Restricted Races
Looking at today’s comic, I’m reminded of the first trip Laurel and I took to Dragon Con. We actually saw that famous kenku cosplay strutting around the Marriott halls, all black plumage and clawed hands. I think maybe it made an impression on my illustrator.
Of course, not everyone is crazy about the idea of non-standard fantasy races. A few years back when I pitched my dragon riders game to the group, I was super stoked about the novel setup. The idea was that everyone would roll up two characters: a dragon and a rider. They would pair up in buddy-cop fashion and defend the throne in classic Dumas style, choosing which of their characters to field at the start of every session. It was going to be courtly intrigue and musketeers and fire breathing! Hype!
One of our long-standing players immediately bowed out.
“Thanks, no thanks. I don’t want to play a dragon.”
It wasn’t a long conversation or a complex rationale. Dude just straight up did not want to move beyond humans and the classic demihumans (i.e. elf, halfling, dwarf). I was taken aback at the time. But in retrospect, it really shouldn’t have been surprising. Placing limitations on PC ancestry will always be divisive. Certainly it can help you set up an unconventional world (see Chris Perkins’s dragonborn-centric Iomandra). Being a dorky English major type, I personally think that restrictions breed creativity, as in the case of formal poetry. But even as novel experiences and idiosyncratic characters offer a certain appeal, they also alter the feeling of your fantasy.
We talked about the weird races way back in “Uneqal Treatment,” and the point still stands. When you add aarakocra and warforged and loxodons to the mix, you begin to wander from that classic Tolkien feel in a hurry. Whether you happen to want that or not is down to player preference.
And so, in an effort to chronicle the full diversity of said preferences, what do you say we figure out “restricted race campaigns” in today’s discussion? Have you ever had to choose from a limited array of possible ancestries? Did it force you to get creative in a unique world, or did it tie your hands and prevent you from making the character you really wanted? And for the GMs out there, when is it appropriate to limit player choice? Have you ever got any pushback for doing so? Tell us all about those all-kobold parties and bands of no-humans-allowed adventurers down in the comments!
ARE YOU AN IMPATIENT GAMER? If so, you should check out the “Henchman” reward level over on The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. For just one buck a month, you can get each and every Handbook of Heroes comic a day earlier than the rest of your party members. That’s bragging rights right there!
Usually we try to give everyone enough choises for their race or better their ancestrie. But in some of our homebrew world we tend to exclude some races that don’t fit the style.
We excluded lizard-folk, yuan-ti, warforged, goblins and kobolds last time. not because we don’t like them but because they just did not exist in this world.
Only exeption to this are changlings. They are just a no-go in our group. everyone was like “we can live without them” but that was a group decision.
then again our rule was allways, everything in the PHB is fair game and most of the other books are ok with some small planing from the DM.
But on the other hand. I once had a group that could only have humans, drawfs, half-elfs, half-ork, gnomes and halflings in them. the campaigne had the goal to have very alien elves and crude dragonborn in them and we were suppose to be confused by a lot of things oning on between the races. Aasimar and tieflings were created agends of the heavens and hells. It was definitly an interessting group.
Were you doing a “transported from Earth to the fantasy realm” sort of campaign?
We’ve certainly never had a D&D game restricted to a narrow set of races, though obviously there are settings where anything goes, and settings where you don’t want the party to be too exotic.
For example, my group is currently working our way through the Saltmarsh campaign, and we have a human, a halfling, a sea-elf, a lizardfolk, and a triton. The first two, no big deal. The sea-elf and the lizard, they’re unusual in town, but they’re races that are found in the area. But the triton, there’s no getting around the fact that he’s something deeply unusual, “not from around here”.
One such character works okay, but if we had a party consisting of a triton, a yuan-ti, a loxodon, a centaur and a bugbear… well, that’d just be a freak show in a setting like this. On the other hand, playing the same group in Forgotten Realms, in Waterdeep? Well, they’re still going to attract attention, but the folks of Waterdeep are used to strange sights.
