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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 9817170" data-attributes="member: 87792">Quite the reverse. Races are part of how players get to personalise their characters. They are more intimately connected with the parts the players engage in than geographic features that the players are never going to see; the players don't carry geography around with them. Meanwhile magic is clearly a setting conceit. The purpose of D&D races is presentation and player identification with the character, and fun.Do fantasy races have to have a deep connection with the setting? No. In my current game the Ribbets live on a small isolated island just off the main continent and for almost all the NPCs this is the first Ribbet they have ever met (and very possibly the last). And in a different campaign the Ribbets could be there and the players just wouldn't notice.Yet despite this the fact that the player is playing a Ribbet and Ribbet lore building on what has been established has been one of the key drivers to the plot. It's been a great story arc that would never have mattered if I had been much more precious and not allowed one of the players to play a slightly melodramatic frog-boy because he thought the art was cool. Had I not allowed him enough space to start this story off and then worked and built on it I'd still have had entertaining scenes with the player (he's a good player) but the story would have landed nowhere near as hard. And even if I'd tried the same story it would have been cheesy because it would not have had the foundations and the investment. This is as far as I can recall literally the first time I have ever heard of this happening in a tabletop RPG. And the only context I can imagine players even asking is if someone, being precious about their setting, asks what the point of Tieflings or Dragonborn and so the players ask what the purpose of every thing the DM does allow them to have. If everything has to have a purpose, and a purpose connected to the setting you can't blame yourself when you get cross-examined on that.But in a more realistic setting where some things exist just because they are cool or because someone thought it would be a good idea or by mistake or even by pure chance many things do have purposes but this isn't a question the players feel they need to ask. And the more some GMs claim "Only things I know the purpose of before the game starts" the more they drive away some folks and stunt the creativity and investment in the game of others.Indeed. VtM is great to read. If you want a set of game books to read while sitting on the loo they are great. But then you get into the world Piled High and Deep that some players find too much to engage with, and then you get into the metaplot that discourages interaction between the players and the setting because the NPCs will do all the important stuff which is heavily about Epic Conflicts with the players in the background.</blockquote>

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