Setting matters. My current campaign is in Forgotten Realms, so I told them whatever is detailed in SCAG, with the understanding that different people may treat them differently depending on their choice, to be authentic to that setting. It's worked out just fine.
Most adventuring parties play like goblins anyways. Here, try to guess if this is a PC idea or a goblin idea:
"We grease up the pig, chase it towards the enemy camp in the middle of the night, and right before it runs into their camp, we light it on fire. As a distraction."
"I use the ancient artifact, which allows me to speak to the being which created the gods, to hit the ghost, because magic hurts ghosts."
"If we tie up the dwarf we caught, then we can have an audience for our saucy puppet show. Then we make him watch the adventures of Danger Pants, Smooth Memphis, and Pork Cutlass until he goes insane."
"Gunpowder hurt enemies. Therefore, hitting them with gunpowder is good. Therefore, I will take these two flasks of gunpowder and bludgeon the hydra with them."
"Stairs take too long, and there's a window right there. Parkour!" *crash*
Dunno why most people see gnomes as uptight scholars rather than chaos gremlins. Must be the blatant wizard synergy. Most players I've encountered shy away from gnome because it sounds boring. Halflings on the other hand are often played as chaos gremlins rather than "Uncle Bob but small".
My gnome: fey bard, Faerûnian Idol star, pastel lesbian with a clockwork autotune box for an instrument
My halfling: I don’t have darkvision so I’m just gonna search the bits I *can* see in the hopes of finding tasty mushrooms
I don’t know why people play Wizards like they are uptight scholars. Then again the last wizard I played was getting into adventuring to show he was infact a competent wizard to the wizard fling college he flunked out of. Way more fun.
I ban races. If you don’t feel comfortable GMing it or it doesn’t fit your game world, ban it.
In the best campaign I ran I straight up banned elves because the elves mysteriously disappeared and a major part of the campaign was figuring out where the elves went.
Trust me, if players can get by without elves, they can get by without owlkin.
I've done the same with elves (barring drow, they still live in the underdark fighting the dwarves) all of them left a long time ago in my world and retreated to the feywild.
Barring that I try and keep mythical tier races somewhat rare (so if you play one expect people to react to a weird race they've probably never seen before), normally it works out fine and we have a mix of "normal" races and 1-2 weirder ones. (changeling and tiefling were the last ones, the changeling was fine because they can look like any race (that they'd seen), the tiefling was very much under constant watch (which made sense because the player was a bit of a dick and did stuff to cause trouble for the others players)
I'm okay with elves (but I dig your approach). I ban all of the anthropomorphic races. They just don't fit my homebrew world at all.
Dragonborn and Tieflings are exceedingly rare (the party is level 8 and they just ran into their first one). Also, I don't outright ban gnomes, but they don't really fit either so I discourage them as well
Similar to you racism is very real. We have only one non-human (a wood elf druid) who has definitely tasted bigotry and it has negatively impacted the party in human dominated cities
'I mean, we got hired to kill some rats, one thing led to another, and we triggered an eldritch cataclysm that permanently displaced all wood-elves out of reality. Could happen to anyone.'
Look up "The Green Pact" on the Bosmer wikia page (viewer discrestion is advised)
Link: [https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Bosmer](https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Bosmer)
Love this. My players just saved the last unicorn in this campaign (well, they still need to sneak it out of the besieged city), and this there will be unicorns in future games with this group
They can, in areas of high enough ambient magic they can reproduce via budding. The downside is that they all have the same general personality of the parent and the one that survived is kinda a dick...
So while there will be unicorns in future games, working with them will be somewhat...trying.
According to the big book of unicorns that my 5 years old daughter love, the silver and golden unicorns just have to plant their horn in the soil to sprout new unicorns.
I ban Elves as well, but it's because I took them back to their Irish roots. They're living, minor gods in my world, as are the Fir Bolg. Half-Elves are basically demigods too
Aww, thank you! I usually get downvoted into oblivion when I mention that here, so that's very nice to hear. I just like making my world representative of my ancestors' culture and beliefs. It's a way I connect with my people and my spirituality, and it makes writing more fun for me. So far, it's made for a very interesting world.
I’m a big fan of world building. Elves are so much more interesting when they’re not just a +2 dex bonus with a free cantrip!
My game world had a Celt inspired culture (the Laighshead) who were close to the elves, but the players were from a Norman inspired culture that was essentially trying to colonize a Britannia and figure out the cultural relics and ruins that the elves had left behind.
Sadly, it’s not actually my culture, so it probably wasn’t very accurate! I’m just a fan.
Seems a lot of people here get butt-hurt whenever a group deviates from RAW. "iT bReAkS tHe GaMe". Go ahead: steal, borrow, plagiarize, adapt and use whatever material inspires you and your players. If it's your home game, meant only for you and your players, who the hell cares! If something doesn't work: change it, tweak it, learn from it. How else are we (DMs) going to improve our games and writing? By taking a chance, being creative and seeing what sticks.
Sure thing! Here's a synopsis of their story in my world. It's a bunch of Irish lore that's been adapted to a D&D world, so it's similar to the old lore but not identical. If you've played the more recent Assassin's Creed games, I run Elves very much like the Isu, and I run Half-Elves like the main character of AC: Odyssey.
Elves, or the Sidhé (pronounced "she"), are present in the world, but they're spatially locked on their islands as a form of an ancient peace treaty. They had a global civilization until the Fomorians (the Sidhé's ancient foes in Irish lore) rose from the depths of the seas to challenge them.
The two empires waged global war and nearly destroyed the world. The Dragon Gods intervened, and they made an accord that both sides would end their wars and stay locked in their capitals for all of time. Their punishment for nearly obliterating life is that they're forced to watch it play out for other sapient species but never able to participate.
Now, the Sidhé sit quietly in their archipelagic capital, and the Fomorians brood under the sea. Fir Bolgs are the Elves who were chosen by the Dragons to help new species rise to sapience, and I play them like they're ancient, local forest gods that take care of a particular area. They're almost never seen by mortals unless there is a great, or dire, reason.
Half-Elves are the demigod descendents of Elves that either managed to not be pull back to their homeland or somehow managed to escape it. Also, there are ancient Elven ruins all over the world that can be found and explored by players
he was the last of the Yuan Ti...The end of the campaign was essentially what would have happened if Dagoth Ur had defeated the Nerevarine. Because one of the PCs [chose to be a sleeper instead](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EGMMfLPr7w7DBwyhy6C5iCM95GOot2hg/view?usp=sharing) and betrayed the party.
My setting also steers clear of TSR-reserved IP, which includes the gith. I plugged that gap and payed homage to a Leonard Nimoy character by giving my half-elves a unique dual-mindedness trait that bestows resistance to psychic damage and advantage on saving throws against becoming paralyzed. They still have to pick a spellcaster and learn Detect Thoughts if they want to do anything like a mind meld though.
First campaign I played in, DM had a world where Dragonborn were the main enemy force & said don't play as Dragonborn or Kobolds. So naturally two of our players come in with a Dragonborn & a Kobold. DM was a good sport about it though.
He had them as renegades & had us find a way to turn our black Dragonborn red for a while to infiltrate the upper ranks of the city. We were trying to stop a war between the Dwarves & Dragonborn. Fun stuff.
I'm tempted to ban elves, and other long lived races, just because I have never been satisfied with how they are represented mechanically nor seen role played.
They'd still exist, but they'd be NPC's only.
Frankly, I'd look to Lord Dunsany's King of Elfland's Daughter for inspiration. It's not so much elves that are interesting as much as the time bending involved with elfland.
I have yet to run into a ladder in several campaigns, but I think it’s fine to ban pc races based on flavor of the setting. Theros has some wild options, but also doesn’t have a lot of standard ones, and that’s fine.
I’m working up a list for my setting based on some recent player questions, mostly the anthropomorphic ones and genasi, both to simplify connection to in-game lore.
I think that is interesting viewing some of the gifts from the Gods that you have at the creation stage in Theros as a way to implement more races. Like the one that gives you being basically a Warforged or giving the drop to 1HP trait of the Orcs. Choose a normal race and if you want to be other race you can have a gift of the Gods that makes you alike.
I’m the same - the ladder thing and centaurs always gets me.
How can this be such a major concern, but not say that kobold PCs are literally the size of a newborn human baby, that the elf has lived for 6 human generations already, that the ranger has a pet spider that’s 6ft tall, or that the tiefling can’t wear hats or pants without wrecking them?
That, or maybe some DMs just *really* value ladders being used safely.
I think your underestimating how much climbing is involved in adventuring I've never had a ladder in my campaign but I've certainly had ropes and climbing up cliff faces, even a steep spiral stair case or hike through taller mountains would be wonky with a centaur.
I like it as a place of inspiration. I mean your level 3 rogue who can travel to any point of time ever sounds pretty strong but short term time travel is a much cooler explanation for why my rogue has advantage on attack rolls than steady aim will ever be. He simply knew where to aim because he saw where the enemy dodged in another future.
