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

[Maxperson]

A fireball can set things on fire. That doesn’t mean the resultant fire is magical.

It isn't magical. Good point.

 

[Minigiant]

So what. Magic can create it and the situation that allows it to survive WITHOUT it being a magical creature. If you want them to be magical creatures, you have to show explicit proof of it, not weak assumptions.

Well then we have a disagreement on how magic works in D&D.
I believe D&D magic cannot sustain a magical effect without some of the magic remaining unless it is done by a god.

If you create something not-natural with magic and you aren't a god, the effect ends or alters when the magic fully leaves. Magic in D&D uses duration.

If the magic on a curse,blessing, or transmutation end and the targeted thing isn't in a natural form, the thing no longer works or might revert.

A fireball can set things on fire. That doesn’t mean the resultant fire is magical.

Heat and fire are natural.

 

[Gammadoodler]

You're just flat out wrong. Technology is irrelevant. There's nothing to suggest that they cannot survive on their own once the magic is complete. If you're going to make the claim that technology or "magic" is needed for survival, you need to prove it.

By RAW they are not magical creatures, because RAW does not specify that they are.

Do we actually even care about RAW? By RAW they can also climb.

But to be fair it's been quite clear for awhile now that the RAW only matter when you believe they support your opinion.

 

[Maxperson]

Well then we have a disagreement on how magic works in D&D.
I believe D&D magic cannot sustain a magical effect without some of the magic remaining unless it is done by a god.

That's a reasonable homebrew for your game. Nothing in RAW says or implies that, though.

If you create something not-natural with magic and you aren't a god, the effect ends or alters when the magic fully leaves. Magic in D&D uses duration.

If the magic on a curse,blessing, or transmutation end and the targeted thing isn't in a natural form, the thing no longer works or might revert.

There are permanent curses, but consider that when you curse a PC, the PC doesn't become a magical creature. Even when it's polymorphed, it doesn't become magical. It's a beast.

If you want them to be ongoing magical creatures in the default game, then you need to show RAW stating so.

 

[Maxperson]

Do we actually even care about RAW?

Yes.

By RAW they can also climb.

Which is silly, so I've changed it.

But to be fair it's been quite clear for awhile now that the RAW only matter when you believe they support your opinion.

I never said that climbing wasn't RAW for them, but it IS only RAW for Ravnica centaurs, not those in any other setting.

 

[Minigiant]

That's a reasonable homebrew for your game. Nothing in RAW says or implies that, though.

There are permanent curses, but consider that when you curse a PC, the PC doesn't become a magical creature. Even when it's polymorphed, it doesn't become magical. It's a beast.

If you want them to be ongoing magical creatures in the default game, then you need to show RAW stating so.

The curse's magic is still on the person.
If you remove the magic, the person becomes uncursed or the curse becomes surpressed.
Same with transmutations.

If the transmutation on the centaur ends, it turns back into a elf and a horse... or dies.

 

[Guest 6801328]

Ibex and Bighorn Sheep are both hooved, 4-legged creatures that are pretty amazing climbers.

Centaurs have 4 hooves and two arms.

 

[Argyle King]

No more so than a rogue sniper that hides every turn, or any number of other common builds.

Having archers and falconers is logical, useful in pretty much any fight, good for hunting, etc. Like I said, I’ve been adding flying enemies (most commonly normal beasts controlled by an enemy) and archers to fights since long before there were flying races available.

Again, I would agree that many common builds are an issue.

I don't see that as a refutation of my views on the value of flying.

What was the value you feel the flying enemies you've been using add?

 

[Argyle King]

Because Tolkien was not a time traveler or precognitive. The Hobbit was published 20 years before M60s came into service.



Tolkien was not running a game. He was writing a book. Unless your argument is going to amount to, "Players should be playing MY STORY THAT I WROTE..." then appealing to author prerogative will not save your position.

Please read Grunts, by Mary Gentle, if you want an answer to what happens when modern weaponry comes to your fantasy world.

Magic didn't exist in Tolkien's real life either, but that was included.

The question is one of whether or not you feel that a fantasy world (or any fictionally created world for that matter) has limits to what is viewed as plausible and/or within the bounds of the setting in-world.

So, in your view, how would you answer that?

My guess is that you would say there are limits, based upon your responses in other threads.

 

[Jack Daniel]

So, we are in agreement that a DM who does that is bad. See, not that hard to actually answer a question.

So, a DM who is strict in worldbuilding but then opens it up, that can work fine. One who then goes back and undoes all of the things the PCs did is not fine.

Could have been done with this tangent a week ago if you had just agreed with that point.

