D&D 5E What is the appeal of the weird fantasy races?

[Hussar]

Breathing life into the world is the responsibility of the DM.

Breathing life into the character is the responsibility of the player. I can do that whether or not I can play an anthropomorphic turtle. Or if anthropomorphic turtles are the only option and the only class allowed is ninja.

Nope.

Breathing life into the game is the responsibility of everyone at the table. I'm sick to death of players who figure that their responsibility to the game begins and ends with their character. Bugger that. Get off your lazy butt and help shape the world. Your character has a family, a history, an area of the world to come from - tell me about it. Your way, @Oofta, leads to cipher, Man with No Name characters with zero background and zero connection to the world because the DM is expected to do all the work of connecting the PC's to the world.

No thanks.

 

[Gammadoodler]

I despise calling out fallacies, because every argument not grounded in ones and zeros has many of them. So basically anything in real life is full of them. But, that is a huge jump you took. A DM details physiological reasons for a group of races to not exist, and you say he will also add bonus rules known only to him and abuse some mythical veto power during the game. That is not right.

It's a red flag for a game style I find disagreeable. Red flags aren't ironclad law, they are warning signs.

It's like the guy who flakes on a team assignment. Sure, they might not always flake, but it's behavior to be wary of. In your hypothetical, one red flag followed another, at character creation no less.

How much do you trust the guy who flakes twice...at the very beginning of the assignment?

 

[prabe]

Breathing life into the game is the responsibility of everyone at the table.

This.

If I'm a player, I want the DM to help me tie my character to the setting and the campaign. I don't need to be the star, but I need some connection if I'm gong to stay engaged.

If I'm the DM, I want the players to help me tie their characters to the setting and the campaign. I can't make all of them stars all the time, but connections help me as much as a DM as they help the players, IME.

 

[Hussar]

Well, you said that you had hoped that the players had made characters of those more exotic races, but they made Tolkien races instead. So that's why. Pretty straightforward.


Because there is insane amount of stuff. You can easily cut swathes of it and still have perfectly functioning game.

No, what I said was that after providing exotic races, everyone chose base races. I think had I only provided base races, the entire party would have chosen exotic. Players can be a cantankerous bunch.

Yes, but, swaths won't get used simply because you have only X number of players. It doesn't matter that D&D has a hundred different playable races, you'll only, at most, see as many as you have players. Why start removing a bunch of stuff beforehand? If you want to play a limited, focused game, there are games that are so much better than D&D for that.

 

[Hussar]

Again. For maybe the hundredth time, there is not one DM on here that has ever said anything remotely close to that. Not even in the slightest. Not even a little. Not even a microscopic cell's worth. Not even an atom's worth.

That's not true:

Breathing life into the world is the responsibility of the DM.

Breathing life into the character is the responsibility of the player. I can do that whether or not I can play an anthropomorphic turtle. Or if anthropomorphic turtles are the only option and the only class allowed is ninja.

Oofta and others have been very, very emphatic that setting design is the sole privelege of the DM and that players are forbidden from doing it.

 

[Maxperson]

When in a thread where someone is asking about why people value these things, and then we have non-fans coming in and saying "you really don't need these things you like," I don't feel like it's so weird to note that bad (or even just on the low end of mediocre) DMs are out there and do do that.

Alternatively? If we're going to assume that every DM is good, or at least on the good end of mediocre, why aren't we assuming that every player is good, or at least on the good end of mediocre?

We are assuming that the players aren't bad. We're discussing bad DMs and bad players in a lot of the posts, but then saying things like, "But in real life this doesn't happen." The reason for that is bad players are as rare as bad DMs.

 

[Minigiant]

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?

But different people game for different reasons, so you do you. It probably just won't be at my table.

The exoticism is not compared to what others are playing but what else you could be playing.

I've encountered 4 very good, even great DMs. One of whom DMs and plays for special events(including by WotC) that get streamed. I've hit maybe 2 bad DMs, so yeah, pretty darn rare. Bad DMs seem to be a bit rarer than good ones.

Very bad DMs tend to get weeded out if the players have options elsewhere.
But they scar everyone they touch.

 

[Don Durito]

Yes, but, swaths won't get used simply because you have only X number of players. It doesn't matter that D&D has a hundred different playable races, you'll only, at most, see as many as you have players. Why start removing a bunch of stuff beforehand? If you want to play a limited, focused game, there are games that are so much better than D&D for that.

Because you want to play D&D but with a limited focus? I mean that's obvious right?

I've seen this argument quite a few times - it's basically just telling people they're playing D&D wrong.

 

[Hussar]

Because you want to play D&D but with a limited focus? I mean that's obvious right?

I've seen this argument quite a few times - it's basically just telling people they're playing D&D wrong.

Playing D&D where you eject well over half the material on your shelves is kinda like using a PS5 to play Pong. Sure, you can do it, but, what a waste. Why not use something that's actually designed to run Pong, rather than using something where you're only using about 10% of its potential?

You want to play humans only and 3 classes? WTF are you using D&D for? It's such a poor system for doing something like that.

It's not that you're playing D&D wrong, but, using a hammer to pound screws, while it works, isn't the best use of your time.

Now, to be fair, I DID run a very limited D&D 5e game with my Thule game. But, that's because I was doing a very specific experiment, and, frankly, it failed miserably. The players constantly chafed at the restrictions, which they saw as largely pointless. I would have been FAR better off playing that campaign using a much different system, like, maybe, Savage Worlds, than 5e D&D.

There's one thing about it. Having done it now, I will never do it again. I think it's a complete mistake. It's no fun for the players and because the players don't like it, no fun for me.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Were those RPGs limited to 3 classes with no subclasses?

Zero classes, zero subclasses.