Gnashtooth
First Post
Interesting how dragonborn are a common example in this thread.
D&D 5E Enforcing theme/structure by saying NO to players
- Thread starter Gnashtooth
- Start date
Interesting how dragonborn are a common example in this thread.
Remathilis
Legend
They were the new kids on the block racially, coming from 4e (with some edition bias) and are the most "alien" of the PH races.
Though I saw plenty of banned gnomes, half-races, Drow, tieflings, and halflings as well.
Gnashtooth
First Post
I do get it though, I just have never had a reason to ever allow them in a game. I allowed them in Hoard of the Dragon Queen. Once. Until the Dragonborn paladin asked me if he would be okay with destroying black dragon eggs. So we tried to refer to the Dragonborn fluff, which uhhhhhhhh didn't explain much.
Again, Nentir Vale, that's totally cool to have them there, there's established lore.
I can't think of anything WotC does that I hate more than altering an existing setting just to add new races, except doing that and providing bad lore support. (Pointing a finger at the Realms here, that idea with the Dragonborn city just showing up out of literally thin air was absolute horsepiss.)
Forcing them into Dark Sun and just calling them dray was almost as bad. They look nothing like dray.
They represent a change in the default D&D setting. You can't really expect everyone to be on board with it.
Dorian_Grey
First Post
Very interesting reading so far. I have two approaches to this: first as a player, second as a DM. I'm currently DMing a campaign with restrictions, so I'll get to that in a moment.
Player Perspective
As a player coming to a table, either an established group or a new group, I tend to believe that I'm an invited guest that is being given an opportunity to explore the offering of the DM - be it a whole new campaign world, or a pre-established campaign setting. I understand the difficulty of creating an enjoyable night for a table and I don't want to do anything that could hurt that experience. As a matter of respect, I will ask what others plan on playing and what the DM would like to see in terms of flavor. Now, most of the time I can usually play my favorite: Warrior Type with a huge sword race unimportant - but I do like to make sure that no one else wants to take on that kind of role, and often go with my second favorite character type, holy warrior of X God who loves to heal his companions while shouting out his or her religion's scripture at the enemy. No matter what though, I ask lots of questions:
And so on and so forth. Sometimes the DM will respond "I have no idea, but if you can write up something quickly we'll run with it." Which is awesome. I can take some of the job off the DMs shoulder while not stepping on their toes.
DM Perspective
As a DM, my goal is to create an interesting and exciting night for my players. My goal, in any campaign setting, is to break conventions and create tension for the players. I will not be the DM that says "You see two orcs! Roll for initiative." Orcs are boring. Everyone knows them, and is fully familiar with them and what they do. Sure you can spice it up a bit - maybe one of the orcs is a sorcerer, but in general orcs are boring.
When my players sit down at the table I do make sure to tell them this. I tell them I do NOT, in general, run generic fantasy settings. I will often try to change things up and keep things interesting.
The most extreme I have ever gone was the creation of a 2E campaign world using the various Player's Options series. The race (class) choices were:
Multi-classing was also allowed, but no one every did multi-class. The reason for this creation was that my group started inviting new players. Three people showed up one night, and despite asking that they hold off character creation until the day of, they all showed up with Drizzt clones. Every. Single. One. They were all deeply misunderstood Drow rangers. So we said there were no Drow in the campaign world, and there was much gnashing and wailing and the pulling of hair. They wanted an explanation, which was entirely due to my best friend (who I still keep in touch with despite it being many years):
The elves, a pompous and self righteous group were getting pretty pompous and much more self righteous then normal. The Dwarven clans, said "Enough is enough!" and packed up their mules and left their mountain fortresses to wipe every last elf off the face of the earth. The two races warred for centuries in unrelenting warfare which made WW1 look like a Sunday picnic. The end result? both species went extinct and created the "Grey Wastes" a land covered in the powdered bone fragments of millions of dwarven and elven dead.
And that was that. We've never forgiven Salvatore either. I'm not sure why my friend sacrificed the dwarves, but Rock Gnomes and Stout Halflings replace them fairly well. Nightfall gnomes were from the demi-plane of Shadow and moved to the prime material plane to escape a scourge of Shadow Dragons - the primary opponents in the campaign.