And then comes difficulty of “do the villagers freak out of every time, or do we just ignore the weirdness for ease of play?” In my experience, it’s usually the latter.
Our groups obviously differ then, since in mine, anyone playing an uncommon race is usually going to play it up. I mean, sure, the local population will grow somewhat accustomed to having a lizardfolk barbarian staying in the town… but they’re still going to be a bit uneasy with how he keeps talking about eating people.
we‘ve got together a COVID-19 group (3 households) to play We Be Goblins.
I quickly discovered that playing „Chaotic, Sorta Bad“ alignment is not for me.
Generally I’m not interested of playing a Human only unless I‘d try a Captain Carrot kind of build.
After playing Runelords, those cute Paizo goblins quickly took a step up from “sorta bad” for me. Creepy face-eating little bastards…
Haven’t you heard? Goblins are green kinder now.
I think “sorta bad” was a reference to YAFGC.
https://www.yafgc.net/comic/0006-them-and-us/
Hey, new comic to read!
someone wins one internet
I’ve mentioned in earlier comics the campaign I made out of that one joke post, “The party are all the offspring of the same bard. None of them have the same mother.” The only reason it came to fruition was because everyone else was so enthusiastic about it (and, you know, because COVID interrupted our LANCER game.) The “half-humans only” restriction was accepted wholeheartedly, and led to some fascinating character concepts and a plot centered around getting themselves into political power and legitimacy to help make the world a better place for the unusual peoples.
This is definitely one of those cases where it’s best to talk things out and make sure everyone’s on board before putting any serious work into the campaign itself. As in so many things, communication is key
Sometimes I think that this is one of the things that fantasy gaming is inherently set up to do: telling the story of Legolas/Gimli types overcoming their differences and improving race relations. That story just seems to plop out of gaming once you have disparate weirdos palling around fighting evil together.
Your posts about it inspired another group to do the same thing, as a one-shot. I played a dragonborn (who wound up going full dragon, in the epilogue).
I may have mentioned this when you previously mentioned this, but I was in a PF2 campaign where three PCs had the same Bard father. Except he was also a goblin. So that made two goblin-orcs, a fully-blooded goblin (with his actual wife) and my backup character was a goblin-elf, all on a quest to find their dad and beat him up.
I actually decided to make an entire party’s worth of characters that are are half-siblings that are all different races. I have a drow, half-drow, elf, half-elf, orc, half-orc, and human. All of the human-blooded characters share a human father. Then they share a mother with their full non-human sibling. I have builds for everyone except the elf. Still working on his. A sorcerer that finds traps is hard to make.
Our players are a fairly middle of the road, strawberry-vanilla-chocolate bunch (with the exception of one player’s swashbuckling Tabaxi riff on Puss n’Boots). I’m usually the one to try the “triple ripple banana road monkey” flavors of weird class/race combos.
That said, ages ago, as a DM, I actually had the following exchange with a player:
(player): I rolled my guy up ahead of time! My new character is a half-drow, half-ogre, half-spirit troll with levels in Samurai, Ninja, and Anti-Paladin!
DM: (mopping face with one hand) Okay, ignoring that at least one of those multiclass combos is a direct alignment violation of the other two, I’m pretty sure spirit trolls are actually undead—
(player): The rulebook says “the means of their creation is forgotten,” it doesn’t say they can’t have kids.
DM: Even so–“half-drow” “half-ogre” “half-troll”–that’s three halves.
(player): (shrugs) He’s a big guy.
We’ve all been there:
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/special-snowflake
That is eerily reminiscent of a Chainmail Bikini comic:
https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=45867
I’m surprised Fighter didn’t go with the Emu race. They’re a bit OP.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emu_War
Had to pick out a suitably blonde bird.
there’s always the „albino“ loophole
Huh, so one’s form is directly tied to one’s hairdo color when it comes to alternate universes or different forms? Hence why Wiz’s white hair leads to being a white bird and Thief is a Raven instead of being some purple bird, plus Cleric being a brown sparrow).