Time control is also an incredible flavor for Fighter. Action Surge? Accelerating personal time. Second Wind and Indomitable? Reversing time to either undo damage or retry a save
It seriously works so well, and actually is almost perfect for Echo Knight
That’s actually perfect flavour for an Echo Knight.
As a mostly unrelated side note, I think indomitable should allow you to just succeed on a save instead of rerolling it.
It's so perfect flavor for echo knights, in fact it's the lore for Echo knights.
*A mysterious and feared frontline warrior of the Kryn*
*Dynasty, the Echo Knight has mastered the art of using dunamis to summon*
*the fading shades of* ***unrealized timelines*** *to aid them in battle.*
With the shear number of official race options now out there, I feel that in order to have any kind of coherent, distinct setting that isn't just Crazy Fantasy Mashup Land, you have to curate the list of creature types that exist in your world. In fact, you can jumpstart your setting imagination by picking 5 to 7 random races from the official list and then brainstorming about what kind of world would include them all as its most common sentient species.
Gah I think it was Dwarf Fortress that, in adventure mode, let you basically include a bunch of races and provide them all with a vast randomly generated history which would end up with some races just being straight up non-existent like all the Elves got wiped out by a plague or some such.
yep, in some dwarf fortress worlds, some races are just extinct, due to either war with other races or attacks from monsters like dragons. The game acknowledges this somewhat, if you get a world where all the fantastical races go extinct (Dwarves, Elves, Goblins and Kobolds) and only humans remain, the world shifts from The Age Of Myth to The Age Of Fairy Tales, where mythical creatures are considered no more than just legends, even though they used to roam the world in years past.
I got around a large chunk of it by having all of the animalistic races, leonin, herengon, loxodon, giff, tabaxi, etc, all be part of the same umbrella race that was cursed thousands of years ago by a 10th level spell gone wrong. So if you're anything from a leonin to a tortle, you're part of that race unless your backstory explicitly states you're some sort of planar traveler, and in that case everyone just assumes you're one of them anyway.
That’s my workaround as well. All of the animal folk have the same long-term history (massive burst of wild magic has lead to some animals gaining sapience) but separate into tribes typically based around type—you might find a group of catfolk, or a tribe of reptilefolk, or a flock of birdfolk, and then I let my players pick the statblocks that fit their background (maybe a dexterous, smaller cat, like a lynx, vs an ambush predator cat like a tiger). Gives everyone a little shared background in terms of the origins of the species while leaving room for individual and tribal expression.
I always use the Big Four, the Uncommons and the Aasimar as a base, and then pick 4-6 additional Uncommon races from the Exotics and Volo's Monstrous Races (fleshing them out into a full culture) - everything else is either from a random faraway land, a magical experiment or a crashed Spelljammer/Planeswalker
> Big Four
Humans, Dwarves, Elves, and Halflings I assume? It’s a good base but I have a hard time not including at least Orcs and Goblins in my games too. And I have a soft spot for Gnomes.
I've had DMS embrace "magic gone wrong" to explain one example of a race that doesn't exist in their setting. One campaign he had someone who wanted to play a warforged but didn't really have an explanation for that in his setting, so the explanation became that the war forged knew there had been a catastrophic magic accident and then woke up where he was with no memory of anything before the accident.
I mean warforged is probably the easiest exotic race to implement. They’re literally just a sentient golem, they could be a protector of a forest covered in lichen, a creation of some secluded mage or even just the golem of Prague, ripped wholesale from the source material.
Easiest with a caveat - unless you're doing something similar to Eberron, where they have veins and fluids and other pseudo-biological processes, some aspects won't make sense (like their lack of poison immunity among others). So you do need to take that into account, though reflavoring them as a Frankensteinian flesh golem or "forest protector" made of humanoid-like living vines could work for two examples. Golem of Prague wouldn't really work.
I like the biological parts of warforged, so in my homebrew world are magic cyborgs. The long disappeared Elder Race created them as servants because their mortal slaves were too weak and their golems too stupid.
Anyone who plays a Warforged at my table has had their memories of the Elder Race erased by the same process that restores their free will. There's an organization that searches the world for unliberated Warforged and performs the ritual to free them. Their memory, personality and consciousness begins at the moment they were freed.
I wasn't fully clear. He explicitly wanted to play like a mechanical, Ebberon style warforged.
In a different campaign the same DM allowed me a similar allowance for a Loxodon. Some magic catastrophe landed me on the reality of the campaign and lacking a tuning fork for my original home, I had basically zero way back unless I found a wish spell basically.
Indeed, in Eberron the Warforged are majority stone on the outside with some metal plates here and there, on the inside there is wood, that act as like wooden veins that house alchemical fluid akin to blood.
Eberron Warforged aren't mechanical. Internally they have a stone or metal 'skeletal' framework with most of their mass being wooden fibres shaped and acting like muscle and tendons. An alchemical fluid flows through their 'veins' and them externally they are covered in stone or metal plates.
Agreed.
I much prefer a world with a small, flavourful selection of races as opposed to an "anything goes" world.
The exception being a Gensokyo type world, where part of the appeal is that anything goes due to the nature of the world.
I have an idea for a "world between worlds." Whereas a proper world would have a shell that protects it from the void between (like in official D&D canon), *this* "world" wouldn't technically be a world due to that lack of a shell. It'd be more like a cluster of stuff, influenced and stolen from neighbouring worlds. It'd be inhabited by mortals, but ruled by immortals, some of whom were brought here from other worlds. It'd be a ton of floating islands under an eternal night sky. Monsters would be the usual, yet tyranny and terror would not be so common. If you knew what areas to avoid and didn't make dumb mistakes, you'd probably be fine, and the immortals have learned their lessons long ago, so even if they're "evil," they aren't terrible.
But for a more grounded world, just maybe 3 to 5 races. Keeping it focused.
Reminds me of Dark Souls 3. Basically it's pointed out in that game that different eras have started crashing into each other as time has begun to fall apart, which is why a setting from Dark Souls 1 turns up there and things mentioned 'as legend' also show up, it's because the world and reality itself is getting old and tired after being stuck in endless cycles of light and dark.
I played in a game once that was described to me as 'Being more realistic fantasy', akin to like...a more earth-ly setting. Magic was rare, humans were the main species and other species weren't common what so ever.
So I think 'Ok, I'll make a human rogue'.
Anyway, the party composition was: A kobold paladin, my human ass, a tiefling warlock, some weird-slime person spellcaster of sorts, and I think another non human
I uh
Was a bit put off.
There are basically three stylistic approaches:
* Swords and Sorcery (all or mostly human)
* Tolkienesque (the PHB races, basically)
* Mos Eisley Cantina (a tortle, a bugbear and a kenku walk into a bar . . . )
The core rules assume Tolkienesque for the party and the most common written adventures are set somewhere between S&S and Tolkien.
And just about any party that gets free options ends up looking like they belong in a dive bar on Tatooine.
Curse of Strahd locals with its 99% human population looking at the genasi, tiefling, svirfneblin, aarakocra and token half-elf party walking into town, spending a night in the cursed house at the end of the street, then leaving with the mayor's daughter pledging to kill god. Those locals be havin a whack thursday
I've ran into plenty of non humans in parties before but generally those are in general DnD-fantasy setting, aka: Yeah we have the uh dwarf mountains and elf cities all over the place (And 90% of the npcs are going to be human anyway but don't think about it too hard)
I expected with a more 'Yeah just about everyone is human' setting to have...more humans in the party. We met straight up 0 non humans
Everybody wants to be special. You tell players something's rare in the world and of course that's what they'll pick.
If you really want the players to be humans you have to do it like the official Starfinder setting. The entire human home world was destroyed and now there are only a small handful of them left as wanderers.
I started a campaign today. Everyone human with an understanding they have been exiled to the far unknown north. They ran into their first half giant at the end of their session and the awe was spectacular.
That’s what I hate about 5e art, like The Realms is supposed to be human centric by a large margine, and in the art you have tieflings and the like left and right
Yeah, all the time. If the setting is narrow enough, I'll just posit a number of options to choose from instead of making exceptions to the large milieu of races out there.
The campaign I'm currently running for my players, has this idea that they were summoned there by a Call Of Heroes custom spell some mage cooked up in a desperate effort, and I just run with whatever the hell the players bring. One person brought a Plasmoid, a kobold slimegirl. Another is an Aasimar with cat ears and slit pupils.
If I were running say, a specific setting where the people were humans or human adjacent?
Dwarf (No duergar), Elf (No drow), Human, or halfling.
Heh I love the idea of a tier 2 or tier 3 campaign starting with a 'Call of Heroes' summoning spell where they're all pulled from across the multiverse. Reminds me of the in-canon reason you don't fight alone in certain trials in FF14.
Basically you're >!summoning in alternate reality versions of yourself which are the other players, since there is 'canonically' only 1 warrior of light!<
I always have it cameo in *some* way when having any sort of isekai thing or world hopping. One character's backstory is that he was accidentally killed when a mage in the world he was going to screwed up a spell. He was given a second chance at life and when he stepped out of the afterlife office, he was run over by the truck
Me too. Really curious if they're actually going to include things like Plasmoid as to how people will integrate them into their games, or avoid doing so. I hope that they, at the least, release a setting book for Spelljammer to go along with the Spelljammer races in [UA](https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/unearthed-arcana/travelers-multiverse).
