D&D 5E Greyhawk, and race options for Oerth PCs

[Urriak Uruk]

I'd just stick with the basic races.

My experience is that people who will really complain about about not getting to play a specific race mostly only exist on internet forums.

My experience would probably be the opposite... everyone I know would be pretty confused if a setting book came out and said, "You can't play this."

 

[Lidgar]

For humans, another option - if feeling creative - is to allow the variant human (i.e., include feats), but then assign the two separate +1 bonuses by race.

For example:
Baklunish: +1 Con and Cha
Flannae: +1 Con and Wis
Oeridians: +1 Str and Int
Olman: +1 Str and Wis
Rhennee: +1 Dex and Cha
Suloise: +1 Dex and Int

Of course you can mix and match the above - just another way to add flavor other than backgrounds (which would definitely be a preferred method).

 

[Oofta]

My experience would probably be the opposite... everyone I know would be pretty confused if a setting book came out and said, "You can't play this."

Whereas my experience is that I limit races in my home campaign and nobody has ever batted an eye once I explained why.

For Greyhawk I could see "standard races" being mentioned with optionally allowing everything and how you could add them in.

 

[Fenris-77]

The Eberron dragon mark model wouldn't be a bad one for differentiating human species.

 

[billd91]

Wow.

I take such a completely different take on Greyhawk than many here. I look at this setting, which has space ships, people taking demon lords prisoner to become a god, ACTUAL gods walking around the setting, yak folk monks, and all sorts of other weirdness and wonder where the heck this idea that Greyhawk is humanocentric. There are serveral non-human nations, elven, dwarven, and places like Pomarj and the Bandit Kingdoms. All of this and people would be weirded out by a tiefling?

Naw, to me Greyhawk is the original kitchen sink. The whole point of the setting is that it has so many blank spaces that you can do anything with it. It's the DM's setting, far more than most published settings. Why would I want to limit it to a Tolkien pastiche with just the 4 basic races? Bleah. Talk about boring.

Hey, again, it's your Greyhawk, so, do what you want with it and that's great. Me, I'll stick to what I see as the original vision of Greyhawk, which is a little bit of everything D&D mixed into one cool setting.

To you it may be the original kitchen sink, and it is the default site of many of the earliest adventures which have fantastic elements to them.

But to many of the rest of us, it's also the first setting to embody the setting of the game which, in AD&D days, was significantly human-centric. It's implied in the rule books, explicit in other materials describing the design. And the population information in the materials generally bear out that Greyhawk is human-centric. Most countries are 70-90% human, ones dominated by demi-humans or humanoids are more like enclaves that stand out as different compared to the broad sweep of the setting.

I think you're taking your impression from the elements that are exceptions to the norm within Greyhawk. They're intended to stand out from the background, every day, non-adventurous life that most people experience. They're fantastic, because they are exceptions rather than the norm. Their appearance or even word of them is the kind of thing that will drive discussions in the taverns and across hedgerows for days on end, not the kind of thing you see on every street corner.

 

[Istbor]

Eh, if they do put out a new GH book, I'd prefer it happen when all the old people are gone. No nostalgia, no 50 years of bias weighting down on it.

It can truly be reborn, and fix some of the obvious issues the old setting has. It needs a face-lift.

In terms of how I would do races? I am typically not very restrictive, and if I am, it is purely for the feel of the setting. So I would cling to (for now) how Greyhawk was depicted, and populated. Though if someone really wanted to play something more off the beaten path, I would try to work with them.

No Gnomes though. I don't care how important they are to the world. No player is taking Gnome.

 

[Oofta]

No Gnomes though. I don't care how important they are to the world. No player is taking Gnome.

I understand. Nobody could stand up to a group of gnomish paladins, that level of awesomeness could break any campaign.

 

[Istbor]

I understand. Nobody could stand up to a group of gnomish paladins, that level of awesomeness could break any campaign.

I know I would melt. Well, at least my brain would.

 

[Hussar]

To you it may be the original kitchen sink, and it is the default site of many of the earliest adventures which have fantastic elements to them.

But to many of the rest of us, it's also the first setting to embody the setting of the game which, in AD&D days, was significantly human-centric. It's implied in the rule books, explicit in other materials describing the design. And the population information in the materials generally bear out that Greyhawk is human-centric. Most countries are 70-90% human, ones dominated by demi-humans or humanoids are more like enclaves that stand out as different compared to the broad sweep of the setting.

I think you're taking your impression from the elements that are exceptions to the norm within Greyhawk. They're intended to stand out from the background, every day, non-adventurous life that most people experience. They're fantastic, because they are exceptions rather than the norm. Their appearance or even word of them is the kind of thing that will drive discussions in the taverns and across hedgerows for days on end, not the kind of thing you see on every street corner.

Oh, fair enough. Totally get that. Just, totally NOT my take on Greyhawk. I was pretty clear that my take was different, right?

See, even back in the AD&D days, I was a pretty avid reader/collector of Dragon (or The Dragon at that time) and most of that stuff was just D&D - which meant that it was for Greyhawk. Unless it was stuff like the Princess Ark stuff that was specifically for The Known World, anyway. Which meant that no, these weren't really exceptions. There were all sorts of different races running around Greyhawk. Sure, there were no dragonborn or tieflings, of course. They hadn't been invented yet. But, anything that WAS getting invented, was getting placed in Greyhawk. Every module, every supplement, everything was for Greyhawk. IIRC, even the original Oriental Adventures talked about it being on Oerth. Until the release of Forgotten Realms, EVERYTHING D&D was found in Greyhawk.

So, the notion that Greyhawk should be this limited, restricted, narrow, Tolkien rip-off just baffles me. It ignores about twenty years of the game's history. Sure, areas were presented as humanocentric. That's because the GAME was presented that way. As soon as you leave that behind in 2e and later, that humanocentrism vanishes as well.

Hey, that's the way you want to view Greyhawk, and that's great. I just think its a very impoverished view of the setting. Greyhawk isn't the "human club" setting to me. It's the "DM's toolkit" setting where every table's version of the setting is expected to be different because it's the setting where the DM should be taking over. It's not a "living setting" like Forgotten Realms where the shape of windows is actually canon. ((While I cannot find the article, there once was one on the WotC site that actually described the shape of windows in some city or other, written by Greenwood himself)) Greyhawk is what YOU make it. So when people tell me, "Oh, Greyhawk is that setting where humans dominate", my first reaction is,

 

[The Mirrorball Man]

So, the notion that Greyhawk should be this limited, restricted, narrow, Tolkien rip-off just baffles me. It ignores about twenty years of the game's history.

Whatever the history of the setting may be, I think that if someone were interested in a 5e version of Greyhawk, it wouldn't be a bad idea to reframe it a little, to focus on what makes it distinct from Forgotten Realms and Eberron. If you were to tell me "Well, Greyhawk is just another kitchen sink setting, anything goes", I'm not interested (and I've played in Greyhawk), but if you tell me, "it's a humanocentric, gritty, postapocalyptic setting", it gives me all kinds of nice ideas.