Racial Determinism: TNE

[NoDot]

Frank, I think that by your count, the planet Earth has failed as a setting due to excessive diversity.

[Tydanosaurus]

Earth has one playable race, humans, the rest are just variants. Maybe two in a sci-fi setting, if you buy that Dolphins are intelligent and computers can become AI.

[Tydanosaurus]

If 3e taught us anything, it taught us that letting people make their own settings and monsters or just adding to yours will let you win at the RPG industry. I'm not looking for personal fame here, so I don't mind if someone tacks on their awesome setting to mine.

If 3E taught us anything, it's that you WIN teh RPG by having a limited basic set and selling expansions, while allowing players to alter it themselves. The question isn't whether your system includes something, but whether it can expand to include something.

It'd be pretty easy to put out a limited basic racial set, and a Steampunk racial set, and a Samurai racial set, and a Horror racial set, and then more. And then it'd be easy to put out a Breackthrough ruleset for combinations.

[K]

The settings themselves were fine. It really doesn't hurt your game at all if Samurai from Legend of the Five Rings are in a party with Dark Sun Psionicists and Krynnish steampunk gnomes.

YES IT DOES!

Holy shit, can you even hear yourself talk here? If you have a party that has an L5R samurai, a Dark Sun Psychic, and a Krynnish Tinker, you do not have a game. That's not a cooperative storytelling game of fantasy adventure, that's a TFOS team. Anything too out-there and absurdist to make it onto a Saturday morning cartoon show is just indescribably lame.

If you can't explain what the fucking hell is going on to an eight year old, your setting is too damn complicated. And if it has a samurai, a canibalistic halfling psionic desert nomad, and an Edwardian Mormon gadgeteer, it's never going to pass the sniff test.

A setting that lacks the basic discipline to determine what it doesn't have in it doesn't have anything in it. Stuff just happens in formless void and nothing matters.

-Username17

Have you ever considered that maybe you just suck?

I mean those character concepts are pretty damned simple and many long-running TV series have had combos like "child savant, android, bestial alien, and psychic who are all military officers." How about "gang leader lawyer, god-thing, wizard, vampire, and bardic demon?" How about "demon puppy-man, guy with void in hand, reincarnated priestess, ninja demon-hunter, and boy-demon trickster?"

Those are the characters from Star Trek: the Next Generation, Angel, and Inuyasha, and they were wildly popular and at no point could anyone tell you what was in the setting and what was not. The whole point of those settings was that the world was a vast and mysterious place and you has to be ready for the unexpected. That is the default fantasy setting because at no point is Conan even fighting the same thing twice. There are no categories of monsters in fantasy literature, so why RPGs need them is beyond me (unless you want to play Pokemon, at which point I have to say "would you like to play a big-boy game?")

At the end of the day, I'm not playing with eight-year olds, so crippling my game with rules that restrict setting choices is bad design on first principles. Hell, eight-years olds don't even want the game to be explained. They just want to meet cool stuff and have awesome adventures.

[Maxus]

Okay, I think what needs to be done here is to differentiate between the specifics and the general.

In general, we need races/species/etc. We need mechanics so that playing one race feels different from playing others. It might be helpful to include some sort of explicit power baseline.

The question is whether this is accomplished Frank's way, with the cultural differences, and whether this is accomplished K's way, where you can make up and include races in your setting.

Either way, it's possible to have a fun game that the players care about and enjoy playing. So why not hammer out a baseline of differences between races and cultures, and then just let players and GMs choose which version they use? As long as they're based on the same basic mechanical rules, they should both work well.

Or, to put it another way--someone, somewhere, is going to want to run a game on an aquatic world they've thought up, and they'll need to make some aquatic versions of humans and ormigans. So the system should provide those rules, and the rules for More Common Themes, as well a treastise on creating your own race/culture in a way that's more meaningul than making sure the numbers add up to be equal to numbers provided by other races and cultures.