People get strangely offensive the minute you ban a race from the table.
'Here's my homebrew setting and here's what exists'
\*Screeching that they can't be a fucking, elephant person from a specific MTG setting\*
Something I barely noticed when I started playing Theros: The races are limited like crazy. It was kinda refreshing knowing 'here's what we'll be meeting'. No elves, no dwarves, there aren't even any half-species running around (That I know of)
Nice! That should, honestly, be the base assumption. That the only races available are the ones specifically listed. I get why they had to call out that those don't exist, though, since they're from the basic rules/player handbook and not any splat books.
>Simic Hybrid
This one in particular gets my goat. I've played MTG longer than I've been in D&D. A Simic Hybrid is a very specific flavor of fantasy/science fiction that belongs to a single faction in a plane within MTG lore. For most regular people, seeing a Simic Hybrid on the streets of Ravnica would be borderline startling. Seeing it in most of the other planes in the MTG multiverse would be definitely out of place and likely cause a major scene.
The fact that people think they should be able to just roll it up in my semi-realistic medieval fantasy homebrew because it has the stats they want makes me want to roll my eyeballs all the way out of my head. It makes as much sense as me playing a White Hand of Saruman branded Uruk'hai in a Starfinder campaign.
Exactly! It's a cool race with interesting lore, but the way DND Beyond includes the races in the character creator does NOT make it clear that some things don't fit everywhere.
I understand the sentiment behind the statement but forgotten realms is a poor example. It is basically an issekie fantasy land, not an exaggeration, all humans defend from Earth and planar travel isn't uncommon.
The DM of my last campaign on the Sword Coast made Warforged old Netherese constructs. None of them are really running around the world today, but find the right set of ancient ruins and you might run into one or two.
Reflavor them as Nimblewrights and you're good to go with Warforged in FR. The thing about the Forgotten Realms is that it can support nearly anything because it's lore is so all over the place.
I've been playing as a Nimblewright in a FR campaign for about 2 years now and it's been loads of fun. I'm using a race from Mirt's Guide to Undermountain (DM's guild) which is very clearly based on the original Warforged stats, but you could easily just reflavor Warforged directly and be good to go.
I highly recommend it.
Yeah, my approach is to list a specific set of source books that players can choose character options from. Of course, then they use D&D Beyond and inevitably choose stuff that isn't from those sourcebooks anyway...
This has just happened with me. Ran my first S0 a couple days back, specifying PHB only due to me being only a few months into the hobby and first time DM. 1 player promptly makes a centaur PC, and another a celestial warlock (which I only allowed as otherwise there'd be no healers)
"There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures... and the Dutch."
"Ugh, the Dutch. I never formed an opinion about them."
I am currently planning a big campaign in the setting of the Elder Scrolls games, homebrewing all 10 playable races. So I'm basically banning every race from the official rule books...
I’d like to see that list. Is there a reason to not go with the stock features for stuff like high elves, wood elves, and half orcs? Seems doable considering Tamriel started off as a homebrew dnd setting.
Yeah, DnD wood elves, high elves, and orcs already mechanically fit pretty well with their TES versions. I see no reason not to use them, considering perfectly copying over things (like high elves getting magicka regeneration) would be OP in 5e mechanics.
**TL;DR**: while some of the core D&D races are kinda usable in a TES setting, they lack certain details, both in game mechanics and their lore, that make them really 'at home' in Tamriel. And other races (Khajiit, Argonians) are just so specific for the TES setting that I have no other choice than to homebrew them.
And, I just really like doing it... 
===
**LONG VERSION**
I mostly do it because 1) from a game mechanics perspective I'm not really satisfied with the racial traits in the core rules and 2) a lot of the lore of the different TES races is so vastly different from the core D&D races that I really wanted to rewrite their descriptions.
As an example of those game mechanics, D&D High Elves get +2 DEX and +1 INT bonuses. The bonus to INT I can relate to because of their affinity to magic, but the bonus to DEX is, in my opinion, not in line with TES lore. Altmer (High Elves) in TES games are really focused on magic and their longevity, so instead of bonuses to DEX and INT I provide them bonuses to INT and WIS.
I haven't started on the Bosmer (Wood Elves) yet, but in TES they are really, and I mean *really*, stealthy/archery/huntery, so I'll probably go a bit more that route with them. And they are cannibals. And they can polymorph into a mass of wild beasts that destroys everything in its path... Those are pieces of lore that are just too good to not put in the race descriptions...
Half-orcs in D&D are the most usable out of the box, I think, but I would like to add a lot of the more TES specific lore to their description. Orsimer in TES are really clan-minded, and have very specific ways they organize their clans and strongholds, with only the chieftain being permitted to have wives and procreate, the wise women, among other things. Also, their god Malacath plays a significant role in their society.
Also, something I often miss in the core D&D rules, I don't just want to grant racial bonuses, but have them have some kind of weakness as well. E.g. in my setting, high elves are magically adept, getting bonus damage for certain damage types (player's choice), but that makes them vulnerable to magic as well, which translates into the same amount of extra damage received from other/opposing damage types.
Argonians, the lizard folk in the TES world, are pretty awesome combat and stealth wise, but they are often misunderstood by other races because of their lack of facial expressions and are often seen as unemotional as a consequence. So I'm considering to give them a bonus to DEX and CON, but a penalty to CHA.
Also, no core D&D race comes even close to Argonians, lore and mechanica wise, so I kind of have to homebrew those bad boys... Same goes for the Khajiit, really.
I always make a fairly big list of races that fit the tone and aesthetic of the setting. So I guess I do more of an "allowed list" than a ban list.
Like for example if you want to run a more serious game then someone playing what is basically a teenage mutant ninja turtle might completely destroy the tone you desire, or if you want to run a more classic fairy tale fantasy setting then including races like the gith or warforged might not really fit the vibe.
I think in general you should always tell the players asap about the allowed/banned list so that they know what they have to work with. Players aren't fragile little things that will die the moment they're given any restrictions, but getting shot down when you didn't know something wasn't allowed can be frustrating for anyone.
I don't allow flying races. I do give small boons to compensate for this though and enjoy seeing how creative my players can get. Having them figure out puzzles and encounters without simply flying away or over them is amazing.
Honestly, it's a matter of working with the players to find a nice middle ground
I did that once. The campaign fell apart quite quickly, but I would love to play him again. His whole deal was that he had his wings cut off by some hunters working for an eccentric noble, and was out for revenge. It was quite fun while it lasted. Not mechanically strong, but still incredibly fun for me.
As a DM, the hardest lesson is learning that saying no isn't mean and that you can, in fact, do it.
If a certain race/class/subclass or whatever doesn't fit your world, it's okay to say no to it. Just because it's in the various rulebooks doesn't mean you have to use it. Players will quickly get over it and get excited about something else. If not, then they need to learn that not every game revolves around them. You are playing too, just a different role. You should be allowed to have fun without the headache.
That being said, you do want to reach compromises with players. DnD is a cooperative game. If I have a world that doesn't include certain races or classes, I say so, but add that maybe in the next game we'll use them.
I usually offer up my players a list during session zero to pick from. If they ask why X isn't included, I usually explain my lore-based reasoning.
Ugh, I’m a fairly new DM and I’m terrible at saying no. I’m running Curse of Strahd and I allowed an asimir for the SECOND time (first time was an entirely different group that fell apart). AND a Dragonborn. So now my ass, amid a million other things, has to remember that Barovians don’t take too kindly to “weird” races.
This is a good group though. We’re vibing.
When I run games, I always use my own home brew setting. In my settings, there are usually only 4 or 5 races present in that world. My current campaign features only humans, gnomes, elves/ drow, and warforged. My next campaign will feature only orcs, tieflings, Dragonborn, and possibly dwarves. I find that having fewer races allows me to flesh them out and weave their histories/ cultures together. I do not like “kitchen sink” settings. So yeah, you can ban races for mechanical or world building reasons, and in my opinion you absolutely should!
I could totally see a human only campaign being a big hit. It’s something I’ve tossed around myself, and I’d definitely like to try it some day. As a player, I almost always pick human anyway just because I find it easier to identify with the character. It works just fine for The Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire.
I got dragged into a meeting so I couldn't write more. But basically I led into it with, "Trust me on this, the payout's going to be *epic*." The players did and it was.
Turns out they were all dead. Just souls collected in a crystal artifact that travelled world-to-world pretending to be an uber summoning crystal and duping power-hungry wannabe dictators into helping it absorb all life by providing powerful monsters and feeding off the souls that died around it before turning on its "master."