Now I want to see what birds Magus, Druid, Eldritch Archer, Street Sammy and other colorful-haired individuals would be. And whether this ‘universally-consistent-hairdo’ rule applies to other situations in the comic.
Never had much of a ‘restricted races’ problem. I feel like it’s more of a alignment association than anything, or the case of race-racism (Goblins, Orcs and such in a civilized area). Closest I’ve had recently is we didn’t want to grab any ‘monster’ races (Minotaur, Drow, etc) in our 4e game as much of it would happen in a fairly human-centric town.
How did the GM pitch the idea of a “human-centric town?” Were you guys actively trying to hit the “standard fantasy” model?
Well it’s human-centric in that all the token art they used for NPCs comes from anime. So most of the NPCs are humans or suitably-long-eared elves. Also they really like anime. Otherwise it’s the standard ‘Points of Light’ setting 4e uses, with a homebrew plot. ‘Goodly’ races like Dragonborn and Eladrin are fine, Minotaurs and Drow are baddies to most of the population.
Hey, I didn’t steal my tokens from anime, I stole them from a korean video game. :p
https://wiki.mabinogiworld.com/view/File:Altam.png
Oh hey, I’m the GM in question there.
It’s less “human-centric” and more that I’m running the game in the standard Points of Light setting; I didn’t mind folks playing unusual options like Shardminds or Satyrs, just not the common “enemy” options like Goblin and Drow.
If I didn’t have something like goblins and orcs to fall back on, I’m not really sure what I’d do for low-level enemies. You can only use so many bandits before you have to wonder where all the guys are coming from, in that largely monster-filled wilderness.
I imagine low-level options of reliable baddies could be:
Low-level scouts or spies from a rival/warring kingdom. They’re not good at fighting, they’re good at buggering out.
Local ordinary wildlife goes craaaazy due to a rare Lunar Druidic event, Rimworld/Birds style. Imagine a bunch of deer suddenly start goring and eating hunters. Or some other shenanigans disturb the local ecosystem. Ordinary animals turned hostile or organized.
Some asshole wizard’s pets or experiments escaped their tower and multiplied in the wild/town. Itty bitty elementals starting fires or soaking libraries!
Local magic school nerds ruin everything by summoning a bunch of mephits/imps by accident, who annoy a lot of people en masse.
Fey decide to visit the town en-masse for tourism, not understanding just how much havoc that can bring to a town wholly unprepared for a bunch of fey just visiting with their oodles of troublemakers of varied/colorful codes of conduct.
PCs spend the early levels being glorified exterminators for houses with trickier-than-a-rat pests.
Cursed magic items cause ordinary people to become irrational/insane enough that they need someone to pacify them long enough to get rid of the curses before they cause harm to themselves or others.
Ive had more of the opposite problem personally, where having too many races available and played affects the setting negatively. The more… i guess fantastical races in particular, like Warforged tend to do this unless the setting is built from the ground up to accommodate all the implications. No offense to anybody who likes Warforged, but im simply not interested in trying to explain why 95% of society still relies on the spear as its primary military weapon when they also have the ability to create sapient robot life.
On a broader level, you also need to give all these different species a home environment, which can quickly result in your land getting cramped and small.
That’s a GM issue, 100%. If a player is jazzed for some unique flavor, but the GM has no interest in exploring the storyline, your special snowflake winds up feeling like any other human… just one wearing a robot costume. That’s a recipe for disappointment.
Same reason that the army uses normal soldiers after they made Captain America, or that the Empire uses boring Fett-based Stormtroopers instead of making Force-sensitive clones, or why Zeus hogs all the thunderbolts instead of having enough forged that he can arm all the Olympians with it.
Sometimes, something in fiction can just be unique, and that’s fine.