Frank can make his iconic races their cultures/subcultures (actually, that just made me realize something), and K can make the races, and as long as they're both on the same page about what a race or a culture should be doing for a character, I'm sure it'll be playable.

I agree with K about one of 3e's reasons for popularity--it was customizeable and provided you with the seeds for growing your own world. Even if that world was totally rediculous and improbable and really did have the Xeph living in a valley of eternal night and those weird orca-men from It's Wet Outside and the sandswimmers from It's Hot Outside, and lizardmen living in a swamp between the two of them, you could still do it.

[Maxus]

Okay, here's what occurred to me while doing the previous post.

There are obviously stratifications of societies and cultures--for most of them, anyway.

So it'd be a little unrealistic to expect a culture to provide flat, universal benefits to all of its members. Scholars move in a different world than soldiers, and both don't do much with workers, and both might have only limited contact with royalty or diplomats. Hell, in some cultures, a 'scholar' might be the guy who spends his evenings telling everyone about what happened when Thor had to dress up like a woman (hilarity ensued, in case you're wondering) and a field worker might be physically stronger and tougher than a warrior-aristocrat because he doesn't ever get off days and spends his time picking up things a lot heavier than a spear or a sword.

So I'm looking at background or caste or social class differences as well as cultural ones.

[RandomCasualty2]

Those are the characters from Star Trek: the Next Generation, Angel, and Inuyasha, and they were wildly popular and at no point could anyone tell you what was in the setting and what was not. The whole point of those settings was that the world was a vast and mysterious place and you has to be ready for the unexpected. That is the default fantasy setting because at no point is Conan even fighting the same thing twice. There are no categories of monsters in fantasy literature, so why RPGs need them is beyond me (unless you want to play Pokemon, at which point I have to say "would you like to play a big-boy game?")

At the end of the day, I'm not playing with eight-year olds, so crippling my game with rules that restrict setting choices is bad design on first principles. Hell, eight-years olds don't even want the game to be explained. They just want to meet cool stuff and have awesome adventures.

Well, it is important that the PCs be races that exist. Their foes can be some random monster of the week, but the PCs themselves should have some connection to the game world if you want any kind of roleplaying at all.

Characters that have no ties to the gameworld are just plain boring, and in all regards, as Frank says, it's like you have no campaign world at all, because those guys aren't actually from any city or anything. Their homeland literally doesn't exist anywhere, they just spontaneously generated or they're from some random planar portal.

[Username17]

Dude, the characters in Angel have only two playable races: human and demon. That's it. Everything else is handled with skill sets. Even vampires are just a kind of demon in that world.

If you want to throw in Buffy you could argue that Werewolf was a race and not a class, bringing the total racial total to 3.

-Username17

[Tydanosaurus]

I mean those character concepts are pretty damned simple and many long-running TV series have had combos like "child savant, android, bestial alien, and psychic who are all military officers." How about "gang leader lawyer, god-thing, wizard, vampire, and bardic demon?" How about "demon puppy-man, guy with void in hand, reincarnated priestess, ninja demon-hunter, and boy-demon trickster?"

Those are the characters from Star Trek: the Next Generation, Angel, and Inuyasha. . .

I have to ask, does a Demurrer kick lots of ass in your game? Otherwise, I don't want to be the lawyer.

I can make all of those characters with 5 races - human, android, beastial person, vampire and demon. But more importantly, look at those races. Android, ass-kicking alien, demon, vampire, or human. It's like Charlie Brown Halloween: I got a candy bar! I got a lollipop! I got a rock.

You've just recreated 3.5.

[Username17]

It is important also to note that Star Trek is a completely unplayable game world and is in fact a classic example of what not to do when designing a cooperative storytelling game. Imagine: you're on a ship and weird green things are appearing in the hallways and causing energy conduits to explode. Oh noes! What do you do?

Seriously, what the heck do you do? It's Star Trek, what the characters do is wander around running diagnostics until theyfigure out what radiation emissions from the crystal aliens are making their shit explode and then they throw some super physics at the problem to either shut out the harmful rays, solve the deeper environmental problem causing those rays to happen in the first place, or just frickin leave and hope the problem doesn't follow. But what the heck does a player do? The characters are just making extended science tests until they win the adventure, the player has seemingly no input whatsoever.

