My question is: does that appeal to you? Do you like a campaign world that has dozens or even hundreds of player option races? If so, why? What's the upside?
For my part, I feel like there's a point where it gets too Mos Eisley or Pirates of Dark Water. Not only does too many races kill the wonder of non-human characters, but I feel like they become mechanical shticks and themes and there's nothing otherwise distinct about the races as cultures. They are just humans with funny hats and stat bonuses.
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.
For my part, I feel like there's a point where it gets too Mos Eisley or Pirates of Dark Water. Not only does too many races kill the wonder of non-human characters, but I feel like they become mechanical shticks and themes and there's nothing otherwise distinct about the races as cultures. They are just humans with funny hats and stat bonuses.
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.