My D&D 4e campaign took a detour for a few sessions to run a secondary party in the drow capital of Menzoberranzan. The main party would be heading there soon (and ultimately razing the place to the ground later on) and these side characters were going to give the players a look at the events going on before the next adventure started. We were to be operatives of one of the drow noble houses, so naturally almost everyone rolled a drow. It was quite fun for everyone to go all-in on the stereotypical backstabbing and spider worship. Especially since the main character of one of our players was your typical chaotic good drow refugee.
I was the exception to the all dark elf group, opting instead to play a bugbear slave fighter. Said slave was notably not any sort of Spartacus rebel, but the matron’s prized gladiator. Turned out to be real handy in a group of dainty, scheming elves to have a huge armored slab of fur and rage to throw in the frontline.Frontline.
Since our little sidestory evil drow party was functionally expendable, the DM went a little harder with the encounters and half the party was dead by the end. My bugbear went down grapping (quite successfully) a mindflayer to cover the retreat for the survivors. She returned later on in the campaign under enemy mind control, which was terrifying as I built her to be damn near unkillable and was allowed to play her myself to ensure optimal use of her kit. We blew a lot of daily powers just pinning her down long enough to kill the aberration controlling her.
All in all, monster parties are fun if you go all-in and play it from their point of view. Do some inter-family backstabbing as the drow. Play goblinoids and do some scouting for a legion. Infiltrate a city as yuan-ti spies. It could even make an opportunity to cut away to what the villains are up to, like how my DM did. All fun ideas to try.
Generally the campaigns I’ve been part of haven’t been too limiting on what races you can play so long as you provide a short backstory explaining how they came to be in this campaign. I’m currently playing a Tortle death cleric (I was unaware of Joe Manganiello’s Krull until I was nearly finished making him) of Pharasma in a 5e version of Golarion, so I made a short backstory of him migrating up to Avistan from the Mwangi Expanse due to feeling called by Pharasma. The main reason my DM or GM wouldn’t allow a race is if they judge it to be too powerful (so no Driders or Drow Nobles in Pathfinder) to be in line with the rest of the party. Homebrew classes and races are under similar scrutiny as they’re generally not as well balanced as the canon ones.
How did the folk of Avistan react to the unusual race? Were you generally accepted as just another adventurer, or did the choice have a more palpable impact on the story?
He’s vaguely terrifying looking (https://i.imgur.com/tIxymyb.png) and been key to dealing with intrusions with the city graveyard. So far people in town have just rolled with it and made sure to ask for any other priest of Pharasma when it comes time for a baby to be born. For the most part he’s just been treated as another adventurer and most likely that’s where it will stay unless the DM feels like it or I prompt it.
I remember a short Savage Worlds campaign I ran a long time ago called “Goblin Glory.” The premise was that goblin conquistadors were set on exploring, conquering, and pillaging a new continent. And the players were the goblinoids. Or their kobold allies.
But I had one player who insisted on playing a halfling. This was despite me warning him that the halflings are natural enemies of the kobolds.
So I let him. And the mostly goblin party, tolerated the halfling for a time. But the halfling ran into a lot of obstacles, not the least being that he didn’t speak goblin and the goblins didn’t speak halfling. But the sole kobold party member, spoke both languages.
So the ever friendly kobold would volunteer to translate. Unfortunately, his translation tended to be like this…
Halfling (speaking Halfling): “My apologize, I mean no harm.”
Kobold (speaking Goblin): “I can’t wait to kill you ugly jerks in your sleep.”
I can’t remember the halfling’s final fate. But I’m fairly sure it involved them using the halfling as bait for something.
Fortunately, everyone had a blast and enjoyed the game. Even the halfling player (he knew what he was getting into).
That’s the important bit. If you’re going to willingly buck the GM’s vision and play something that doesn’t fit the setting, it pays to A) have a good reason why, and B) take it with good grace when you’re treated like the fish-out-of-water you’re supposed to be.
It heavily depends on what setting I am doing. In some I pre-define what the races are, and what their cultures look like, giving my players a limited array to chose from.
