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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6523798" data-attributes="member: 4937">I don't think we should have "always-on" races, and don't think I have argued that we should.  I'm merely explaining why most published fantasy materials assume the basic triad of humans, elves, and dwarves.   When it comes to canon, I'm of the school that sharply delineates canon from rules.  The presence of Halflings in D&D is canonical in the default setting, but their position as a 'common' race can't require them to be present in a setting.  It's merely an admission that most settings will have halflings, but as with anything that is canon, the meta-rule is "check with your DM".The further you depart from consensus fantasy, the bigger burden you are putting on yourself to do the necessary exposition to explain to everyone the particulars of your setting, and the bigger burden you are putting on your players to learn how everything differs from their expectations.   But as long as you accept that burden to communicate and dole it out in bite sized pieces, I really don't think there is anything wrong with have a unique mythology behind your world whether completely unique or derived from another one.Well, they don't have to, obviously.  But, for myself, if they don't fall outside the already wide range of cultural values present in humanity, then they are basically just humanity and why do we even have multiple races instead of say, an equally broad variety of ethnic groups.   And in general, I feel that troping a race as just some human ethnic group tends to produce really awkward, bad roleplay - dwarves as cantankerous drunken Scots, for example.  Sure, but then you are dealing with slightly more big budget versions of 'humans with bumps on their forehead'.  "They are like humans, only they have hooves." or "They are like humans, only they have a tail."  Of course realizing characters that differ from humanity only in a few superficial features results in no interesting acting.  That's my point.   I'm talking about more significant differences that might impact a characters outlook racial reincarnation, physical caste systems or other polymorphism, asexual, born mature adults, extremely long lives, telepathic, genders don't have nearly 1:1 ratio, lack certain human emotions or have emotions for which humans lack name, wildly different metabolisms, etc.   And of course, you can make humans unusual in this manner too - maybe everyone knows humans undergo reincarnation and elves don't, they just die.</blockquote>

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