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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6490734" data-attributes="member: 1465">I have a constant desire to decrease the degree of "kitchen sink" look and feel of D&D. It seems that every published setting or homebrew I play in is based on the assumption that "more is better", and that:- there has to be many playable races- playable races should include traditional PHB races- all races should more or less have similar societies and therefore opportunitiesThis is fine, but it's certainly not novel or original anymore. In particular, the third concept above means that every race should have access to every class, background, spell, equipment etc. with only few minor exceptions.For me a few downsides have manifested clearly in play, among which:- all campaigns are more similar to each other- everybody roleplays their PC identically, whatever the chosen race (speaking like a drunkard doesn't make your Dwarf PC really different)- there is nothing "fantastical" left about fantasy racesI almost would like to toss it all away and just have the players play human characters, and focus on the individuals in order to decide how to roleplay them, instead of looking at "race".In the past while we were playtesting 5e, in order to simplify the game setup (almost all players had never played D&D), I didn't even mention other races, in fact we didn't use races features at all (not even the human bonuses). It was only a short campaign of but a few evenings, but nothing felt missing.Perhaps it doesn't have to use such an extreme solution. What if the options of playing other PHB races is still there (also in combination with any class), but all non-human characters are treated are rarely seen in the world? So you can play an Elf or Dwarf (or even an Elf Barbarian or a Dwarf Monk) but you'll very unlikely ever see an Elf/Dwarf NPC?I want to try and push these non-human races out of the common and restore a tiny little bit of wonder about them, not jeopardize a player's desires. What would be wrong with this?</blockquote>

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