What Races Do You Allow?

[Herzog]

I play and DM in several campaigns.
One is restricted to Humans, being an Earth setting (historical with some magic)
One is an Eberron setting, and is pretty loose on allowed races (we have (had) a goblin, changeling, warforged, Kalashtar, Shifter, Drow, and I'm playing a Dragonwrought Kobold (no cheese) myself.
One is a post-mage-war setting, in which half-races are the rule instead of the exception (out of necessity: the pureblood population was too small to sustain the various races). And Dwarves are disallowed (considered evil).
One is the Mystara setting, in which I allow only exceptions to the standard OD&D races when a) the player has a very good story b) I can provide a reason for the race to interact peacefully with the players group.

In all settings I DM I try to roleplay the distrust 'goblinoid' and other races instill in the general population because of their reputation. It is up to the players themselves to either validate that reputation or attempt to disprove it by their behaviour.

 

[Empirate]

So the Elan has a racial ability that can be a lifesaver. Circumstantially. At high levels only. If you pick your career from a certain set of classes.

That's good. Options are good. But remember that this racial ability is strictly an option, nothing more. It doesn't provide you with strategies (like a Human bonus feat can, especially at low to mid level play, which is most common). It doesn't provide you with the power to overcome an obstacle - merely with a way to not die. Which is still limited to mitigating single massive attacks that only deal HP damage (not your only problem at high levels, really). And which, more importantly, eats up your resources for actually dealing with the threat that nearly killed you in the first place.

If we are to consider strictly racial ability power, we need to do so abstracted from class abilities, and abstracted from levels.

What can the Elan do? Prevent a little damage, and get its saves buffed a few times per day. Preventing more damage takes a certain build, and we're not talking builds here - otherwise the Human Red Wizard example simply trumps the Elan's staying alive trick.

I'll not go into cheesy races like Anthropomorphic Animals etc. Just plain, exotic LA+0 races.
Consider the Lesser Air Genasi. It doesn't need to breathe. That, right there, provides you with the ability to access three quarters of the planet's surface that are effectively closed to most other land-bound races. You're further immune to inhaled poisons etc. You can also levitate, which can put you out of harm's way, or get you places the others can't access (again). Great!

What about the Neraph: no need to eat, breathe, or sleep, due to the Outsider type. You can effectively walk over the biggest landmass of the planet without stopping to take a break.

Necropolitans are Undead, with all that entails. You're immune to pretty much everything one can be immune to, won't ever die if you're careful, and can abuse Negative Energy shenanigans. You can also spellstitch yourself with Wish, Forcecage, and maybe Stoneskin (just trying to come up with costly spells), but that's going into builds again, so disregard it for now.

Warforged have already been harped on, and rightly so.

Raptorans, Dragonborn etc. can fly. Can Elans fly? I thought not. Flying is good. This can outright prevent the attack that your Elan had to spend all his PP on to negate, before it ever happens.


And although these are all LA+0, Humans are still considered the single most powerful race for almost any build out there! That should tell you how important builds are (as Humans' advantage really only comes into play when builds are considered). Elans' racial abilities must therefore be compared to other, non-racial abilities.

For example, Sorcerers can cast Wings of Cover as a 2nd level spell. Immediate Action to prevent one attack, regardless what it does, without burning through many resources at all. This is better than an Elan's Resilience even at 4th level. It is much, MUCH better at higher level, because you're spending relatively less resources on it.

Just my opinion of the kind of yardstick one should be using.

 

[Celebrim]

And although these are all LA+0, Humans are still considered the single most powerful race for almost any build out there!

Much as the fluff of a race is campaign specific, exactly how the crunch of a race works out is campaign specific as well. In most games an ability that allows you to get by without eating isn't as much useful crunch as it is fluff. It may never come up because the DM is highly unlikely to throw any starvation challenges at you, and if he were to do so, in most games it can be easily fixed with 'create food and water'.

But if a DM modifies his game world so that 'create food and water' is difficult (a higher level spell), or impossible ('the five principle exceptions to Gamp's Law') then suddenly the otherwise minor ability to go without food becomes huge.

