D&D 5E PC races that a DM has specifically excluded from their campaign and why

[CleverNickName]

How Dare You limit our options. Now we going to Vulcans, Kligions and Lokies to tick you off. When ever a GM puts a race off limits it always raises the cool factor of the off limited race.

Yep. That's why I ban gnomes.

It's really the only way they could ever look cool.

 

[Zardnaar]

Man, that must be nice.

Any time I try to limit any player choice, whatever I'm limiting will be the very first thing the players ask for. Oh, Mr. DM, you want to run a low magic campaign with no core casters? Can I be the only warlock/wizard/sorcerer? (first three character pitches I received after stating I wanted a low magic game). Oh, Mr. DM, you want to run a Greyhawk game and have provided all sorts of background for the region? Yeah, I'm going to play an orc, a firbolg, a gnome, and two humans. Oh, Mr. DM, you want to run a Waterdeep Dragon Heist game? Ok, I'm going to play a sentient skeleton and a warforged.... sigh.

I've just given up to be honest. There's just no fight left in me. It's been this way since I can remember. The second I suggest any sort of limitations, the players immediately want to play that. I could suggest fifteen other things they COULD play, but, no, I'm yucking in their yum for not letting them play what they want.

headdesk**headdesk**headdesk

You're the boss put your foot down or offer to let them DM.

 

[Zardnaar]

How Dare You limit our options. Now we going to Vulcans, Kligions and Lokies to tick you off. When ever a GM puts a race off limits it always raises the cool factor of the off limited race.

Rather than ban individual races you have a list of what's allowed to fit the theme.

 

[jasper]

Rather than ban individual races you have a list of what's allowed to fit the theme.

Six, half a dozen, VI, 10-4, = All the same thing.

 

[Zardnaar]

Six, half a dozen, VI, 10-4, = All the same thing.

Yeah but it doesn't single out individual banned stuff for the cool factor.

 

[Grantypants]

I haven't actually run this campaign, but once I find some free time again, I'd like to try an all-monster campaign where the humans, dwarves, elves, half-elves, halflings, and gnomes are all explicitly the evil villains and banned as PCs. Those races formed an alliance and have invaded the lands where everyone else lives. Obviously, the players would all have to be on board for this concept from session zero, but it could be fun with the right group, not as an evil campaign, but as a monster campaign.

Alternatively, I've also been kicking around an idea for an urban intrigue campaign mostly taking place in a single city. The city's a melting pot so any race is permitted, except that in this campaign the Underdark doesn't exist, so the Underdark versions of races like Drow and Duergar and the like don't exist either.

Instead, they are secret societies and dissident factions that are only figuratively underground. The Drow in this campaign are a spider cult open only to elves. The Svirfneblin are isolationists, mostly gnomes, that violently oppose trade or contact with anyone outside the city. There's also a group of halfling revolutionaries that completely reject the idea of private property that call themselves Kender.

 

[Hussar]

I've been meaning to ask, how did you do that? Is it a homebrew creation or just something like a Changeling or what not?

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[Ringtail]

One campaign has no real restrictions. Another campaign has certain restrictions based on our DM's homebrew. I don't recall them all but I know that Gnomes are extinct, so none of them.

I'm getting ready to run a campaign using Midgard from Kobold Press. I'm planning on presenting a limited list of races for that campaign, mainly for a thematic purpose. There is a suggestion in that book to limit races depending on Geogrphical area and that's basically what I'm doing, to ensure a consistent theme. It's an Italian themed campaign featuring Humans, Half-Elves, Dwarves, Minotaurs & Tieflings. (Elves have retreated, gnomes and halflings, etc are not common in that region.) There might be one or two other races I'd have to check my notes.

 

[DammitVictor]

For as long as I've been a rabid evangelist of limiting the options available to nonhuman PCs, I've always considered myself pretty permissive when it comes to what kind of nonhuman PCs I allow: as long as it's sentient; it's free-willed; it's capable of functioning in a dungeon, on a ship, or among a (demi)human society and it exists in the setting, I'm usually game.

I'm happy to accommodate tortles and aranea in Mystara, but not drow, thri-kreen, or halfsies. There are no gnomes, (half)orcs, tieflings, aasimar, or dragonborn on Athas, but I'd love to help you play a genasi, xixchil, gith...

Gets a little fuzzier with metasettings, because I hate the concept of metasettings but my two favorite AD&D settings are Spelljammer and Planescape. Those settings properly... logically... should be vale tudo but they suffer from thematic collapse if you actually run them that way.

In Planescape, I strongly encourage players to make Planar characters and I only allow the most vanilla D&D races from the Prime Material Plane: the AD&D PHB races, plus orcs, goblins, hobgoblins, and half-ogres. Other monstrous races are only allowed, as planars, if they have an iconic planar presence.

In Spelljammer, I ditch the Great Wheel cosmology and the Radiant Triangle, basically making SJ not a metasetting. I don't allow any of the planar races except the githyanki and githzerai; I allow all of the surface-world PHB races (thus excluding dwarves, svirfneblin, and drow); all of the Complete Spacefarer's Handbook races, plus thri-kreen; and most basic orc, ogre (magi), and goblinoid types. If Oriental Adventures had ever really included good player races, I'd have included them; the only real contender here is the vanara, and CSFH already has two monkey races.

I prefer whitelisting to blacklisting, but sometimes I have to ban something specifically when players ignore general guidelines.

Also... this is normally where I brag about what I've done with Shroompunk, but I haven't ever actually run a Shroompunk game yet-- I've run proto-shroompunk games set in the Mushroom Kingdom, using a lot of different systems, but those games were always "humans only, characters are from Earth" and nonhumans were all NPCs. I've got a stupid number of nonhuman kiths, and I'm using the race-as-class/racial class rules for them... so if someone really wants to play something that's not included, it's going to be an uphill battle. Everything I'm inclined to consider includable has already been included.

I haven't actually run this campaign, but once I find some free time again, I'd like to try an all-monster campaign where the humans, dwarves, elves, half-elves, halflings, and gnomes are all explicitly the evil villains and banned as PCs.

Chaotic Good Human Ranger who has pledged his twin scimitars in opposition to the tyranny of his evil cousins?

Any time I try to limit any player choice, whatever I'm limiting will be the very first thing the players ask for. Oh, Mr. DM, you want to run a low magic campaign with no core casters? Can I be the only warlock/wizard/sorcerer? (first three character pitches I received after stating I wanted a low magic game).

"Hey, I'm going to run Street Fighter: the Storytelling Game, retelling the events of Final Fight and Street Fighter leading up to Street Fighter IV and possibly beyond."

"Oh, that sounds really cool! I want to play a character who can't fight and doesn't want to!"

Every. Single. Time.

EDIT: Oh, hey, major +1 for all the people who treat worldbuilding as part of character building in Session 0.0-0.5. Generally, there's about seven unique lineages in the PHB, and I think a D&D world should have about twice that-- including "standard opposition"-- but there's no reason they have to be the same 7-14 in every single game. Let players whitelist and blacklist things on their own, see where it goes.

 

[The Green Hermit]

At the start of the current campaign, I said no to Dragonborn, because it would cause potential issues that the players were not aware of. Now, though, if a player has to reroll, Dragonborn are also options, because they know what they are getting into.

New players have to avoid Dragonborn for the original reason.