I agree with everything apart from your final point. I haven't come across anyone (not even Tolkien, who had halflings, half elves, aasimar, werebears and half orcs) who limits races to just elves and dwarves. And woses. Whatever they were.
I have. From numerous people across several forums. Many of whom specifically cite Tolkien (or "tradition," which is almost always code for "what stuff appeared in early D&D," which just makes the Tolkien connection one step removed instead of no steps removed.)
I apologize Ezekiel. I reread my comment to you and it sounded off base. I promise when I wrote it, that was not the intention. I was just saying maybe a different setting for awhile might help get fresh eyes on fantasy. Again, sorry.
No worries.
But your statement that I was responding to stated D&D was "chained" to Tolkien. That D&D had to stand in the shadow of Tolkien.
I know it doesn't. I just wish more than the seemingly-vanishing minority of DMs ever talked about stepping outside it. The vast, VAST majority--nearly to the point of exclusivity--of DMs who speak about their settings make it pretty clear how hostile they are to anything that wasn't published before 1970 (maybe 1980, I'm a bit fuzzy on some of the specifics).
I have also seen dozens of DMs not use that dynamic.
I wish these DMs would be more vocal about the stuff they do, then. 'Cause it sure doesn't feel like they're more than a rounding error at this point.
None of those are like Tolkien. Should D&D, which has 45 years of lore, ditch it all to become new?
That's...not what I'm saying, and I'm DEEPLY confused as to how you got that from what I did say. However, unlike some who simply leave it at "I never said that" and then disengage, I will actually try to work this one out, because this is important to me.
I am not, AT ALL, saying that we need to SHUN elves and dwarves or anything like that. I am not, AT ALL, saying that we need to enforce totally new standards on absolutely everyone. That would, in fact, be just as bad in my eyes as the situation we have currently. It would be foolishly limiting ourselves.
What I'm talking about is the DMs who--again, WITHOUT a worldbuilding reason, WITHOUT any thought to what could be or what would make sense or whether there's unexplored horizons left--
loudly and proudly reject anything that isn't the four good-guy, relatively widespread races found in Tolkien. (Despite Farquhar's assertions to the contrary, pretty much nobody treats Tolkien as putting aasimar, werebears, or woses out as important races.) I'm talking about people who seem to
enjoy active exclusion of anything that isn't in this loose, extended shadow of Tolkien's work, because it's Not Traditional Enough
But of course, because it's Not Traditional, we don't get to make any new works or establish new worlds with them....so there's never an opportunity for them to take root and develop
their own traditions. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It really is only within the past 15 years or so that we've seen even the slightest breakdown of that "you must have at least [number of years since Tolkien wrote] to ride" policy hanging over the community at large.
I am confused. What is your point? D&D is chained to Tolkien. It is in Tolkien's shadow. DMs should not limit races. DMs should not have dwarves unless they don't have beards. DMs should not have elves unless they have rounded ears. DMs should not use a Eurocentric campaign. Honestly, I am confused as the DMG explains exactly how to do all this and more.
No, and no, and no, and no, and no. Like, literally all of the no.
I'm not saying that these things
should never happen. I'm saying that it would be really, really, really damn nice if our community didn't respond so infuriatingly often with
gleeful hostility or
blanket opposition to things that DO make such breaks.
I am very glad you think this. That is awesome. Because that is the exact reasoning I gave for why a DM would limit races in their campaign world - because it doesn't make sense! (Full circle.) Yet, notion after notion was insisted that the DM can simply wave their hand and create a race. Or the DM can bend and alter their world without so much of a thought.
I have absolutely never said that it should be done as a handwave, and I have
definitely never said that they should "bend and alter their world withotu so much of a thought." What I
have, however, said is that I am deeply skeptical of anyone who claims to have nailed down their world so tightly, to have given such a thorough accounting of everything in it, that it is now impossible to add anything new. That adding anything further would
unavoidably break things. Because, to use the phrase I've now repeated a dozen times or more,
there should always be something beyond the horizon. If your world has become so well-defined that you can't have something surprising and unknown sail into it, I remain unconvinced that this world actually allows much to happen in it. With boundary conditions absolutely fixed, there's only so much one can do before one runs out of world to see.
Can we do a thought experiment please? Pretty please?
<snip>
This is the reason to use a standard setting.
