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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5141897" data-attributes="member: 4937">It's kind of a loaded question, and neither 'yes' or 'no' really captures my feelings.I've run human centered campaigns, elf centered campaigns, and goblin centered campaigns.  For my game, there are seven playable races, plus two half-breeds plus 4 additional racial variants, for a total of 13 racial choices.  And additionally, there is a feat that lets you play two additional racial variants, and if you play a sorcerer there are feats that let you essentially 'mutate' over time.  Just within the racial variants then that would be considered 'normal' within my game world, that's alot of options.And yet, I'm probably on the 'anti-cantina' side of the line.  Twenty years ago I removed Orcs from my homebrew because I thought two was one too many ugly savage demihuman races for a campaign world.  I'm very unopen to allowing lizard folk, gnolls, trikin, minotaurs, tieflings, mongrelmen and so forth as player races to the extent that I've set out a very clear cosmological distinction between PC races and NPC races that makes breaking this rule very difficult.I generally find that playing a non-human race is difficult for the player.  Typically, it hinders rather than helps the players role play.  This is in part due to the fact that D&D has never done a good job defining what makes a race different than humanity.  In general, I find that most peoples personification of non-human races varies from either sterotypical to Star Trek style 'human except for the bumps on your hear' or 'sterotype of one human culture inflated to become the trope of a whole race'.  And actually, so long as you don't unbalance the races so that human is an undesirable choice, I find its the preferred choice for most players.  Most races are difficult to self-identify with and mostly they seem to be taken for mechanical reasons.Further, I find that the more races that you open up, the worse this problem becomes.  The more races you have, the more you water down any one races characterization.  Inventing an alien race which is as rich in cultural possibilities and range of personalities as human is hard.  Finding some trait of the race that is sufficiently robust as to become a significant distinguishing feature from humans is not easy.  Very rarerly do I see a race which adds something to the character that simply having the same character as a human wouldn't add and better.  Very rarely is the character's race important to the characterization except to the extent that it just brings with it some limiting tropes.When I move the racial focus from human to one other race, it lets me explore that race in a depth that improves the player characterization and makes exploring the race an interesting thing in itself without swamping the players too much in exposition.  We can seriously explore questions like, "What is it like to be a member of a race that lives for centuries, has low constitution, actually is connected to the natural world in a way humans are not, and a stronger than human tendency to prefer individualism (chaos) over collectivism (law)?", if we make that a fairly large part of the game focus.   But when you have lots of races at the table, its impossible to explore any one portrayal in much detail.  The impact of being a member of that race on the overall presonification and dialogue at the table is small, except when it becomes tedious exposition on the part of the player as they regurgitate setting information, as in the sterotypical Vampire the Masquerade player dialogue: "I'm a Brujah.  You are Ventrue.  We can't get along."  So, on the whole, I prefer to work with a small set of very broad racial archetypes with clear biological differences with humanity and with a strong focus on one race rather than with a kitchen sink approach.  And I say this as someone whose homebrew is often in practice more multi-racial and often multi-ethnic than any pre-4e inspired setting except Planescape.</blockquote>

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