I don't think it's so much the issue of having fantasy races outside the 'main' ones so much as a mixture of DM letting everything fly combined with the main races being generally seen as boring and played out.

The first thing to keep in mind is that most of these people are of my generation and began playing from 3E onward. While having a ton of options was something which existed in D&D (and by extension, all RPG) to some extent I'd say it certainly exploded with the business model of 3E with it's obsession and 'builds' and making people buy new books. It seems that, at some point, people forgot the DM was supposed to police what was and wasn't allowed in his game and these new books went from 'new options' to 'every new book must be immediately added' resulting in games where I saw GM thinking refusing to use certain books was somehow a bad thing. They became less like options and more like a major DLC to videogames or, more accurately, an MMORPG expansion which superseded previous releases. It seems this 'buffet' mentality really took hold and I do recall people whining to me whenever I didn't want to add a certain book, in part because I hadn't read the book and did not want to add new mechanics. This was especially true of Psionics, even if nowadays I do like them as long as they fit.

The second problem is that, for you grognards over 35 these fantasy races (Elves, Dwarves, Halflings as the playable races plus Orcs for monsters) are the OG Fantasy Races, accept no substitute. They are basically seen as the archetypal races with a lot of interesting history in part derived from Grandpa Tolkien. However, do keep in mind not everyone my age or younger is ready and willing to read LotR and The Silmarillion. Instead these people were raised on the shitty ripoff of the ripoff of the ripoff. These races seemingly only exist in the public consciousness in some sort of debased, boring form and do not appear fantastical to the average person. Today an elf is not an ancient wise, unfallen human with a rich history: no they are either just longer-lived and pointy-eared humans or they are essentially 'fantasy nazi' (due to writers playing off the idea that elves are 'smug and superior'). Dwarves today are reduced to memes about mining, beards and alcohol. Halflings are forgotten or seen as boring humans. Orcs have undergone so many changes that most people think 'fantasy Klingons' or 'fantasy black people' when their name is mentioned rather than 'souless abomination and human-shaped demon'. Even with the enduring popularity of The Elder Scrolls franchise, most casuals generally don't know the interesting and fantastical background of the races of that setting and only see the surface details the game portray. Fantasy has been nothing but derivative shit or the past 20-30 years and the current generation is too fucking dumb to bother digging on how and why we got there, which is why the current generation see the core races as stupid and boring.

Today the core races are about as exotic and alien as a Star Trek alien race: a human in a funny hat with some rubber parts. Of course there's far more to it than just that, but then we'd have to move this to Pundit's forum.

That said the problem isn't the new races themselves, but rather how people choose to use them. If people were using Tiefling and Dragonborn better rather than treating them as part of the Mos Eisley cantina people would not be remotely bitching, but then we'd be asking my generation for too much, since writing something interesting and unique (and complex) is far beyond their programming. That and the problem is, when you allow every fantasy race it stop being fantastical. Personally I like the Dragonborn and Tiefling but I understand why they are so loathed. Dragonborn could be terrifying and interesting, since they walk an interesting line where they are monster-like and people-like in equal measure but, unlike the Hobgoblin they are more clearly aligned with the idea of using magic. Portraying them as an ancient, alien and war-like culture which breed mighty and fearsome warriors equally as it breed Clerics and Magic-Users would really go a long way to make them seem cool, but that is lost when they are just thrown into the mix 'just because'. If anything, I'd personally portray Dragonborn more akin to a less degenerate and evil take on the Serpent-Men with a more draconic bent. Alternatively they work fine as a minion race to evil dragons, especially if you want your evil dragons to have something like Orcs but that isn't just Orcs.

Meanwhile Tieflings suffer from the fact people see them as 'MUH OPPRESSED PEOPLE' and because the idea of clearly defined cosmic evil is so alien and antithetical to today's postmodern thoughts: granted that one game I did use Tiefling, I completely went along with the idea they were in fact misunderstood. But that was a Godbound game where things labelled as 'demons' weren't 'demons' in the D&D sense. Tieflings work because their concept is, I think, sound enough: a people cursed to be tainted with evil on a fundamental level. The problem is in how it is portrayed and understood by players and GM, not in the idea itself. You can use that to great effect but you got to think beyond the 'curse anime emo protagonist' shtick. Or, alternatively, you can play Tieflings 100% straight and portray them as a whole race of evil motherfuckers. It worked for Melnibonean, after all.

