How much is too much (Race Bloat)

[AeroDm]

Laggy, laggy double post.

 

[I'm A Banana]

In Tolkien, you happen to have five or so races: humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, and orcs

Well, judging by the current DDI list, modern D&D bears only a very superficial passing resemblence to any of these. We're quite a long way from Samwise and the spawning pits at this point.

I do think that the three main archetypal fantasy races are humans, elves, and dwarves. All other races are "lesser" in that they can be seen to come from those three lineages. You have dwarves as truly earthly, elves as heavenly or "super-earthly", and humans in the middle.

So it's a power trio?

It really depends on what you mean by "elves" (since that could be anything from wild elves to midsummer night's elves to Pratchett's elves to Eladrin to Legolas to Elfquest), "dwarves" (since that could be anything from the industrial revolution to magical crafters to anti-magical warriors), and "humans" (since that could be tribal nomads or city-state king-worshippers, or feudal lords, or imperial colonists).

There's a lot of sub-headings. You might as well say there's only two archetypes: Wizard and Warrior.

Upthrust being that the exact tropes you're trawling in don't always have to be the same, but as far as PC races go, the Five Man Band is a pretty useful one. The reason for this is pretty concrete: it's enough options to give everyone in the party a different race, without overlapping their tropes.

 

[Glade Riven]

Five Man Band or Power Trio (+1) works great for party set up. World building...eh...

I know, I know, "every" DM wants to be Tolkien. And sometimes players want to play some rather janky things. There are times when a DM probably should say "No," like no to opening up the entire 3.0, 3.5, and 3rd party d20 to a Pathfinder game. Or even just to Savage Species. That is why a lot of DMs limit things to core, or core + one or two books (maybe a setting book or two on top of it). From what I hear, 4e has gotten rather monotanous & formulaic. Complaints about Paizo's recent stuff seem to be more of conflicts of play style or needing more GM arbitration and judgement calls on certain (new) things (like golem components or creating spells). As a Game Master myself, I don't mind abusing...er..using rule 0 to reign in anything that gets too janky.

One thing about Phaetos is that I want it to be as modular as possible, and as far as races go, each race I define I want to have a unique position in the world - not just tacked on, marginally different varients (marginally different varients can be handled in other ways). Plenty of space is left over for a GM that wants to throw in a village of dhampirs or something, or create their own nations of some unused race for their own campaign.

Something I've noticed is that while people like options, a small number of choices is preferible to dozens keeps the majority from being overwhelmed. Too many options can be information overload, especially when the variations are minuete. Yet having more options for advanced players can be handy, especially when an advanced player can recommend options for when the average joe wants to play something special for a character concept.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

To use a very imperfect analogy, choosing races for a campaign is kind of like selecting which paints I'll use in a painting.

I like having hundreds of colors to choose from- and I do- but I rarely use more than 8 for the palette of a particular piece. How they blend or contrast is what matters.

Likewise, I like having a bunch of PC race options statted out in the game, but I usually have a restricted list of what PC races actually exist in a given world.

 

[prosfilaes]

So the "strong guy" in D&D is typically a dwarf,

Not in my experience. If you don't have half-orcs, humans are the strong guys in core D&D.

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Personally, I get tired of kitchen-sink settings. But I see no reason why if we have fewer races, why they must be the core races. I would be happy to play in a game where I had a short list of races that was mostly new.

 

[LurkAway]

To capture the feel of an era of exploration, discovering not just new locations and treasures but also new civilizations, like a pulpish adventure, it might be interesting to start with human only or core only races, and then pick up new races only when the party finds them in the story.

That is, you dispense with the new dragonborn PC who, according to the cliche, meets the party at a bar, provides the obligatory tale of travelling from a land faraway, and the alien is invited to join the party.

Instead, the party travels to a land faraway, an exotic island populated by dragonborn and deva, and then the players can swap for new PC of a local race (or keep their original PCs) as desired.

Any 'dumped' PCs might have gotten lost in the jungle, thrown in jail, killed purposefully and gloriously in battle, or taken a vacation to drink margaritas on the beach -- they can be picked up again later in the story by the player or not.