Even without rules modifications, the utility of 'immunity to disease' is entirely capaign specific. In a typical campaign, exposure to disease is a hazard associated with encounters with certain monsters and may never even come up and when it does is a minor inconvienance. Immunity to disease is therefore a rather minor ability. In a grim and gritty campaign situation where the DM is secretly making disease exposure checks on a weekly or even daily basis and plague ravages the nations, the exposure to disease is a regular hazard that if not avoided can severely tax party resources.

In the overwhelming number of campaigns, 'doesn't age' is simply fluff because most campaigns don't last more than a few months or a few years of in game time. But I have known games where years are assumed to pass between adventures and the campaign scope is measured in decades. In that case, how fast you age matters very much indeed.

So sure, humans are a powerful and popular race and rightly so, but its hard to compare their abilities with immunities without some context. Absolute abilities get more and more important as the scale of the thing that they protect against expands.

For example, Sorcerers can cast Wings of Cover as a 2nd level spell.

Assuming of course that we aren't limiting spells to spells in the SRD. You are here assuming an optional and perhaps obscure race is balanced by the inclusion of an optional spell. It's very hard however to say what additional material is included from one campaign to the next. There are ALOT of 3.X hardcovers, and I'd imagine that campaigns that include every single one on a regular basis are not typical. Most groups probably haven't invested the several thousand dollars requied to keep up with all the material even if they wanted to.

 

[Empirate]

Good points all. Let me just comment on the following:

Assuming of course that we aren't limiting spells to spells in the SRD. You are here assuming an optional and perhaps obscure race is balanced by the inclusion of an optional spell. It's very hard however to say what additional material is included from one campaign to the next. There are ALOT of 3.X hardcovers, and I'd imagine that campaigns that include every single one on a regular basis are not typical. Most groups probably haven't invested the several thousand dollars requied to keep up with all the material even if they wanted to.

Sure enough, most groups don't play with just everything allowed. I just thought it stood to reason that including Elans is at about the same level of 'includedness of semi-obscure material' as Wings of Cover. But if you want, Improved Blink or Greater Mirror Image (both just a little less obscure than Wings of Cover, and higher level, but still) can be substituted.

 

[Dandu]

Abrupt Jaunt is worth mentioning.

 

[Eldritch_Lord]

Because the Average commoner in a medieval borderlands setting would be a racist. They see a half-orc even they think stabby stabby. Let alone an ogre? For lords sake St-Cuthbert is even racist towards dwarves and elves in the Temple of Elemental Evil

Would they be, though? Sure, in the medieval period on Earth, most peasants would probably be racist and afraid out outsiders...but in D&D, the other races are common and can be found pretty much everywhere unless you have a setting that specifically sets out to make them rare--heck, a human commoner is more likely to run into a half-orc than a medieval Englishman would have been to run into someone from the Orient.

For example, in my game elves are arguably more shunned in human lands than goblins, not because elves are necessarily bad, but because elves are more alien than goblins. Goblins and humans largely value the same things. Elves could care less about most things that humans value. The world isn't a jolly place were everyone gets along regardless of how long their race lives, their biology, or what their attitude to life is, or even a world divided into the nice beautiful races in their fight with the dark ugly evil ones. What gets along has much less to do with appearance than it has to do with innate characteristics. Elves live for centuries if not struck down by disease or violence - both of which they are uncommonly vulnerable to. They can literally commune with nature, and they'll probably outlast any possible material possession in a blink of an eye, and if you withhold beauty from them they'll literally die like if you withheld food from a man. They are therefore naturally incompatible with humanity.

Now this is the kind of world I like to see. My main problem with the D&D default assumptions isn't that I want everyone to be happy and living together singing kumbaya, but rather that the set of default races is entirely arbitrary. Half-orcs are fine, orcs are not. Gnomes are fine, goblins are not. Elves are fine, hobgoblins are not.