There's no game there, it's just a narrative. The viewer has literally no basis on which to anticipate what the next group of forehead aliens are or do, and has no idea how to solve any particular problem. Everything that happens is the equivalent of Game Master Exposition.

• "How do I fix the power conduits?"
  "Modulate the shield generator and then replace the plasma couplings."
  "OK, sounds good. I do that."
  "It didn't work, the new couplings still explode."
  "Mother fucker!"

And I don't just say this because the Decipher System of Star Trek is completely unplayable (I've tried), but because fundamentally the setting has nothing in it that can be played. Since no one knows where anything is, no one knows how anything works, no one knows what exists in the setting, no one knows what problems can arrive or how to respond to any of them - you can't tell a story in any kind of structured fashion. Literally the only system that could work for that setting is Münchhausen. Which looking back on it would work fine:

• "And then when all seemed lost, the alien princess took pity on me because she found me passing fair for no reason. And then instead of hurling us to the Shantak she brought us into her chambers and had her handmaidens undress me..."
  "That's not how I remember it! Oh sure, the four of us were sealed to a fate of Shantak feeding well enough, but that's when I had the foresight to reverse the polarity on the solar filtration fields, causing it to project an image of terrible power such as fit their primitive Shantak mythology that I had so forthrightly borrowed from their imperial library..."
  "That's not how I remember it! The moment the Shantak seemed fit to tear us in twain with its many serrated beaks was the culmination of the commander's work with the transporters, and our harrowing ordeal cut short. Not by the tearing maw of the Shantak, but by the familiar blue static of the transport beam..."

So yeah. Unless you're looking for a game masterless, rootless, diceless, wander fest with people ranting about plasma relays and Bertholdt Radiation, making a role playing game out of Star Trek is simply not even possible.

---
So to recap:
Inu Yasha: Three races: Yōkai, Human, Hanyo.
Angel: Three Races: Demon, Undead, Human.
Star Trek: Completely fucking unplayable.

Final assessment: your exact choice of examples shows exactly why you are wrong and I am right.

-Username17

[RandomCasualty2]

Seriously, what the heck do you do? It's Star Trek, what the characters do is wander around running diagnostics until theyfigure out what radiation emissions from the crystal aliens are making their shit explode and then they throw some super physics at the problem to either shut out the harmful rays, solve the deeper environmental problem causing those rays to happen in the first place, or just frickin leave and hope the problem doesn't follow. But what the heck does a player do? The characters are just making extended science tests until they win the adventure, the player has seemingly no input whatsoever.

Yeah, seriously. This is exactly what a game shouldn't turn into: A situation where players can't make any choices, they just roll dice. It's one reason that I'm heavily against a diplomacy system where it's all just one dice roll and then something either happens or doesn't happen and you're really not sure why it happened.

Nobody wants to play a game where they have no actual choices and just roll dice. And the further we can deviate from that style, in fact, the better.

[Koumei]

I prefer the Discworld way - there are a bunch of races that would be the Player Races (Human, Dwarf, Troll, Vampire and Werewolf - maybe Zombie as well), and a handful of other races that are here and there (Gargoyle, Gnome, Pixie, Golem, Igor* and Gnoll). Then you have a handful of things that fit in the Monster Manual. Most of these are imaginary (big dragons), extinct (chimera), legendary creatures** or endangered***.

Then there are the Things, but that's really just "Creature from the Dungeon Dimensions. They're all the same thing, which is to say none of them look like anything you could ever imagine". Mostly you just have the fixed list of races, and occasionally a reference to something that may or may not exist, or something that does exist, if only for a limited time, thanks to magic playing silly buggers.

And it works nicely. You know what's meant to exist, and any time something new appears, you can actually be impressed, suspicious or frightened, rather than simply taking every new thing in stride. Sure, there are plenty of these cases where something weird crops up, but it's a one-off, it's brief, and it's generally understood by everyone that it doesn't belong and won't exist for very long.****

*That might just be a special type of human, though. Like a template or feat.