Okay, but doing only fortnightly sessions is, itself, rather limiting things, isn't it? I get that that's what
you do, but it's hardly universal. I
will not use the term "white room" because I despise it utterly, but I do think you are misapplying your specific personal circumstances in a way that generalizes what should not be generalized.
And even beyond that, do you really never talk about setting information
outside of playtime? Because that's literally the second-best time to flesh out your world (after, as you've noted, explaining things in play). I provide my players with written material on occasion, ask them questions between sessions, and flesh out NPC backstories and interactions even while play is
not happening. I keep an accessible log (through a Discord bot) of NPCs we've interacted with that were relevant, which players can access at their leisure. You have many, many, many more than 20 hours to share and explore a world--and this is only counting time spent
after you've started playing for real. The game pitch and early discussion should be several hours of almost pure setting exposure; Session 0 should be more hours yet of exploring at least the fundamentals of a world and why the things in it are what they are.
If that is true, then what does that logically tell you? It tells me that those that are tired of dwarves and elves are in the minority. It tells me that the vast number of people who play like what D&D is doing with elves and dwarves.
This only assumes that the preferences of DMs are a representative sample of the preferences of all players. My whole point is that DMs are NOT a representative sample of players, that they have a very specific, honed, and often unpleasant bias against specific options and toward others, and that this is a deeply frustrating trend in D&D that is only
very slowly changing.
Perhaps my experience, heavily influenced by who's willing to talk about things, is unrepresentative. But it is the only experience I have; I cannot account for hypothetical data from presumed silent masses. My experience is that there is a strong, consistent opposition to
permitting people to do things that even include something that isn't "elves and dwarves," and that doing what I just did--suggesting "hey, maybe people should be willing to try, I unno, other things?"--is met with what
you just did, assuming that I mean
destroying everything D&D has ever been before.
No. It was absolutely a Strawman. Saying that anyone who wants to play something other than Tolkien races a "snowflake" and "doing it wrong." is a blatant twisting of his argument.
Jack Daniel's exact words were:
Well what's the alternative? To make the non-Tolkien races not weird? The moment they're perceived as mundane, people who want to play spiffy-new-unique-interesting won't want to play them anymore.
Unless I am supposed to somehow intuit that Jack is implicitly separating things into two categories (those who
need "spiffy-new-unique-interesting" from those whose preferences simply happen to
be what is currently "spiffy-new-unique-interesting"), it sounds
exactly like saying that all the people who play <thing that isn't traditional, and is thus Weird> do so
specifically and exclusively because they need to feel "spiffy-new-unique-weird" and will never stop whinging about playing something yet further undefined, forever.
In other words, it doesn't sound like a straw man at all. It sounds like Jack is explicitly saying, "You're only into this because it's weird." And, as the quote below shows, Jack very much seems to think, "Don't come crying to me when this thing you like ceases to be shiny."
I would say that "most people" limit to the races in the PHB which includes dragonborn, tieflings, half-orcs and gnomes, if that's even true. I have no clue since for the most part I don't get to participate in many other people's home campaigns. When I do play it's either with my wife as DM (we share a campaign world) or I do AL which is everything.
Perhaps this is true. As stated above, I really wish people who were fine with whatever is in the PHB would...like...speak up? Ever? Because the vocal people aren't those. At all. Seemingly
ever.
But the best numbers we have seem to indicate that the races from the PHB are the most popular, which is hardly surprising. A lot of people probably never purchase anything else. So to a certain degree it's a chicken and the egg scenario, but it's also based on customer demand.
This, at least, I can fully cop to. What limited data we have indicates that the "traditional" races are of mixed reception, other than elves. (Humans should always be excluded from any conversation on this front, because they'll
always be incredibly popular purely for self-identification purposes.)
To my mind, however, that just makes the open and proud "not EVER in my game" attitude that much more of a problem. If they're popular with the
players, but a large portion of
DMs are opposed, that is a recipe for intra-group strife.
Could I create a world with no elves or dwarves? Sure. I just don't think it would make much difference after the new and shiny wore off after a few sessions. We'd still be playing D&D with races that were stand-ins for aspects of humanity with slightly unique abilities.
I can't tell you what to do or what you'd like. But I think you might find it more engaging than you give it credit for, here. I can say that I, at least, find a great deal of stimulation in being exposed to questions that wouldn't have been asked if players knew they could just
presume how elf society and dwarf society work, and in having to answer questions that don't give me the
option of just falling back on something everyone knows.