Hobgoblins believe that all other races are inferior; they are "insulting and dismissive" of non-hobgoblins. If a hobgoblin raiding party attacks a settlement unprovoked, the default races band together to defend it...yet if a band of snooty, arrogant, insulting elves attacks an orc or goblin settlement without provocation, this is perfectly justified. Why? Because hobgoblins have a little "usually LE" in their statblock while elves have a little "usually CG." So if a hobgoblin walks into a town, he's immediately viewed with suspicion and possibly kicked out, while a human is given a free pass, despite the fact that humans are perfectly capable of being evil and the Generic Evil Wizard is as often a human or elf or whatever as a hobgoblin or orc.

In fantasy worlds where monsters are around every corner and evil is a tangible force, I don't think the forces of Good (or at least Neutral) should be turning people away because of their race, they should be doing it for other reasons. A hobgoblin walks into town and passes the detect evil test? Sure, let him in; we have a bunch more because "usually LE" doesn't mean "always LE." A ghoul walks into town and (somehow) passes the detect evil test? Even if he's really sincere, we're not going to kill our own people to feed him, sorry. When creatures survive on human flesh, when their society runs on enslaving humanoids, when their very presence messes with reality, that's the kind of creature that should be automatically shunned.

In my experience, not holding on tight to the innate differences of the species and the conflicts they might create ends up leaking into the world you create to the extent that nothing - whether dragon or fiend or thing from the dungeon dimensions - isn't ultimately and fundamentally human in its portrayal. Sometimes this is intentional, but more often than not it surfaces as a sort of blindness, a fundamental inability to imagine anything different than yourself to the extent that you here some people argue that its only realistic for their to be less diversity between things of radically different biology than exists in real humanity.

I'd rather risk losing what you gain by readily making monsters accessible NPCs to have conversations with, than losing the identity of the monsters altogether. I'm not saying that you can't do both (troll bards, hill giant drovers, ogres in the city watch, and so forth), but that if you don't remind yourself what you stand to lose it can be really easy to lose it and not realize it.

This is true, and again I probably should have made it more clear that I don't like a blanket acceptance of any and all vaguely humanoid creatures, but rather I dislike the knee-jerk "kill it!" reaction present in most worlds. However, most humanoid creatures are humans with makeup, essentially. Goblins, gnomes, orcs, halflings, etc. are all essentially "humans, but..." The most out-there race of all is the elves, since their long life would give them a vastly different perception on things, and to a lesser extent the dwarves, yet they're almost always portrayed as more "human" than the savage humanoids.

 

[Celebrim]

Would they be, though? Sure, in the medieval period on Earth, most peasants would probably be racist and afraid out outsiders...

Why restrict this to 'the medieval period'. Fear of outsiders is the default position of humanity. True cosmopolitianism is rare and well, associated almost entirely with city dwellers as the word suggests. And even then, the stock position is typically to divide into ghettos and wards with their own communities and culture. And even then, what you just typically end up with is city dwellers who fear and despise rural people.

but in D&D, the other races are common and can be found pretty much everywhere unless you have a setting that specifically sets out to make them rare--heck, a human commoner is more likely to run into a half-orc than a medieval Englishman would have been to run into someone from the Orient.

While I agree that rubbing elbows with your neighbors is one way to overcome racism, I think its niave to suggest that it inevitably does so. While people may be more afraid of what they don't know, close contact also leads to its own irritations and conflicts. Neighbors may hate each other for 'good reasons' and not just simply out of fear of the unknown. Differences in culture may lead to fundamental and irresolvable incompatibilities. If one group practices cannibalism and believes disputes should be settled by personal combat, it won't take 'racism' to get them into conflict with a group that believes cannibalism is barbaric, disgusting and probably immoral and that disputes ought to be settled in a court.

Besides which, whether or not races 'are common' is entirely campaign specific. In some worlds there might be whole nations made up of half-elves. On my world, half-elves are so rare that there probably aren't more than a six half-elves in the whole world at any given time. In one case, you'd not expect a half-breed to face much discrimination. In the other, it might be the overriding concern of their existance.

Hobgoblins believe that all other races are inferior; they are "insulting and dismissive" of non-hobgoblins.