Of course if your setting has more than 3-4 nonhuman races you got a problem. So there is that.

Edit: That said there are furries who play D&D to enact their weird furry fetish shit and it's disgusting. Purge with napalm whenever possible.

My problem isn't the Mos Eisley-ness of it. Spelljammer is probably my favorite setting outiside of Dark Sun. I'm saying the established settings do a poor job of giving relevance to these new elements.

Case in point - I don't run modules. So Barrier Peaks, and Dungeonland do not exist in any of my settings for the very reasons you cite. They're incongruous. (god knows I love some Barrier Peaks as a one-shot). The point being is WotC needs to start building settings where the non-traditional stuff is cooked into their settings.

Eberron tried and did an okay job. The issue with 5e is that they're not really producing campaign settings like they did in 1e/2e. So it looks/feels like a big shoe-horn.

Of course there is denying a lot of this come from my generation's desire to be SPESHULL and making cookie cutter boring characters who are only interesting based on a serie of randomly thrown-together labels. How fitting.

Quote from: kythri;1066753Oh, I get that, but, in the context of the novels, Drizzt kinda made sense - in a lot of tabletop sessions, with an assumed humanocentric world, the non-humans (or at least, non-human-looking) characters typically don't roleplay that aspect of their character and expect everything to function as if they were human.  In my experience, when a DM/GM has the world react accordingly, they get pissy about it.  Fortunately, we haven't had that many players of that type in our games, but I've certainly experienced it.

It's part of what turns me off to a lot of organized play (lack of roleplay), so I can certainly sympathize with folks who are frustrated with all the wacky races as player races.

Bob Something tackles some of the following but basically I think these are two different issues. One is a question of what races are the norm in the game. The other is a question of how much cohesion should there be between character creation options and setting, and how much authority does the GM have to allow/disallow based on what works with the setting. This is something that cropped up way back in 3E (and frankly I was dealing with it before as a GM whenever a player insisted on being a Drow). Personally, I think setting is important and I don't enjoy play as much when the setting creation or setting options are put in the hands of the PCs. Back when I was running 3rd edition, this was a big problem for me because the game moved more in the direction of writing books for players and giving players the expectation that the options in those books would be allowed. There was definitely a cultural shift. Suddenly if a player had some kind of prestige class option that made them draconic, you were expected to allow it, even if the setting didn't have draconic things in it. And it is one of the reasons I moved away from playing as much D&D (or at least as much official D&D). I didn't see any point getting bitter about it though. I just viewed that as a taste issue. They were just giving people what they wanted and making books that sold. If that doesn't appeal to me, I can find other games or use an older edition. New tastes and approaches crop up all the time. If people want forty race options and don't want the GM's setting to muck with their choices, that is just where things are. That is what is giving them enjoyment. Mostly I play with people my own age anyways so this isn't really much of an issue for me. That said, I think persuading people that there is merit to the style you play can be good. I just don't think an approach that starts with 'kids these days' is likely to convince anyone but the choir and those who are dissatisfied with their current group.

By the way I'm utterly, straight-faced serious in my belief that something as maligned and a byproduct of 'corporate D&D' like the Dragonborn can be used in a good way. There is untapped potential in the race.

I prefer my fantasy games to have a more serious tone, preferably lowish magic, and with a more gritty pseudo-historical feel. This leads me to usually prefer all human parties. Once you throw in all sorts of weird races, it just starts to strike me as being silly. It kind of feels the same way as when you introduce too much magic into a setting, it demystifies the setting and makes things which should feel wondrous into the mundane.

There is also the added issue that D&D races, even the traditional ones like elves and dwarves, all too often just become hats for the character to wear that undermines more deep character development. If someone is going to role play a person who is obviously half human and half demon, that should be something far more profound than merely having some horns and I suspect that it usually isn't. That idea would go for elves too, it should be about more than just having pointy ears and a high Dexterity.

Quote from: Bob Something;1066821By the way I'm utterly, straight-faced serious in my belief that something as maligned and a byproduct of 'corporate D&D' like the Dragonborn can be used in a good way. There is untapped potential in the race.

Context is key.