Current Campaign
In my current campaign setting, I banned Half-Orcs as I find orcs boring. That was all. I replaced them with Gnolls. You can play a gnoll using the half-orc stats, but with the cultural flavor of the gnolls themselves. I also replaced Dragonborn with Kenku (slightly modified, and renamed Corvidians), and am contemplating removing Tieflings, though I haven't found a replacement race I like enough yet. The world flavor is Eastern European and set in the late middle ages. Gnolls take on the role of the Ottoman Empire.
So far these restrictions have been met without any issue whatsoever, and all the players are loving the campaign setting and spent far more time in the city then I was anticipating. They wanted to explore the flavor of the world and I almost had to rail road them to get them to move out of the city!
Player Perspective
As a player coming to a table, either an established group or a new group, I tend to believe that I'm an invited guest that is being given an opportunity to explore the offering of the DM - be it a whole new campaign world, or a pre-established campaign setting. I understand the difficulty of creating an enjoyable night for a table and I don't want to do anything that could hurt that experience. As a matter of respect, I will ask what others plan on playing and what the DM would like to see in terms of flavor. Now, most of the time I can usually play my favorite: Warrior Type with a huge sword race unimportant - but I do like to make sure that no one else wants to take on that kind of role, and often go with my second favorite character type, holy warrior of X God who loves to heal his companions while shouting out his or her religion's scripture at the enemy. No matter what though, I ask lots of questions:
- Are warriors with big swords a common sight for people in the campaign world?
- Should I be a member of a recognized organization or are mercenaries common enough that I won't be out of place?
- What are the societal restrictions on weapons - how does the campaign world handle someone drawing a sword to slaughter an evil doer in the middle of a street (maybe not knowing that the evil doer is evil, like a human crime boss or some such)?
- What gods are there?
- What are the gods preferred weapons?
- What is worship like?
- Should my character be reserved or outgoing in their faith - i.e. would a cleric of this god seek converts or just be like "My God rocks suckers, you all ain't worthy enough to speak his/her name! And I'll smite you if you do!"
And so on and so forth. Sometimes the DM will respond "I have no idea, but if you can write up something quickly we'll run with it." Which is awesome. I can take some of the job off the DMs shoulder while not stepping on their toes.
DM Perspective
As a DM, my goal is to create an interesting and exciting night for my players. My goal, in any campaign setting, is to break conventions and create tension for the players. I will not be the DM that says "You see two orcs! Roll for initiative." Orcs are boring. Everyone knows them, and is fully familiar with them and what they do. Sure you can spice it up a bit - maybe one of the orcs is a sorcerer, but in general orcs are boring.
When my players sit down at the table I do make sure to tell them this. I tell them I do NOT, in general, run generic fantasy settings. I will often try to change things up and keep things interesting.
The most extreme I have ever gone was the creation of a 2E campaign world using the various Player's Options series. The race (class) choices were:
- Human (All)
- Human, Romany (As human, -M, but still allowed specialists)
- Gnome, Forest (F, R, C, D, T)
- Gnome, Rock (F, P, S, C, T)
- Gnome, Nightfall (F, S, C, T, B)
- Halfling, Stout (F, C, T, F/T, F/C)
- Halfling, Tallfellow (F, R, M, C, T, B)
- Halfling, Hairfoot (F, P, M, C, T, B)
Multi-classing was also allowed, but no one every did multi-class. The reason for this creation was that my group started inviting new players. Three people showed up one night, and despite asking that they hold off character creation until the day of, they all showed up with Drizzt clones. Every. Single. One. They were all deeply misunderstood Drow rangers. So we said there were no Drow in the campaign world, and there was much gnashing and wailing and the pulling of hair. They wanted an explanation, which was entirely due to my best friend (who I still keep in touch with despite it being many years):
The elves, a pompous and self righteous group were getting pretty pompous and much more self righteous then normal. The Dwarven clans, said "Enough is enough!" and packed up their mules and left their mountain fortresses to wipe every last elf off the face of the earth. The two races warred for centuries in unrelenting warfare which made WW1 look like a Sunday picnic. The end result? both species went extinct and created the "Grey Wastes" a land covered in the powdered bone fragments of millions of dwarven and elven dead.
And that was that. We've never forgiven Salvatore either. I'm not sure why my friend sacrificed the dwarves, but Rock Gnomes and Stout Halflings replace them fairly well. Nightfall gnomes were from the demi-plane of Shadow and moved to the prime material plane to escape a scourge of Shadow Dragons - the primary opponents in the campaign.