It might interest you to know that my 'humans' are drawn from the real world culture of antiquity with all of its tribalism, racism, and xenophobia. However, I also assume that the degree of racism, tribalism, and xenophobia present in humans is actually far less than that of every other race. Every one of my major PC races normally believes that the other races are inferior. Most of them do not live in mixed communities, and even ones that are willing to live in mixed communities generally do not open their 'home lands' to outsiders. So in practice, its ownly human communities that are actually cosmopolitian and were significant mingling of the races occur. Humanity is virtually every races second favorite race (after its own), and often the chief problem they have with humanity is that they don't understand just how unredeemably nasty race X is.

Goblins believe they are the master race, destined to eventually wipe out every other race. Elves believe that they alone are fulfilling the task the gods set mortals to fulfill, and that the chiefest obstacle to fulfilling this task is the evil of the other races. Dwarves believe the other races are niave, foolish, and undisciplined, and that its because of the sheer stupidity of the other races that the world is going to hell. They are convinced that they alone can save the world from destruction, and if anything that gets in the way of dwarven interests for any reason at all is just a tool of evil. The fairies are immortal and uncreated, each believes that it is a god (however minor), and have absolutely no understanding of the other races (and generally this is mutual), and see the other races as slaves at best and objects at worst. The Orine are insane and even they admit this, and are generally best known for turning into beserking murderers at the drop of a hat. The Idreth have a collective racial memory, inscrutable motives, and live most of their life in monastic seclusion from the other races.

To say that these races don't typically get along is a vast understatement.

In fantasy worlds where monsters are around every corner and evil is a tangible force, I don't think the forces of Good (or at least Neutral) should be turning people away because of their race, they should be doing it for other reasons. A hobgoblin walks into town and passes the detect evil test?

I think you are incorrectly assuming that 'evil' and 'good' are neatly definable teams were everyone who is 'good' can presumably get along without disagreement.

but rather I dislike the knee-jerk "kill it!" reaction present in most worlds.

The biggest problem with this knee jerk reaction is that often as not it leads to counterproductive behavior. Presumably the reason for the "kill it!" reaction is that the characters having this reaction are trying to protect their life and property. So, for example, if it turns out that somebody is a vampire, werewolf, or witch, it's natural to assume that "kill it!" is a far safer reaction than "let's try to get along". However, if you look how this works out in humanoid interactions, it turns out "kill it!" is more likely to get you killed than "let's try to get along". The most obvious example of this is the way in which monsterous humanoids like goblins tend to try to ambush and kill every PC they come across, even though this almost inevitably leads to them being massacred. It's reasonable to assume that the reverse is true. If a group of human commoners first reaction to a random troop of hobgoblins is "kill it!", chances are they are going to end up dead when it inevitably turns out that that troop of hobgoblins is the 4th level hobgoblin mercenaries that are scheduled to eventually be mooks for the BBEG when the PC's are 8th level.

PC's of course behave differently, but then again they are mechanically different from most NPCs so they can usually afford to. One of the things I try to do early in my campaigns is establish that "kill it!" is not always an optimal course of action by introducing some EL 9+ encounter early on where the default assumption isn't that the PC's are going to behave like reflexive killers. Or failing that, at the very least demonstrating how to behave by showing NPC's interacting in some fashion other than 'kill it!'

Early in one campaign, before the party had significant loot, I had one group of PC's robbed by an overwhelming force of goblin bandits (mounted on worgs and clearly better equipped than the PC's). The PC's had pretty much no chance versus the bandits if the bandits were going to 'fight to the death' like typical monsters, but the bandits didn't want to fight with, much less kill the PC's. Thier position was: 'Get what loot we can from armed opponents without fighting unless we have to. Failing that, don't get killed because there is always some easier target than a well armed group of poor mercenaries around the corner' All the bandits wanted to do was extort some cash. Of course, I didn't tell the PC's that outright, but I let them work it out for themselves. If the PC's tried to fight, the bandits would try to take the PC's alive (because they are valuable as slaves) using lassos, nets and nonlethal damage, but would flee if the PC's put up good enough resistance. Afterall, the goblins didn't know that the PC's were 1st level. The PC's could use social skills to talk their way out of the problem, or at least negotiate the damages to their pocket books required to get out of the problem.

