D&D General Do you like LOTS of races/ancestries/whatever? If so, why?

[Xamnam]

Why do people assume that saying "Looks like Mos Eisley Cantina" is derogatory? Because to me, it's not.

I would and do use the terms Mos Eisley or Kitchen Sink as positive descriptors, but in their most frequent use, they are overwhelmingly surrounded by text that colors its intention as dismissive, usually in the sense that it's thoughtless, lazy, or indiscriminate and therefore boring. Barring an explicitly positive note, or even just lacking other context, it's a fair guess to take that it is not being meant as praise.

I honestly appreciate the folks who are offering the consideration that that is a fine feeling in a Star Wars/Star Trek/Planescape/etc. setting, just not in Forgotten Realms/their personal setting, because that's more than term usually gets.

 

[FrozenNorth]

I’ll play in both settings with a large number of races and in more curated settings.

BUT, even in a curated setting, you need a large number of races to umm… curate from.

If I’m proposing to my players a campaign that is entirely set in the Underdark, the list of races is going to consist of 7 different underground races, and while have pretty much 0 overlap with a Theros campaign, one set in the jungle, or one inspired by Chinese culture.

 

[Incenjucar]

It's difficulty.

If I the player roleplay my taxabi not as a "furry human with some cat traits" but as a "feline with humaniod limbs and the culture one might imagine a race of felines might create", I'm heavily suggesting that the DMM does as well.

You have to go really human or really alien. The middle requires a lorebook to sort out what they do like humans and what they do like aliens.

That's a lot of work. So a worldbuilder has to be invested in every single race when they due a world with tons of races AND go for the middle.

That applies to everything else about the world. Nobody knows what it's like to see your best friend's brain get sucked out of their skull by a squid man who can obliterate your individuality by thinking at you. Nobody is correctly playing a person who was raised in a world where dragons have affairs with your granny and literal gods have fist fights on your lawn while weird uncle Derrick cuts through reality to allow you to drift through fog that unites the vast majority of existence in a manner that you can just float through as long as a platypus skeleton doesn't eat your ability to think. Nobody knows what it's like to share a latrine with an orc who ate beholder meat. And that's fine!

It's a game of dress up and pretend, it doesn't need to be hard sci-fi xeno fic.

 

[Vaalingrade]

And if everyone was playing a Human in D&D just with different skin colors, I'd agree with you.

But even at the baseline level of someone playing an elf with a lifespan of 1000 years playing the character EXACTLY the same as a Human with a lifespan of just 100 (if lucky)... that's when all the different so-called "Races" fail the sniff test when played by humans at the table.

Now players are going to that... play a Gnoll exactly the same as they would a Human... because 99.99% of all players probably don't care about all the different biology, biochemistry, and psychology of Gnolls versus Humans. Which is fine! It's not like I'm going to stop them from playing the game the way they wish to. But at the same time it doesn't mean I can't think something is lost when players don't put any thought into it.

Again, this is a wholly unrealistic expectation for the vast majority of people. Like 99.9%.

This is asking people to perform basically pioneering acts of fiction creation. For a game. Not doing that is not worthy of the low key shade of 'that's fine but something is lost'. This is asking the wizard player to write a treatise on thaumic theory as part of playing their character.

 

[the Jester]

Not in my campaign, no.

 

[Minigiant]

That applies to everything else about the world. Nobody knows what it's like to see your best friend's brain get sucked out of their skull by a squid man who can obliterate your individuality by thinking at you. Nobody is correctly playing a person who was raised in a world where dragons have affairs with your granny and literal gods have fist fights on your lawn while weird uncle Derrick cuts through reality to allow you to drift through fog that unites the vast majority of existence in a manner that you can just float through as long as a platypus skeleton doesn't eat your ability to think. Nobody knows what it's like to share a latrine with an orc who ate beholder meat. And that's fine!

It's a game of dress up and pretend, it doesn't need to be hard sci-fi xeno fic.

Playing Xeno is not Sci Fi exclusive.
And you don't have to play full alien.

For example. D&D elves physically mature in decades but aren't socially treated as adults for 8 to 10 decades and they live for centuries.
Hot Take: It makes no sense to roleplay that like a human. It makes no sense that elves are only split into high, wood, and dark due to divine action. And if you go down every almost single race, you run into this.

