Azzy
ᚳᚣᚾᛖᚹᚢᛚᚠ (He/Him)
Right?
From a world-building perspective, I like to have as many options as I can to choose from and from that I can choose which particular options to use in any particular campaign.
D&D General Do you like LOTS of races/ancestries/whatever? If so, why?
- Thread starter Reynard
- Start date
- Status
From a world-building perspective, I like to have as many options as I can to choose from and from that I can choose which particular options to use in any particular campaign.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
To begin with, I personally have never, even slightly, understood why "Mos Eisley" (or "cantina" etc.) is an insult, nor why people keep using it so much. Seeing that cantina filled with a dizzying variety of species instantly communicated to me that this was a vast and mysterious galaxy: that behind every (space)rock and (integral?) tree, I'd find more secrets to uncover or more lore to delve into. And it accomplished that with literally one scene. That's damned impressive environmental storytelling!
But let's tackle your questions before I properly address your answers.
Does this appeal to me? If so, why?
Yes, very much so. Beyond the reasons already given, I like my fantasy universes to be...well, fantastical. I like high-flying action and mysterious depths and ancient runes hewn upon the living rock! While many things communicate that fantastical experience, having diverse races is one of the efficient ways to do that. Further, if I'm being perfectly honest, I find being human kind of boring. It excites and energizes my imagination to think of what it must be like to be something so close to human, and yet simultaneously not human. You've probably seen one of my deep-dives analyzing the physiological differences between humans and dragonborn, for example. I find that whole thing fascinating, and would even if I weren't a fanboy (as I have had similar fascinated reactions to races/species/metatypes in other games, even when they aren't my focus.)
What's the upside?
My above answers are more about the direct experience, so I'll examine the structural benefits now. Firstly, having a variety of races/species/ancestries/metatypes/etc. means each individual option doesn't need to be all things to all people, or even most things to most people. When you have a diverse palette of options, you can provide some horizontal market segmentation. The most popular option will essentially always be humans (or elves, but usually humans), at least for Western games.* Even if we expand beyond the single most-popular option, the top 3-4 will almost always be traditionally beautiful/handsome, with svelte-yet-buxom women and either hypermuscled ultra-masculine men or similarly svelte men.
Having more than just the top handful of options means it's actually possible to get Rubenesque characters (especially with art support, which is huge!), or statuesque amazonian women, or dudes who are legit smaller than their female counterparts, etc. You also get a variety of subcultural interests, like appealing to gay men, lesbian women, transgender folks, anyone who doesn't conform 100% to the traditional gender binary, etc., to say nothing of varying aesthetic tastes totally distinct from sexuality, orientation, and gender. It's hard to support all of those things with only a small handful of races, and essentially impossible to do so with only the hypertraditional Core Four options.
Further, I find that there's often two unstated assumptions made by critics of having a diverse palette. First, they assume that just because these other races have similar freedom of action and emotional responses, they must be perfectly identical to human beings in absolutely every respect, damn the consequences; this is usually phrased, very unkindly, as "rubber forehead aliens." Second, they assume that these nonhuman races receive zero analysis and examination beyond tired, staid, stereotypical things, while at the same time completely excusing all the times where the hypertraditional Core Four races fall prey to that exact problem. I defy both of these assumptions.
Having similar emotional responses, sharing fundamental rationality, and being able to achieve mostly the same spectrum of things does not, in any way, make these beings perfectly equivalent to IRL humans. As mentioned, I've done deep-dive analyses (plural...) on the dragonborn before. Suffice it to say, the few details we've been given paint an extremely interesting and very different species, despite them being quite comparable to human beings. In brief: dragonborn heal faster, reproduce faster, spend far less time in fragile infancy and labored pregnancy, and reach physical/mental maturity faster than humans do--but in the exchange, their diets are harder to fulfill (they need more protein than humans and they're simply bigger than humans, so they also need to eat more total food), their infrastructural needs are greater, and they're prone to intense feast-or-famine survival, where either things are going great or things are collapsing, with little margin of error between. And that's just an analysis of one species, albeit one with some more dramatic differences (e.g. laying eggs.) If I'm running a game, I'm going to do that kind of analysis on multiple different races, trying to come up with ways in which they are both similar and different, and how that would likely influence their cultural attitudes and the kind of contributions they make when part of a multiracial culture.
As to the second, well, the tail end of that last paragraph, plus the reminder: tropes are tools. You get out results in accord with the effort you put in. Yes, if you keep your minotaurs as violent, maze-obsessed berserkers (all of them), and your githzerai as aloof ascetic mage-monks (no exceptions), and your aasimar as ethereal, saintly paladins (every single one), then you're going to end up with really boring, flat worldbuilding that is distractingly empty. But you would get the same thing if you had rigidly stereotypical dwarves and elves. They shouldn't get a pass just for being traditional; what's good for the goose is good for the gander. Either we should be critiquing our "traditional" races (as, for example, The Elder Scrolls and Divinity: Original Sin 2 have done, what with their piratical dwarves and cannibal elves) for falling prey to this rigid stereotyping, or we should stop raising it as a criticism only for new things. People should pick one and stick with it, whichever they choose.