**See: imaginary

***Until they meet the Luggage, where they become extinct.

****Especially if the Luggage is nearby.

[RiotGearEpsilon]

I'm with Koumei on this one. You can have the big mess of species - but any species that falls outside the standard few is obviously Not Part Of The Social Fabric.

[virgil]

How do you make the rules and setting so intrinsically linked such that you can't make alternate settings, and thus the unplayability of a homebrew setting is on the party? D&D rules can handle wildly different settings, and it's the players' choice to decide that it's a good idea to mix Rokugan Goblin Eunuch with a Former Captain of the Spanish Main.

[Crissa]

You know, racial packages don't need to mean 'you can't have sex with that hot guy and get pregnant'.

I like K's version, and I don't see how it denigrates Frank's at all. If you have the hot sexxings with an elemental, why can't you or your kid be half-elemental? Why can't that be what we call 'racial' abilities?

Isn't that what Feats are for? Customizing your character?

You choose a race - a Feat - when you begin the game. That might mean you're a Human from the City and you get reading, writing, and pickpocketing for free. But you could choose the race 'Nomad' and still be Human, but you get instead a bonus to soak checks, fort checks, and spot.

'Race' isn't always 'Species'.

-Crissa

[Draco_Argentum]

Fantasy Races and Determinism
“Black skinned elves are for killing.”

There is an absolute limit to the number of race/culture combinations that a game world can handle, which is essentially unmodified whether there are large numbers of races or small numbers. That is, when detailing the continent, you will write up a series of different cultures until you run out of space on the map, run out of word count, run out of allotted time for world building, or are for some other reason required to stop.

I would say this is incorrect. The more races you write the more effort you'll expend on that. A race writeup needs to contain at the least a physical description. In effect there is an overhead every time you put in a new race that takes time/pages away from new cultures.

I think K is right though, if the base rules don't allow people to come up with their own settings then everyone who has a setting in mind that diverges form the rules will use some other rules. I'd vote for keeping the rules extensible.

[SphereOfFeetMan]

So to recap:
Inu Yasha: Three races: Yōkai, Human, Hanyo.
Angel: Three Races: Demon, Undead, Human.
Star Trek: Completely fucking unplayable.

Final assessment: your exact choice of examples shows exactly why you are wrong and I am right.

Concerning Inu Yasha and Angel: So you are stating that all the demons are one species, and all the undead are one species?

Hell, if you define that much diversity under the heading of one race for demons, TNE could have just one race and be done with it.

[Koumei]

I can't speak for Inu Yasha, but in Angel, practically every demon is "unique", in that no others happen to look like it, but they're all generic "costume-limited" demons. Apart from when they encounter a family or race (such as in... Pailaya? I have never seen the name written down, so don't know the spelling. Where Lorn comes from), where they're still costume-limited demons, but in this instance all have similar traits.

So they can just work like Things from the Dungeon Dimensions: It's one race, and maybe you just make the appearance up or choose shit from a list. It makes far more sense than actually listing each one in a game.

Still, I would say that it's best to allow for people to port their own stuff in easily - provide the stuff that the attached setting will use, and then make it easy for someone else to include short green minotaurs or whatever.

[baduin]

I have a few corrections, which can be useful or not:

Tolkien doesn't explain his racial system (Elf, Man, Orc) very well, for various reasons - mostly because he was writing novels, not handbooks. Anyway, they are called races, not species for a reason - they are all interfertile. There are some genetic differences between them - elves are high and graceful, and mostly don't have beards, and orcs are dark, hairy, stooped, longarmed and with slant eyes etc. Those genetic differences aren't the crucial difference. Nearly all children of elves and men are simply men, even if they have a lot of elvish genetics. Only some special cases were allowed to become elves or to chose between races. In that case, with no change in genetics, they could select their race.

