GreenTengu
Adventurer
You know, both restricting and not restricting have potentially nasty consequences attached to them.
If you are restricting races, then in all likelihood you are going into this with a fully-detailed campaign world in which you are not willing to alter or adjust any of the details to allow for a player's concept to fit into the world. You have fully conceptualized yourself what each of the peoples who inhabit are like and what role each and every member of those people are like and which ones are at all capable of becoming heroes.
In which case, such inflexibility suggests that you also have a very solid idea what the story you intend to tell within this setting is, for there is no need to be stringent about the details of the world unless it would derail the story you intend to tell, and if you have a very clear idea how the story is going to go then it follows that you know what the protagonists are like and how they should behave. Ultimately, it is worth questioning your motives as to why exactly you are inviting other people-- other voices-- into your vision as they can only serve to screw up your narrative by making the wrong choices at any given interval.
Really, it seems that what you should be doing is writing a novel rather than offering this up as a "game" so that your narrative can be presented cleanly and uncorrupted as the ideal reflection of the vision you had.
On the other hand, what if you write no detail of your world or have a single shred of an idea of a story until the players tell you something. So the player comes to you and says they want to play a Tiefling or Dragonborn and then you ask them what it means to be a Tiefling or a Dragonborn in this world and where they come from, how they generally behave and how people react to them. And not just for the people, but you create the whole world from the player's backgrounds and only after that do you try to come up with ways to make what they want into a world in which they can drive their own narrative.
Ultimately it means you are coming unprepared for much of anything because you cannot even know where to begin until the players have filled out the world. And just how invested are you even going to be? And if you aren't invested, whether the world is formed from their collective ideas or not, it means you aren't going to get the players invested-- in all likelihood you aren't going to be able to put anything out there to hook the players and motivate them to undertake any sort of meaningful challenge... and ultimately you will likely collectively create a very poor story.
It would probably be best to try to figure out the middle ground between these two extremes.
If you are restricting races, then in all likelihood you are going into this with a fully-detailed campaign world in which you are not willing to alter or adjust any of the details to allow for a player's concept to fit into the world. You have fully conceptualized yourself what each of the peoples who inhabit are like and what role each and every member of those people are like and which ones are at all capable of becoming heroes.
In which case, such inflexibility suggests that you also have a very solid idea what the story you intend to tell within this setting is, for there is no need to be stringent about the details of the world unless it would derail the story you intend to tell, and if you have a very clear idea how the story is going to go then it follows that you know what the protagonists are like and how they should behave. Ultimately, it is worth questioning your motives as to why exactly you are inviting other people-- other voices-- into your vision as they can only serve to screw up your narrative by making the wrong choices at any given interval.
Really, it seems that what you should be doing is writing a novel rather than offering this up as a "game" so that your narrative can be presented cleanly and uncorrupted as the ideal reflection of the vision you had.
On the other hand, what if you write no detail of your world or have a single shred of an idea of a story until the players tell you something. So the player comes to you and says they want to play a Tiefling or Dragonborn and then you ask them what it means to be a Tiefling or a Dragonborn in this world and where they come from, how they generally behave and how people react to them. And not just for the people, but you create the whole world from the player's backgrounds and only after that do you try to come up with ways to make what they want into a world in which they can drive their own narrative.
Ultimately it means you are coming unprepared for much of anything because you cannot even know where to begin until the players have filled out the world. And just how invested are you even going to be? And if you aren't invested, whether the world is formed from their collective ideas or not, it means you aren't going to get the players invested-- in all likelihood you aren't going to be able to put anything out there to hook the players and motivate them to undertake any sort of meaningful challenge... and ultimately you will likely collectively create a very poor story.
It would probably be best to try to figure out the middle ground between these two extremes.
