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As with everything, the ideal situation is that the player comes with a set of ideas and the GM comes with setting expectations and the two work out the details. Maybe the evil warlord who attacked my family long ago is the leader of city state that the campaign is supposed revolve around. Of...

Yup. You'll always get that one guy who, when to tell them you can't be a ninja in a wild west campaign, ends up a ninja with a cowboy hat.

I assume that when the DM isn't interested in my character backstory, it's because they have zero interest in incorporating my character into their world and would rather I make the sacrifice to fit their vision than vice versa. Which is fine, I just default to the tropiest possible character...

I was wondering when we would get the remaining preview articles for ForA.

This is going to be some armchair psychoanalysis, but I think this is due to a heavy an element of traditionalism stemming from design of AD&D and BD&D. D&D for years (mostly the TSR era) was built around the idea that the Core Four options were the safest options, and every class and race...

Which comes back to the circus trope I guess. I mean, kobold adventurers are rare (at least in my experience) but if someone really wanted to be one, I wouldn't press demographic considerations on people.

I have a deep seated dislike for procedurally generated characters, so the idea that I have a 1 in a hundred chance of being a kobold better come with stats and features that are superior than every other option on that list. If I win the jackpot on a 100 roll, I better get more than small size...

And it was considered expensive even then for a race, three monsters and a mini adventure. The saving grace was it was a Extra Life charity item. It was $10 and 28 pages.

I wouldn't call warforged as having a homeland in the Mournlands, they are very much creations of the Five Nations. But even so, I always considered Shifters and Changelings as having less direct connection to Eberron lore than warforged and Kalshatar. (You can remove the former without...

That's possible, and I didn't want to get too deep into that because I don't know how they have the profit sharing arrangement with MHP. Based on the fact WotC sold the Tortle Package on DMs guild for $10 and on D&D Beyond for the same price makes me think that, but that was before D&DB was...

Eberron included four new explicitly Eberron species and didn't bother to give three of them homelands. Greyhawk never had a halfling nation despite halflings being older than Greyhawk. I can't guarantee you that a 5.5 specific setting would have an aasimar or tiefling nation any more than it...

How about an apples to apples comparison? Mage Hand Presses Gunslinger class is available on D&D Beyond. You get a base class, six subclasses, some feats and spells, new guns and a few mechanics. All integrated into the chargen. For $14.99. MHP sells the exact same material as a PDF on their...

As a general rule, I dislike forced demographics. I don't get to play a PC as often as I wish, and I would hate to have to pick human because my friend wants to play a half-orc. A long time DM I knew had a demographic rule: he was left-handed and hated when people picked left-handedness to "be...

My Ravenloft game was the best and worst example of player's grabbing the theme. They consisted of: * A human blood hunter (ghosthunter) *A Dhampir bard (lore) *A Hexblood cleric of Ezra (twilight) *A human artificer (reanimator, custom made before the horror UA) *A reborn sorcerer (shadow) and...

I've been arguing for a while D&D needs a real default setting that defines the place of everything in the setting, like Midguard for TotV or Golarion for Pathfinder. It would solve a lot of the headaches D&D has for trying to support 11 settings.

I think the level of fantastical is definitely a factor, because determines how common a specific species is and how integrated they are. A setting like Middle Earth only has a half-dozen types of non-humans (elves, dwarves, hobbits, goblins, orcs, trolls) and they are both isolated and...

I have a player who has played D&D for almost 30 years and is sick of elves dwarves and humans. He will play the weirdest thing you can offer every time. He's not a bad player, but he's always going to be the odd man out. Some players are just like that.

It depends on how fantastical a world you want is. Typical D&D worlds are full of sentient humanlike creatures. It makes sense that some would be part of society or even adventurers. I can certainly see a design model where their are few humanoid species (Tolkien has very few humanoids but...

It's another example of how digital media is priced to keep the paper version of the same media competitive.

Part of the issue is that old demihuman design paradigm where the classic PC races got homelands and monsters spring up from the ground already patrolling dungeons. And even then, gnomes, halflings and sometimes dwarves get the short end of the stick (pun intended) when it comes to having full...