Should I bother with new races in my Homebrew???

[Kapture]

Nyuh.

Um. I just started a homebrew myself, in a similar situation where I hadn't run a homebrew for years, and I find the following two things:

1) If you don't want to tell stories about the standard ADND races and their relationships, you should make up different races and superimpose your stories on them.

2) Most new players to your game will choose a human.

3) Most of the rest will reach for a familiar archetype to base a character on.

4) On the one hand, there's only so many archetypes you can comfortably use and have people be interested in them.

a)There are only so many ways you can bend the system and have them be an ECL 0.

5) You can pick only the archetypes you like, but inevitibly someone will want to play something you don't like.

6) Less is not necessarily more.

7) Playing funky looking superhumans is fun.

8) I notice that just as many players like to play against type as with.

9) The sins of fantasy race archetypes will often be repeated on fantasy culture archetypes. So what the hell.

I myself almost always go the Ming from Mongo/Nightbreed route.

 

[Psion]

It depends on how lazy your players are.

I am of the growing opinion that the existing core races are a little stale and players are in a rut with them, and think that introducing some new races is a great way to add a fresh spin to the game.

If your players are so lazy they really won't bother to absorb any information on new races other than how it can make them more uber, may as well play an all human campaign...

 

[Tonguez]

I'm going to take a different tack from most answers and suggest you ask yourself why are you creating a homebrew world at all?

I love homebrew and do so in order to explore different stories, different cultures and characteristics and that for me ought to mean having races that 'fit' with those characteristics reflect the different cultures and assist the story. Whether elf or dwarf or 'New Race Y' fits the setting is the only consideration you need to make.

If the choice is PHB races in or not rather than 'does it fit my story' then I say just run a vanilla setting allowing all races and let it self evolve

actually after realising that I've never played or run anything other than homebrew worlds I've decided that my next campaign will be entirely based on WotC modules
and see what happens...