I'm currently working on a new campaign that is set in a highly mutated version of the Realms. It's a continuing campaign where the end result had Planescape, Spelljammer, Forgotten Realms slamming headlong together with the Underdark, Kara-tur that at the end resulted in the main hub of the game being a Spelljamming port with a permanent portal to the city of Sigil - and the newly freed Githyanki and Githzerai (the Lich Queen died) have called a truce and have come home after ten-thousand years of of inter-planar war.

So the new game has as potential playable races on top of the "standard" D&D fare - Imperial Elves, Twilight Elves (new race of cursed Drow that forsook Lolth), Githyanki, Githerzerai, Gith, Duergar, Drow, Hadozee, Grommams, Warrgs (intelligent Gnolls), Scro, Krynn Tinker Gnomes - all as minority communities in the main metropolis.

But they're all there because the setting supports the conceit of WHY they're playable. This is not counting the intense politics of the human culture and the dominant Dwarf culture (it's set in the Great Rift) who are largely very bigotted and not a few outright hostile and racist to non-Dwarves (the main metropolis is far more progressive for pragmatic reasons).

So yeah it's a freakshow. But it's a freakshow where nothing is simply there "just because". And while these cultures are very snowflakey - I make sure they feel the real social impact of being looked at as outsiders and treated as such. IF the players choose to play one.

the problem with D&D as it stands is that most games I've seen, players approach the game with the assumption that any race that has stats is appropriate for the game.

Quote from: Baulderstone;1066787Gygax would weep to see the carefully constructed ecology of the world presented is his original Monster Manual turning into a mish-mash of influences. Next they will be tossing in crashed spaceships, crossing it over with tonally different works like those of Lewis Carroll, or allowing people to play balrogs.

Quote from: S'mon;1066708Girls posting their pastel-coloured My First PC drawing on Facebook are not particularly representative IME. In any case I don't bear them any ill will (unless they complain when I kill their PC).

Quote from: sureshot;1066746The sad part those shitting on other peoples fun would do the exact same thing if they were born with the same exposure to non-Tolkien influences to Fantasy. I'm sure they will deny it though because hypocrites are going to be hypocrites and denial is more than a river in Egypt. Myself I freely admit I would be probably be playing a non-standard race if I was a younger player.

There were other equally good posts put down here, but these are representative of what I think the case of it is. To sum up:

• What you see when you go on Twitter is not representative of what people are doing in general
• People who want to draw character art of their characters are not representative of modern D&D players in general
• Assuming we're talking about actual kids, I consider myself extremely fortunate that I had no avenue to publicly display the character art and character ideas I had at age 9 (or heavens forfend, age 12-13).
• As everyone has pointed out, D&D has had PC vampires, balrogs, dragons, and all sorts of things that would fit squarely in the 'hipster'/'edgelord'/'snowflake' category.
• Exactly how playing as friggin' elves and dwarves and gnomes is somehow less namby-pamby/pretentious/whatever-snowflake-is-supposed-to-mean or whatever than dragon people or devil spawn is a mystery to me.
• Why exactly is it that people born more recently than us are supposed to like the same things that we do? Why would, could, or should they want to play strictly the Tolkein/Howard/Burroughs-inspired stuff that inspired us (that stuff that inspired us specifically because it was what came out during our or our father's times and we grew up with it)? This is like whatever stodgy old professor it was that complained that the kids of the 90s should be reading Wind in the Willows books instead of Harry Potter, but then couldn't come up with a reason except that it was what he grew up with.
  
• I just don't have, or really enjoy, a preoccupation with desperately trying to explain why something someone else is doing is somehow wrong (with incredibly torturous mental gymnastics to explain how and why it is wrong). It violates my libertarian ideals.

Quote from: RPGPundit;1066672Take a look at the DnD tag on twitter and all you'll see is hipster kids showing off drawings of their totally non-human orange or red or blue or purple thing, which they'll call 'my boi' or 'this cutie' or whatever, to the point where you wonder whether the fuck they've ever had them inside a dungeon or their whole campaign is just about the characters eating cake while complaining about the patriarchy.

So what do you think about modern D&D having all these kids playing tieflings, aasimar, genasi, tabaxi, dragonborn etc.?

Is it 'special snowflakeism'? Does it let them show off their (mostly imagined) non-conformity by all doing the exact same thing?

But is it basically harmless? Does it add to the game? or make it worse?

Data disagrees with your guessimate.

Quote from: Mistwell;1066841Data disagrees with your guessimate.

Holy crap, that link.



