D&D 5E (2014) Which common monsters/creature types do you exclude from your campaigns?

[Vaalingrade]

Gnome, Sylph, Undine, and Salamander..

Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest in your formative years?

At least that's where I got my idea for the elemental peoples in my setting. They're not playable species, but summons and companions.

 

[grimslade]

Savage pack tactic blink dogs would be wonderfully terrifying. Would their baying and howling randomly cut out and emerge while they blink? Even scarier...
Gonzo is ok with some things. I don't mind Giff or Space Whales, but modrons leave me cold. I don't mind tentacly weird creatures like aboleth, illithid, or beholders, but flummphs are right out.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

Final Fantasy: Mystic Quest in your formative years?

At least that's where I got my idea for the elemental peoples in my setting. They're not playable species, but summons and companions.

Mostly a fascination with alchemy, both Western and Eastern. My Dwarves and Elves are metal and wood aligned, respectively.

 

[Baron Opal II]

So which creatures do you exclude and why? And is it something you decide on ahead of time or something you decide as you prep events/adventures?

Let's see...

Elves and Drow. They chose their last battlefield and I don't have to deal with them anymore.

No "half" races (kinda), you can have a halfling and a dwarf for parents, but you favor one over the other. I do have half-elves, sort of, but they are people (humans, dwarves, whatever) who happen to have an elvish blood line that manifests. No dragonborn, lizardfolk instead. No gnomes.

The only non-corporeal undead are shadows and ghosts. The scary undead are nazgul types.

The only giants are stone and cloud, and they're obvious cousins.

The only dragons are basically red and black, and they can be any alignment. Vengeful greedy, usually. I just stopped being jazzed by a variety of color-coded breath weapons. Two that I came to appreciate and could run with was fire, because that's just what dragons do. I could also see a lesser sea dragon version that coughed out a noxious bile.

I don't have a lot of humanoid opposition. The vatborn are reskinned orcs and ogres. Goblins are fae, hobgoblins are humans from a parallel dimension, no bugbears. I use gnolls, minotaurs, and skaven as the "wizard did it" magical races, with lizardfolk and kobolds as the scalely folk. That's about it for humanoids. I don't need 30 humanoid races, a dozen will do.

No cursed lycanthropes, and people with that as a heritage are very few and far between. I always appreciated Eberron changelings, but they don't quite have a place yet.

Anything that could fit into an ecosystem, magical or otherwise I can use, although I give morkoths and ixtixiclixal the pass. No tritons or sea elves. Sahauguin and locathah are enough.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I feel like blink dogs could work if they, like so many other D&D creatures weren't fully sapient with their own whole unique language... and absolutely no cultures or society. They're just Very Good Boys who exist as a joke about Displacer Beasts being cats.

Pathfinder has an alternative teleport dog, which is a servant to the drunken god of adventurers that work way better.

Mythology has an ever better teleport dog who might be Actually Satan.

Blink dogs are perfect. I’d rather have more fully sapient magical animals, than less. And why should they have complex social orders? You think every sapient species would always follow a path similar to humanities? Especially a magical Fey canid?

Yeah, I tend to think these would be better modelled as a racial modifier, or (perhaps better) a feat chain - that would allow for characters discovering a heritage later and/or allow them to lean in to one. Amongst other things, if they introduced the appropriate "X heritage" modifier each time they introduced the matching race, that would make it trivial for people to mix-and-match.

That said, IMC I only have half-elves and half-orcs. Half-elves are just the children either of mixed parents or of two half-elves, so nothing special there. But half-orcs are a little different - in places where human and orcish lands border one another, many children are simply born as half-orcs - most such children therefore have either two human or two orcish parents.

I kinda go the other way, and let all these magical weirdo races mix all day. Wanna play a mino-centaur? Sure. We just kinda list all the traits of both races, and of any races that fill an overlapping narrative space with the races being mixed, and Lego together a new race writeup out of those parts.

 

[Tonguez]

Sure. We just kinda list all the traits of both races, and of any races that fill an overlapping narrative space with the races being mixed, and Lego together a new race writeup out of those parts.

because then we’d be playing Gurps

 

[Yaarel]

Generally, I prefer to exclude all creatures from the setting, and then cherry pick say 5 sapient creatures/races to focus on, that the setting will revolve around. If a player wants to a play a different race, I "soft-ban" that race by making it a unique creature or from a remote periphery. As the campaigns evolve, the players tend to discover more races, but I am still cherry picking them.

 

[Voadam]

Also:

The Owlbear doesn't even have poison claws!

Hey, where's Perry?

 

[Yaarel]

Has anyone written an adventure set inside an oversized gelatinous cube and/or hypercube yet? It seems like that should probably happen.

One of my earliest D&D adventures was in a hypercube demiplane. The form was building whose rooms lacked windows, but had doors leading to other rooms. The furnishings were of a mansion. It took us sometime to realize we were in a hypercube, when we unwittingly circled back to an earlier room, but this time around we were walking on what turned out to be the ceiling.

 

[Vaalingrade]

You think every sapient species would always follow a path similar to humanities?

It's not the sapience, it's the unique language they've developed despite not having a society or culture that would have necessitated such. If they just spoke Sylvan, I would question it.