Well you didn't say that you were spinning off your own hypothetical, so it looked for all the world like you were just badly misreading mine. I still have no idea what you were trying to accomplish rhetorically by doing that. It looks to me like an utterly pointless non sequitur.

And, no, we're not "in agreement." A DM who ruthlessly undoes everything the player characters do in order to restore the setting to an earlier status quo is doing something bad in a sandbox game where player freedom is a value. A DM who does that is doing something bad in any game where the player's actions are supposed to have meaningful consequences. But it might be brilliant in an adventure path where drama is the higher good, or in a themed campaign where the DM is trying to explore impermanence and the futility of ambition. I don't know. Neither do you. As always, context is king. The point here is that without it, neither of us can make blanket statements like that.

I may personally despise railroads, I may never willingly inflict them on my players, but I can't judge a group who loves them. And a group like that deserves to have its fun without being judged for it. That is real line in the sand being drawn here: not staid and traditional vs. new and exotic, not DM authority vs. player freedom, not singular vision vs. creative collaboration, not sandbox vs. story, not rules-as-written vs. homebrew, not D&D is a genre vs. D&D is a toolkit, not verisimilitude vs. rule-of-cool. It's judgmental vs. non-judgmental. "There are better and worse, right and wrong ways to DM" vs. "A wide variety of styles are equally valid."

I've said it before a few times already in this thread, and I'll say it yet again: kitchen sink campaigns are valid, rules-as-written campaigns are valid, campaigns where the DM is "just another player" are valid, campaigns where the players add elements to the game-world are valid, campaigns that ignore basic physics in favor of genre convention are valid. These are all good and genuine ways to play D&D.

I still haven't heard a peep from anyone on the opposite side of this discussion willing to step up and say that campaigns where the DM holds full authority over the world-building and the character creation parameters, or games where the DM is scrupulous about verisimilitude and realistic physics, are also valid, good, and genuine ways to play D&D. I could leave the thread happy if just one of you lot could admit that. But I'm not holding my breath.

Treating personal preference as universal good is a problem endemic to only one side in this discussion. Case in point:

See, the thing is, I used to be strongly on the other side of the fence on this issue. I used to agree with the DM's World POV. Then, well, I started trusting my players more.

Take the oft used "no evils". It's repeated so often that it's become a truism - evil campaigns can't function, they fall apart, they don't work. And, I bought into that line of thinking for a long time. I up front banned evil characters for years.

Then, as an experiment, I told the group that I was going to relax the alignment restrictions. It was up to the players to figure out how to work together but, otherwise, any alignment was on the table.

Turns out that evil groups function FAR more effectively than good ones. First off, there's none of the disrespect between the PC's. When you know that that lipping off to the other PC might cause that character to kill you in your sleep, everyone got a LOT more polite. Almost movie mafia type behavior where everyone was respectful and polite, at least to each other's faces. Then, they quickly realized that together they could succeed at their own individual goals faster and better than they could alone. They banded together for protection because they knew that not only did the bad guys want them dead, the good guys probably did too.

After that campaign, I no longer have alignment restrictions in my games. Evil characters, played intelligently, function perfectly well in a good group. And it creates all sorts of interesting interplay between the characters.

So, yes, I came to the conclusion of "trust your players over your own preferences" through experience. Your own preferences and assumptions likely have never really been tested. Let them go and your game will be a lot more fun.

I have a problem with this. The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. "An all-evil campaign worked well this one time" does not lead to a broader conclusion like "evil campaigns can always work" or "evil characters can always work", so I fail to see how it can lead to the conclusion that @Hussar actually draws, namely that DMs should "trust your players over your own preferences." If Hussar learned a lesson about being more flexible that works for his own group and his own table, well and groovy, but there's no good reason to believe that that holds for all groups and all tables.

There can be practical DMing advice in there—"Hey, if you want to run an all-evil campaign, help the players to figure out for themselves that cooperation is better than backstabbing!"—but it's just not the case that every group wants or needs every great new DMing tip'n'trick to run their table.

I'd say that you have the right gist here.

Good, because misrepresentation of the opposite side's positions has been one area endemic to everyone in this conversation, and I'd like to avoid it if I can. I'm going to respond to you and @EzekielRaiden together, because what you're saying is fundamentally pretty similar, but Ezekiel wrote a lot more, so it's going to take me a moment here to comb over all the relevant quotes.

To sum up:

The question was, why is it a bad thing for a DM to ban an option (like a race) for pure whim or personal preference (absent concerns like setting cohesion, campaign theme, practicality, mechanics, and all the other common excuses that make banning a race "okay")? As an example, I don't include dwarves in most of my settings for no good reason other than "I don't like dwarves."

