FrankTrollman wrote:
I think you're forgetting how badly designed D&D is and was. Recall that in the original setup, hard unbreachable guidelines existed for the players, but not for the DM. Players had to be a Human, Elf, Dwarf, or Hobbit. They later graciously allowed the players to be a half orc or a gnome. Gygax went on exciting rants about how under no circumstances should you ever allow a player to be an Ogre or a Gnoll. Those were set aside to be playthings for the DM and the DM alone.
And that's bullshit! If it's in the world, it's in the world, and if it's not, it's not. The selfish crap about how the DM can play any monster he feels like and the PCs can't is extremely bad for the game - and obviously so.
No it's not. For you to run a game, the PCs all have to be on the same side. In many worlds, this means that being on Team monsters is right out. You just can't have one PC be a brutal eye of Gruumsh and another guy be a paladin of Pelor. It just doesn't work. D&D is based on the PCs being a team. If one guy is a cop, then the other PCs can't be robbers.
In other cases, the proposed PC race would just be more powerful than everyone else. Yeah, one PC could be Hercules and the rest could be mere mortals, but the idea is also that PCs are supposed to be balanced, so unless everyone else is a demigod, no Hercules PC.
And lastly, you don't want PCs being some flavor of the week race because that ruins their connection to the game world. Often times something weird like a Goliath or a Githyanki has no reason traveling with the other PCs and his very existence in the adventuring party just strains everyone's disbelief and leaves the player with uncertain motivations for the character, since even to play he must come up with some contrived bullshit story as to how he got there. Monster races aren't really limited by that, since they can be more seamlessly written into a story by the DM.
On the DM side of it, PCs seriously want their opposition to be varied. People get bored as shit when every monster is an orc or ogre, at least I do. I want some variety. The age old "Attack the kobold cave" is a trope that's been done to death. Sometimes a monster will be more powerful than any one given PC. There are massive dragons and uber sorcerers and all that shit that require that PCs team up to take them out, and that's a good thing.
Gygax seriously had it right the first time around. Some things are part of the DM's toolbox and aren't part of the PC's. Because the two play entirely different roles. The guy making the mazes and placing the monsters has a lot more power than the people who run the maze. That's just a fact of the game.
Yes, the DM is god, he can just wave his hands and say there's a stone wall there, because he fucking said so. I don't want him to have to jump through funny hoops and have to cross reference three tables to make sure that he can put a stone wall there. Because either way it doesn't matter, one way just takes longer.
World consistency doesn't come because you set up a variety of rules binding the DM's hands. Some DMs have trouble telling a consistent world period and others can make a world with a ton of races seem consistent. DMing is an art and some people are just better at it than others.
The main problem with consistency doesn't come with what happens, it comes with what doesn't happen. The first time you establish the palace of the sea elves, and the sea elves role in the world, people nod their head and say "Ok." Now if in the next adventure, the sea elves are just gone, then they start having problems.
You can very well throw anything in the story that you want, so long as you explain how it can coexist with everything else you've already included in the story. So long as the DM can keep up with all the factions it's fine.
One of the biggest problems with Forgotten Realms is that the world can't keep up with all the factions. Far too many of them are teleporting global powers yet for some reason the world sometimes behaves as though it's isolated. A teleport capable power is something that you REALLY must think over as a DM, because once something goes global, it has to actually be global. Whenever something bad happens, people ask: "Where is God?" (or Elminster), because they're a global presence that can damn well go whereever they want. That's why a world must certainly avoid having too many global presences. One reason that I actually don't think long range teleportation is good for a game in general unless it is kept ultra rare.
But the moral of that is that teleportation and global powers need to kept to a minimum, not that extra races screw things up. Even if all those archmagi are human having a ton of global archmagi is bad, because people will always question anytime they should get involved but don't. On the other hand, nobody really questions why the Yeti of the great glacier was never spotted in Waterdeep. In fact, nobody even cares. It's some random monster that lives out in the wilderness in some remote area that nobody goes to. And for a fantasy game, that explanation is enough.
But so long as you have natural borders for your factions that make sense, you can go ahead and create new stuff for certain regions and the majority of the time, nobody asks why the Flinds of the Northern forest are unique to that area, the same way that I can accept that Kangaroos exist in Australia but aren't native to North America.