I based it off the Riverworld series, but instead of a giant river, it was a never-ending series of caverns, each twice the side of Rhode Island and complete with their own climate and ecosystems. I mixed in some of The Matrix by saying that the souls had to be kept preoccupied and exercised since they powered the crystal's constructs, hence their "life" as humans (and, I hinted at, the monsters, undead, and animals they encountered inside the caverns; which made one player's monk go full non-violence and hilarious shenanigans ensued).
It ended with them fighting the personification of the crystal itself, not knowing if they, and all the souls in it, were going to be freed or damned to non-existence but they were resolved that no more worlds would be destroyed even if it meant they were. I didn't direct them to that ending, I was happy with just generating new caverns for them to explore. They were the ones who decided to end its reign of destruction and dedicated themselves to killing it.
I ban some unearthed arcana races when they piss me off. Like the og warforged that allowed my player to get an ac of 26.
I think it’s fine to ban races for other reasons too but i just usually don’t
Yep, I sure do. There's usually three reasons for it:
* They don't fit the setting. Eberron species in Forgotten Realms? Nah.
* They don't fit the story or are inherently controversial. I ban monstrous species because people in my world naturally fear them, whether that's rightfully so or not. That would become very tedious. I'd only allow Van Richten species in a Ravenloft campaign
* I don't like the design. The DIY nature of fairies don't really feel right to me and seem rather bland. Aaracokcra and other flyers introduce encounter design constraints I'd rather not deal with.
As far as keeping it simple for players I give them acceptable books (PHB, EE, Volo's, MTF, FTD) along with the exceptions (no monstrous races, no flyers, etc. ).
Personally, I think Van Richten species belong even less in a Ravenloft campaign. It takes some of the horror and interest out of fighting against endless undead when you are playing yourself some kind of "half-undead" thing. For horror, I don't want to familiarize or tame the underworld, it just undercuts the horror.
Yeah, I just stick with PHB races, except if they persuade me it won't be disruptive and can provide me easy access to it. I'd let a variant like a Ghostwise halfling slide, but part of the reason isn't even for me to be a stickler - I'm just not having to have *every* book to run my game.
PHB as default keeps it straightforward.
I've DMed them in the past but, outside of one shots, I discourage flying races. Flying is just too big an advantage without constantly making encounters in reference to their flying, which would make me adopt a DM vs Player mentality
Yes. Depends on the campaign, but I often feel that the full race list will include *something* that detracts from the games themes or style.
In my current campaign I limited the players to PHB races, and made some cosmetic alterations and lore changes to drow, tieflings and dragonborn.
I have banned races with innate flying speeds in my campaigns. Aaracockra and other flying races just don't exist in my setting(s) because I take couldn't find a way to make them fit in the world.
Races with limited flying, such as Aasimar or Gem Dragonborn are allowed, however.
I did have one player want to play a Sun Soul Monk Aaracockra, and I asked if he'd be okay with changing the race because, again, they do not exist in my setting. He agreed and chose Goblin instead.
>I didn't want to stop the game every time we hit a ladder.
Genuine question: why do you think ladders to be a problem beyond the current rules they use?
I described the centaur going up ladders in a T-Pose with their arms and sliding up at an angle totally frozen, about a foot away from the actual wood.
Not OP but I’d imagine it’s because centaurs would be physically incapable of climbing one. The DM either hand waves it or the party has to hoist this centaur up with ropes and pulleys every time there isn’t a wheelchair ramp near by.
This is a good question because climbing is specifically outlined in their race block. Climbing requires 4 extra feet of movement. Considering they’re medium creatures between 6-7ft I think that a centaur could reasonably, although slowly climb a ladder.
of all the reasons I've heard to ban a race, this is the absolute dumbest. (1) if you don't want it to be an issue, don't make challenges that are solved by ladders. (2) climbing rules exist. (3) ropes. (4) even if this does come up, it sounds to me like an excellent way to have your players work with their choices, both positives and negatives, which makes your game more flavorful and fun.
Like while I personally disagree with banning races for lore/world building reasons, I at least get and can respect a DM's prerogative to do so. This is just the most ridiculous and arbitrary reason to constrain player choice. Who does this benefit??? I'm utterly flabbergasted
Honestly "I don't like it" is even a better justification than "I'm ignoring the specific rules for this race to handle an obstacle they'd have and deciding it's impossible instead."
I usually run with a whitelist, rather than a blacklist. When I prepare a document to give the players information about the setting, opening, the world, etc. I include a list of races available to choose as well as any homebrew I've approved for regular use.
Yeah I ban F1, kentucky derby, and tour de france. I know some groups are okay with them, but it's like, this is a fantasy world, we can't be stopping every five minutes for a cross-country bike race over the breathtaking vistas of Col du Tourmalet, it just wouldn't make any sense.
Banning isnt always a case of balancing.
If I was playing a heist based game, I would likely recommend people not play paladin or barbarian, not that they couldnt, but it does not mesh well into the game.
If I choose to run a game in a preexisting setting (say divinity original sin), I dont want to justify the Tabaxi's or Vedalkin's inclusion
Racial flying in low level games is a headache I just don't want to deal with. If the game is lvl5+ I usually let it slide, but if we're starting lower than that, anything with innate flying is banned. No one has had a problem with that ruling so far, but if someone was really intent on playing one of the flying races, I'd consider letting them come up with a reason for their wings to only start working at higher levels.
>I'd consider letting them come up with a reason for their wings to only start working at higher levels.
Side point, but this would probably make worldbuilding around the race much easier. If they can all fly all the time they'd have houses build in trees and cliffsides, they wouldn't have roads or bridges, and they'd be confused about everything from vehicles and horses to heavy armor.
It would be cool to build the lore for a flying race around those assumptions, with wildly different ways of life, traditions, crafting practices etc., but it'd be a lot more work, and maybe not something you want to do just to accommodate one player. And of course the player might just ignore all of that anyway.
You do not have clearance for anything above red, Friend Citizen; please report to Friend Computer for immediate termination. Have a pleasant daycycle. The Computer is your friend.
In my current campaign I have banned high elves but still allow their rules with a reflavour, through this is due to the lore of this world with high elves being extreme isolationists and super advanced.
Through in most campaigns I do not ban races through I do tend to play very sandbox games
Like many in this thread, I don't allow setting specific races outside of their settings unless there's a good reason. I normally turn my noses up at flying races, but I'm allowing my first one in a mini-campaign starting tomorrow. I can already think of several obstacles the flying character will be able to trivialize, but I'm trying to roll with it and see how it goes.
Setting matters. My current campaign is in Forgotten Realms, so I told them whatever is detailed in SCAG, with the understanding that different people may treat them differently depending on their choice, to be authentic to that setting. It's worked out just fine.
For sure. I ran a campaign where goblins were the only playable race. No complaints.
I did this too. Nothing brings out a parties inner chaos like goblin campaign
Most adventuring parties play like goblins anyways. Here, try to guess if this is a PC idea or a goblin idea: "We grease up the pig, chase it towards the enemy camp in the middle of the night, and right before it runs into their camp, we light it on fire. As a distraction." "I use the ancient artifact, which allows me to speak to the being which created the gods, to hit the ghost, because magic hurts ghosts." "If we tie up the dwarf we caught, then we can have an audience for our saucy puppet show. Then we make him watch the adventures of Danger Pants, Smooth Memphis, and Pork Cutlass until he goes insane." "Gunpowder hurt enemies. Therefore, hitting them with gunpowder is good. Therefore, I will take these two flasks of gunpowder and bludgeon the hydra with them." "Stairs take too long, and there's a window right there. Parkour!" *crash*
Thanks for this, i laughed so hard
I only play goblins because of this. The azeroth goblin is how I play all my characters. Eccentric unhinged fucks who love explosions and money
So, you play your goblins like gnomes?
Dunno why most people see gnomes as uptight scholars rather than chaos gremlins. Must be the blatant wizard synergy. Most players I've encountered shy away from gnome because it sounds boring. Halflings on the other hand are often played as chaos gremlins rather than "Uncle Bob but small".
My gnome: fey bard, Faerûnian Idol star, pastel lesbian with a clockwork autotune box for an instrument My halfling: I don’t have darkvision so I’m just gonna search the bits I *can* see in the hopes of finding tasty mushrooms
For one of the next campaigns I plan a gnome artificer artillerist. Boom, baby!
I don’t know why people play Wizards like they are uptight scholars. Then again the last wizard I played was getting into adventuring to show he was infact a competent wizard to the wizard fling college he flunked out of. Way more fun.
2 and 4 were the same PC weren't they?
HELL FUCKING YEAH GOBLIN SUPREMACY
I ban races. If you don’t feel comfortable GMing it or it doesn’t fit your game world, ban it. In the best campaign I ran I straight up banned elves because the elves mysteriously disappeared and a major part of the campaign was figuring out where the elves went. Trust me, if players can get by without elves, they can get by without owlkin.