In others I whatever is fine, as long as they can help me fit it into the setting. The only race I often limit is Githyanki or other races that rely heavily on coming from other planes. Both because they often require being more aware of planar stuff then my players usually are, and also because I sometimes don´t want to fit their planar stuff into my cosmology. Through I can of course, and have, just change the species backstory to fit with the setting.
But overall I have grown fond of having some really odd parties. Especially because you can then have people not just how odd it is.
But there is a lot of fun to be had with a One Race game. I have DM´ed both an all Dwarf and an all Drow game. In the all dwarf game I made use of 5e optional Honor Mechanic (Basically an extra ability score, that can increase or decrease by doing honorable or dishonable actions), and it was pretty fun to see the players have fun going full dwarf.
The drow campaign centered around a nomadic noble house, lead by the current matriarch. Who was a 1 year old baby. The house also suffered from a “curse” that made them extremely drownable.
The party consisted of the “Matriachs” inner circle, and spent most of their time plotting for her favor, desperately trying to keep their house together and figure out who murdered the former Matriach. All of them were, for some reason, utterly loyal to the baby. It´s “commands” were the only thing that could make them work together without complaint.
That an interesting point about the interplanar origins. Quite often, the planes area high-level concept that only becomes relevant in the last third of a campaign. Starting out with the expectations of “planar stuff will be in this adventure” can leave that kind of player disappointed or a lot of levels.
How did the baby remain un-murdered?
I find that I rarely visit planar stuff all that much, especially because most of my campaigns ends before it becomes relevant. If I include it, then I like to include it from the beginning in some way.
The Baby mainly went unmurdered due to everyone in the group having a strong reason to be loyal to it (Beloved sister, thought it was sending him psychic commands, thought it was adorable etc.), because they were busy with a lot of other things (Rival houses, giant dragon, a puddle on the road) and because it was protected by the aforementioned giant Minotaur bodyguard.
We actually had a follow up campaign to it, that followed one of the players playing as the Minotaur, who carried around the Matriach in a sling. The party was split between those that just wanted to escape the Underdark and those that wanted to help the Matriach regain her throne.
The D&D “Human” irks me. Humans have many unique abilities like our incredible stamina (We’re the only species that can run a marathon) our big brains, and our exceptional throwing ability. Yet for some reason whenever they’re in an RPG system they’re nondescript generalists, hence why I refuse to call them humans: I call them “Apefolk”.
Those “unique abilities” are only significant irl; in a fantasy rpg setting they’re not and your point is nonsensical.
Those aren’t exactly unique in a fantasy setting. Our stamina and throwing ability mostly comes from how our limbs and torso are shaped, and that’s broadly shared across all fantasy races. The big brains…should be self-evident that dwarves are smarter than badgers.
Things that make humans unique IRL don’t make them unique in a fantasy world, where basically every other race is humans with fantasy stuff added on top.
Humans wrote the books. When you do fantasy, it pays to start off with Kevin Bacon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxKtZmQgxrI&t=143s
Any species (Except Elves and Warforged) can easily be played off as a “Regular everyday dude that the audience can relate to” though. I identify a lot more with a Halfling who entered a Warlock pact because he was down on his luck than I do with a Human Noble seeking to bring glory to their house.
Anyone can be written as anything, but everything has some things that it’s easier or harder to write them as.
It’s easy to write bug-aliens as inhuman monstrosities out to consume the galaxy, but writing them as empathetic pacifists is trickier. Well, in one sense it’s equally easy, but in a practical sense, writing “The Rocust of Plaguesis-IV are empathetic pacifists” is bad writing. Writing bug-aliens as empathetic pacifists, getting the audience to accept them as such, and still writing a good story with them is harder than if you do something more traditional.
Likewise, humans are (by definition) the fantasy race most like the reader’s, so it’s easy to write them as a relatable everydude. You don’t need to wonder what this world’s humans are like, the way no two settings’ elves or dwarves are quite alike; humans are humans. It’s not hard to relate to a halfling everyman, but it would be even easier if the everyman was human, because everyone knows how this world’s humans work without needing so much as an establishing shot.