What are the differences between elves and men? Elves have, so to say, stronger souls. That means that they can directly influence themselves and enviroment. They don't get old or get sick, except when they are terribly depressed. They cannot get pregnant accidentally - they must wish it. They never stumble accidentally and fall from the rope over the raging river. When they make things, those things obey them to a certain extent - their ropes knot and unknot themselves, their cloaks change color etc. They never engage in agriculture - when they want some plants to grow somewhere, or some animals to live there, they just wish it, and this happens. There are also some disadvantages, but they are either pretty theoretical, or come up after the elf in question is many thousands of years old.

With the orcs the situation is even more complicated: Tolkien didn't actually invent them, he borrowed them, and he couldn't fit them into Catholic theology, so he tried to muddle things up.

What are the originals of Orcs, in that case? They were invented by a group of authors in the end of XIX and early XX century, such as Machen, Buchan, R.E. Howard, Hodgson, H.P. Lovecraft, C.A. Smith.
etc. I suppose there was a pretty strong theosophic and antroposophic influence there also. They are usually, but not always, called Picts for some reason. Their problem is that they have so to say, either defective or Evil souls. They are usually unable to behave reasonably - live peacefully in villages etc. They are inherently inimical to true humans. Such beings are described eg in Hodgson's Night Land, Machen's Shining Pyramid and Novel of the Black Seal, Howard's Wings in the Night, Worms of the Earth, Children of the Night. Generally they have been modified in some way by the Outer Dark, Outer Blackness, Old Great Ones or something similar.

Since their distinguishing characteristic is an Evil soul, there can be many kinds of such creatures - Gygax called them all Humanoids, as distinguished from the reasonable Demihumans.

Derro has actually only little in common with Drow (perhaps in some deeper origins?). They were invented, as DERO, by one Richar Shaver, in his book "I remember Lemuria"

http://www.sacred-texts.com/ufo/irl/index.htm

"Pressed for a more complete explanation, Mr. Shaver has defined "dero' for us:

"Long ago it happened that certain (underground) cities were abandoned and into those cities stole many mild mortals to live, At first they were normal people, though on a lower intelligence plane; and ignorant due to lack of proper education. It was inevitable that certain inhabitants of the culture forests lose themselves and escape proper development; and some of them are of faulty development. But due to their improper handling of the life-force and ray apparatus in the abandoned cities, these apparatii became harmful in effect. They simply did not realize that the ray filters of the ray mechanisms must be changed and much of the conductive metal renewed regularly. If such renewals are not made, the apparatus collects in itself—in its metal—a disintegrant particle which gradually turns its beneficial qualities into strangely harmful ones.

"These ignorant people learned to play with these things, but not to renew them; so gradually they were mentally impregnated with the persistently disintegrative particles. This habituates the creature's mind, its mental movements, to being overwhelmed by detrimental, evil force flows which in time produce a creature whose every reaction in thought is dominated by a detrimental will. So it is that these wild people, living in the same rooms with degenerating force generators, in time become dero, which is short for detrimental energy robot.

"When this process has gone on long enough, a race of dero is produced whose every thought movement is concluded with the decision to kill. They will instantly kill or torture anyone whom they contact unless they are extremely familiar with them and fear them. That is why they do not instantly kill each other—because, being raised together, the part of their brain that functions has learned very early to recognize as friend or heartily to fear the members of their own group. They recognize no other living thing as friend; to a dero all new things are enemy.

"To define: A dero is a man who responds mentally to dis impulse more readily than to his own impulses. When a dero has used old. defective apparatus full of dis particle accumulations, they become so degenerate that they are able to think only when a machine is operating and they are using it; otherwise they are idiot. When they reach this stage they are known as 'ray' (A Lemurian word not to be confused with ray as it is used in English.) Translated, ray means 'dangerous or detrimental energy animal.' Ray is also used to mean a soldier—one of those who handles beam weapons (note how the ancient meaning has come into our modern word)."