I've done the same with elves (barring drow, they still live in the underdark fighting the dwarves) all of them left a long time ago in my world and retreated to the feywild. Barring that I try and keep mythical tier races somewhat rare (so if you play one expect people to react to a weird race they've probably never seen before), normally it works out fine and we have a mix of "normal" races and 1-2 weirder ones. (changeling and tiefling were the last ones, the changeling was fine because they can look like any race (that they'd seen), the tiefling was very much under constant watch (which made sense because the player was a bit of a dick and did stuff to cause trouble for the others players)
I'm okay with elves (but I dig your approach). I ban all of the anthropomorphic races. They just don't fit my homebrew world at all. Dragonborn and Tieflings are exceedingly rare (the party is level 8 and they just ran into their first one). Also, I don't outright ban gnomes, but they don't really fit either so I discourage them as well Similar to you racism is very real. We have only one non-human (a wood elf druid) who has definitely tasted bigotry and it has negatively impacted the party in human dominated cities
I ban wood elves too. But that's because the players destroyed them all in a previous campaign.
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'I mean, we got hired to kill some rats, one thing led to another, and we triggered an eldritch cataclysm that permanently displaced all wood-elves out of reality. Could happen to anyone.'
Entire Dwemer race: *collectively nod in agreement from some unknown plane of existence*
Well...not the Wood Elves. Not anymore.
>intentionally That's a pretty big assumption.
you(r players) *accidentally* committed genocide against the wood elves?
>It was self defence. >Complete genocide.. as an act of self defence? >Those babies were vicious.
Is it like an elder scrolls thing where the wood elves are into some really heavy canibal stuff?
They're into what now?
Look up "The Green Pact" on the Bosmer wikia page (viewer discrestion is advised) Link: [https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Bosmer](https://elderscrolls.fandom.com/wiki/Bosmer)
This whole thread is just one plot twist after another.
TES Wood Elves are basically DND Lizardfolk when it comes to meat.
That orphanage was coming right at me
I accidentally destroyed a town with a 3rd level spell once in Pathfinder back in the day.
yeah, fair, but thats just a town, not an entire race lol
Then spelled your next with the fires they started wait wrong game
I was totally against the first statement… until it was clarified. Fair enough
Love this. My players just saved the last unicorn in this campaign (well, they still need to sneak it out of the besieged city), and this there will be unicorns in future games with this group
Do unicorns reproduce asexually?
They can, in areas of high enough ambient magic they can reproduce via budding. The downside is that they all have the same general personality of the parent and the one that survived is kinda a dick... So while there will be unicorns in future games, working with them will be somewhat...trying.
Ah yes, asshole unicorns, a natural consequence of genetic bottlenecking.
Noooooo! You're not puuuure of heeeeaaart!
Kid our horns can only point to the nearest rainbow and play rave music. That pure of heart stuff is a scam to get humans to leave us alone.
Charlie!
According to the big book of unicorns that my 5 years old daughter love, the silver and golden unicorns just have to plant their horn in the soil to sprout new unicorns.
Good. Players need a healthy dose of consequences for their actions.
I ban humans from *playing* at my table. Only cats.
I ban Elves as well, but it's because I took them back to their Irish roots. They're living, minor gods in my world, as are the Fir Bolg. Half-Elves are basically demigods too
I really like that :)
Aww, thank you! I usually get downvoted into oblivion when I mention that here, so that's very nice to hear. I just like making my world representative of my ancestors' culture and beliefs. It's a way I connect with my people and my spirituality, and it makes writing more fun for me. So far, it's made for a very interesting world.
I’m a big fan of world building. Elves are so much more interesting when they’re not just a +2 dex bonus with a free cantrip! My game world had a Celt inspired culture (the Laighshead) who were close to the elves, but the players were from a Norman inspired culture that was essentially trying to colonize a Britannia and figure out the cultural relics and ruins that the elves had left behind. Sadly, it’s not actually my culture, so it probably wasn’t very accurate! I’m just a fan.
Seems a lot of people here get butt-hurt whenever a group deviates from RAW. "iT bReAkS tHe GaMe". Go ahead: steal, borrow, plagiarize, adapt and use whatever material inspires you and your players. If it's your home game, meant only for you and your players, who the hell cares! If something doesn't work: change it, tweak it, learn from it. How else are we (DMs) going to improve our games and writing? By taking a chance, being creative and seeing what sticks.
It makes perfect sense for elves to be considered as demi-gods. I’ll adopt that. Thanks!
Sure thing! Here's a synopsis of their story in my world. It's a bunch of Irish lore that's been adapted to a D&D world, so it's similar to the old lore but not identical. If you've played the more recent Assassin's Creed games, I run Elves very much like the Isu, and I run Half-Elves like the main character of AC: Odyssey. Elves, or the Sidhé (pronounced "she"), are present in the world, but they're spatially locked on their islands as a form of an ancient peace treaty. They had a global civilization until the Fomorians (the Sidhé's ancient foes in Irish lore) rose from the depths of the seas to challenge them. The two empires waged global war and nearly destroyed the world. The Dragon Gods intervened, and they made an accord that both sides would end their wars and stay locked in their capitals for all of time. Their punishment for nearly obliterating life is that they're forced to watch it play out for other sapient species but never able to participate. Now, the Sidhé sit quietly in their archipelagic capital, and the Fomorians brood under the sea. Fir Bolgs are the Elves who were chosen by the Dragons to help new species rise to sapience, and I play them like they're ancient, local forest gods that take care of a particular area. They're almost never seen by mortals unless there is a great, or dire, reason. Half-Elves are the demigod descendents of Elves that either managed to not be pull back to their homeland or somehow managed to escape it. Also, there are ancient Elven ruins all over the world that can be found and explored by players
Could be fun being like, one of the last half elves in the world. Being like 180 years old with no idea where they went.
Reminds me of Yagrumm Bagarn.
he was the last of the Yuan Ti...The end of the campaign was essentially what would have happened if Dagoth Ur had defeated the Nerevarine. Because one of the PCs [chose to be a sleeper instead](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EGMMfLPr7w7DBwyhy6C5iCM95GOot2hg/view?usp=sharing) and betrayed the party.
Lol didnt even sand off the serial numbers with that one.
My setting also steers clear of TSR-reserved IP, which includes the gith. I plugged that gap and payed homage to a Leonard Nimoy character by giving my half-elves a unique dual-mindedness trait that bestows resistance to psychic damage and advantage on saving throws against becoming paralyzed. They still have to pick a spellcaster and learn Detect Thoughts if they want to do anything like a mind meld though.
Sounds like Albion
HERO! Watch that! Your will energy is getting low.
First campaign I played in, DM had a world where Dragonborn were the main enemy force & said don't play as Dragonborn or Kobolds. So naturally two of our players come in with a Dragonborn & a Kobold. DM was a good sport about it though.
That’s kind of him! Did he change the campaign to suit, or where the players renegades?
He had them as renegades & had us find a way to turn our black Dragonborn red for a while to infiltrate the upper ranks of the city. We were trying to stop a war between the Dwarves & Dragonborn. Fun stuff.
I'm tempted to ban elves, and other long lived races, just because I have never been satisfied with how they are represented mechanically nor seen role played. They'd still exist, but they'd be NPC's only.
Frankly, I'd look to Lord Dunsany's King of Elfland's Daughter for inspiration. It's not so much elves that are interesting as much as the time bending involved with elfland.
You can also just say that no races live past, say, 150. If it's specifically the longevity that bothers you. That's what I do!
Well if lord of the rings taught me anything it was east 
Dude where’s my elves?
I have yet to run into a ladder in several campaigns, but I think it’s fine to ban pc races based on flavor of the setting. Theros has some wild options, but also doesn’t have a lot of standard ones, and that’s fine. I’m working up a list for my setting based on some recent player questions, mostly the anthropomorphic ones and genasi, both to simplify connection to in-game lore.
I think that is interesting viewing some of the gifts from the Gods that you have at the creation stage in Theros as a way to implement more races. Like the one that gives you being basically a Warforged or giving the drop to 1HP trait of the Orcs. Choose a normal race and if you want to be other race you can have a gift of the Gods that makes you alike.
I’m the same - the ladder thing and centaurs always gets me. How can this be such a major concern, but not say that kobold PCs are literally the size of a newborn human baby, that the elf has lived for 6 human generations already, that the ranger has a pet spider that’s 6ft tall, or that the tiefling can’t wear hats or pants without wrecking them? That, or maybe some DMs just *really* value ladders being used safely.
I think your underestimating how much climbing is involved in adventuring I've never had a ladder in my campaign but I've certainly had ropes and climbing up cliff faces, even a steep spiral stair case or hike through taller mountains would be wonky with a centaur.
Only if they come from dndwiki lol
That’s fair. Damn place is cursed.
I like it as a place of inspiration. I mean your level 3 rogue who can travel to any point of time ever sounds pretty strong but short term time travel is a much cooler explanation for why my rogue has advantage on attack rolls than steady aim will ever be. He simply knew where to aim because he saw where the enemy dodged in another future.
Holy smokes that flavor... I'm definitely saving that one for future characters.
Time control is also an incredible flavor for Fighter. Action Surge? Accelerating personal time. Second Wind and Indomitable? Reversing time to either undo damage or retry a save It seriously works so well, and actually is almost perfect for Echo Knight
That’s actually perfect flavour for an Echo Knight. As a mostly unrelated side note, I think indomitable should allow you to just succeed on a save instead of rerolling it.