Hey, I like Loxodon! You can make one that’s a ranger, with favoured enemy: elves, a penchant for headshots, while shouting “Payback’s a b**ch, isn’t it Legolas?!”
snerk
I can’t deal with the loxodon as written. They need to have a racial fear of vermin and also ratfolk. Total missed opportunity.
Elephants aren’t actually afraid of rodents. They are however afraid of bees. Farms are putting up beehives as elephant deterrents.
https://news.mongabay.com/2019/09/beehive-fences-can-help-mitigate-human-elephant-conflict/
“restrictions breed creativity” that is true and false. Restrictions only breed creativity when you look for a way around the ban. Like if a rute is close you look for an alternate path to get where you go on the first place. Otherwise restrictions may only help people look for other than they wanted, not necessarily breeding creativity but making them doing something they could but wont normally. Lets say you want a chocolate ice-cream but the place didn’t got anything of it. You ask for another flavor, you could still have asked for it but only do for it’s second to chocolate, not because you are being creative making the most out of a restriction 🙂
That said using other races than the standard ones is fun. Specially when i can play monsters that way. Humans are yummy 😛
That’s the thing about RPGs. If you look at character creation as selecting options from a menu, it’s not an especially creative process. However, the options exist to shock your brain into some kind of reaction. Suddenly your Harry Potter clone goes through a, “What if Harry Potter were an elephant?” metamorphosis.
https://mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Quintorius_Kand
That sort of “what if” starts with the ice cream menu, but it’s useful because it activates player creativity.
So me and two guys join a sci fi space game and are told we can only play humans. Later other people get interested in this game and want to join. The dm now let them play alien races which everyone did with cool abilities and such. Felt kind of jipped.
Was this a new GM? Dude might have wanted a “normal” game for his first outing, then got comfortable enough with the system.
Alternatively, I could see a GM wanting to start a campaign in a human-centric setting, then expanding outward as you began planet hopping.
Would definitely be curious to hear the guy’s rationale on that one. :/
Also, because a buddy in academia pointed this out to me recently, ‘jipped’ is losing cultural currency. The style guides recommend using a synonym.
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/150468/is-jipped-a-politically-incorrect-word
I’ll keep that in mind.
They were making a human centric region but they have a bad habit of setting hard rules because it makes sense to them. i.e aliens don’t visit this place because the place is full of humans and thus strange therefore no aliens would exist there.
I am running a rather fast-and-loose campaign in the Grim Hollow campaign setting, but over half my players are new to 5e, and one of them had a particular idea in mind he wanted to play… So we are going the opposite direction: You tell me what you wanna be, and I make it happen, but people in-world WILL react to you appropriately.
This is how one of my players came to play a double-isekai’d white and pink spider.
…she purchased a tiny top-hat to help assuage people’s fears of her. It… does not work. It’s amazing.
Today is the day I became old. 🙁
https://memegenerator.net/img/instances/74867237.jpg
All of the listed things I believe.
I’ve played in games where the racial restrictions just pushed me in creative directions, ones where it felt they were restricting me from what I wanted to do (often as not for seemingly no good reason), and have made my own lists of “what’s available in this setting”.
You’ve got me curious about the “seemingly no good reason” examples. What was the situation? What got restricted, and what rationale did the GM give?
If the players could ever only field the dragon OR the rider, but never both, how would they actually get to ride the dragon? If you are playing a dragon-rider game, and all the players are dragon riders, but they never get to actually DO the riding riding thing, that seems a bit bait-and-switch. I think I would be most nonplussed by that.
…I don’t see anything saying they would only play one of the characters at once, so why did you assume that?!?
“The idea was that everyone would roll up two characters: a dragon and a rider. They would pair up in buddy-cop fashion and defend the throne in classic Dumas style, choosing which of their characters to field at the start of every session.”
