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!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6486391" data-attributes="member: 1465">I've done a little bit of everything, many times I just had to accept DMing fairly vanilla D&D, in which case I don't have the luxury of planning a fantasy setting, and I just go by books (typically startting with "core only"). In this case it's a bit pointless to suggest players what they should or shouldn't play within the allowed books.I have of course also run the game using published settings (Forgotten Realms and Rokugan), in which case I stick with the campaign settings own restrictions and ideas of rarity. I hope I will manage to run my 5e conversion of Rokugan, in which case I will probably restrict everyone to Rokugani noble humans, because everything else is difficult to roleplay satisfactorily in this setting.In the early days I've attempted to create a few settings of my own, and should I use a top-down (DM-driven) approach again to fantasy settings design, I will definitely restrict Races and Classes. This is one of the key methods to establish a unique flavor to a fantasy setting! I would definitely try to avoid both the "everything allowed" idea and the usual Human+Elf+Dwarf+Halfling starting point. These two choices leads too easily to a vanilla setting, which is not bad per se, but makes me feel I'm wasting my time to design it since it's identical to 1000s others.I think the OP has already thought about that. I could ask you "what does allowing all/more races and classes really adds to the game and world". It may certainly add tactical options, but tactical options don't need to be added via race or class, you could add those same options via spells, feats, tools etc. If your concern is lack of tactical variety, more races/classes is not the only solution, and furthermore it may actually even be a bad solution for some groups (e.g. introducing a race that makes the best archers, then everyone wanting to play an archer feels compelled to choose it, then they realize they have to give up on something else they wanted more which is available only to another race). That said, I don't think tactical options are what the OP thread is about, but rather races and classes as major world-building blocks. If I ask again "what does allowing all/more races and classes really adds to the game and world" but focus on the "world" part now, I am not so sure that more is a good thing, because IMXP players tend more often than not to roleplay all races equally, and DMs tend more often than not to represent all races societies equally in the world. Using less of them can make it easier to portray them distinctly, but also can shift the focus of a campaign, and that's the main reason why I would want to do that... like have one campaign settings where Tieflings and Dwarves are major players, another where Gnomes and Dragonborn are, rather than have yet another soup with all possible flavors in it...A final note, if you are worried about DMs having too much say in what the players can play, this is a separate matter of deciding between a top-down/DM-driven approach to world building ("DM has decided you must all be Humans, Elves or Aasimar") versus bottom-up/player-driven approach ("Bob wants to play a human, Jane wants to play an Elf, Susan wants to play an Aasimar, so the DM makes those 3 races the ones around which the campaign theme is built").You must have quite a low esteem for Rangers if you equate them to trappers or "someone who knows the woods" <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />But I think the problem is probably that everybody equates Fighters to "someone who knows how to swing a sword", and then assume every guard in town or soldier in the army is of the Fighter class.In an edition where the monsters and NPC explicitly don't follow the same rules as the PC, anybody who is not a PC doesn't have to be anything...</blockquote>

Verification