The purpose of encounters like that is to help the players unlearn what they may have learned about surviving in D&D. One of the surest ways to die in my game is assume that every problem can and should be overcome by trying to achieve a surprise and fighting to the death. That is inevitably going to generate TPKs in my game, because I think having a god show up at 1st level is kinda cool, and in sandbox mode the highest level encounter on the map might well be 17 levels or more above party level. I was pleased to see that my present party has already learned the important lesson, "Leave things that belong to a god alone - even if you really really don't like that god - unless you have a very very good reason." This is going to be important because an equally important lesson in a game informed by greek myth is, "I don't care how high level you are, don't be rude to a deity. It just doesn't pay."

However, most humanoid creatures are humans with makeup, essentially

I think this is the result of limited imagination, which has sadly often been encouraged by the source material. I cringe when I see published material were a thing as alien as 'dragon' or 'demon' is treated as if it had exactly the same basic emotions and motivations as humans, and were the author's assumption seems to be that sentience implies humanity. I don't think that it necessarily has to be so. I believe that things that aren't human ought to be alien or else they have no real purpose.

 

[Eldritch_Lord]

Why restrict this to 'the medieval period'. Fear of outsiders is the default position of humanity. True cosmopolitianism is rare and well, associated almost entirely with city dwellers as the word suggests. And even then, the stock position is typically to divide into ghettos and wards with their own communities and culture. And even then, what you just typically end up with is city dwellers who fear and despise rural people.

The person I was quoting was talking about the "average commoner in a medieval borderlands setting"--I was clarifying medieval commoner on Earth vs. medieval commoner in D&D, not medieval human vs. modern human or the like.

While I agree that rubbing elbows with your neighbors is one way to overcome racism, I think its niave to suggest that it inevitably does so. While people may be more afraid of what they don't know, close contact also leads to its own irritations and conflicts. Neighbors may hate each other for 'good reasons' and not just simply out of fear of the unknown. Differences in culture may lead to fundamental and irresolvable incompatibilities. If one group practices cannibalism and believes disputes should be settled by personal combat, it won't take 'racism' to get them into conflict with a group that believes cannibalism is barbaric, disgusting and probably immoral and that disputes ought to be settled in a court.

I didn't say they were familiar, I said they could be found anywhere; it's not so much mere familiarity as a universal acceptance. If you look in the DMG, the vast majority of communities have members of all the common races in them in not-insignificant quantities. A member of one of the common races can walk into any city anywhere and have some other members of his or her race there, he or she will not have to worry about being shunned, etc. Even if an individual human, say, hates dwarves with a vengeance, the number of cities that won't allow dwarves in them is vanishingly small; a human and dwarf who hate each other "for good reason" will have said good reason to hate each other, they won't simply hate each other on sight for being evil.

It might interest you to know that my 'humans' are drawn from the real world culture of antiquity with all of its tribalism, racism, and xenophobia. However, I also assume that the degree of racism, tribalism, and xenophobia present in humans is actually far less than that of every other race. Every one of my major PC races normally believes that the other races are inferior. Most of them do not live in mixed communities, and even ones that are willing to live in mixed communities generally do not open their 'home lands' to outsiders. So in practice, its ownly human communities that are actually cosmopolitian and were significant mingling of the races occur. Humanity is virtually every races second favorite race (after its own), and often the chief problem they have with humanity is that they don't understand just how unredeemably nasty race X is.

Goblins believe they are the master race, destined to eventually wipe out every other race. Elves believe that they alone are fulfilling the task the gods set mortals to fulfill, and that the chiefest obstacle to fulfilling this task is the evil of the other races. Dwarves believe the other races are niave, foolish, and undisciplined, and that its because of the sheer stupidity of the other races that the world is going to hell. They are convinced that they alone can save the world from destruction, and if anything that gets in the way of dwarven interests for any reason at all is just a tool of evil. The fairies are immortal and uncreated, each believes that it is a god (however minor), and have absolutely no understanding of the other races (and generally this is mutual), and see the other races as slaves at best and objects at worst. The Orine are insane and even they admit this, and are generally best known for turning into beserking murderers at the drop of a hat. The Idreth have a collective racial memory, inscrutable motives, and live most of their life in monastic seclusion from the other races.