Perhaps I misinterpreted, but I took “choosing which” to mean ‘choose either the dragon or the rider, but not both’.
That’s correct.
They weren’t their own partners. They’d choose another PC to be their buddy cop. And you’re right: it has the side effect of meaning that some character pairings never get fielded at the table at the same time.
My group briefly played a Pathfinder game using the (third-party) Noble Wild rules. For those who don’t know, Noble Wild basically has you play…basically intelligent wild animals, with the occasional intelligent domestic animal thrown in. I was the DM, so I didn’t really experience the limited racial selection (beyond throwing together goose stats for a player that wanted to play a goose bard that just honked at everything); however, I think the players enjoyed it.
I’ve always wanted to use Noble Wild to run a Night in the Lonesome October game:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Night_in_the_Lonesome_October
I believe there are campaigns where certain races don’t make much, or any, sense- but I also believe that working that into a character’s backstory & roleplay can be very interesting. Example; War For The Crown takes place in the heavily… let’s call it ‘human-centric’ Taldor, so the most common race is always going to be human. Taldans tend to look down on non-humans, especially halflings and other small races, who they see as servants at best. Since the party is working with Eutropia, a noble with ideals of reformation of Taldan culture, her allying herself with other disenfranchised groups makes for a good story. I’m currently helping test a 2nd Edition conversion of the campaign where our party includes a kobold. Most nobility won’t acknowledge his presence unless the rest of the party is with him, but being a cousin to the royal line, I give his opinions merit in the eyes of the nobility.
Similarly, I believe much the same about classes- it doesn’t make much sense to play Wrath of the Righteous as an Antipaladin, but if you can give me a good justification why you’re in with the crusade, I’ll run with it.
I think my favorite moment of oddball player character was my Psychic Bloodline Sorcerer Kitsune who masqueraded as a Fox Familiar for her Fey-Touched Rabbit familiar; psychic casting doesn’t require the normal components, so having the Fox Form bonus feat let my caster roll around in the general safety of her satchel while her familiar armored up and used Total Defense to up her AC. The Kitsune was a fugitive suspected of poisoning her lower nobility fling, and the rabbit was a local of the nearby forest of the town’s setting who took to having a human form and lifestyle with gusto (though limited competence). Both spoke Vegepygmy thanks to Linguistics ranks, which is a language of clicks and taps, effectively being a secret way to exchange information.
And I misread the entire question. To properly address it: there was a human or human-descended only game we played, as part of the hook was the inheritance of a distant relative that tied them together- allegedly. Sadly, that game didn’t get far for a number of reasons, one of which is no longer part of our gaming group.
We’re currently playing a new game with a somewhat similar limit due to again noble ties, different families fighting over a territory in what’s long since devolved to a mercenary-hired proxy war for spite. Still a bit early as an experimental air ship crashing has led to us trying to both find survivors and eventually make our way back to the front.
My very first campaign as a GM was actually a Kobold-only campaign. The idea was that the Kobold tribe lived in the mountain as a dragon recently moved in without explaining much about their background besides “I’m in charge now.” Said dragon had plans to build a dungeon, and appointed the group as Special Kobold Task Force #23. Quests for the group involved diplomacy with a dwarven clan to carve out the base dungeon, negotiating with a Medusa for information, and capturing monsters with particularly annoying/deadly abilities to stock the dungeon.
Overall, the players didn’t resist the idea too much (though one was a human-only player in any campaign without restrictions) and seemed to come to enjoy playing “the other side” for a bit. Particularly memorable was after ambushing a traveling merchant and killing the adventurers guarding him – the group had a moment of realization that “omg, WE’RE the random encounter that TPKed an adventuring party!” They had some mixed reactions to that realization, with one commenting they actual felt a bit bad about the situation – though that did not stop the group from declaring they couldn’t leave any witnesses when they finished off the merchant and dragged some dead Gnolls over to make it look like a different group was responsible.
