fit in a nation of race X.
• I like to put thought into what race and cultures are like in different areas. I know that while the elves from here share quite a bit in common with elves from there (such as appearing to be haughty because they dont want to get too attached to short lived races) but I also know how they are different and why. I know why elves from A distrust dwarves and elves from B prefer dwarves to humans.
• How many times can you have a "one of a kind" or a PC from a "lost tribe" before it becomes trite? In addition, every time in history something really different shows up it's usually a creature from another plane of existence that is out to kill everyone. Tends to make people a bit paranoid.
• Some races (drow) do have a place in my world, but it's as the bogeyman.
• I don't see a need. If a potential player can only envision their PC as one race it indicates a potential issue of inflexibility and unwillingness to make a story that I and the rest of the group have decided to tell.
• It's a simple preference. I personally have a hard time taking kitchen sink campaigns seriously. If I had to do it all over again, I'd probably consider axing a couple of races in my own campaign.

Let's say a cat person, a different type of cat person, a bird person, a different kind of bird person, a snake person, a golem person, a half horse person, an elephant person and a cow person walk into a bar. The bartender, a pile of sentient rock from a previous edition that's now retired asks them what they'd like to drink.​

​

That sounds to me like the start of a bad joke. Other people might think it sounds like a normal Thursday game night because different people have different preferences and seek different things from their games.​

• Last, but not least, I can't please everyone. For everyone that would want to play a warforged in my campaign, there may well be another person that thinks warforged don't belong in a fantasy game. If I try to please everyone that could potentially join my game it's guaranteed to fail.

Just to be clear there is no wrong or "better" way to run a game if you and your group are having fun. All of the above is just personal preference.

 

[Jack Daniel]

It is not good for D&D to create a situation that because DMS have to do more work than the players that they should not care about the player's desires and simply fish for players that match their desires (or browbeat players into acceptance)

The DM's desire are more important. However it is not a good idea to foster an idea that the DM shouldn't care about the player's. That just feeds the powermad and creates the bitterness from past experiences seen here.

I can't agree with this even as a matter of principle. Not caring overmuch about players' desires and fishing for players that want to play my campaigns suits my style perfectly. I couldn't possibly care less about whether this is "good for D&D" as a whole, because I'm philosophically opposed to seeing "the hobby" as some sort of monolith that can be improved or damaged by the things individual hobbyists do. We're not all playing the same D&D. We're not all even participating in the same hobby, not really.

If I did think it worthwhile to try and impose what I believe to be "good for D&D" on others, I'd be sitting here like idiot, arguing that "role-playing" should still be called "fantasy wargaming," elf should be a character class, and anyone who enjoys the character-building mini-game should be lashed with a wet noodle until suitably contrite about the error of their ways.

Philosophically, is banning something just because you don't like it good or bad DMing?

Fundamentally neither. Impossible to judge absent context.

People argue all that time that "Quantum Ogres" are bad DMing that remove player agency, yet, a player can never truly know that it has been done. Unless they can read the DM's mind or their notes, so why do we bother discussing it?

Because if we as DMs and a community all agree that something is wrong, it at least creates a kind of pressure.

And, we have these discussions all the time when discussing DMing, all the time there are things a DM can do that the players will never know, and we discuss them. Why is this so different?

Now it's interesting that you bring this up, because I think it's tightly intertwined with the opposed set of (gaming) values and (gaming) ethics at play here. The statement that quantum ogres abrogate player agency is often made, but why is it so? What's the underlying principle that makes that "bad DMing"?

I would contend that "quantum ogres are bad" is a statement that only makes sense if you hold to the a priori principle that the game setting must in some sense "persist" (that seems a less fraught way of putting it than "exist") outside of the game. If your campaign setting exists only as a backdrop for the sake of the player characters—the only part of the game-world that ever "exists" at any one moment is the part the player characters are looking at—then everything is a quantum ogre; and whether you move a city or an encounter into the players' path doesn't really impact their agency because that kind of agency—the players' ability to explore a persistent setting and possibly avoid encounters through their decisions and actions—wasn't a meaningful component of the game to begin with.

But if you hold to the persistent setting, open world, sandbox ethic—pithily summarized by the phrase, "the world is the world"—then the DM moving encounters or map locations around behind the scenes, on a whim rather than according to procedure or logic, just because the DM can (and maybe wants to conserve prep work, and thinks it's okay because the players haven't been there yet to "fix" the location), or because the DM wants the players to have that encounter, is doing something verboten, a veritable robbery of the very game itself from the players. It is only in this sense, when operating under principles like this (they don't have to be this set of ethics exactly, just something analogous), that we can say that quantum ogres really do detract from player agency.

DMs who don't make room in their world for races they didn't plan for—"No, there are no tabaxi living in the blank spaces on my world map. No, not even on that far continent I haven't fully detailed yet."—are just adhering to this same sort of persistent world ethic writ large, combined with holding the "singular vision" as a value. (And good luck convincing someone that their values are wrong!) A DM who creates worlds in this manner is no more obliged to solicit player input than a painter is obliged to let an art critic touch up their canvas. For a DM like this, the singular creation of the milieu is one of the very reasons for playing D&D in the first place; and in that case, a statement like "If I didn't think of it, it's not in my world—because then, if I added it, it wouldn't be my world anymore" doesn't just make perfect sense, it's also a literal ethical principle for that DM.

 

[Minigiant]

I can't agree with this even as a matter of principle. Not caring overmuch about players' desires and fishing for players that want to play my campaigns suits my style perfectly. I couldn't possibly care less about whether this is "good for D&D" as a whole, because I'm philosophically opposed to seeing "the hobby" as some sort of monolith that can be improved or damaged by the things individual hobbyists do. We're not all playing the same D&D. We're not all even participating in the same hobby, not really.

If I did think it worthwhile to try and impose what I believe to be "good for D&D" on others, I'd be sitting here like idiot, arguing that "role-playing" should still be called "fantasy wargaming," elf should be a character class, and anyone who enjoys the character-building mini-game should be lashed with a wet noodle until suitably contrite about the error of their ways.

You don't have to care what is good for D&D.

But D&D does. And WOTC does.

And if their plan is to expand, they need DMs willingly to offer the experiences that their additional new target consumer base wants.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

You don't have to care what is good for D&D.

But D&D does. And WOTC does.

And if their plan is to expand, they need DMs willingly to offer the experiences that their additional new target consumer base wants.

And that's kitchen sink?

 

[Oofta]

You don't have to care what is good for D&D.

But D&D does. And WOTC does.

And if their plan is to expand, they need DMs willingly to offer the experiences that their additional new target consumer base wants.

D&D cares? When did D&D become sentient? WOTC certainly doesn't care as long as they sell books. I have a full table of people having fun playing and not switching to a different TTRPG, what more could they want?

Saying we have to "offer the experiences..." makes the assumption that your style of play is inherently better somehow. It's not.

 

[Minigiant]

I think the extra work GMs have to do is partly responsible for the movement/s in some quarters toward zero-myth and/or collaborative worldbuilding in TRPGs; I suspect devolution of authority to the players in those games is not an unintended consequence.

I think so. I think many DMs of D&D have gone on the designing side reminding the work and put effort into lessening it. And like you said, weakening authority of the GMs is one result.