To say that these races don't typically get along is a vast understatement.

Changing the basic assumptions is great; I like seeing more isolated and xenophobic races as much as I do more cosmopolitan races. My objection is to the "default" presentation of races in generic D&D and in the published settings; I assumed that would go unstated because the OP was talking about how races in the "original D&D universes" held these views. If you change the assumptions, then of course all the problems with "good races" and "evil races" are off the table.

I think you are incorrectly assuming that 'evil' and 'good' are neatly definable teams were everyone who is 'good' can presumably get along without disagreement.

Oh, I'm sure elves and dwarves disagree about a great many things...but one thing they probably agree on is that evil races shouldn't be associated with. In my previous example, I pointed how hobgoblins and elves are quite similar in that both have a "holier than thou" attitude, both believe everything else to be inferior, both have lots of talents ("intensive military training from an early age" for the hobs, "dabbles in everything" for the elves), and yet because hobgoblins are generally evil and elves are generally good, as far as the default settings are concerned hobgoblins are unconditionally shunned in most cities while elves are unconditionally welcomed, with a few exceptions. Team Good doesn't have to agree on what "good" means in order to exclude a member of Team Evil without giving him a chance.

 

[Tharkon]

The most out-there race of all is the elves, since their long life would give them a vastly different perception on things, and to a lesser extent the dwarves, yet they're almost always portrayed as more "human" than the savage humanoids.

Probably caused by experience, humans probably have had more friendly encounters with elves than with goblins in standard D&D games.

It could also be that elves' grave inspires humans, in a similar but lesser way humans look at celestial beings.

 

[Celebrim]

The person I was quoting was talking about the "average commoner in a medieval borderlands setting"--I was clarifying medieval commoner on Earth vs. medieval commoner in D&D, not medieval human vs. modern human or the like.

In a nutshell, I guess what I was trying to say is that I'm very skeptical of words like 'default'. My assumption and my experience is that what is normal and unquestioned for one group is abnormal for another. My assumption is that most DMs don't purchase all the suplimental material, haven't adopted every Dragon article (or have priviledged Dragon over other sorts of suplimental material), and are pretty opinionated sorts prone to dismissing ideas that they don't like and creating there own material.

I'm not at all sure that we can speak of a 'default' setting.

If you look in the DMG, the vast majority of communities have members of all the common races in them in not-insignificant quantities.

Yes, but I think that's the 3e DMG you are talking about, and by the time it came out groups and DMs had 25 odd years to evolve there own default demographic assumptions or to adopt any number of prior published demographic standards. And even those that first encountered the 3e DMG, many probably took such demographics as suggestions and did what they wanted anyway. I don't think we can take it for granted that even a majority of groups used those demographics as stated, so while they may be 'cannonical' I'm not sure there is any more a 'default demographics or 'default settings' than there is a 'default pantheon'.

To use your own example, of the wide variaty of information about hobgoblins that has been published in scattered places, what if any of it became cannonical for a give table? What is the root of your assumptions of default culture of hobgoblins?

Two tables will likely very wildly in what they think of as normal.

To give you an example, among my many sources of information about what must be 'normal' in D&D demographics was the D&D cartoon. The D&D cartoon encouraged on one hand something close to a Star Wars cantina approach where in average cities it might not be unusual to see a squad of orcs stumbling out of a bar, or to find an ettin playing cards with a dwarf, while on the other hand it protrayed these Tolkien like racial havens were the races did not normally mix. This caused me to adopt as early as the mid-80's the assumption that there was commerce between intermediaries of the races that normally didn't get along, from which was born the idea of the goblin merchant. Pirates and smugglers did business with goblin merchants, and trading towns existed where goblin merchants could meet openly with human smugglers and slave traders. Demographics of a town were based on its social role, the prevailing culture, and the proximaty to racial homelands not on some standardized chart. Is that how people did things by default or not? I don't know, but there is some evidence in published settings (are they default or not, and if so, which one) that those sort of factors were considered.