Current Campaign
In my current campaign setting, I banned Half-Orcs as I find orcs boring. That was all. I replaced them with Gnolls. You can play a gnoll using the half-orc stats, but with the cultural flavor of the gnolls themselves. I also replaced Dragonborn with Kenku (slightly modified, and renamed Corvidians), and am contemplating removing Tieflings, though I haven't found a replacement race I like enough yet. The world flavor is Eastern European and set in the late middle ages. Gnolls take on the role of the Ottoman Empire.
So far these restrictions have been met without any issue whatsoever, and all the players are loving the campaign setting and spent far more time in the city then I was anticipating. They wanted to explore the flavor of the world and I almost had to rail road them to get them to move out of the city!
I would have just asked the Player if he would be okay with destroying black dragon eggs.
mmmm nope never, but i DMed only Planescape's campaigns so far...
as long as they had a justification for what they wanted to do and they were consistent about it, i always allowed anything that made the game fun for them.
EDIT: oh well, I would never allow them to play Her Serenity or a Dabus ahahah
as long as they had a justification for what they wanted to do and they were consistent about it, i always allowed anything that made the game fun for them.
EDIT: oh well, I would never allow them to play Her Serenity or a Dabus ahahah
Last edited:
Ruin Explorer
Legend
When you say that, do you mean that your default position on races is hard "no", or that you've just not really run campaign settings where they're a normal part of things? I mean, personally, it seems weird to start with no, rather than "maybe, if it can fit" or "let's talk it through". It's not like adventures for settings don't constantly introduce new NPC races (they particularly did in Ye Olde Dayes).
It's also pretty weird to me that you'd need to refer to the fluff to see if destroying the eggs was okay. That's something you roleplay out. It's not like dragonborn actually come from dragon eggs (at least in 4E/5E). They're not Draconians, for goodness sake! Legends may have it that they once did (can't remember), but legends are legends for a reason, even in a fantasy setting, and dragonborn and dragons are rarely shown to be BFFs. It seems to me kind of like referring to lore to see if it would be okay for humans to fight Dire Apes or something. That's not something you can reasonably expect the lore to lay out in detail. If a human paladin would be okay doing it, a Dragonborn one would.
Personally I think what's most odd about Dragonborn is how long it took for D&D to acquire an "official" Dragon-based race. Dragon-people are an ancient trope in fantasy, one that appears over and over again. I seem to recall Out of the Pit for the Fighting Fantasy RPG (related to the books) had at least two dragon-person races, possibly three or four.
That was in 1985.
Many FRPGs have featured dragon-people, and they've cropped up in D&D since the Draconians, if not earlier. I don't think it's any coincidence that the "standard dragonborn" concept is this honor-bound warrior-type who has something in common with Dragonbait, too.
D&D always lacked a playable race that didn't appear to be a fairly basic hominid, though minotaurs and thri-kreen filled that role for some settings, despite such races being ten-a-penny in D&D settings.
Warbringer
Explorer
I have a very specific thematic world, and it has been the base of my campaigns and house rules for 15 years.
That said, I have had a player who wanted to play a demon suit of armor making him essentially immortal and jumped classes (the armor possessed the NPC it wished to become) - so what; I had one player that went through 5 wizards, but he was actually the familiar; A changeling that never changed form and even a warforged, that ended up in my world due to a rift caused by the Day of Mourning - he was hunted by most Wizards in the lands (and the Paladins who had perfected their own form of non-sentient constructs)
In a world of magic, it's well, ya know ....
That said, I have had a player who wanted to play a demon suit of armor making him essentially immortal and jumped classes (the armor possessed the NPC it wished to become) - so what; I had one player that went through 5 wizards, but he was actually the familiar; A changeling that never changed form and even a warforged, that ended up in my world due to a rift caused by the Day of Mourning - he was hunted by most Wizards in the lands (and the Paladins who had perfected their own form of non-sentient constructs)
In a world of magic, it's well, ya know ....
The Human Target
Adventurer
I say this with all due respect to the people playing in their own homebrew worlds for decades.
Maybe try something new some time.
Or just add in some new stuff to your world.
It's fun!
Maybe try something new some time.
Or just add in some new stuff to your world.
It's fun!
Last edited:
Similar Threads