Hussar contends, in brief, that this is the DM (a) attacking the player's imagination, (b) being unimaginative, (c) being distrustful, and (d) being selfish.

EzekielRaiden's position is a little more difficult to summarize, but from what I gather, it boils down to the DM being (a) distrustful, (b) disrespectful, (c) selfish, (d) petty, and (e) inherently rude.

Now I don't want it to seem like I'm glossing over everything that EzekielRadien wrote, because I'm not, and I'll address some specific points I take issue with in a moment, but right here and now, what interests me (as I've been saying up to this point) is not the particulars so much as the reasons underneath them. I want to drill down to the whys—namely, why in the world do you both connect something like "the selection of playable races in a campaign" to the DM being controlling, selfish, rude, petty, distrustful, etc. if that selection is tampered with?

To me, the various conclusions (rude, petty, disrespectful, etc.) all reek of psychologizing the DM, and I'm inherently skeptical of psychoanalytic explanations in situations like this. Maybe it's just my personal bias, I have more background in anthropology and sociology, so I put more stock in systemic, cultural explanations for widely-occurring interpersonal phenomena. Psychological explanations are too situational and idiosyncratic; cultural explanations have broad explanatory power. Just my perspective. In this case, though, I'd argue that it's a valid move, because psychologizing is useless here. The "DM authority" side in this discussion has no more right to accuse the "player freedom" side of "wanting to just play whatever without limits" than the "player freedom" side has a right to accuse the "DM authority" side of "just wanting to be a bunch of tyrannical control-freaks." And saying that "a DM who bans a race due to personal preference is just being X" is exactly the same thing. It doesn't follow.

A cultural explanation, on the other hand, seems to offer something worth saying.

I don't expect everyone to agree, but from where I'm standing, it looks to me like all of these negative associations boil down to this: the DM is violating a norm. After all, "the DM is being selfish" is just another way of saying "the DM is exceeding the socially acceptable parameters of self-interest." Parameters like this—norms—always stem from what the cultural group values.

In this instance, the underlying value—the thing that I'm trying to interrogate here—is this: players ought to be able to play what they want to play.

Players ought to be able to play what they want to play.

Note the "ought." It's a statement of value. It places value in player freedom, specifically player freedom during character generation/creation.

Now here's the rub: this value is not universal. Like the personal preferences I mentioned earlier in this post, you cannot treat norms and values as universal goods. That does not work. That's how you get culture clash—which is precisely what we have here.

I do not believe that players ought to be able to play what they want to play. This is not a value that I hold. It's not present in my sub-culture. It's not present in my table-culture. For me, it's not a thing. I have other values: other ways that I demonstrate my respect for those who play at my table, other freedoms of theirs that I refuse to impinge upon. Chief among these is that I run an open-world sandbox where the players are free to go anywhere and do anything—I am a player freedom absolutist when it comes to in-game action. Another value I hold is that for all the authority I have over the campaign setting prior to the start of a campaign, I will never alter it on a whim once the game has begin: I will not fudge dice, I will not fudge monster hp, I will not ever say something like "a random encounter wouldn't be fun right now, so let's ignore that wandering monster check." That would be a high crime at my table: that would be me overstepping my (slef-circumscribed) authority as the DM; cheating, even.

(And this isn't because I respect the players. This isn't because I want the players to trust me. It's because I hold to a particular philosophy for how I want my games to work, and the respect and the trust follow from that. DMing philosophy —> how I run my games —> earning the players' respect and trust. To start with respect and trust as a prior predicate is, to me, to get the order of operations precisely backwards. But that's neither here nor there, unless we want to start a spinoff thread.)

The point is, I do not expect other tables to share my values. I fully expect that most tables do treat dice-fudging (for example) far more nonchalantly than I do, and I can't judge them for that. They're holding to an entirely different set of norms.

Do you agree with those who have said that the DM role, in order to function, requires the other players to give that person special trust and respect?
Do you think respect and trust require some amount of justification, demonstrating that they are appropriate, or are they simply something demanded?
Do you believe it is possible for someone, even if they intend to only do good things, to behave in such a way that erodes trust and reflects a lack of respect?

To me, trust and respect in the sense that matters for a game of D&D (which is to say, not the basic respect we're supposed to give our peers in all social situations) is something that must be earned first. Any player who sits down at my table starts with a score of "0" in both categories, and I have no expectation that I rate any higher in their eyes until they've actually played my game.

