NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dire Bare" data-source="post: 7905807" data-attributes="member: 18182">Greyhawk, and other classic gaming and literary settings, certainly are jam-packed with weird and sentient creatures. Certainly, devil-people and dragon-people shouldn't stand out in that regard. However, what exists in the setting and the make-up of the heroic adventuring party are two different things. In classic fantasy (and science fantasy!) stories, most of the heroes are human with only one or two being "strange" in some way. Star Wars is on my mind this week, and if you look at the OT "adventuring party" of Luke, Han, Leia, Lando, Chewie and the droids . . . . our weird or monstrous representative is of course Chewie. The droids are comic sidekicks/servants, everybody else is human. Most classic fantasy stories D&D is modeled after are similar. Elves, dwarves, and <s>hobbits</s> halflings are only one-step removed from mundane humanity, and don't seem as weird or monstrous as a Wookie, Dragonborn, or Tiefling.As D&D and fantasy has evolved over the years . . . . we all want to play the "cool" races making our adventuring parties develop that "Mos Eisley Cantina" effect with straight-up human characters being the rarity sometimes! Obviously, what race options are available is up to each group's tastes and there are no wrong answers. But to maintain that classic fantasy "feel" with the heroes being mostly human (or near-human elves, dwarves, etc), how do you encourage that without being the cranky DM who always says "No"?I haven't DM'd in a while, but I've tossed around a "lottery" idea I might try during character and party creation. Put a bunch of tiles in a basket, with one tile marked "weird race", another "weird class", "legacy item", "driving backstory", or any other ideas that would be best limited to one or two PCs in the party. Each player draws a tile and can then use it, trade it with another player, or trade it in for an extra feat or something. The distribution of tiles can of course be customized for the feel of the campaign the DM wants to run.</blockquote>

Verification