Campaign Choices You've Made On Races

[Infiniti2000]

This can't be said often enough:

Ban Gnomes!

 

[SkidAce]

Banned halflings actually. Since 1986.

And gnomes have a tendency to be evil illusionists (or reclusive healers).

 

[Gort]

I forbade all races bar human in my current campaign, still going strong at level 9 now.

 

[Gradine]

Our Star Wars GM always forbid Gungans

 

[eamon]

I don't like running "kitchen sink" worlds where anything that WotC produces gets tossed in. Adding dragonborn and tieflings for 4th edition was jarring enough for my homebrew setting; I don't want to have other weird races springing up constantly and have to answer the "where the heck have these things been" question all the time, so I don't.

Well, PC's constantly encounter the craziest of beasts; gelatinous cubes, goblins, demons, darkmantles, naga, djinni, wraiths, duergar, etc. How hard is it to imagine some lonesome creature wandering into society without attacking everything in sight?

I mean, I don't encourage these things, but if someone wants to play one and comes up with a reasonable explanation, sure, why not? I've more trouble with those that want some kind of background that links them to particular societies which may or may not exist. But everyone I know is flexible like that and quite willing to work together to find the best way to embed a particular character into a story.

 

[Tsukiyomi]

Well, PC's constantly encounter the craziest of beasts; gelatinous cubes, goblins, demons, darkmantles, naga, djinni, wraiths, duergar, etc. How hard is it to imagine some lonesome creature wandering into society without attacking everything in sight?

I mean, I don't encourage these things, but if someone wants to play one and comes up with a reasonable explanation, sure, why not? I've more trouble with those that want some kind of background that links them to particular societies which may or may not exist. But everyone I know is flexible like that and quite willing to work together to find the best way to embed a particular character into a story.

I'll freely admit that part of my stance comes from the fact that I just don't like the idea of adding dozens of races to the world as a personal preference. It creates a lot of questions. Where have they been all this time? Why are they in the world? I don't like to handwave or gloss over these details if I can help it.

It's also important to bear in mind that not all campaign worlds use the POL style where there's tons of unknown out there. Many parts of my campaign world are actually pretty well civilized, and planar travel is at a minimum -- so much of a minimum that my previous group of PCs were among the first non-epic level people to traverse the planes in a long time. Any sort of extraplanar race (shadar-kai, kenku, etc) is going to have great difficulty in merely getting to the material plane.

Also, while it's true that adding one additional race can be dealt with, that isn't true when multiple players start wanting new races, and if you run multiple parties throughout your world the number of new creatures can start to escalate.

That said, one player in my world wanted to be a changeling, and there aren't any of those in my world. Since it was the concept he was interested in more than the stats, I came up with the idea that he used to be something else, but was magically altered (without going into details, let's just say that it made a lot of sense with things that already existed) to gain the disguise self power. Something like that I'm willing to do on occasion because it doesn't really create problems. In general though I feel that a dozen or so playable races with a rare exception here and there is plenty.

 

[The Human Target]

Not into banning anything unless its mechanically broken (which in this case means its substantially more powerful than the other races) and in 4E that hasn't happened yet.

The drow is borderline, but generally speaking anyone who chooses to play a dark elf is accepting a huge amount of crap in game roleplay wise.

And race I see as being sorta weak (shifters, tieflings) I just make sure people are aware of it but let them choose freely.

For my current game I said no Warforged, Drow, Kalashtar, changelings, or genasi to start. Just because I didn't want to borrow from other more defined campaign settings and wanted to see some of the other more normal races get a shot. But if someone would have had their heart set on one of those, I'd have probably allowed it.

I always use the default fluff of the DnD world though (unless its changed by a specific campaign setting which I haven't used yet in 4th.)

To me DnD isn't and has never been a good kit style system and drastic homebrews and settings like Dark Sun don't hold much interest to me.

 

[The Human Target]

I don't like monster races, and the PHB III really seems like it's tailored to the player who wants to be a real off-the-wall character. But, if a player came up with a REALLY, REALLY good justification for why your minotaur isn't raiding a mountain village with his brethren, then we can probably make it work. If you can justify why your Gith isn't struggling to just NOT DIE in the Abyss, then we can probably make it work. I won't like it, but we can probably make something jive. That being said...if it's a deal-breaker and I think it will destroy the flavor and tenor of my world, I'll say no. I hope I never have to do that, but I'm prepared to.

This mind frame I don't get at all.

Do you make a player who wants to run a halfling rogue jump through hoops to explain why their PC isn't hanging out on a riverboat with their family? Or why the half-elf ranger isn't hanging out in the woods with his tribe hunting boar? Or why the dwarf fighter isn't in his mountain home sweating over a forge?

Pcs are special. Adventurers are special. They all have reasons for leaving behind the common and becoming spectacular.

The idea of not letting someone be a minotaur because you don't care for it baffles me.

 

[Squire James]

My current campaign allows all "player allowed" races. One of them wanted to play something the 4e rules never defined, so I let him "re-skin" as an eladrin. In retrospect, I think he chose his re-skin target for game mechanics more than role-playing, and I should have told him to make it a dragonborn (which was a lot closer mechanically).

In my next campaign, all PC's will be human. Kinda. Actually, they can be nearly any race, but they all LOOK human. Some races will be excluded (warforged, shardmind, and wilden come to mind) because their abilities are almost impossible to represent as human. If someone wants to play a gnome or halfling, well, he's a 10 year-old human that will finish the campaign before he "grows into another race".

 

[Stumblewyk]

Do you make a player who wants to run a halfling rogue jump through hoops to explain why their PC isn't hanging out on a riverboat with their family? Or why the half-elf ranger isn't hanging out in the woods with his tribe hunting boar? Or why the dwarf fighter isn't in his mountain home sweating over a forge?

Well...if you're asking if I expect them to have a good backstory explaining why they're not the baseline of their race...then yeah, I do.

I suspect what you're really asking is "Why do you treat the 'standard' PC races differently from other races?" And the answer to that is simple - in my homebrew, the "monstrous" races are just that - monsters. They're the beasts that go bump in the night 99.9% of the time. It's just not in them to be heroes. That's why you need to justify why you want to be a minotaur with a good reason.

I don't expect the player to come up with some brilliantly moving narrative convincing me to let them play the race they want, but I do want something that works within the framework of my world to explain why that (nearly universal) monster simply isn't what you, me, and everyone else around the table expects them to be.