What other truly personal relationship in existence (that is, not like the relationship between an employee and an employer, or between commanding and subordinate officers, etc.) affords its participants an absolute, unilateral, and completely beyond discussion ability to nix the non-abusive, non-coercive interests of the other party? If I did this to a significant other, they would rightly feel hurt and angry. Even a parent to a child; remember, practicality can't be a consideration by your own admission, so it isn't a "no, you can't eat the whole bowl of Halloween candy" situation, nor a "we can't afford to go there" situation. This is, "Can we go to Taco Bell or something similar instead of McDonald's next time?" "No, I don't like that kind of food, so we will never eat it, and we will not discuss it further." How is that NOT disrespectful even to a minor child? How is that NOT treating another person's desires and interests with disdain?

The key difference here is that I have no vested interest in retaining players by enticing them with more player character options. A spouse is bound to their significant other. A minor child is dependent on a parent. A player is free to leave my table if they don't like rolling 3d6 in order for ability scores and picking from a list of classes that includes "elf" and "halfling." The draw for games like mine is not playing a role or pretending to be a non-human or portraying a personality different from the player's own—it's taking part in (and in some sense, self-inserting into) a fantasy world full of potentially adventurous situations. As it turns out, I never have a shortage of players who are on board with that.

(For what that's worth. I do hate it when I see others arguing their points based on this particular tidbit of anecdotal "evidence." But in this instance, I feel it does need to be said, if only to head off yet another snarky reply from certain posters in this thread who seem to think that pointing out a campaign is working, and working well, is the same thing as bragging about "not actively driving players away". )

Firstly: A person's manner and tone are fundamental, here. They cannot be extracted from the situation, because doing this thing IS demonstrating a manner and tone. You keep trying to silo these things apart, as though one can speak of a pure behavior in isolation without the impact and meaning that behavior will communicate. You can't do that. It's not possible. Particularly when the behavior in question is one of the things I would consider most directly and explicitly demonstrative of such a manner and tone!

I seriously disagree with this. It's also probably off-topic, so I won't belabor the point.

Ah, with this last point, you have inserted an intent now, have you not? "Denying them game elements." That's no longer just a behavior, that's a judgment. You are, quite clearly, implying a sense of entitlement on the part of the players

No I haven't, and no it isn't, and no I'm not. I'm using "denial of game element" as a synonym for "banning" or "vetoing" a game element. Nothing more.

I don't know about you, but if a DM behaved toward you in any other context by being completely one-sided, exhibiting no restraint, and being completely opposed to any form of discussion or persuasion, would you feel they were maintaining the DM-player relationship? If so, I'm very curious what you think a healthy DM-player relationship is. And if not, I'm curious as to why this one special situation is different--particularly when it's one that matters (on both sides, as this over-3000-posts thread shows) to a lot of people.

To be frank, I simply don't see DMing and playing in those terms. The relationship between DM and player is, to me, somewhere between "akin to two chess players at a tournament" and "akin to a player and a referee at a local club or minor-level sporting event." As I said before, to me, trust and respect are not prior predicates for playing D&D. I certainly don't see a DM setting up a campaign's set of character creation parameters as in any way linked to trust, respect, player creativity, DM magnanimity, or anything else you may want to pin on it.

When I play D&D, I expect the DM to be as unilateral concerning the campaign world and the playable options as they are when making an in-game ruling. That's a value that I hold. That's a norm I adhere to. I don't need for the other posters in this long, long thread to share that value and adhere to that norm.

I'm sure there's more to say about this, but I'd rather it happen in another thread, because again, it's wandering pretty far from the topic of "exotic" races if you ask me.

Centaurs...are as mundane as pumpkin pie. Centaurs.

Yeah, pretty sure this is about my limit. When the openly fantastical is mundane, we may as well start singing Weird Al's Everything You Know Is Wrong.

Soon people will start saying a ten-ton flying, fire-breathing, carnivorous, sapient reptile is "mundane"....

The only magic power I'm aware of that centaurs in mythology have is foretelling the future by reading the stars, and even then, that might've been restricted to Chiron—who was, alone among all the centaurs, an immortal because of his different origins. (Hey, maybe he was the one Fae centaur, while all the Lapith-battling rapey drunkard centaurs who descended from Ixion and the Hera-shaped cloud were the Monstrous Humanoids.)

Well then we have a disagreement on how magic works in D&D.
I believe D&D magic cannot sustain a magical effect without some of the magic remaining unless it is done by a god.

This is why I said earlier that it's useless to hinge this discussion on lore. There is no one single, solid, widely-agreed-upon body of lore for D&D, or even for any single edition of D&D.