A DM can most certainly limit you form making a specific interesting character. Multiple times.
Absolutely. I've had times where I applied for an online game (which is 99.9% of my gaming) and been rejected each time I tried an interesting character, something I spent multiple hours working on a brief but rich backstory (something that can be summarized in two paragraphs), for "light and transient reasons," as it were. Whereas others with shoestring story but DM-favored character options (race and class primarily, since that's the only thing present across various editions) got in. Likewise, I've also been brought into games where I was favored because I
did have a thematic, coherent character concept, even if it involved things that might otherwise raise eyebrows (like a gestalt Druid/Wizard with Planar Shepherd levels). It's most assuredly a spectrum, and it
absolutely can be the DM who is the obstructionist.
You're overly pessimistic about this. It's not as if the DM is sitting around waiting to poopoo your ideas.
Well, I've seen it happen. I've also seen people explicitly say--on this board and others--that they enjoy banning things popular with other people but not them. There's absolutely a minority group within those-who-favor-high-detail-that-forbids-expansion that
enjoy banning things, and if there's daylight between that and "waiting to poopoo [my] ideas," I'm not seeing it.
Because there is insane amount of stuff. You can easily cut swathes of it and still have perfectly functioning game.
"Perfectly functioning" is a worthless standard of quality, appropriate only to things that function and do nothing else, like washing machines.
And, honestly? "PHB+1" in 5e is not "an insane amount of stuff." Even if every player picked a different +1, it's
still not an insane amount of stuff. With just the core books + Xanathar's, Mordenkainen's, Tasha's, Volo's, Wildemount, SCAG, and Eberron, and ignoring reprints, I'm counting 35 races, and that's including some
really out-there stuff like Zombie, Skeleton, or Kuo-Toa. (Note that I exclude subrace from this count for exactly the same reason that I would exclude sub
class for a discussion about how many classes exist in 5e. I also excluded the Custom Lineage because it's specifically meant as a one-size-fits-all structure.)
And of those 35 races, you're only going to see 5 in most games. Really, it's 5 out of something-less-than-35, because there's two more books than there are players in a typical game, three if you count the DMG.
Virtually all professionally written setting books allow for pretty much any race in the game. And, they always include space for stuff to be added later.
Yep. Even the oft-cited Dark Sun makes room for variations or exceptions. Re-configuring the Dragonborn as Dray (and radically changing their culture as a result), for an official example. It is, of course, a good example for a place where there's a hard-coded reason why you don't find gnomes or goliaths or whatever, but The Tablelands are (potentially) a pretty small chunk of Athas--and even parts of it wildly diverge from the normal theme, such as the Crimson Savannah or the Last Sea. While it
is reasonable to say, "I'm not willing to let you play a gnome, that's outside my comfort zone for the kind of game I want to run" or even "...that would make your character too much the center of attention--everyone would want to either help you or destroy you, which is too much early on," it is incorrect to say that nothing whatever could be done.
The Tablelands aren't more than a thousand miles on a side (=1 mil square miles). Them
plus the Crimson Savannah (at least from what maps I have access to) barely make up a third of the continental US, to say nothing of an entire continent like North America (9.4 mil square miles) or Africa (11.7 mil), hell not even
Australia (~3 mil), and that landmass actually resembles the Tablelands to some small extent. The notion that another continent exists--perhaps one far less scoured by Rajaat's mad genocide--is hardly untenable, especially since the aforementioned Savannah is
much wetter than the Tablelands. Who knows what might lie beyond the horizon of the Sea of Silt? Who knows where the horrific storms that wet the Savannah come from?
Again, I am NOT saying you HAVE to do this. You emphatically, explicitly DO NOT. Saying, "I want to run a classic Dark Sun game, so only the described surviving races," is perfectly acceptable, and that means no pixies, no lizardmen, no gnomes, etc. What I am saying is that saying "Athas!" and acting like your hands are tied
against your will isn't kosher, like even if you wanted to you somehow "can't." Even without invoking the "I'm the DM I can do whatever I want" rule,
the lands beyond the horizon can always serve you, they are inexhaustible sources of wonder, mystery, exceptions, etc. If you choose not to, that choice is on you. As long as they don't go overboard about it, which will always be a contextual thing and thus no hard universal line can be drawn, I don't see why
even in Dark Sun, a player couldn't ask to talk about it. Again, assuming this is BEFORE the player has officially joined up, during the "I'm looking for a game, what are you offering, will it work for me" phase because
obviously that's when you do the talking-it-out stuff.
If everyone at the table is playing a "weird and exotic" race while no one in the game world bats an eye, is it really weird or exotic?
Absolutely. Do we
really need to go into why
a Pixar supervillain's logic is busted? Do we
really have to dress down the "when everyone is special, no one is" argument for all its flaws?
Ugh, and I thought the "death of the author" tangent was bad...
