D&D General how did we end up with the thousand types of Bruiser?

[Mind of tempest]

Well, that puts you in a bit of a box; in that it seems you want to design a setting to suit your taste (which is great! go for it!) but in order to get any use out of that setting you want someone else to DM it (not so great) so you can play in it (also not so great as you'd have way more setting knowledge than any of the other players).

That said: Humans, Dwarves, Elves, Hobbits, Part-Elves, Part-Orcs and - I suppose - Gnomes. What more do you need?

Welcome to my life mostly the inability to ever get what I want.

the standard ones do not fit properly plus not-medieval euro land seems kinda dull and hard to do well plus favourite class is not the common ones.

You see Minotaurs way differently than I do! I see them as little more than reclusive brutes, smart enough to survive and (sometimes) prosper but that's about it. They wouldn't argue with the squirrels, they'd just see the squirrels as bite-size snacks and gobble 'em down.

Your Ogres, however, are pretty much spot on.

wait all character would not eat the squirrels?

 

[embee]

Because it's one of the archetypes.

There are the stabby sneaky folks, the sexy singing folks, the squishy spellcasty folks, the slashy shieldy folks, and the short and sneaky folks.

You might as well as why there are so many shades of white. There's the standard Decorator's White, but there's also titanium white, eggshell, ecru, bone, ivory, snow, and pure white to name a few. They're all a little bit different from each other and that there are so many shades of white doesn't negate that there are also just as many shades of red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, or brown or any other hue you can imagine.

I like playing dwarven bruisers. Someone else might like playing an orc bruiser. Or a human bruiser.

Even two dwarven "bruisers" might be different. One might be an Athasian dwarf gladiator who brawls and another might be a mountain dwarf battlemaster with a hammer and a shield.

 

[Stormonu]

yeah, what was with that could no one make a mystical race other than elves?

Certain things are more popular than others, for some reason elves & dragons (& demons/devils) generate an inordinate amount of interest among D&D enthusiasts. The designers have written about this in the past, and back in 3E it's why we got books like Draconomican and the Fiendish Codexes. I guess we didn't get an explicitly elf book because every other book had an elf variant in it already.

And it's relatively easy to "Planet-of-the-hats" racial tropes, so we ended up with an elf for every occasion.

 

[Lanefan]

I came upon Minotaurs as a species from MtG and the Hurloon minotaur's, who are giant magic-science minded Klingons with horns. In one novel, they are trying to create a chemical/therapy cocktail to make goblins more intelligent/sociable. Then there are the Taraluum (sp), who are Proud Warrior Race guys.

Ah. I'd hit them long before M:tG was a thing; and M:tG's take on many creatures has been a bit - well, let's just say their take and mine differ fairly often.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Ah. I'd hit them long before M:tG was a thing; and M:tG's take on many creatures has been a bit - well, let's just say their take and mine differ fairly often.

Dragonlance had minotaurs right they had nations and such?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

how did we end up with the thousand types of Bruiser?
we have dwarves, orcs and family, minotaurs, Dragonborn and whatever Goliath are plus whatever we had it past editions
why do we seem to end up with some many bulky folks made only to mash things?
what is the point each one has to set it apart from the others?
why even have more than one of these per setting?

let the discussion commence!

IME, most people don’t look at races as “well that niche is filled now”, but rather just...view them individually. No one* cares that orcs exist already, that’s got nothing to do with the development of Goliaths.

*no one being a term which here means, “very few people”.

 

[Lanefan]

Dragonlance had minotaurs right they had nations and such?

Dragonlance had Minotaurs, yes, but the extent of my DL experience is converting and running one module (DL-6 I think) about 30 years ago and there I just used the Minotaur warriors as brute-force enemies. (in hindsight I should have swapped them with a different creature entirely; Minotaurs - based as they are in Greek/Mediterranean culture - are a warm-weather creature and the module was Dragons of Winter Ice, meaning they were wildly out of place)

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Dragonlance had minotaurs right they had nations and such?

Dragonlance minotaurs where known for their seafaring skills. I suspect under the influence of Voyage of the Dawn Treader. They had an empire consisting of a chain of islands.

But you seem to be looking for "race" to supply what what the player should bring to the table. Every individual is different. Not all Krynn Minotaurs are proud seafarers, each one is as unique as a human character. Our Eberron Bugbear was extremely vain about grooming his fur. Are all Eberron Bugbears vain about their fur? Hell if I know! This was a particular individual, that doesn't allow you to draw conclusions about the rest of their species.

 

[JEB]

Dude. You can play a Yeti or something extremely similar to a Yeti (it might have a different name) in 2E. It's the awful "Evil Humanoid PC Complete Guide" book the name of which escapes me.

The alaghi, from The Complete Book of Humanoids. (One of the first D&D books I got that wasn't a Monstrous Compendium.)

 

[Paul Farquhar]

You could play a Yeti Tyke (RotFM) using the sidekick rules from Tasha's.