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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8876651" data-attributes="member: 6790260">And yet, as with races and classes (to again more-or-less bring things back to the topic of the thread), all too often it's either "you'll play what was an option in OD&D and you'll like it" or "you can play humans, or maybe elves I guess" (strongly implying "I really wish you wouldn't.") You can do anything you can imagine, as long as what you imagine isn't this weird newfangled tripe that Kids These Days want, because of <insert video game reference here.>Exactly.Oh yeah. It's a huge problem. Do you remember, back during the Next playtest, how one of the members of the staff openly joked about how liking dragonborn was this weird bizarro thing he couldn't understand, but that he had slowly, slowly come to terms with? It was very clearly intended to come across as good-natured ribbing. Instead, it reminded me of the multiple times I've had to fight tooth and nail just to get something that interested me, particularly before 4e and its initial semi-normalization of dragonborn. (I say "semi" only because 4e did normalize them, but the haters used that as a rallying cry to oppose the Great Enemy Edition; the fact that dragonborn are now extremely popular in 5e shows that any hate for them in the 4e era really didn't have anything to do with their lack of tradition pedigree or the other "objective" reasons most people cited for disliking them.)And yet every DM I referred to above saw it as a "rules" problem. "You can't be a half-dragon! Not even a lesser one! That <would be too powerful/doesn't make sense/is just being a special snowflake/etc.>" "Lizardfolk wouldn't worship Bahamut, and even if they did, I won't let you play one,they're evil." "Can't you just play a human? Or maybe an elf, if you want the longer lifespan?" Etc.It doesn't happen every time. But it happens a lot. Especially if you're going looking for a game because you don't know enough people to play games with, and had difficulties finding in-person games even before the pandemic (I'm painfully shy IRL.)</blockquote>

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