A Concern About Wizard's Race Designs of Late

[IanB]

I know that a lot of effort has gone into the whole "DMs should learn how to say yes" philosophy that infuses 4e, and I don't really have a problem with that when it comes to in-game sorts of things.

When it comes to world design though, there's absolutely nothing wrong with saying No to some options and you really shouldn't feel bad about doing so. If shardminds don't make sense for your setting, don't use them, there's really no problem with that. People run gimmick settings all the time - "all martial heroes only", "everyone is kobolds", etc. - and those setups include a huge amount of "No."

That's fine, don't feel bad about it. There's no reason to. You can save the always saying "Yes" for rogues who want to shoot the rope and drop a chandelier on someone's head and the like.

 

[eriktheguy]

I'm not to thrilled with the new player races myself. I was fine with dragonborn, and meh with the shifters. The Shardminds and Wilden both seem very generic to me.
I would have loved for PHB3 to contain interesting racial builds for savage humanoids (orc, goblin, hobgoblin, bugbear, kobold, who knows what else). Some racial feats for those things would be cool, and they benefit from already having a sophisticated lore and each their own pantheon.
The new races I saw in PHB3 seem to be in line with the general direction of 4e; going from "fantasy" to "fantastical", but without a lot of soul.
On the other hand, the new races haven't had time to cement themselves in the lore of this edition, so given time they might seem as natural and appealing to us as humans, dwarves and elves... but probably not.

 

[renau1g]

Well shifters aren't new for 4e, they've been around since Eberron was first released along with the warforged, changelings and kalashters.

Oh, I'm sure that shardminds will never enter a sphere of acceptance like the Tolkien races, unless someone publishes a piece of literature as excellent as the LOTR trilogy with Shardminds as a featured race...