You can roleplay and worldbuild however you want. However the base lore of D&D and of most of its settings don't match how people roleplay them.

Hot Take #2: It is easier to run a ton of races and have their differences get lost in the sauce than to run a small set of races and really think how they would act in the world tropes you label them in.

 

[Laurefindel]

Mos Eisley’s Cantina is an interesting case figure. The whole scene is meant to convey the impression of a diverse galaxy, but in RPG terms, few of these species are “PC races”. Obviously if you dig far enough you’ll find stats for every single one, but even “wide” settings like SW typically narrow down to more familiar choices.

 

[Mind of tempest]

look I like as many options to be published so I can finally find the race I truly love and just play that till whichever fool finally sets off the bomb and ends us all.

that being said I like my campaigns to only have five by that only five max full stop no monsters legally not people there are only people, animals, and spiritual stuff.

no sapient made only to be killed it feels wrong.

I also fail to get why the cantina is bad, it is just not how I like to build.

Playing Xeno is not Sci Fi exclusive.
And you don't have to play full alien.

For example. D&D physically mature in decades but aren't socially treated as adults for 8 to 10 decades and they live for centuries.
Hot Take: It makes no sense to roleplay that like a human. It makes no sense that elves are only split into high, wood, and dark due to divine action. And if you go down every almost single race, you run into this.

You can roleplay and worldbuild however you want. However the base lore of D&D and of most of its settings don't match how people roleplay them.

Hot Take #2: It is easier to run a ton of races and have their differences get lost in the sauce than to run a small set of races and really think how they would act in the world tropes you label them in.

you made a spelling error as d&d is not a race as dungeon are normally not people.

 

[Minigiant]

you made a spelling error as d&d is not a race as dungeon are normally not people.

accidentally removed the word "elves".

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Doing it "once in their life" means MOST of the time, they are "home", not in some exotic location or something.

That isn’t what was in contention. You claimed that most people never see places further away than a few days travel. I claimed that most people at least know someone who has been traveled months away from home, and/or have seen people from away.
None of that has anything to do with whether most years are spent without significant travel. That is an entirely separate discussion.

No, it really isn't quite a lot. And I was including travelers as well as more permanent residents.

Wow. Okay.

shrug, I can't say, those are your experiences. I enjoy "mundane" in my fantasy, because it makes the fantasy more fantastic for me.

So do I, when it isn’t more mundane than the real world.

IMO that is poor (and or just lazy) world-building then, to my tastes anyway.

It’s the primary purpose for which fantasy races exist.

Then I suggest you re-read history?

Human, by-and-large, historically are not very tolerant.

You know that overwhelmingly more of history is just people quietly living their lives, trading with neighbors, etc, than war, right?

For thousands of years humans have been distrusting of outsiders and things they don't understand or feel threatened by. Killing predators to make area cultivated, driving out others for resources, and so on... History is riddled with it.

More sprinkled. In between all the farming and trading and sharing news and all that.

You’re mistaking the most exciting bits for being the most common bits. They aren’t.

Agree to disagree then, because frankly historically we haven't been.

Yes, we have been. And it’s seemingly disingenuous, though that may not be your intent, to say “agree to disagree” followed by strong declaratives that most naturally come across as statements of fact, rather than opinion.
There is no agree to disagree with flat earthers, for instance. There is ignoring them, placating them, or telling them they are factually incorrect.

You say small skirmishes, but to those peoples/tribes, etc. it is war. It might not be on the grand scale we think of, but it is there.

A fight over a slip of land or preferred access to part of a river or whatever isn’t war. Vastly more common than such fights is comfortable trade, anyway.

Anyway, I don't really want to get more into this as it is skirting the lines of forum policy.

How?

I mean, if you don’t want to debate history, fine, but like…what? Are your views on the topic inextricably intertwined with political or religious beliefs or something?

Don't confuse species with playable PC races. My game world have thousands of "species" for PCs to contend with or whatever, simply the vast majority of them are not sentient playable PC races.

This is senseless nitpicking. We are discussing sentient tool users. “Species” is extremely clearly referring to that. I shouldn’t need to specify that every single time.