D&D 5E Do you restrict racial choices in your games?

[Lakesidefantasy]

Well, well, well looks like I'm very much in the minority. Crabapples!

 

[TwoSix]

Well, well, well looks like I'm very much in the minority. Crabapples!

Nothing wrong with being different.

 

[Lakesidefantasy]

I am.

I once ran a campaign for five years where the only playable race was human. Gasp!

 

[Voadam]

As a side question, I tend to run a lot of Greyhawk - how do others handle Dragonborn, Tieflings, Warforged (Eberron), Shifters (Eberron), Changlings (Eberron), Drow and any of the others from different books/campaign resources?

I've allowed all of the above in my game - the two Warforged were relics from the Great Devastation, the majority of Tieflings are from the lands of Iuz, Shifters from the various Nomads, Changlings were a renegade race spawned from a failed Scarlett Brotherhood attempt to create infiltrators, the Drow had survived the destruction of their house in Erelhei-Cinlu. I haven't come up with where the heck Dragonborn come from - possibly former dragon servants from lands beyond the west or perhaps the original inhabitants of Blackmoor (or should I have those be Kalashtar from Eberron)?

Tieflings could also be Horned Society for the devil lineages. Iuz particularly after the Greyhawk Wars is the natural for planescape style demon blooded tieflings.

Shifters are easy as people with lycanthrope ancestry similar to planetouched with outsiders. Alternatively you can go as an option to represent a full PC lycanthrope using shifter mechanics (I am doing that in my 5e game currently for a World of Darkness werebear concept PC).

Warforged could be robots or full metal constructs or the stone and plant ones which can have lots of different non-Eberron origins that fit in Greyhawk from Barrier Peaks to Ancient Empires to Old Faith Druid stuff to new magical creations.

Changelings you could also adopt Pathfinder's children of hags trope since there are hags in Greyhawk.

Dragonborn are the toughest conceptually in my opinion. Nothing in the setting to latch onto as a hook so probably a small population race or from across one of the seas.

 

[MGibster]

Practically speaking, I don't really restrict their choices in race to play. The number of 5E campaigns I've run where I placed restrictions can be counted on one hand. I limited race choices to those that were found in the PHB for Curse of Strahd. While I think the overabundance of player races is a problem in D&D, ultimately I've never seen player race make any meaningful difference to the campaign. So I don't worry about it. It doesn't matter if you're a halfling, goliath, or a dwarf.

 

[Blackrat]

Ok, so I answered the last one, each setting has their own racial choices. The thing is, I mostly use settings where anything goes. But on occasion I run games where the choice is limited.

 

[TheSword]

I don't find it difficult. I'm running a Greyhawk campaign (on hold due to pandemic) and I've limited the game to Humans, Half-Elves, Elves (High [grey/valley] and Wood [wild]), Gnomes (forest or rock, though they're different subcultures of the same race), Dwarves (mountain or hill, though, again, subcultures of the same race), Halflings (ditto), and Half-Orcs. Those are the races that exist in Greyhawk.

Greyhawk -- as I have always viewed it -- has lots of cultures that are xenophobic and insular after the apocalypse of the Twin Cataclysms, and the rise of Iuz had made them even more so. It's not a melting pot. It doesn't benefit from modern sensibilities. It's post-apocalyptic, modestly grimdark, largely feudalistic, and nearly the twilight of human civilization. It's law vs chaos in the colonial sense of human civilization vs the wilderness... and chaos has spent the past several millennia winning. The people are much more likely to shoot first and ask questions later, and they casually label each other monsters.

I had a player ask to be a Drow. I said no because Drow are kill-on-sight to the surface races after the recent activity of Lolth. I had another player ask to play as a Goliath, I said sure, but you must be a snow, frost, or ice barbarian because that's what that race was basically created to represent. Similarly dragonborn do not exist; lizardfolk do, but they are are substantially different and are even more xenophobic than most races in the setting. Tieflings technically exist, but they're exclusively the result of demonic experiments conducted by Iuz and such a creature would in Iuz's forces or dead. Again, you'd be kill-on-sight to the "good-aligned" (a very loose term) races.



No more so than deciding that Wookies, Vulcans, Narns, samurai, gunslingers, superhumans, etc. are worth the effort of excluding. Stories, and therefore settings, are defined by what they are not as much as by what they are. That helps set the tone of the game and the style of play.

I think Matt Colville's video on saying, "No," really covers the issue pretty completely, especially with how the player's choice of race can undermine the setting.

There’s a big difference between not creating a race from a different setting and excluding one from the core rulebook.

As I said in my later post, I don’t mean that coming up with a justification is mentally taxing or onerous. I mean it’s hard to justify excluding a player race when that requires changing things more than not excluding them does.

A lot of that depends on how people build worlds. if you start with a map and start detailing everyone who lives there and where they originate then it’s easy to exclude options. If like me, you add things as it makes sense to add them then, then bringing in a new race for a particular player is no different to adding a monster, spell or item.

Any way this is a clear example of “you do you”

 

[Ibrandul]

I clicked option 4, but the truth is I'm a very flexible DM, so option 1 is equally accurate.

If I'm running the Forgotten Realms and a player wants to be a vedalken, we'll collaborate to invent something vedalkenish that makes sense in the Realms and doesn't require magic-the-gatheringing the setting. But I'm flexible only to an extent; if the player wants to be a vedalken whose magic relies on channeling blue mana and whose backstory is that they were childhood besties with Jace Beleren, then they'll need to find a different table.

 

[Bacon Bits]

There’s a big difference between not creating a race from a different setting and excluding one from the core rulebook.

As I said in my later post, I don’t mean that coming up with a justification is mentally taxing or onerous. I mean it’s hard to justify excluding a player race when that requires changing things more than not excluding them does.

That's just it, though. Greyhawk doesn't have drow on the surface. It doesn't have dragonborn or tieflings as a part of existing cultures. Yes, that's because they didn't exist at all in the 70s, but that's still what the setting is. They exist in the player's handbook, but you'd need to do work to integrate them to Greyhawk as a playable race unless you just drop them in with no unique culture or attributes. If they haven't got any unique aspects or culture, why are they there at all? What is the player even interested in? Just the mechanics?

You can certainly use an existing setting as a blank slate to tell whatever stories your players want using whatever characters they can invent. You can just use an existing setting as a map and a kitchen sink. However, you can also use an existing setting for the provided tone, presentation, themes, and so on. For the stories and narrative that already exist. To make new stories that feel like they belong in the same setting and feature the same story elements.

Like if you want to play a dragonborn in Westeros, it would risk spoiling the tone of the existing setting because they don't exist there. There's no dragonborn homeland, no history of dragonborn culture, no wars or alliances between dragonborn and the human nations and so on, while existing cultures are recognizable. A character from Dorn is going to be very different than a character from the Iron Islands or Winterfell. What would a dragonborn be in order to be distinct? Why would they associate with the rest of the characters? Further, by making one of the PCs, of all characters, be a unique exception, it drastically changes the whole campaign.

Any way this is a clear example of “you do you”

Weren't you the one asking for an explanation?

 

[GreyLord]

It looks like I'm the oddity. I have the PHB+1. I thought that would be the norm, but it appears that more people do it as a campaign specific thing.