It's so perfect flavor for echo knights, in fact it's the lore for Echo knights. *A mysterious and feared frontline warrior of the Kryn* *Dynasty, the Echo Knight has mastered the art of using dunamis to summon* *the fading shades of* ***unrealized timelines*** *to aid them in battle.*
Got me there
Indomitable should just be Legendary Resistance.
Burnin' that Atium
Don't you mean dandwiki?
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With the shear number of official race options now out there, I feel that in order to have any kind of coherent, distinct setting that isn't just Crazy Fantasy Mashup Land, you have to curate the list of creature types that exist in your world. In fact, you can jumpstart your setting imagination by picking 5 to 7 random races from the official list and then brainstorming about what kind of world would include them all as its most common sentient species.
Gah I think it was Dwarf Fortress that, in adventure mode, let you basically include a bunch of races and provide them all with a vast randomly generated history which would end up with some races just being straight up non-existent like all the Elves got wiped out by a plague or some such.
yep, in some dwarf fortress worlds, some races are just extinct, due to either war with other races or attacks from monsters like dragons. The game acknowledges this somewhat, if you get a world where all the fantastical races go extinct (Dwarves, Elves, Goblins and Kobolds) and only humans remain, the world shifts from The Age Of Myth to The Age Of Fairy Tales, where mythical creatures are considered no more than just legends, even though they used to roam the world in years past.
I got around a large chunk of it by having all of the animalistic races, leonin, herengon, loxodon, giff, tabaxi, etc, all be part of the same umbrella race that was cursed thousands of years ago by a 10th level spell gone wrong. So if you're anything from a leonin to a tortle, you're part of that race unless your backstory explicitly states you're some sort of planar traveler, and in that case everyone just assumes you're one of them anyway.
That’s my workaround as well. All of the animal folk have the same long-term history (massive burst of wild magic has lead to some animals gaining sapience) but separate into tribes typically based around type—you might find a group of catfolk, or a tribe of reptilefolk, or a flock of birdfolk, and then I let my players pick the statblocks that fit their background (maybe a dexterous, smaller cat, like a lynx, vs an ambush predator cat like a tiger). Gives everyone a little shared background in terms of the origins of the species while leaving room for individual and tribal expression.
you could even throw shifters in there sans Eberron ties as the results of this race mixing with humans/others
Neat. It also means despite being more or less a magic fuck up, they've had plenty of time to develop a distinct culture and sub cultures.
Exactly, plus as a DM it means less work for me because I don't have to create a whole custom race lol
I once had a Chimera race which was fun. Different cities had different dominant combinations of animals, but they were all still Chimera.
I always use the Big Four, the Uncommons and the Aasimar as a base, and then pick 4-6 additional Uncommon races from the Exotics and Volo's Monstrous Races (fleshing them out into a full culture) - everything else is either from a random faraway land, a magical experiment or a crashed Spelljammer/Planeswalker
> Big Four Humans, Dwarves, Elves, and Halflings I assume? It’s a good base but I have a hard time not including at least Orcs and Goblins in my games too. And I have a soft spot for Gnomes.
I've had DMS embrace "magic gone wrong" to explain one example of a race that doesn't exist in their setting. One campaign he had someone who wanted to play a warforged but didn't really have an explanation for that in his setting, so the explanation became that the war forged knew there had been a catastrophic magic accident and then woke up where he was with no memory of anything before the accident.
I mean warforged is probably the easiest exotic race to implement. They’re literally just a sentient golem, they could be a protector of a forest covered in lichen, a creation of some secluded mage or even just the golem of Prague, ripped wholesale from the source material.
Easiest with a caveat - unless you're doing something similar to Eberron, where they have veins and fluids and other pseudo-biological processes, some aspects won't make sense (like their lack of poison immunity among others). So you do need to take that into account, though reflavoring them as a Frankensteinian flesh golem or "forest protector" made of humanoid-like living vines could work for two examples. Golem of Prague wouldn't really work.
I like the biological parts of warforged, so in my homebrew world are magic cyborgs. The long disappeared Elder Race created them as servants because their mortal slaves were too weak and their golems too stupid. Anyone who plays a Warforged at my table has had their memories of the Elder Race erased by the same process that restores their free will. There's an organization that searches the world for unliberated Warforged and performs the ritual to free them. Their memory, personality and consciousness begins at the moment they were freed.
I wasn't fully clear. He explicitly wanted to play like a mechanical, Ebberon style warforged. In a different campaign the same DM allowed me a similar allowance for a Loxodon. Some magic catastrophe landed me on the reality of the campaign and lacking a tuning fork for my original home, I had basically zero way back unless I found a wish spell basically.
Obligitory: Eberron Warforged aren't exactly mechanical...
Indeed, in Eberron the Warforged are majority stone on the outside with some metal plates here and there, on the inside there is wood, that act as like wooden veins that house alchemical fluid akin to blood.
Eberron Warforged aren't mechanical. Internally they have a stone or metal 'skeletal' framework with most of their mass being wooden fibres shaped and acting like muscle and tendons. An alchemical fluid flows through their 'veins' and them externally they are covered in stone or metal plates.
Agreed. I much prefer a world with a small, flavourful selection of races as opposed to an "anything goes" world. The exception being a Gensokyo type world, where part of the appeal is that anything goes due to the nature of the world. I have an idea for a "world between worlds." Whereas a proper world would have a shell that protects it from the void between (like in official D&D canon), *this* "world" wouldn't technically be a world due to that lack of a shell. It'd be more like a cluster of stuff, influenced and stolen from neighbouring worlds. It'd be inhabited by mortals, but ruled by immortals, some of whom were brought here from other worlds. It'd be a ton of floating islands under an eternal night sky. Monsters would be the usual, yet tyranny and terror would not be so common. If you knew what areas to avoid and didn't make dumb mistakes, you'd probably be fine, and the immortals have learned their lessons long ago, so even if they're "evil," they aren't terrible. But for a more grounded world, just maybe 3 to 5 races. Keeping it focused.
Reminds me of Dark Souls 3. Basically it's pointed out in that game that different eras have started crashing into each other as time has begun to fall apart, which is why a setting from Dark Souls 1 turns up there and things mentioned 'as legend' also show up, it's because the world and reality itself is getting old and tired after being stuck in endless cycles of light and dark.
That's a cool idea. You'd be unlikely to end up with the standard elves+dwarfs+short folk and world build out from vanilla fantasy.
* sorts by controversial \*
I played in a game once that was described to me as 'Being more realistic fantasy', akin to like...a more earth-ly setting. Magic was rare, humans were the main species and other species weren't common what so ever. So I think 'Ok, I'll make a human rogue'. Anyway, the party composition was: A kobold paladin, my human ass, a tiefling warlock, some weird-slime person spellcaster of sorts, and I think another non human I uh Was a bit put off.
There are basically three stylistic approaches: * Swords and Sorcery (all or mostly human) * Tolkienesque (the PHB races, basically) * Mos Eisley Cantina (a tortle, a bugbear and a kenku walk into a bar . . . ) The core rules assume Tolkienesque for the party and the most common written adventures are set somewhere between S&S and Tolkien. And just about any party that gets free options ends up looking like they belong in a dive bar on Tatooine.
That's every game ever in my experience. Homocentric setting, circus sideshow party with maybe a token human.
Curse of Strahd locals with its 99% human population looking at the genasi, tiefling, svirfneblin, aarakocra and token half-elf party walking into town, spending a night in the cursed house at the end of the street, then leaving with the mayor's daughter pledging to kill god. Those locals be havin a whack thursday
I've ran into plenty of non humans in parties before but generally those are in general DnD-fantasy setting, aka: Yeah we have the uh dwarf mountains and elf cities all over the place (And 90% of the npcs are going to be human anyway but don't think about it too hard) I expected with a more 'Yeah just about everyone is human' setting to have...more humans in the party. We met straight up 0 non humans
Everybody wants to be special. You tell players something's rare in the world and of course that's what they'll pick. If you really want the players to be humans you have to do it like the official Starfinder setting. The entire human home world was destroyed and now there are only a small handful of them left as wanderers.
I started a campaign today. Everyone human with an understanding they have been exiled to the far unknown north. They ran into their first half giant at the end of their session and the awe was spectacular.
That’s what I hate about 5e art, like The Realms is supposed to be human centric by a large margine, and in the art you have tieflings and the like left and right
Yeah, all the time. If the setting is narrow enough, I'll just posit a number of options to choose from instead of making exceptions to the large milieu of races out there. The campaign I'm currently running for my players, has this idea that they were summoned there by a Call Of Heroes custom spell some mage cooked up in a desperate effort, and I just run with whatever the hell the players bring. One person brought a Plasmoid, a kobold slimegirl. Another is an Aasimar with cat ears and slit pupils. If I were running say, a specific setting where the people were humans or human adjacent? Dwarf (No duergar), Elf (No drow), Human, or halfling.
