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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 124170" data-attributes="member: 2205">Yes, but many will argue that that is the unnatural state.  After all, it's only been the last c. 20,000 years that there has only been one homonid race on earth, while there were literally millions of years prior to that when diversity was the order of the day.We don't really know how big a population needs to be to have a viable gene-pool.  Most fantasy settings presume a population of at least hundreds of thousands of individuals of a given race concentrated in an area, I'd hazard a guess.  That's not that big, but certainly it should be big enough, barring some catastrophe, to carry on the race.I quite agree.  Currently the spectrum seen in, say, Forgotten Realms borders on ridiculous.  If you think back to Tolkien, who started it all, I guess you could say, then you have much less in terms of races.  One race of orcs, with a lot of regional and cultural variation, until Sauron bred the uruks as a fighter elite, and Saruman attempted the same strategy.  Three races of elves, of which only one realistically had stat differences.  Two of them were practically all either extinct or migrated to Aman during the time frame of the novels anyway.  One race of dwarves.  One race of halflings (consolidated from three prior "breeds" that had primarily intermingled to the point of indistinction by the time frame of the novels -- and they likely wouldn't have had stat differences anyway.)  Several races of humans, but differences could be done better with regional feats and backgrounds ala Oriental Adventures, Forgotten Realms or The Wheel of Time Roleplaying Game rather than stat differences.Sure, there's some variety, but not as much as there initially appears, and certainly not as much as you see in a typical D&D setting.  Personally, I'm a fan of using less races, but making cultural distinctions within races by creating cultural units that would work similar to Wheel of Time backgrounds, or Oriental Adventures clans.</blockquote>

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