NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 9397288" data-attributes="member: 7006">In answer to your first part of your post... my opinion would be whatever narrative aspects or connections to the setting a character might have.  There are many things in the D&D game that a player can choose to make their character different, but which do not give a mechanic connected to it.  As others have said... the location where a character grew up gives no mechanical benefit, but yet a lot of us still choose it anyway.  Reason of course being that if/when the adventures the PCs go on ever take them there to that location... there may be quite a bit of narrative benefit for the character-- with the PC recognizing areas, knowing people, having a reputation (even if there aren't specific game mechanics given.)  Not to mention that for many editions of D&D, a character's former job (or Background) never gave you any mechanics for what you used to do before becoming an adventurer... but whatever it was a person chose, there might be narrative implications should they come up as well.  Species is no different.  Even if there were no specific game mechanics for each species... how people in the setting would react to you, what knowledge you might have on hand, and how you would portray yourself in the fiction would indeed still be something of note.  That can all occur even without a specific "+2 to X skill" mechanic for instance.That being said... the only reason I mention this is because I absolutely also agree with your second sentence, and think it's possibly the true crux of the matter-- it would indeed put more necessity and stress onto the Dungeon Master to make these narrative conceits come to life.  In order for Species, or Background, or Place You Grew Up to matter (to the player or the setting on the whole)... the DM would be the one needing to find places during the game to illustrate and narrate these things and let the players play them.  Which does put a lot more on a DM's plate.  So having "species mechanics" does allow the DM to artificially make each species narratively different for the player's benefit... thus allowing the DM to never bother ever having to talk or think about species again if they don't want to (the same way more often that not, most games don't ever really care about the "hometowns" of the characters, and what living in those areas possibly could have granted for mechanics.)  Even if the Human character and the Elf character are played exactly the same way by their respective players and anyone who was watching the game would never be able to tell the differences between the species apart.. the fact one of them could say "I only sleep for 4 hours!" is all the players might feel they need to make their character (and species) be different.  Which isn't nothing.</blockquote>

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