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

[jmartkdr2]

Aarakokra are a tough one for me. I don't find flight, alone, to be an issue, but I worry about a base speed of 50 feet. That's very fast.

But the more common issue is: a lot of players will pick the race for pure powergaming reasons. They might roleplay the choice (with the occasional verbal tic), but many will do so only to a limited degree, and the race doesn't provide a ton of really interesting, distinctive hooks for rp anyways. So if someone says they've never seen a player pick aarakokra except to powergame - I totally believe them.

I don't believe banning the race is an ideal solution to that problem, however. Powergamers aren't going to stop powergaming because you remove a strong option; they'll just pick the best option of the remaining choices. And some people will roleplay out the whole bird-man thing and are more interested in having feathers than flight. But those people are rare and/or playing kenku already.

So banning the race is the simplest solution: it reigns in the spotlight-hogging of powergamers and probably won't bother anyone else.

 

[J.Quondam]

So banning the race is the simplest solution: it reigns in the spotlight-hogging of powergamers and probably won't bother anyone else.

What's probably going through my head in this situation:

"Hmm... Should I ban the race or ban the powergamer?"​

​

.

 

[Deset Gled]

Aarakokra are a tough one for me. I don't find flight, alone, to be an issue, but I worry about a base speed of 50 feet. That's very fast.

But the more common issue is: a lot of players will pick the race for pure powergaming reasons.

One of my worst experiences with winged races had the opposite problem.

I let new player talk me into allowing them to be a "special" race because they really wanted to stand out. I allowed a winged race in, despite the fact that the party was only around level 2-3. From that point on, I had to plan in flight as a variable. No one else had access to it yet, so it meant redesigning lots of low level challenges around that character. I spent significant time making sure locations and encounters allowed flying to be useful, but not overpowering.

They never flew. Ever. Even when it was completely obvious that going up would be the simplest way to solve a problem, they just never did. Plenty of nice reminders were given. They even watched another player climb a tree once.

It's probably the worst experience I've had in terms of effort discrepancy between player and DM, and it really lowered my enjoyment level for the campaign.

 

[tetrasodium]

My group has a person who usually plays Tabaxi, and another player who often does. I've never noticed any problems with their movement either. Maybe it's because we usually do Theater of the Mind or use limited battlemats instead of a full VTT or similar?

Probably. It was already somewhat of a hazy likely that wotc neither plays or considers grid combat anything but a thing of derision that they were not able to completely remove. The poison pill flanking & facing rules The rabbit d12 feet hop* made the it painfully obvious that wotc does not consider grid combat. a tabaxi roague bing able to move 24 squares,18 squares & still attack, or 12 squares & still disengage is rather problematic in grid combat.

* Grid combat takes place on 5 foot squares, it's impossible to model anything but multiples of five so any ability that grants movement in speeds other than multiples of 5 should obviously never have made it past the initial "hmm..." by anyone who considers grid combat a valid style of gameplay

 

[Eltab]

PS. Thanks to all for refraining from making a "this argument is for the birds" joke.

The conversation has been interesting informative and positive, so the opportunity to make light of it just kinda flew the coop.

 

[Hussar]

One of my worst experiences with winged races had the opposite problem.

I let new player talk me into allowing them to be a "special" race because they really wanted to stand out. I allowed a winged race in, despite the fact that the party was only around level 2-3. From that point on, I had to plan in flight as a variable. No one else had access to it yet, so it meant redesigning lots of low level challenges around that character. I spent significant time making sure locations and encounters allowed flying to be useful, but not overpowering.

They never flew. Ever. Even when it was completely obvious that going up would be the simplest way to solve a problem, they just never did. Plenty of nice reminders were given. They even watched another player climb a tree once.

It's probably the worst experience I've had in terms of effort discrepancy between player and DM, and it really lowered my enjoyment level for the campaign.

