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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Man in the Funny Hat" data-source="post: 7907929" data-attributes="member: 32740">There is too much that got lumped into this thread in a short time and then overblown to unpack it all.  suffice to say that there are several aspects to the original question that EGG had not even begun to consider and he was, IMO, being wildly overblown and overbearing in his expressed concerns.what options do I provide for race choices? Well what’s the setting going to be for starters? If I’m running a Dark Sun game it’d be quite understandable to restrict choice to pc races EXPRESSLY associated with that setting and NOT just permit any ol wacky notion of race/class a player cooks up. If my game is a home brew setting with an intended heavy post-apocalypse feel then Gygax’ paranoia about players just using monsters solely for game-breaking motivations is pointless ranting - but it’s then on me as DM to keep things in line. Etc.His lengthy diatribe about the evils of letting players run roughshod over the game does indeed have valid points to make, but it is entirely based on narrow-minded assumptions of where the game should start and where it should be allowed to go.  Were the DMG not begun with him saying, “Others will think of things I don’t,” I’d be a harsher critic.  Certainly ANYTHING being said now about RPGs as therapy or in personal growth exercises is so f’n beyond WHAT HE WAS TALKING ABOUT it’s laughable to make even remote associations.  And again, how we play the game now is strikingly different from how he was expecting it to be run by others, and both those also different in many ways from how he ran his own games.He makes it quite apparent what his concerns were when he started talking about “humanocentirism”.  GIVEN that narrowed area of concern, his intent was for DMs to use “humanocentirism” of what he expected all settings to be like as the explanation for why players would be denied permission to play MONSTERS.  That could be extrapolated to include Any ol variation of non-humans that were of humanOID shape but it is NOT what he was really on about.  He wasn’t peering into the future to see what we see today with 2E’s glut of splatbooks, and new editions, and new and creative settings, and players wanting to use stuff they made up themselves, etc.  HE was looking at just the 1E PH and the MM.  He didn’t want to see one player actually being a creative role player in choosing to portray a MONSTER instead of a listed PC race, but another player doing it as an “I win!” button.  THAT was the extent of his rambling.If we have a far wider and more permissive concept of what a valid PC race is for the game, so be it.  The DM is still the one calling the shots for where AND WHY the line is drawn - and that didn’t change a whit with time, nor with Gygax’s warnings and his promotion of “humanocentirism”.</blockquote>

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