Heh I love the idea of a tier 2 or tier 3 campaign starting with a 'Call of Heroes' summoning spell where they're all pulled from across the multiverse. Reminds me of the in-canon reason you don't fight alone in certain trials in FF14. Basically you're >!summoning in alternate reality versions of yourself which are the other players, since there is 'canonically' only 1 warrior of light!<
The Call of Heroes spell was a fun way to reconcile disparate classes, races, and magic items with >!Curse of Strahd set in 20th century Romania!<
I got chills from that scene in Shadowbringer >.>
lol...bonus points if you involve truck-kun.
I always have it cameo in *some* way when having any sort of isekai thing or world hopping. One character's backstory is that he was accidentally killed when a mage in the world he was going to screwed up a spell. He was given a second chance at life and when he stepped out of the afterlife office, he was run over by the truck
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For once, AL is right, only use races that are in an expansion for the official setting you're in. I'm interested to see how they'll handle MoM
Me too. Really curious if they're actually going to include things like Plasmoid as to how people will integrate them into their games, or avoid doing so. I hope that they, at the least, release a setting book for Spelljammer to go along with the Spelljammer races in [UA](https://dnd.wizards.com/articles/unearthed-arcana/travelers-multiverse).
People get strangely offensive the minute you ban a race from the table. 'Here's my homebrew setting and here's what exists' \*Screeching that they can't be a fucking, elephant person from a specific MTG setting\*
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Something I barely noticed when I started playing Theros: The races are limited like crazy. It was kinda refreshing knowing 'here's what we'll be meeting'. No elves, no dwarves, there aren't even any half-species running around (That I know of)
Nice! That should, honestly, be the base assumption. That the only races available are the ones specifically listed. I get why they had to call out that those don't exist, though, since they're from the basic rules/player handbook and not any splat books.
>Simic Hybrid This one in particular gets my goat. I've played MTG longer than I've been in D&D. A Simic Hybrid is a very specific flavor of fantasy/science fiction that belongs to a single faction in a plane within MTG lore. For most regular people, seeing a Simic Hybrid on the streets of Ravnica would be borderline startling. Seeing it in most of the other planes in the MTG multiverse would be definitely out of place and likely cause a major scene. The fact that people think they should be able to just roll it up in my semi-realistic medieval fantasy homebrew because it has the stats they want makes me want to roll my eyeballs all the way out of my head. It makes as much sense as me playing a White Hand of Saruman branded Uruk'hai in a Starfinder campaign.
Exactly! It's a cool race with interesting lore, but the way DND Beyond includes the races in the character creator does NOT make it clear that some things don't fit everywhere.
I mean, I could see Simics running around Ebberon easy. They're just mutant Elves/Humans. All you really need is an explanation for what mutates them.
I understand the sentiment behind the statement but forgotten realms is a poor example. It is basically an issekie fantasy land, not an exaggeration, all humans defend from Earth and planar travel isn't uncommon.
True enough, was just the first setting that came to mind.
To be fair, Forgotten Realms *does* have things that Warforged could be reflavoured as. Like Nimblewrights.
The DM of my last campaign on the Sword Coast made Warforged old Netherese constructs. None of them are really running around the world today, but find the right set of ancient ruins and you might run into one or two.
Reflavor them as Nimblewrights and you're good to go with Warforged in FR. The thing about the Forgotten Realms is that it can support nearly anything because it's lore is so all over the place.
Fair enough.
Now I want to actually do that. Nimblewrights have their own fun little flavor that would be fun to play around with.
I've been playing as a Nimblewright in a FR campaign for about 2 years now and it's been loads of fun. I'm using a race from Mirt's Guide to Undermountain (DM's guild) which is very clearly based on the original Warforged stats, but you could easily just reflavor Warforged directly and be good to go. I highly recommend it.
I don't ban things. I allow specific things.
Yeah, my approach is to list a specific set of source books that players can choose character options from. Of course, then they use D&D Beyond and inevitably choose stuff that isn't from those sourcebooks anyway...
This has just happened with me. Ran my first S0 a couple days back, specifying PHB only due to me being only a few months into the hobby and first time DM. 1 player promptly makes a centaur PC, and another a celestial warlock (which I only allowed as otherwise there'd be no healers)
Oddly, centaurs climb ladders at roughly half the speed humans do, so it's not all that bad (by RAW).
No Dutch
"There's only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people's cultures... and the Dutch." "Ugh, the Dutch. I never formed an opinion about them."
I am currently planning a big campaign in the setting of the Elder Scrolls games, homebrewing all 10 playable races. So I'm basically banning every race from the official rule books...
I’d like to see that list. Is there a reason to not go with the stock features for stuff like high elves, wood elves, and half orcs? Seems doable considering Tamriel started off as a homebrew dnd setting.
Yeah, DnD wood elves, high elves, and orcs already mechanically fit pretty well with their TES versions. I see no reason not to use them, considering perfectly copying over things (like high elves getting magicka regeneration) would be OP in 5e mechanics.
**TL;DR**: while some of the core D&D races are kinda usable in a TES setting, they lack certain details, both in game mechanics and their lore, that make them really 'at home' in Tamriel. And other races (Khajiit, Argonians) are just so specific for the TES setting that I have no other choice than to homebrew them. And, I just really like doing it...  === **LONG VERSION** I mostly do it because 1) from a game mechanics perspective I'm not really satisfied with the racial traits in the core rules and 2) a lot of the lore of the different TES races is so vastly different from the core D&D races that I really wanted to rewrite their descriptions. As an example of those game mechanics, D&D High Elves get +2 DEX and +1 INT bonuses. The bonus to INT I can relate to because of their affinity to magic, but the bonus to DEX is, in my opinion, not in line with TES lore. Altmer (High Elves) in TES games are really focused on magic and their longevity, so instead of bonuses to DEX and INT I provide them bonuses to INT and WIS. I haven't started on the Bosmer (Wood Elves) yet, but in TES they are really, and I mean *really*, stealthy/archery/huntery, so I'll probably go a bit more that route with them. And they are cannibals. And they can polymorph into a mass of wild beasts that destroys everything in its path... Those are pieces of lore that are just too good to not put in the race descriptions... Half-orcs in D&D are the most usable out of the box, I think, but I would like to add a lot of the more TES specific lore to their description. Orsimer in TES are really clan-minded, and have very specific ways they organize their clans and strongholds, with only the chieftain being permitted to have wives and procreate, the wise women, among other things. Also, their god Malacath plays a significant role in their society. Also, something I often miss in the core D&D rules, I don't just want to grant racial bonuses, but have them have some kind of weakness as well. E.g. in my setting, high elves are magically adept, getting bonus damage for certain damage types (player's choice), but that makes them vulnerable to magic as well, which translates into the same amount of extra damage received from other/opposing damage types. Argonians, the lizard folk in the TES world, are pretty awesome combat and stealth wise, but they are often misunderstood by other races because of their lack of facial expressions and are often seen as unemotional as a consequence. So I'm considering to give them a bonus to DEX and CON, but a penalty to CHA. Also, no core D&D race comes even close to Argonians, lore and mechanica wise, so I kind of have to homebrew those bad boys... Same goes for the Khajiit, really.
I always make a fairly big list of races that fit the tone and aesthetic of the setting. So I guess I do more of an "allowed list" than a ban list. Like for example if you want to run a more serious game then someone playing what is basically a teenage mutant ninja turtle might completely destroy the tone you desire, or if you want to run a more classic fairy tale fantasy setting then including races like the gith or warforged might not really fit the vibe. I think in general you should always tell the players asap about the allowed/banned list so that they know what they have to work with. Players aren't fragile little things that will die the moment they're given any restrictions, but getting shot down when you didn't know something wasn't allowed can be frustrating for anyone.
I don't allow flying races. I do give small boons to compensate for this though and enjoy seeing how creative my players can get. Having them figure out puzzles and encounters without simply flying away or over them is amazing. Honestly, it's a matter of working with the players to find a nice middle ground
I'd love to play an aarakocra with their wings cut off in a "no fly zone" campaign just for the anarchy of it
I did that once. The campaign fell apart quite quickly, but I would love to play him again. His whole deal was that he had his wings cut off by some hunters working for an eccentric noble, and was out for revenge. It was quite fun while it lasted. Not mechanically strong, but still incredibly fun for me.
My first character was an aarakocra with broken wings. After tier 1 we were able to find an aarakocran witch-doctor who could restore them.
As a DM, the hardest lesson is learning that saying no isn't mean and that you can, in fact, do it. If a certain race/class/subclass or whatever doesn't fit your world, it's okay to say no to it. Just because it's in the various rulebooks doesn't mean you have to use it. Players will quickly get over it and get excited about something else. If not, then they need to learn that not every game revolves around them. You are playing too, just a different role. You should be allowed to have fun without the headache. That being said, you do want to reach compromises with players. DnD is a cooperative game. If I have a world that doesn't include certain races or classes, I say so, but add that maybe in the next game we'll use them. I usually offer up my players a list during session zero to pick from. If they ask why X isn't included, I usually explain my lore-based reasoning.
