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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DammitVictor" data-source="post: 8353366" data-attributes="member: 6750908">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.Chaotic Good Human Ranger who has pledged his twin scimitars in opposition to the tyranny of his evil cousins?"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.</blockquote>

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