I've never seen a limit on gnomes, halflings, or half-elves, and almost never on half-orcs. And uncommonly on races like Aasimar, Genasi and such. It's not until you get to Wemics, Tabaxi and other much more exotic races that limitations become fairly common, but still not all pervasive.
My experience is exactly the reverse. Numerous DMs will aggressively push their dislike of anything that isn't human, and begrudgingly tolerate elves, dwarves, and halfings. If the DM is more "enlightened," they'll treat all four of those races with equal respect, but assume anyone who wants to play something else is--as
actual people have
actually argued in
this very thread, even if they didn't mean to--people having a need to be something "weird" and "different," or people solely grubbing for any power advantage they can get over the other players. (Even though it's almost universally agreed that humans have been among the strongest of player options, at least since WotC took over!)
Having a genuinely neutral attitude, even being willing to
consider them, seems to be rare as hen's teeth. As this thread has pretty amply demonstrated.
Okay then, what did you ACTUALLY mean? Because I literally cannot see what your actual point was, here. Your words communicated to me, "Most if not all people who are really into this thing are only into it because it's New and Shiny and Different, and when that isn't true anymore, you all will yet again push for some yet Newer and Shinier and Differenter thing." If that wasn't what you meant, I really don't know what I was supposed to get out of your post.
I meant exactly what I said. Everyone here who's complaining that elves and dwarves are boring and lazy and chained to the corpse of a dead writer simply don't get to complain when, five or ten years from now, tieflings and dragonborn are staid and dull and overplayed and solely the province of hidebound traditionalists. At that point, nobody will like them because they're new and fresh; they'll lump them in with old and boring.
Enjoy the New Car Smell while it's fresh, because it won't last.
(Hell, cat-people are already a dead horse trope if you have even one weeb in your gaming group.)
Dragonborn have been around by that name since 2006 (Races of the Dragon), and "draconians" etc. have been around since Dragonlance (Dragonlance Adventures, 1987). Tieflings have been around since 1994 (Planescape Campaign Setting). If they haven't lost their "new car smell" by now, I'm real curious why the next 5-10 years would be such a sudden change.
I'm not saying it's bad to like elves and dwarves. I'm saying it's bad that the people in the "driver's seats," as it were, are so gorram hidebound and traditionalist that they feel a
need to sneer at non-Tolkienesque options, that they loudly and proudly ban huge swathes for no worldbuilding reason whatsoever, purely because they
can and because those things "don't fit in D&D" or the like. I mean, for God's sake, literally during the Next Playtest we had an ACTUAL designer at WotC make a "humorous" post about how his friends keep liking these incredibly weird options, and that at first he was opposed but now he's
deigning to allow them to play what they like. (I fully understand that the point was joking and somewhat self-mocking, but it really did cut too close to my lived experience as a D&D player in a lot of ways.)
And you were most definitely attacking a strawman when you tried to put these words in my mouth: "people who play Tolkienesque races do so for the deep role playing and everyone else is just doing it wrong." If you've been following this thread at all, you should know that from the earliest, I've maintained that Tolkien races and "exotic" races are both crutches, and players who want "deep role-playing" play humans. I don't appreciate my views being mischaracterized, and cut it the heck out.
Humans are just as much of a crutch. Consider how frequently you get a Totally Not Roman Empire culture, with literally zero work done, just
assuming the players know what a classical, marble-columned culture should look like, with togas and everything. We just don't see it as leaning on "humans" as the crutch, but rather as leaning on "this one
historical grouping of humans." (Other examples: Not-Asia, which will blend specific attributes of different eras from India, China, Japan, and sometimes Mongolia; Not-Arabia, which will generally look like the decadent far-spanning and trade-centric Islamic empire of the high middle ages; Not-Viking semi-piratical warriors from a cold climate who worship a pantheon of pretty much all warrior-deities; Not-Egyptians who build vast monument complexes and usually live on a river floodplain; I could go on, but you get the point.)
Some amount of drawing inspiration from things is necessary; "there is nothing new under the sun" and such. But there really is a ton of genuinely lazy worldbuilding out there. I can't see it as anything but disingenuous to act like the appeal of non-Tolkien races has
anything to do with "new car smell," or to act like limiting things to humans only somehow assures serious roleplay from players and serious worldbuilding from DMs.