Sorry, @Deset Gled - I laughed because of what you said. I wasn't laughing at you. But, having been in very similar situations SOOO many times, it just made me giggle. You can lead the horse to water ...

Like I said, I've found that many of the "problems" That people talk about just don't happen for me. So the Tabaxi moves fast, so what? It's not it's going to make a difference most of the time - you still only move so far to get to the enemy. Being on a grid or not shouldn't make a difference. Most combats start around 50 feet away at most anyway. It's pretty rare that you have 300 foot combat areas - mostly because people don't play on ping pong table sized battlemaps. And, as far as fliers go, there's a lot of flying monsters. Currently I'm doing a Candlekeep adventure where the big combat features a wight and two gargoyles. The previous adventure didn't have fliers, but, everyone had ranged weapons, so, flying didn't matter that much. And the first Candlekeep adventure is indoors. Which, frankly, about half of all adventures happen indoors - whether it's a castle, dungeon, or whatever. It's pretty rare to have wide open spaces for combat. Heck, even trees make flying combat very difficult, particularly now that you can add line of sight obstacle blocking in Fantasy Grounds. The fliers can't see the targets or are shooting through serious cover nearly all the time.

Like I said, I'm just not seeing the issue here.

 

[Mad_Jack]

You can't really place 100% of the blame on kender players when that is how the race is canonically depicted and Word of God is that anyone who retaliates against kender in-character and in-universe for this behavior is Objectively Evil. Kender players are obnoxious because the authors' Mary Sue BS enables and encourages them to be.

See, the problem with Kender is that playing them requires massive effort and finesse on the part of the player to play them well... By which I mean that it's easy to play up the annoying aspects...but hard to ensure that you're playing them up at the right times and in a way that it's making the story more interesting for everyone. The Kender's personality quirks need to be used as tools to enable the other party members, which requires constant effort and awareness of when those "opportune moments" are coming. And a good rapport with a DM who is willing to give you the opportunities and leeway to run with them.
Much like any one of the other common "offenders" in the game's history - Drow, Aarocockra, Pixies, Chaotic Neutral, etc. - it's easy to play one, but requires a much more involved and nuanced performance to play a character who is a good party member first and a good <insert X here> second.

 

[tetrasodium]

Sorry, @Deset Gled - I laughed because of what you said. I wasn't laughing at you. But, having been in very similar situations SOOO many times, it just made me giggle. You can lead the horse to water ...

Like I said, I've found that many of the "problems" That people talk about just don't happen for me. So the Tabaxi moves fast, so what? It's not it's going to make a difference most of the time - you still only move so far to get to the enemy. Being on a grid or not shouldn't make a difference. Most combats start around 50 feet away at most anyway. It's pretty rare that you have 300 foot combat areas - mostly because people don't play on ping pong table sized battlemaps. And, as far as fliers go, there's a lot of flying monsters. Currently I'm doing a Candlekeep adventure where the big combat features a wight and two gargoyles. The previous adventure didn't have fliers, but, everyone had ranged weapons, so, flying didn't matter that much. And the first Candlekeep adventure is indoors. Which, frankly, about half of all adventures happen indoors - whether it's a castle, dungeon, or whatever. It's pretty rare to have wide open spaces for combat. Heck, even trees make flying combat very difficult, particularly now that you can add line of sight obstacle blocking in Fantasy Grounds. The fliers can't see the targets or are shooting through serious cover nearly all the time.

Like I said, I'm just not seeing the issue here.

That bolded bit is something that changed in the last 7-8 years since 5e was released.