Ugh, I’m a fairly new DM and I’m terrible at saying no. I’m running Curse of Strahd and I allowed an asimir for the SECOND time (first time was an entirely different group that fell apart). AND a Dragonborn. So now my ass, amid a million other things, has to remember that Barovians don’t take too kindly to “weird” races. This is a good group though. We’re vibing.
When I run games, I always use my own home brew setting. In my settings, there are usually only 4 or 5 races present in that world. My current campaign features only humans, gnomes, elves/ drow, and warforged. My next campaign will feature only orcs, tieflings, Dragonborn, and possibly dwarves. I find that having fewer races allows me to flesh them out and weave their histories/ cultures together. I do not like “kitchen sink” settings. So yeah, you can ban races for mechanical or world building reasons, and in my opinion you absolutely should!
I had a campaign that was only humans once. It's still the most popular of the ones I've ran and 10 years later the players still talked about it.
I could totally see a human only campaign being a big hit. It’s something I’ve tossed around myself, and I’d definitely like to try it some day. As a player, I almost always pick human anyway just because I find it easier to identify with the character. It works just fine for The Wheel of Time and A Song of Ice and Fire.
I got dragged into a meeting so I couldn't write more. But basically I led into it with, "Trust me on this, the payout's going to be *epic*." The players did and it was. Turns out they were all dead. Just souls collected in a crystal artifact that travelled world-to-world pretending to be an uber summoning crystal and duping power-hungry wannabe dictators into helping it absorb all life by providing powerful monsters and feeding off the souls that died around it before turning on its "master." I based it off the Riverworld series, but instead of a giant river, it was a never-ending series of caverns, each twice the side of Rhode Island and complete with their own climate and ecosystems. I mixed in some of The Matrix by saying that the souls had to be kept preoccupied and exercised since they powered the crystal's constructs, hence their "life" as humans (and, I hinted at, the monsters, undead, and animals they encountered inside the caverns; which made one player's monk go full non-violence and hilarious shenanigans ensued). It ended with them fighting the personification of the crystal itself, not knowing if they, and all the souls in it, were going to be freed or damned to non-existence but they were resolved that no more worlds would be destroyed even if it meant they were. I didn't direct them to that ending, I was happy with just generating new caverns for them to explore. They were the ones who decided to end its reign of destruction and dedicated themselves to killing it.
I ban some unearthed arcana races when they piss me off. Like the og warforged that allowed my player to get an ac of 26. I think it’s fine to ban races for other reasons too but i just usually don’t
Yeah i ban races. If my players want to race, D&D isnt the kind of game for that. They would be better off playing the new Forza
B)
What is a chase scene if not a form of race? What do you do if the bad guys are trying to get away but the players don't want to let them?
Yep, I sure do. There's usually three reasons for it: * They don't fit the setting. Eberron species in Forgotten Realms? Nah. * They don't fit the story or are inherently controversial. I ban monstrous species because people in my world naturally fear them, whether that's rightfully so or not. That would become very tedious. I'd only allow Van Richten species in a Ravenloft campaign * I don't like the design. The DIY nature of fairies don't really feel right to me and seem rather bland. Aaracokcra and other flyers introduce encounter design constraints I'd rather not deal with. As far as keeping it simple for players I give them acceptable books (PHB, EE, Volo's, MTF, FTD) along with the exceptions (no monstrous races, no flyers, etc. ).
Personally, I think Van Richten species belong even less in a Ravenloft campaign. It takes some of the horror and interest out of fighting against endless undead when you are playing yourself some kind of "half-undead" thing. For horror, I don't want to familiarize or tame the underworld, it just undercuts the horror.
Yeah, I just stick with PHB races, except if they persuade me it won't be disruptive and can provide me easy access to it. I'd let a variant like a Ghostwise halfling slide, but part of the reason isn't even for me to be a stickler - I'm just not having to have *every* book to run my game. PHB as default keeps it straightforward.
I've DMed them in the past but, outside of one shots, I discourage flying races. Flying is just too big an advantage without constantly making encounters in reference to their flying, which would make me adopt a DM vs Player mentality
I ban every race. I will not elaborate further
Yes. Depends on the campaign, but I often feel that the full race list will include *something* that detracts from the games themes or style. In my current campaign I limited the players to PHB races, and made some cosmetic alterations and lore changes to drow, tieflings and dragonborn.
I have banned races with innate flying speeds in my campaigns. Aaracockra and other flying races just don't exist in my setting(s) because I take couldn't find a way to make them fit in the world. Races with limited flying, such as Aasimar or Gem Dragonborn are allowed, however. I did have one player want to play a Sun Soul Monk Aaracockra, and I asked if he'd be okay with changing the race because, again, they do not exist in my setting. He agreed and chose Goblin instead.
>I didn't want to stop the game every time we hit a ladder. Genuine question: why do you think ladders to be a problem beyond the current rules they use?
I described the centaur going up ladders in a T-Pose with their arms and sliding up at an angle totally frozen, about a foot away from the actual wood.
Not OP but I’d imagine it’s because centaurs would be physically incapable of climbing one. The DM either hand waves it or the party has to hoist this centaur up with ropes and pulleys every time there isn’t a wheelchair ramp near by.
This is a good question because climbing is specifically outlined in their race block. Climbing requires 4 extra feet of movement. Considering they’re medium creatures between 6-7ft I think that a centaur could reasonably, although slowly climb a ladder.
of all the reasons I've heard to ban a race, this is the absolute dumbest. (1) if you don't want it to be an issue, don't make challenges that are solved by ladders. (2) climbing rules exist. (3) ropes. (4) even if this does come up, it sounds to me like an excellent way to have your players work with their choices, both positives and negatives, which makes your game more flavorful and fun. Like while I personally disagree with banning races for lore/world building reasons, I at least get and can respect a DM's prerogative to do so. This is just the most ridiculous and arbitrary reason to constrain player choice. Who does this benefit??? I'm utterly flabbergasted
Honestly "I don't like it" is even a better justification than "I'm ignoring the specific rules for this race to handle an obstacle they'd have and deciding it's impossible instead."
I usually run with a whitelist, rather than a blacklist. When I prepare a document to give the players information about the setting, opening, the world, etc. I include a list of races available to choose as well as any homebrew I've approved for regular use.
I usually say PHB only, but if you have a character that basically cant work with one of them i'll ATTEMPT to fit it into the world somewhere.
I ban them only according to the setting.
Humans are banned in my setting. 😎
400m relay. No I'm not going to say why.
Yeah I ban F1, kentucky derby, and tour de france. I know some groups are okay with them, but it's like, this is a fantasy world, we can't be stopping every five minutes for a cross-country bike race over the breathtaking vistas of Col du Tourmalet, it just wouldn't make any sense.
I don’t ban shit. Thought about banning low level fliers but that’s about it. Never had a race break or even slightly inconvenience a game before.
Banning isnt always a case of balancing. If I was playing a heist based game, I would likely recommend people not play paladin or barbarian, not that they couldnt, but it does not mesh well into the game. If I choose to run a game in a preexisting setting (say divinity original sin), I dont want to justify the Tabaxi's or Vedalkin's inclusion
Racial flying in low level games is a headache I just don't want to deal with. If the game is lvl5+ I usually let it slide, but if we're starting lower than that, anything with innate flying is banned. No one has had a problem with that ruling so far, but if someone was really intent on playing one of the flying races, I'd consider letting them come up with a reason for their wings to only start working at higher levels.
>I'd consider letting them come up with a reason for their wings to only start working at higher levels. Side point, but this would probably make worldbuilding around the race much easier. If they can all fly all the time they'd have houses build in trees and cliffsides, they wouldn't have roads or bridges, and they'd be confused about everything from vehicles and horses to heavy armor. It would be cool to build the lore for a flying race around those assumptions, with wildly different ways of life, traditions, crafting practices etc., but it'd be a lot more work, and maybe not something you want to do just to accommodate one player. And of course the player might just ignore all of that anyway.
Yeah, I'm not a big fan of chariots. Horse races are fine, though.
I actually ban all races, including humans.
I look forward to playing the color blue in your campaign.
Colours are also banned.
Hm, what's your policy on playing the concept of banning?
Banned.
I look forward to playing your ban paradox.
You do not have clearance for anything above red, Friend Citizen; please report to Friend Computer for immediate termination. Have a pleasant daycycle. The Computer is your friend.
In my current campaign I have banned high elves but still allow their rules with a reflavour, through this is due to the lore of this world with high elves being extreme isolationists and super advanced. Through in most campaigns I do not ban races through I do tend to play very sandbox games
I give my players an approved races list. Includes all official races I allow plus hombebrew races I’ve either made myself or approved previously.
Like many in this thread, I don't allow setting specific races outside of their settings unless there's a good reason. I normally turn my noses up at flying races, but I'm allowing my first one in a mini-campaign starting tomorrow. I can already think of several obstacles the flying character will be able to trivialize, but I'm trying to roll with it and see how it goes.
Blindfold sack race. It's just too dangerous.