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Message: <blockquote data-quote="rmcoen" data-source="post: 9811405" data-attributes="member: 6692404">Given that my gaming group has been together (mostly) for 30 years, we don't generally have too much difficulty in this regard.  As the "forever DM", I will generally give the players an idea of what restrictions (or lack thereof) the next campaign will have.  And since our campaigns tend to span years of RL play time, everyone is interested in not causing a jarring issue.  In the previous campaign - 4e, as it happens, but not too relevant - the players were allowed to pick any race and/or class, but were told their starting location and "required" background would be based on a choice between them (for example, "all" clerics hailed from the Godshome citystate, while "all" dwarves came from the Hammerdown mountain).  One player wanted to be a warforged, so he ended up being a unique "sentient golem" invented by the mentor of another player's wizard, and we made it work.  The party ended up being almost entirely human, with the warforged and one elf.The current campaign - for Story reasons - was very restrictive; the players were told they would be the non-firstborn-children of Frontier Barons (Noble background encouraged, not required), and the only races available for initial characters were Human, Dwarf, or Elf.  Classes had campaign-specific limitations and requirements - "Primal" magic is held under suspicion (as it is the "magic of the enemy", the goblinoids that surround the starting Kingdoms), for example; "Divine" magic is communal, so individuals wielding the power of full congregations are viewed as charlatans or saints; "Arcane" magic is either sorcerous in nature, and denoted Noble (Mageborn) blood, or "wizardous", and only taught in state-controlled Towers.  The party still ended up with a Changeling, as well as two Humans, a variant (dragonmarked, but reflavored) Human, and a Dwarf.  And one player wasn't a Noble scion, despite the campaign requirement, but I worked it in as him being a foreigner assigned as a bodyguard to one of the noble brats...But a one-shot I played last month had a half-elf sorcerer, a plasmoid rogue, a tiefling barbarian, an elf druid, a dwarf "bartender" (fighter), a human cleric, and a tabaxi monk.  Yep, Circus Troupe with no reason to exist altogether in the little town where the adventure took place... and I think that's fine for the one-shot.  For a campaign, though... whether DM or player, I'd want to fit the PCs into the setting.  Even the oddballs in my campaigns still "fit" (warforged was "created" to protect the squishy wizard student; changeling and dragonmark human are both hidden "mutants" caused by an underlying threat to the world, etc.).</blockquote>

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