It certaintly isn't for everyone to have to wait for x game sessions until the party comes to the new race, instead of the new race come to the party. But I think it does make race selection feel more organic.

 

[delericho]

My understanding is that if you ask people they will always say they want more options, but in reality there is a point beyond which adding options actually reduces their enjoyment.

In the game as a whole, I would argue that it should try to support as many of the existing races (and subraces) as makes sense. Every race is somebody's favourite, and there's nothing really lost by including them, so...

For world-building, I would strongly advise picking a small representative set of races as the "core races" of the setting - whether that's the traditional Humans, Elves and Dwarves, or the Eberron Warforged, Shifters and Kalashtar, or whatever.

But I would also strongly advise leaving some gaping holes in the limits of the 'known world' - areas that simply haven't been filled in, or legends saying "Here be Dragons", or whatever. That way, if you get a player who really wants to play some obscure or offbeat race, you have the ability to slot that race in to the world without too much hassle, and without contradicting the existing lore.

(The suggestion of allowing for unique individuals is a good one, also, especially if it's something really offbeat such as a Shardmind. Of course, that runs into a problem if another player decides he really must play another Shardmind!)

 

[LurkAway]

They just wanted to be weird no matter what. For them, I think variety is important and trying to reign them in actually ruins their fun.

In a campaign that seeks consistency but wants to allow for full player choice, the setting could have a mutagen backstory (aberration magic, Far Realm virus, divine curse, etc.) to cover these unique individuals.

For most players, though, I think races are primarily a vehicle to confer a bundle of powers on the character. That's actually a useful thing in my opinion--powers have to come from somewhere and having them come from race lets us un-frontload classes and allow greater diversity and customization. If that's the role, though, then the narrative stuff (description, culture, how they act, etc) actually becomes an unnecessary complication on the bundle of powers. If I want +2 dex and you're telling me that in order to get it I have to be "fanciful and not serious" then we have an issue if I don't want to RP that. It is an unnecessary conflict.

In the second scenario, we'd be better off decoupling the bundle of powers from the narrative aspects of race and just create templates or something (i.e. military upbringing, streetrat, etc). Then people are free to be a member of whatever race they desire and take on whatever role they desire without having to compromise on how they perform in other situations. Converting most races into background templates would be as easy as changing the name (with a few outliers due to size, innate magic, etc).

I agree, but I think there is another nuance there.

If there are 3 physical stereotypes -- thin & agile, standard variation, or short & stout -- and 3 cultural concepts -- fey/forest affinity, versatile, or earth affinity -- then the race of elf, human, and dwarf is a combo of each. That is, you don't get the complete elf racial mechanics when you strip out the cultural/environmental role, you only get something like +2 Dex leftover.

If I was to reskin an elf as a human, I could make it a tribe of fey-touched forest-dwelling humans, in order to lock in the racial aspect with the physical stereotype.

If you disconnect the physical stereotype from the racial concept, then you're implying that non-human races have the same body diversity as humans. You can have obese elves and tall foppish dwarves.

Which is fine, except that some of these racial physical stereotypes is an easy (maybe lazy) way of classifying their non-humanity. Remove some of those stereotyped traits and the racial lines are more blurry. The obese elves in the forest and the tall dwarves living on the mountain start to feel more like eccentric human colonies.

So then you really have to try hard to make the non-humans think and behave differently than humans -- otherwise they're just regular people in funny suits that are now less funny-looking and more ordinary, so might as well take off the funny suit and call yourself what you are: a human variant.

But in tackling such fictional issues, D&D isn't exactly well-known for taking the deep-thinking route.

 

[Dice4Hire]

But in tackling such fictional issues, D&D isn't exactly well-known for taking the deep-thinking route.

That is the DM's job in their own campaign worlds.

 

[LurkAway]

That is the DM's job in their own campaign worlds.

Right, except the point I had intended to make is that if the DM houserules to disconnect race mechanics from physical stereotypes, then it makes the job harder for the DM to differentiate the non-humans from the humans. And let's not forget that the players would also be involved in roleplaying the non-human and may not be inclined to act out alien mentalities.