How Many PC Races?

[Arrgh! Mark!]

Eh.

Players in my game tend to play humans, but elves, halflings and dwarves are not unheard of.

I like it that way to be honest.

But I've one player that annoys me. He either plays Drow or Tieflings. (Rolls eyes). This wasn't so bad in the FR campaigns we were running, though fights erupted around him a lot.

We start my homebrew, and the first thing he wants to be is a half stone-demon fighter. I let it happen. And I give the party a nice little description when they meet him - "A hulking figure awaits you in the darkness, chuckling to itself. You see it tearing the remains of something oddly humanoid, and eating the raw flesh. As you get closer and the light illuminates him, you see a truly frightening creature, all spikes and horns and tail and red eyes. It's a demon!

Players: (Also sick of nonsense characters) CHAAARRRGGEE!!


Aha, he never played a tiefling again.

 

[s/LaSH]

There will typically be a stock set of races in a region. These are the 'recommended' races. However, there are exceptions (and I want exceptions - they're interesting).

My Dungeon Damage game had four tiers of common races:
Common: Human. We had two of these.
Not as common: Elf, Dwarf. We had an elf.
Out of the ordinary: Gnoll, Orc, Triton. We had a triton.
Everything else: Nothing from this group in the party, but it would have been possible given a good explanation.

My Twilight world, on the other hand, is built for a ruleset that allows all sorts of character building tricks, so I provide a couple dozen races that form most of the population, then start throwing in options like minority genetic projects, dragonspawn, unique cyborgs, and half-demons, encouraging people to use whatever they can come up with inside their character budget. Even the human races aren't very ordinary: there are bownar, tall tattooed tribals, who have keen smell; tallaern, who have an unusual point to their earlobes and live in great sea-cities; cathedrals, chubby little fellows who worship dragons and have a few more fingernails than necessary; and androgynes, who are rather pretty but spend most of their time waging war in an icefield in the sky. The next most common race lives in hive cities and doesn't use equipment because of the predominance of shapechanging magic... and that's not leaving the 'no challenge to play' lists.

Twilight's not a world designed to say 'no'.

 

[Chimera]

For my next campaign, the region we're playing in is 99% Human and 1% Dwarf, so those are the recommended starting races.

A Gnome or a Halfling may be allowed, with the caveat that no one has ever seen one before, so they'll either mistake it for a small child, or think it's some kind of evil monster and try to kill it. But likely they won't take it seriously as an intelligent equal.

A Half-Orc is possible, but with a warning that Orcs are hated and feared, and a Half-Orc will be too. And that I won't minimize the role-playing nightmare that this entails.

No other races. Period. All the other races are hostile monsters and wouldn't survive attempted entry into any town. Or they're completely unknown, which makes them "hostile monsters" to the people of the region, with good reason.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

There is no such thing as too many PC races. There is such a thing as too many NPC races.

PCs should be allowed choices, NPCs get the retrictions.

One way to do it would be to just allow whatever the player's pick. No one picked dwarf? -Dwarfs don't exist.

This two quotes sum up my philosophy exactly.

Except for elves and halflings. They bother me.