Though now I want to play an Aasimar Druid.

Dont let the table layout fool ya. Aasimar ranger is where its at.

Quote from: Bob Something;1066815That said the problem isn't the new races themselves, but rather how people choose to use them. If people were using Tiefling and Dragonborn better rather than treating them as part of the Mos Eisley cantina people would not be remotely bitching, but then we'd be asking my generation for too much, since writing something interesting and unique (and complex) is far beyond their programming. That and the problem is, when you allow every fantasy race it stop being fantastical. Personally I like the Dragonborn and Tiefling but I understand why they are so loathed. Dragonborn could be terrifying and interesting, since they walk an interesting line where they are monster-like and people-like in equal measure but, unlike the Hobgoblin they are more clearly aligned with the idea of using magic. Portraying them as an ancient, alien and war-like culture which breed mighty and fearsome warriors equally as it breed Clerics and Magic-Users would really go a long way to make them seem cool, but that is lost when they are just thrown into the mix 'just because'.

It seems to me that this is holding dragonborn to a higher standard than other PCs. In my experience, most PCs aren't fascinating, fantastical creations - regardless of their race. They're most often simple stereotypes that the player mucks around with. And that's OK. It's not like the game has to be high art with great psychological and mythological depth.

Quote from: Bob Something;1066815Of course if your setting has more than 3-4 nonhuman races you got a problem. So there is that.

I also don't buy this. Obviously, more races inherently means less detail on each race - but it's not like maximum detail is always better. Personally, my current setting has humans as an evil NPC-only race and eight core PC races, and I think it's been working fine. Everyone has gotten into the contrast of the eight races, and they're all well-integrated into the setting. (The PC races are kobold, goblin, orc, drow, bugbear, gnoll, hobgoblin, and yuan-ti.)

Quote from: tenbones;1066816My problem isn't the Mos Eisley-ness of it. Spelljammer is probably my favorite setting outiside of Dark Sun. I'm saying the established settings do a poor job of giving relevance to these new elements.

Case in point - I don't run modules. So Barrier Peaks, and Dungeonland do not exist in any of my settings for the very reasons you cite. They're incongruous. (god knows I love some Barrier Peaks as a one-shot). The point being is WotC needs to start building settings where the non-traditional stuff is cooked into their settings.

Eberron tried and did an okay job. The issue with 5e is that they're not really producing campaign settings like they did in 1e/2e. So it looks/feels like a big shoe-horn.

Conversely, I've used modules but I have never done much with published D&D settings. I've technically used Forgotten Realms, but it's been a default backdrop that is mostly irrelevant. The default for a while has been for alternate settings to be stuff for third parties and individual GMs, rather than part of the core product line, which makes sense to me. Since the beginning, many people have seen D&D as a toolkit to put together their own setting from the disparate elements, rather than playing in a published world.

I have nothing against new settings that highlight new stuff, but I don't think it should be necessary.

Quote from: Mistwell;1066841Data disagrees with your guessimate.

I'd say that the Dragonborn, Tiefling, and Gensi coming in the list above the halfling and especially the half-orc supports Pundit's theory.

I always thought half-orc was a bit snow flake so I see a snowflake being and supercede by more snow flakes.

The Elf group probably includes Drow. I know it includes Eladrin which I find even more insufferable at the hands of most players because you know they are going to be played as insufferable jerks.

But I stand by my original hypothesis that a generation of players raised on super hero movies are looking for the most unique avatar they can to represent them in game. I have had several players go human to get their feet wet and then want something more exotic after a couple of games and catching glimpses of the PHB or online character builder.

Halflings in 5e honestly look really odd thanks to the dodgey artwork in the rulebooks, couple that with the hobbit movies and you dont really have a race folks want to touch when you have a ton of better options with way more interesting art to draw from...also they scrapped the cool halfing lore form 4e which honestly made them something unique in favor of hobbit-lite...and half orcs are kinda shite as a race option and always have been so cant really blame anyone there.

dont really get dragonborn since rules wise they kinda suck in 5e and the lore is ropey as heck too(another case of scrapping what worked for something that needs work), but again if its a toss up between half orc or dragonborn most will pick the dragonborn since 'its a frickin dragon person' so why wouldnt you?

I can't stand Tolkein, I only play humans.

Given the choice, I prefer to run historical games, so all-human and nothing else.