I’ve recently been taking inspiration from Corefinder’s ancestry system and also some ideas from PF2E and the various WoD games to create ancestral traits and ability clouds/chains that synchronize and integrate with class abilities and features to allow characters tons of powerful and awesome options.
Yo dawg, I heard your like prerequisites….
I think it’s interesting that this player specifically wanted to not play a dragon. It’s not uncommon for a player to have something specific they do want to play, and for a player to object to being told “you must play X” because that prevents them from playing Y. But in this case playing a dragon wouldn’t have interfered with the player playing something else (he could in theory have just played his “rider” character in every session), it was that he had a specific, positive objection to playing a dragon. That’s a little rarer.
Some folks want specific things out of their fantasy I guess.
Hmm, given a choice I almost always play human (or in the grand old days, very occasionally the human subraces of aasimar and tiefling, when that’s what they were). I can’t properly explain why, but I think I’ve always felt that if you play anything other than human it tends to become a part of what defines your character. I have over the years noticed that people who play humans are the least likely to describe their character in race/class terms. That said, in a world where there was a different standard rsce, maybe I’d do it differently?
Though I have plenty of fun in the out-of-the-box D&D settings, if I’m writing my own campaign then I personally like restricting races. My preference is to avoid the maximalism of traditional D&D and (as I’ve previously mentioned) build an at least halfway “internally consistent” world. This means I can’t use the excuse “it’s fantasy, who cares why there are insert unexplained phenomena” – everything needs to have an explanation that is plausible at least within the scientific truths of the setting.
Every new kind of wildly different sapient creature, therefore, is one step further down a path of fantastical implausibility. And yet (while I can happily only ever play as a human), many other players want the variety. So when designing a setting I will tend to reach a compromise with a select number of races – enough to give some options, but few enough that I can write each unique species into the world so that it doesn’t feel like an afterthought.
Admittedly, “the world was created by intelligent and whimsical deities” kinda does work as an internally consistent explanation – but I’ve never wanted to go with that for some reason. xD
I’d like to thank you for defeating Omadon.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uw9bny88OuY
I’ve never seen this before, but I love it, thank you! xD
Only instance I’ve had for “restricted races” that knocked “human” off the list was one of the weirdest bunch of misfit characters I ever had the pleasure of derailing a campaign with. The DM decided he wanted a simple rule: No PC could pick a race from the PHB, and had to have class levels (plural, we started at level 5 in college) in something outside the PHB. The original intent was “nothing from PHB except feats”, but the class restriction was a little rough.
The story was a summoning by Evil Cult dragged our characters from other worlds to force an epoch and change the nature of the world we were playing in. So we were going to be “alien and strange” from the get-go. I can’t remember the entire party off the top of my head, but I played a Were-DireFox Rilkin Swashbuckler, there was a Warforged Charger Hulking Hurler (the one time we tried the “throw me” idea, the DM had him roll an INT check to see if he could figure out how to do it properly… we didn’t ask to try it again, because of the short argument that followed), and a Kender (this race was immediately banned from all subsequent games). And we “derailed” by abusing Player Knowledge as if it were Character Knowledge, and went from “explore the world to try and figure out the Evil Cult plans” to “Hey, Boccob is a god of knowledge and not a jerkwad, right? Let’s just go ask him!” (We did, for the record. We all had “new knowledge” to trade with him. I liked dealing with him better than the god of time, though.)
I bet the god of time threatened to retcon your campaign. 😛
The opposite, actually! DM had him as “required encounter” at that point, because “those more powerful than the gods” were considering dropping the universe from existence if it didn’t stabilize itself. So TIME TRAVEL to previous epoch for training, so we could handle the cult and stabilize the world “the next day”.
… I mentioned the idea of a pocket dimension progressing as the rest of existence looped, or perpetually looping us through a local time framework until we were ready. But I guess he was upset we were late to the meeting. (You’d think he would have known we were going to be!) But we didn’t get to do much beyond giving a Githyanki Silver Sword to a Gith in the long-long past before, once again, the semester ended and the campaign was cut short.