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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9458429" data-attributes="member: 6790260">As usual, the frustrating thing is that there IS a way to do what Mr. Sweet and others ask for, without deprecating things or turning it into "Mother May I" where you as a player are constantly walking blind until you get every possible question answered by the DM.That, of course, is to actually talk about how species and classes are used for worldbuilding.Seriously, just two pages talking about how adding and removing different options can shape the feel and experience of a given setting would be WORLDS better than what we got. Instead, the (5.0) books explicitly declared that some species are universal and others belong in the so-called "true exotics" ghetto, which is straight-up the worst of both worlds. It gives players the idea that they will always be able to play humans or elves, but that they should otherwise have an attitude of "everything not permitted is forbidden," something fans of older styles of D&D allegedly don't like.*People talk so much about DM "vision" and "curation" and such--but the books seem to go out of their way to either undercut or completely ignore that. Instead, we should be both telling and showing players this stuff. A world where the only spellcasters are Warlocks and where Fighters don't exist, will feel very different from one where every character must have a link to the divine (so being a divine spellcaster is a shoe-in, but Zealot Barbarian, Divine Soul Sorcerer, and Celestial Warlock are also valid). A world where the extant races are humans, dragonborn, gnomes, and satyrs will feel very different from one where it's elves, orcs, genasi, and kobolds. Showing players how these things can be leveraged to produce flavor, and thus players clearly benefit from working with their DMs to come up with something cool, is FAR more productive and effective than the tripe they published in the 5.0 PHB, and nothing I've seen of the 5.5e PHB suggests that they meaningfully improved on this front.*IME, it's much more accurate to say that both older-style and newer-style fans use both "everything not permitted is forbidden" and "everything not forbidden is permitted" but in different, frequently non-overlapping areas.</blockquote>

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