How acceptable is unaccepted?

[kaomera]

When I was playing 1e AD&D I played a number of half-orc characters. One of the things about playing a half-orc (one of the fun things, IMO) was that you just knew the NPCs where going to mess with you. You where practically playing a monster! If you where lucky (or not, the phrase "with friends like these..." comes to mind) the the other PCs would stick with you... And then, eventually, if you survived to level up a few times, you got the chance to throw it back in their faces...

I mostly stopped playing / running D&D at the time that 2e came out, up until just before 3e. And when I got back into the game I ran into the attitude from the majority of the people I was playing with that it wasn't fair for a DM to "pick on" a player for his character choices in this way. If a player wanted to play a half-fiend Drow with mind-flayer implants, that was their choice and as long as it was within the rules treating (or having the NPCs treat) them any differently from any other PC was just low.

This idea has led me to try and incorporate any choices that players make regarding their character into my setting fluff. Which in turn has caused me a problem: I don't like sprawling fluff, I don't really want to have a "place" in my settings for dozens and dozens of PC races. And if I could get players to give me their character ideas I could just make sure that those where the ones I did incorporate; but a lot of players really prefer to see what I've got cooked up before they come up with a character, and there's always players who join the game later, etc...

So what I've been thinking is that I can just build a core setting the way I want to and present it to the players. Then I can incorporate anything else that shows up as something of a fringe element... Something that the average person in the campaign has never seen and won't be sure of how to react to. Heck, the NPCs might even be liable to mistake the PC for a monster! The possible problem is that if the idea that making a player's choices "weird" is no good is still around (and if it ever was as widespread as I've assumed), this might not work either...

(Obviously "ask the players" is the first & best answer, but I don't get to play with a stable pool of people I've gamed with before - I'd like to get an idea of how a player who's never gamed with me might react to this...)

 

[Incenjucar]

My solutions to not wanting to run every world as if it were Sigil are mutation, tradition, and training. I have a grand total of FOUR "real" PC races, three of which are homebrew, with only humans surviving from the various PHBs... but by reskinning most races as a mutant of the four races (using magical body-modification, generally), a member of those races who comes from an unusual cultural background (elves can easily just be humans from a culture of swift, sharp-eyed bow-users), or who have basically semi-multiclassed (Dragon breath? Naw, that's my cantrip-level fireball that my pa taught me before I ran away to be a paladin). You can very easily keep most if not all D&D races as far as numbers go, while making humans the only humanoids.


My WotC forum blog can give you several specific examples, from the setting I'm working on, of how dozens of races can become four: Whoops! Browser Settings Incompatible

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

I have two drow in my campaign. One player picked drow for the stats, the other picked for the angst. How do I cater to both?

Well, I specifically designed my current campaign to be as generic and cosmopolitan as possible, so that I wouldn't feel like I have to specifically justify every weird race/class that my players want. And one of them is playing a centaur, btw, possibly the the most egregious example of "oh, a wizard did it." (Amusingly, certain aspects of my campaign have become very non-generic because of my permissiveness.)

How do I justify such a cosmopolitan world, without using Sigil? Jack Vance and Points of Light, baby. The world is ancient and huge, and its people may not have seen it all, but they've heard it all. It's basically a water world, with civilization confined to an uncounted number of islands. So no matter how weird your race is, there's sure to be an island for them somewhere.

Back to my drow players. Because my world is jaded and cosmopolitan, NPCs are of course suspicious of drow but nobody attacks them on sight. Which makes my roll player happy. To make my role player happy, I'll use the background she wrote to angst things up. What DM doesn't like an excuse to send drow assassins after the PCs?

I'm also a fan of refluffing for general purposes.

 

[the-golem]

Whenever I run a new campaign, I present my players all with the same "Campaign Primer". As a general rule, some specific races and classes are banned, unless the player can write me a convincing backstory on how their character came about. Of course, the reasons for the disallowed races/classes is mostly on an aesthetic basis.


Other races I've changed signifigantly, as far as aesthetics go. I'm fond of Greyhawk, where the trational dragonborn doesn't really fit. However, in the Greyhawk Appendix to the Monstrous Compendium for 2e, there's mention of a Greyhawk Dragon that actually prefers human form. In this form, they do what normal humans do. Work, play, mate... Wait, what? Gee, what would a draconic-human hybrid look like, I wondered. My answer was mostly human, with some odd draconic traits. Maybe they've a forked tongue, or burp fire ... maybe their skin has a rough leathery/scaly texture to it.

IMHO, slightly monstrous is much more disturbing than fully monstrous.

"What's with that dude's eyes. SWEET DIETY! I just saw him blink sideways..."

And now I'm rambling...You get the point.