• Roll20 starts melting down some player computers around 50x50 sized grids, which is on par with chessex maps. That imposes some limitations on players
  • For these types of combat going beyond that is pretty much "well bob you are off the map so nehnenenehnhneh" & bob is forced to avoid doing things that go beyond the map edge.
• With VTTs like arkenforge& such that run locally on the GM's PC pumping the map to a tvbox or whatever the max size of a grid map is dictated by 32/64bit floating point giving a max size somewhere absurd in the millions of squares.
  • Bob no longer needs to worry about moving off the map so his tabaxi rogue can close to melee from sort range of bows.. & the party wants to start from those ranges because sharpshooter spell sniper & eldritch lance make it possible to attack with no penalty at a range of hundreds of feet.... It doesn't stop there because the warlock & ranged characters want to start combat with a crossfire 240 300 480 or 600 feet from the target while Barry Allen the tabaxi is literally the flash weaving around the victims of d&d's equivalent of rods from god who probably can't take cover thanks to the cross fire. Even if they can take cover, barry allen can stab & run out of reach to ensure they can't counter him unless spending at least a round* getting hit by crossfire before closing in next round when barry attacks & zips away
    
    * assuming the tabaxi rogue remains still for them rather than shoting a shortbow/light xbow while moving away to make it 2 rounds of crossfire exposure

 

[teitan]

Drow. I don't generally allow Drow because they might not even exist in my homebrew. My next campaign will probably disclude dragonborn, halflings, gnomes, elves, & dwarves as well with Half Elves being called Feytouched, eladrin being elves (but not PCs), half orcs being a cursed race of men that are called Half-orcs but aren't. Dwarves will be more akin to their lore and not PCs but using Duergar stats to emulate them. Bringing in some Ratfolk PCs, Trollkin from Midgard as standard trolls but also PCs. It's a more dark fantasy setting.

 

[Hussar]

That bolded bit is something that changed in the last 7-8 years since 5e was released.

• Roll20 starts melting down some player computers around 50x50 sized grids, which is on par with chessex maps. That imposes some limitations on players
  • For these types of combat going beyond that is pretty much "well bob you are off the map so nehnenenehnhneh" & bob is forced to avoid doing things that go beyond the map edge.
• With VTTs like arkenforge& such that run locally on the GM's PC pumping the map to a tvbox or whatever the max size of a grid map is dictated by 32/64bit floating point giving a max size somewhere absurd in the millions of squares.
  • Bob no longer needs to worry about moving off the map so his tabaxi rogue can close to melee from sort range of bows.. & the party wants to start from those ranges because sharpshooter spell sniper & eldritch lance make it possible to attack with no penalty at a range of hundreds of feet.... It doesn't stop there because the warlock & ranged characters want to start combat with a crossfire 240 300 480 or 600 feet from the target while Barry Allen the tabaxi is literally the flash weaving around the victims of d&d's equivalent of rods from god who probably can't take cover thanks to the cross fire. Even if they can take cover, barry allen can stab & run out of reach to ensure they can't counter him unless spending at least a round* getting hit by crossfire before closing in next round when barry attacks & zips away
    
    * assuming the tabaxi rogue remains still for them rather than shoting a shortbow/light xbow while moving away to make it 2 rounds of crossfire exposure

Again, yes and no. Because, sure, your map in Arkenforge can be massive, you're still limited by other people's connections and, IME, any image over 1 meg and you're starting to have issues. So, yeah, you're looking at about (presuming 50 pixel grids) about 50x50 maps tend to be about is big as it gets. Plus, again, in play, combat almost never happens at more than about 100 feet between combatants and that's pretty rare. Typically combat starts up around 50 feet apart (ish). So, sure, the party can start up the fight at hundreds of feet away, but, there are so many impediments to that:

• Line of sight. It's nearly impossible to have lines of sight that far. For one, night fighting limits you to 60 feet or less. Indoor never has areas that big. So, right off the bat, the majority of encounters are closer. Even outdoors, unless you're fighting in flat, open fields, you rarely have sight lines of more than a couple of hundred feet at the absolute outside and most of the time, it's far, far shorter.
• Most of the time, the party isn't hunting the bad guys. So, the encounter, which may or may not be a combat encounter, typically starts within talking distance.

So, no, it almost never works that way in play. Unless you're fighting on water, battlefields in D&D are virtually never that large. You simply can't see that far.