D&D 5E criteria for new races to be added to the PHB

[Hussar]

That this sidebar in Ghosts about setting in Greyhawk was the author telling the DM to be nice with the players running strange races. Since Greyhawk had a hard good/evil vibe, gee there a demon looking critter coming down main street. Lets kill it. Um No it a PC so we must be nice to it.
hahahhaha just read lowkey13 comment. SPOT ON .

Sidebar? You have a major tiefling npc in saltmarsh and a good reason for her to be there.

Oh and several art pieces featuring Dragonborn and tieflings.

Never minding places like Scuttlecove.

Yah. I’ll take my Paizohawk thanks.

 

[Mecheon]

Anime? What anime is on the FR?

I mean, clearly we go for the stereotypical answers of Record of Lodoss War and Dungeon Meshi, so the ones of "Based on a D&D game turned story, popular enough they approached TSR to produce the setting, got turned down, so decided to produce their own RPG instead" and "Goes into the mechanics of surviving giant megadungeons by eating what you kill"

But in regards to other stuff, hot take: Dragonborn and Tieflings are super easy to add to Greyhawk. Too much focus on Tieflings needing to specifically be descended from beings and ignoring that they can just spontaneously show up. So in places Iuz's forces have been around, kids just start showing up with horns and red skin simply due to what magics have been around.

As for Dragonborn, simple as pie: Azor'alq is basically "I embody everything Dragonborn like, the god" and the islands named after him are full of dragons, constantly covered in fog, and about as mysterious as you can get

 

[jasper]

Sidebar? You have a major tiefling npc in saltmarsh and a good reason for her to be there.

Oh and several art pieces featuring Dragonborn and tieflings.

Never minding places like Scuttlecove.

Yah. I’ll take my Paizohawk thanks.

What a PaizonHawk?

 

[Hussar]

What a PaizonHawk?

Paizo, when they were running Dungeon and Dragon expanded Greyhawk considerably. Eric Mona is a HUGE GH fan and it shows. Cauldron, The Isle of Dread, Sasserine - all parts of Greyhawk now. Heck, a number of the Secrets of Saltmarsh modules come from this period - Salvage Operation, the Styes and Tammeraut's Fate are all from this period of Paizo Dragon.

The first three Paizo adventure paths were all set in Greyhawk.

 

[lowkey13]

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[jasper]

thanks, sounds like I was not buying the dragon at that time. And the Dragon mag was always iffy with me about being an "Official" change to Greyhawk.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Naw. I think it does. Your complaint about what I'm saying is the same as if I were to say, "Dude, no one is going to start re-printing the PHB until it is up the 'correct number of race standards of gyor' so your thread is a non-starter."

As I wrote, races serve only two real purposes in the game. Mechanical (a collection of bonuses and abilities) and roleplaying (a collection of stereotypes traits for a race).

You could accomplish the exact same thing by having variant humans with those abilities.

So the question is, why? Why bother with these races at all? After all, many games don't need it. And you could play D&D just fine by re-skinning every single race as human.

There's really three reasons, then. The first is tradition. D&D has classes and races. It always has, and therefore it always will.

The second is a variant of tradition. Fantasy games (aka Tolkien-y games) have fantasy races. People see LOTR, people want to play Legolas. Especially Brad. You think he'd change it up, but no, every single time, "Hey guys, Ima play an elven archer!" "Yeah, we know."

The third is a variant of the second, wish-fulfillment. "I want to play an Elf, because I want to imagine myself as an elf." And so on.

So D&D will have the PHB with the core races (and the core classes) that appeal to the greatest number of players (your standard core fantasy/D&D races), and then will push out additional material for people that want it.

But yeah, a lot of the issues revolving around races (and RPing races) can be ... weird ... after a while. Which is why I prefer anthropocentric campaigns.

In my group we focus on perspective.

No human culture can ever have the perspective of its elders being hundreds of years old, or of barely being considered an adult socially at 100 years old, or of every single person having magical abilities, or of one’s pets being a friend you can have an actual conversation with, or even just the perspective that come with the weakest men ever of you clan being stronger than the average human farmer and being able to live comfortably at extreme altitudes.

So, we focus on that perspective, not on tropes and stereotypes, and then just try to roleplay a person with that perspective.

Andthe whole thing is made more fun (which is all that matters) by having very different perspectives to consider.

 

[lowkey13]

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[doctorbadwolf]

It's certainly a way to do it; the issue, IMO, is that you end up taking one thing and extrapolating it. Kind of like "golden era" science fiction stories; imagine taking one thing from today and thinking about it ... IN THE FUTURE! You're always doomed to fail, because it's hard to imagine what other things change.

In other words (going back to my first post on the subject) it's really, really, really hard to imagine what a truly different race would "play" as, because we've never encountered one.

My contention is that that doesn’t matter even a tiny little bit.

What matters is that we are having fun at the table pretending to be aliens. An added bonus is that we are stretching out empathy and imagination muscles, but the fun is the point.

IMO, there is no meaningful degree to which “failure” even comes into the equation.

 

[lowkey13]

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