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

[Hussar]

I do find it funny that someone upthread talked about it being weird if a bar in Waterdeep had 60 different races in it.

Hrm, we have a bar that sits above a dungeon with numerous planar gates, an entire Underdark city, in a major port of a world where it's described as THE center of trade for most of the world. If there was one place in D&D where having 60 different races in one place makes the most logical sense (since we're all about logic apparently), it would be Waterdeep.

You can argue until you're blue in the face that it's "logical" that a world has less races than more, but, that's just a smokescreen to try to justify your preferences. You have less races because you like it that way. Full stop. Which is fine. So long as you find players who also share your preferences, you're golden.

But, don't try to pretend that it's anything other than your preference. The OP posed a question - and a very valid one - why does this appeal to you? If it doesn't appeal to you, then why one earth are you responding to any of this?

Otherwise, it seems pretty disingenuous to pose a question and then reject any answers to the question that was asked.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Reasonable world wide. Totally gonzo silly to have all 60 races sit at bar in Waterdeep and NO ONE bats an eye.

Not in the least.

And some players would hit the freaky roof if Lif the barkeep charged the Rabbit, Owlin, and Triton double. Because Lif likes double charging the out towners.

If it’s because they are out of towners, cool. If it’s because they’re not human, Lif is a bigoted dingus and he’s gonna get robbed later. Or have a song circulate around town satirizing and humiliating him.

But I’m Waterdeep, like in the great metropolises of the real world, them looking different doesn’t actually indicate that they’re out of towners.

Wotc appears to want DMs to have "Hero" over the PC head, and all NPC react like it just Jake from State Farm.

Wotc is building worlds where people say “We’re all people” in place of “We’re all human”, and the bigots say “keep Neverwinter for humans!” And get punched in the street for doing so.
They highlight good people, and villains whose villainy isn’t the banal evil of real world bigotry, in their products. No one is forcing you to use their settings and adventures. I certainly don’t. Those books serve to give me maps, monsters (that I tweak heavily anyway), and player options, other than the Eberron game I’ve run for ten years, and the FR game I took over when the DM got burnt out.

It is not logical for a world with large flying creatures, interdimensional portals, and teleportation to be non-diverse. That is a setting preference only.

This.

If that's your preference, go for it. Others have different preferences. Not sure why this is contentious.

Others in this thread have been claiming repeatedly that our preference is illogical, or based in putting player options above world building, or not caring out believable worlds, or whatever else.

That is what is contentious. No one is saying, barring someone on my ignore list maybe, that preferring few races is bad or wrong. The OP asks why we like many races.

It doesn't make sense to me either.

I live in NYC, the most international multicultural city on Earth.
If I were to go make to Manhattan for a drink at a random non-ethnic bar and don't see people of 10+ national backgrounds, I'd be confused. So would an adventurer sitting in a tavern in Waterdeep, Neverinter, or Sigil.

Yep. My hometown is a little under half a million people, but it’s about 50% Hispanic/Latine, and has significant populations of pretty much every single broad region in the world.

Yep! I live in Seattle, and diversity is the norm here. We have furries and lolitas and cowboys and drag queens and people with parrots in coffee shops and it's normal. I've also lived in a place with little diversity and it never stopped creeping me out.

Yeah that’s a big part of why I still live in California’s Central Valley, in spite of all the things.

I go to some other place in the US, see a sea of people who have never heard Punjabi or Korean spoken aloud or eaten authentic Mexican food, and I don’t even know how to process the lack of diversity. It’s unsettling.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

But, that's the issue. This reading of history that is very, very much not accurate. The world was, maybe not tolerant, but certainly very mixed. Trade and mixing was going on for a very, very long time. There were enclaves within virtually all port cities. And that's just what we know about. There most likely was far, far more mixing that's been buried by history for all sorts of reasons.

Good grief, I live in Japan, one of the most homogeneous populations in the world. Yet, they had two major peoples - Japanese and Ainu co-existing (relatively) peacefully until the 19th century. Genocide is a largely modern thing simply because before, people simply lacked the ability to actually wipe out other populations. Millennia of trade in the real world between pretty much everyone.

This idea that each group was largely homogeneous is ludicrous. Good grief, look at England. How many ethnic groups could you find by, say, 1200 AD? And, even with all those invasions, zero genocide. The invaders, like the Scandanvians, simply married into the population and became part of the people.

Right. I would confidently wager that fewer years in a given region feature significant sectarian violence than feature one or more travelers riding through, or more than one local traveling somewhere more than a month of travel away.

Every single port city in the world, outside of periods of extreme isolationism (which is rare), had had significant immigrant populations, not to mention all the trade-related visitors, poor young folk looking for work or running from something (or both), and tourists. Yeah, tourists are not a modern phenomenon, they’re just more common now.

 

[DND_Reborn]

But, that's the issue. This reading of history that is very, very much not accurate.