Coming back to this. I've already addressed the "Mos Eisley" mockery, and wish people would leave it behind. I know nothing of Pirates of Dark Water, so I can't really respond to that. The idea that "too many races kills the wonder of non-human characters" baffles me: does this mean that the idea of too many unanswered questions ruins the awe and mystery of the cosmos for you? That knowing you have too many unread books spoils the joy you would get from reading them? I just don't understand how there can be a zero-sum game of the wonder involved in an experience, like finding out that there are dozens of geysers at Yellowstone would make Old Faithful somehow less beautiful.
As for the remainder: Then give them those cultures--or ask your DM to do so (or to let you do so, of they're so inclined.) That's a huge part of the joy here. MAKE them distinct! Think about the kinds of things that YOUR character would do or say, influenced by their physiology and the history of their race/species/etc. Invent phrasings that differ from standard English, or speak with an archaic flourish to emphasize that this dragonborn is so steeped in the study of the old ways, it bleeds into his vocabulary. Use metaphors and similes that wouldn't fit in with a human worldview, but would with the long, languid development time of elves (or the short, rapid-fire development of dragonborn): instead of teenage, speak of "threenagers," because 30-something elves are considered to be the equivalent of early-teens human children (or whatever), or wax poetic about how "o, the bright and youthful flower/blooms from the shell for an hour" or the like. Even in a game where everything is rigidly fixed in place and players can only affect a tiny slice of it (as more than one user has described on this forum), the above things give an enormous space for you to enrich the experience and make that palette be as vibrant as it can be.
*Japanese games, it's almost always catgirls, and to a lesser extent other "literally JUST humans with animal ears and/or tails." But humans usually still rank in the top 3.
Azzy
ᚳᚣᚾᛖᚹᚢᛚᚠ (He/Him)
Yeah, it's a trite "insult" and completely played out.
billd91
Not your screen monkey (he/him) 🇺🇦🇵🇸🏳️⚧️
I don’t see it as an insult either, but it might be something undesirable for a single fantasy world. And the rest of this paragraph underscores why.
To me, Mos Eisley is suitable for a vast galaxy, not so much a single world setting.
Clint_L
Legend
I don't mind, as it gives options for player choice, and I am all about players being active in the story. And pretty much every D&D setting has a bazillion sentient races; it's just that most of them traditionally weren't playable options. So it's not really world breaking that there is a Lizardfolk who winds up joining the party, or whatever.
Although I try to have it both ways, in that my settings definitely have a relatively small number of dominant races, and then if the player wants to play something else we just come up with a reason for them to be there. So it still has a somewhat traditional fantasy flavour, though not as narrow as, say, Greyhawk, but with the odd exception.
All that said, in a thread somewhere here I posted the race choices of close to a hundred players in D&D Club over the past year or so, and they skew pretty heavily towards ye olde fantasy. Humans remain by far the most popular choice, with elves/half-elves a strong second.
Although I try to have it both ways, in that my settings definitely have a relatively small number of dominant races, and then if the player wants to play something else we just come up with a reason for them to be there. So it still has a somewhat traditional fantasy flavour, though not as narrow as, say, Greyhawk, but with the odd exception.
All that said, in a thread somewhere here I posted the race choices of close to a hundred players in D&D Club over the past year or so, and they skew pretty heavily towards ye olde fantasy. Humans remain by far the most popular choice, with elves/half-elves a strong second.
EzekielRaiden
Follower of the Way
My problem is, a "vast galaxy" almost always shrinks planets down to occasional-visit type places. Because the scope changes to the whole dang galaxy, you necessarily have to work in generalizations across whole planets. It may be an extremely lossy thing, but people just don't have the room to store the complete complex three-thousand-year history of a whole civilized planet for hundreds of planets.
So, in that galaxy, planets become the equivalent of cities--places that also have WAY more history than it is reasonable (or even possible) for the players to store and track, but which can be glossed with high-level generalizations. And that's exactly what we see with D&D stuff: city-state type governments, sometimes forming larger alliances/unions/empires, but more often being many separate ruling powers. And such city-states, spread across half a dozen continents or the like, work just fine as being the loci of various races. Or you can take the FFXIV route, where there are some races which tend to stay endemic to one area (e.g. the amalj'aa, giant lizard-people, or the kobolds, who look like bipedal chinchillas) and others which have a history of migration (e.g. "hyur" aka humans, "miqo'te" aka catgirls/catboys, or "roegadyn" who are essentially tuskless, taller orcs.)
Ulorian - Agent of Chaos
Legend
Lots of choice is the route to go. No one says you have to use all of them! Let folks customise their own world though.
payn
Glory to Marik
I have never seen it as insult, but descriptor of setting/game with high amounts of species/races/etc…
That said, I have always been on the lower side of playable species because I’ve rarely seen folks exhaust the options available. Many folks I played with wanted the power inherent within many species, which makes the Mos Eisley cantina undesirable. Though, I have never been insulting to folks who roll that way. YMMV
- Status
