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<blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5451672" data-attributes="member: 58197">As a&nbsp; DM, I am unwilling to run a kitchen-sink world; I like focus and theme, and restricting the list of races available is part of that. Kitchen-sink fantasy bores me, and if I'm bored, the campaign isn't going to be fun for anybody.D&amp;D has inculcated the kitchen-sink mentality from the start, though. Look at 2E. You had an unbelievable wealth of settings--literally dozens of them, spread over many distinct worlds. But go where you would, there you would find elves, dwarves, halflings, and probably gnomes too. It was a rare setting that omitted even one of these races, and I'm not aware of any that got rid of them all. So a lot of people got the idea that a setting has to have all the &quot;standard races&quot; available to play.As time went on, people wanted to branch out some, try some new races. Nothing wrong with that, nor with WotC catering to them. The problem was, they stuck with the kitchen-sink approach, and the dishes just kept piling up. From a business standpoint, it makes sense; you want all your products to be compatible with each other. But it did mean an accumulation of wahoo.(As regards making nonhumans rare, I think 3E did the best job of this. Humans are the go-to race in 3E. You can build pretty much any character concept with a human and make it effective. Nonhumans are much more niche. If you like having the occasional elf or dwarf, but prefer a majority human party, it's a good way to go. These days, however, I find it simpler just to ban outright the races I don't want to see.)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Dausuul, post: 5451672, member: 58197"] As a DM, I am unwilling to run a kitchen-sink world; I like focus and theme, and restricting the list of races available is part of that. Kitchen-sink fantasy bores me, and if I'm bored, the campaign isn't going to be fun for anybody. D&D has inculcated the kitchen-sink mentality from the start, though. Look at 2E. You had an unbelievable wealth of settings--literally dozens of them, spread over many distinct worlds. But go where you would, there you would find elves, dwarves, halflings, and probably gnomes too. It was a rare setting that omitted even one of these races, and I'm not aware of any that got rid of them all. So a lot of people got the idea that a setting [i]has[/i] to have all the "standard races" available to play. As time went on, people wanted to branch out some, try some new races. Nothing wrong with that, nor with WotC catering to them. The problem was, they stuck with the kitchen-sink approach, and the dishes just kept piling up. From a business standpoint, it makes sense; you want all your products to be compatible with each other. But it did mean an accumulation of wahoo. (As regards making nonhumans rare, I think 3E did the best job of this. Humans are the go-to race in 3E. You can build pretty much any character concept with a human and make it effective. Nonhumans are much more niche. If you like having the occasional elf or dwarf, but prefer a majority human party, it's a good way to go. These days, however, I find it simpler just to ban outright the races I don't want to see.) [/QUOTE]

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