Well, you're free to disagree, of course, but you'd be wrong. (j/k)

This idea that each group was largely homogeneous is ludicrous. Good grief, look at England. How many ethnic groups could you find by, say, 1200 AD?

No, it isn't. While certainly you might have people from dozens of cultures in London, for example, all those people COMBINED were less than 5-10% of the entire city's population.

Key exceptions would be someplace like ancient Rome, which had more slaves than citizens. Slaves came from all over the Roman Empire (a very diverse region I am certain you'd agree!), so the number of people from diverse cultures might have easily outnumbered the homogeneous population of Rome. But those were slaves, how much tolerance do you think they received in general? Provided they worked well and were obedient, they were probably treated well (they were valuable property, after all), but otherwise not so well.

Hrm, we have a bar that sits above a dungeon with numerous planar gates, an entire Underdark city, in a major port of a world where it's described as THE center of trade for most of the world. If there was one place in D&D where having 60 different races in one place makes the most logical sense (since we're all about logic apparently), it would be Waterdeep.

IF you have a place like that in your world, fine. But a lot of game worlds DON'T.

Even given that, how likely do you think the people of Waterdeep are going to be tolerant of all those "extra races" coming up from below? Probably not very.

Finally, if your world has a dozen races instead of 60, such a place would almost certainly have representatives from all 12 races, but that in no way implies those representatives would comprise most of such a city. The people who founded the city, or at least where there during parts of its history, would be the majority.

You can argue until you're blue in the face that it's "logical" that a world has less races than more, but, that's just a smokescreen to try to justify your preferences. You have less races because you like it that way. Full stop. Which is fine. So long as you find players who also share your preferences, you're golden.

It is logical to myself (anyway) because that is my preference, as I have stated upthread, and given my justifications for that logic.

You might not agree with my logic, but that is YOUR preference and not stop pretending it is anything but. Full stop.

 

[Minigiant]

"Human but aquatic" is done. Give us pure street shark joys with.... An actual shark-person given sahuagin aren't that any more, the comedy of "Mermaid flops around on ground and has to snake her way to places", cecaelia for "Underwater octopus witch mermaid" and of course, the true option everyone wants, the end goal of all species: C R A B

Street Sharks vs Crab People vs Kraken Cult

The adventure writes itself.

 

[DND_Reborn]

Street Sharks vs Crab People vs Kraken Cult

The adventure writes itself.

I'd have to go with Crab People to win that one!

 

[Minigiant]

I'd have to go with Crab People to win that one!

View attachment 267943

But sharks on rollerblades!

 

[DND_Reborn]

But sharks on rollerblades!

View attachment 267945

LOL, true, but there are SO MANY crab people! I would just have to go with the numbers versus the strength/speed element.

 

[Mecheon]

Street Sharks even had a crab guy enemy!

Well, a lobster guy. An an alien manta ray super hero.

Street Sharks was a weird show and that's before we even get to Extreme Dinosaurs

 

[EzekielRaiden]

To be fair, realistic means more like reality.

A common misconception. Realism is still stylized. It's just a style that aims to support those things the creator thinks are inherent to reality, usually by way of including "imperfections" or negative consequences, but sometimes simply by rendering things to a higher degree of believed or perceived precision (those two words are extremely important; actual precision matters less than the appearance of precision or conformity to expectation.) E.g. the real-time ray tracing development in video games is a form of realism, attempting to add in a detail previously not presented in 3D rendering because our technology couldn't support ray tracing (following light rays from their source and how they bounce off of surfaces) and instead used the much faster technique called rasterization, which doesn't require nearly as much computing power but is also much less like how physical light sources behave. (Rasterization only renders light cast, rather than actually following where light goes, and thus doesn't actually consider reflection at all; this is why most mirrors in video games either don't work or are dirty or broken, so they won't be expected to reflect anything. Functional mirrors are instead effectively TVs showing a different camera position than the player's camera.)

The problem is, fans of realism make the false leap of logic that because the effort (usually) considers more details or factors in generally negative consequences overlooked in other styles, it is therefore better in some way: more true, more real, more serious, more "mature" (whatever that means), more poignant, etc. And that's simply not true, not on any consistent basis. It is, like all the other things, a style, one often shaped by major human biases or limitations. One need only glance at the TVTropes page for "Reality is Unrealistic" to find (many, many) examples where "realism" is in fact less true to life or less like the observable world because human expectations are weighted more highly than empirical adequacy.

This pretty much says it all right here.

The dms world is a “painting” that the nasty bad players are vandalizing with a marker.

But, sure, it’s all about “believability “ and sense of wonder.

Agreed. All these selfish, hurtful, petty players, with their intentional vandalism of the poor, beleaguered GM's beautiful setting. They put in all that work and time, and what do the players do? They have the gall to demand that that meticulous portrait include things they want in it. The nerve of these...philistines! If they wanted a (sniff) commission, they should have sought out some plebian scriptor, not an artiste!