What dnd races are required?

@dnd

I’m making a new #homebrew #dnd setting. The mistake I felt I made last time was trying to devise an orgin from whole cloth for each playable race, which wasted a TON of time and energy while also confusing my players. So, herein I wish to ask: What playable races would you miss, if you joined my table and noticed their absence?

Humans, dwarves, halflings, orcs, goblinoids, and elves will all stay, but I am not sure about all the others.

  • bogdugg@sh.itjust.works
    20·
    1 year ago

    I would just write the world in a way that is interesting to you, and add to it as players show interest. “Hey, I want to play a Tabaxi” -> “oh okay, let me think about what that means and I’ll get back to you.” This also gives you more latitude for using their ideas to inform the world. “I want to play a Tabaxi Wizard” -> “oh interesting, maybe there’s a clan of them that…”

    You’ll be able to focus on what you care about, which will make the world more interesting, and allow players to incorporate things they care about if they wish, which will make it more fun for them too. Framing it in terms of “up for deletion” implies you need to answer everything about the world from the start, which is not only inefficient but an impossible standard. Just because you haven’t considered something doesn’t mean it can’t exist.

    • Xilabar the Dice Goblin@dice.campOP
      6·
      1 year ago

      this is honestly just solid #DMAdvice. But also bad phrasing on my part. My actual motivation for asking the internet was to see if there was going to be a surprisingly large chunk of people that would be turned off if [insert species here] wasn’t included by default.

        • Xilabar the Dice Goblin@dice.campOP
          1·
          1 year ago

          You’d be surprised how many people don’t ever think about what they like, and because they don’t do self-reflection they can’t tell me what they like. It’s really common in nerds for some reason.

            • Xilabar the Dice Goblin@dice.campOP
              1·
              1 year ago

              🤷‍♂️I only have like three people I could currently recruit, since I only have 2 irl friends plus my fiancée. Considering that in my experience about a quarter of the people I recruit don’t show up regularly and another quarter stop coming after a bit, I would prefer to recruit another 6-8 people so I can have six players.

              Basically, I’m doing market research. I want my game to be minimally aggravating for my players. Right now I’m specifically focusing on one detail that I dont really get.

            • Xilabar the Dice Goblin@dice.campOP
              1·
              1 year ago

              But I do agree that after I have players I should implement what they like. A mistake I made last time is that I spent a year and a half going wild with my worldbuilding, filling in every single nook and cranny that normally the players would co-create with me.

              • Xilabar the Dice Goblin@dice.campOP
                1·
                1 year ago

                I’m thinking about having my pantheon be about that, sort of how in the #Silmarillon the original sin was “a talented prick made the coolest thing, but decided no one else deserved to work with them and got obsessed with protecting their intellectual property”.

                Melkor got pissed that he had to compromise his vision with the other Valar when making Arda, Feanor got waay too proud of his Silmarils, Sauron got litigious about his ring-lore IP, and so on. It’s a really good message for a #ttrpg