"Clothed in rags and dirt, hung all over with hand weapons, their hair long and matted, were the strangest, most disgusting creatures I had ever seen in my life. They were dwarfs, some of them white-haired, from the Gods know what hidden hole in Mu's endless warren of caverns.

"What in the name of mother Mu are these things?" I asked Halftan, who had been one of the Atlans arriving immediately behind me, and who now helped me in the task of binding the hideous dwarfs in turn after turn of the heavy drapes from the walls.

"You already know of them," he said. "They come from the abandoned caves and cities of Mu. When the machinery became defective from age, many centuries ago, a vast number of caverns were sealed up. Fugitives hid in them, used the defective pleasure stimulators, 30 and as a result, their children were these things.

"They die of age, are stupid, cannot even read or write, but they must have a vicious, cunning leader who has learned to use them. "

[PhoneLobster]

Race options as traditional represented in D&D are massively problematic.

What we NEED is a system where you have a pool of background abilities and one guy can spend that on being "Streetwise Pickpocket With A Scar" while the next girl can spend it on being "Tiny Naked Flying Fairy" and the next guy can spend it on "I'm calling myself a Dwarf but taking abilities to be atypically frail and scholarly due to individual variation" while another girl declares herself a half elf but spends all her background on the elf flavoured options because that's where the stuff she thinks is cool is at or because she wants to play "rediscover my ancestral heritage" archetype.

If you have a system where individual characters get selectable background/physical abilities (and they fucking SHOULD) then the issue of "are dark elves a separate race or just another culture" really is nothing but a bit of fluff that people can and will adopt or ignore without even caring.

The objective of delivering what is required for players to build useful and desirable starting character archetypes makes this culture/race thing pretty much a pointless distraction.

Mind you if you people are suddenly concerned about the race direction in the project being too "setting specific" at a mechanical level I vaguely recall some stuff that at least looked a lot worse in the "class/magic colour" bullshit being thrown around early in the project.

[Username17]

Race/class combination is quintessential for durable settings. Anad by quintessential, I mean that without the ability to shuffle the combination of species and role in life, one has a stale environment as entrenched in pomp and birthright as the Dune setting. The characters are born to their clan and role; they might be able to make a name for themselves as individuals, but an Atreides and Harkonnen will never be able to become members of the other side. It's just how the setting goes.
However, I don't want to play Dune, I want to play a fantasy RPG.

Granted, there are players that enjoy a stereotypical "It's an orc! Kill it before it rapes and pillages." kind of setting but in my experience they are few in number these days.
Probably for the better.

This is exactly wrong. The more races there are, the less variation will appear in each race, and the more likely you will be ale to render judgment upon a creature because it is a Kua-Toa and all of those people are bad. The Atreides and Harkonen are just humans, and indeed many members of each team successfully switched sides or infiltrated the other team because racially they were exactly the same. At the limit of D&D standard racial bullshit, you have D&D standard racial bullshit - where it is literally OK to kill baby Sahuagin because they are all bad anyway.

If there are lots of different orcs all over the world who come from different cultures and do different shit, then encountering a new orc in a hat you haven't seen before opens negotiations and questions. If you have sufficient race bloat that you actually have Rhinogoblins and Witch Knives, then when you see a frickin Witch Knife in a hat you haven't seen before you will kill him and take his hat.

Only races which are diverse are not subject to summary judgment. Only races that have sufficient conceptual space left to them to do so are able to be diverse. More races is less conceptual space per race. Therefore: if you don't want summary judgment against people for the color of their skin and the size of your nose, you have to accept a small and finite number of races.

-Username17

[baduin]

As a compromise, I would suggest divinding races into two classes:

1) Common races - there are only a few of them, they are known about, they interact with the rest of the world, they can have different cultures etc
2) Hidden races. In the style of "Lost World", Conan, Tarzan, "She" etc, there are only a few of them hiding somewhere in a city in the desert/in a cave/on the moon/deep in the jungle. They are survivors from ancient time/castaway from a starship/hideous mutants/created by a wizard/summoned from a far star. They are unknown, don't interact with the rest of the world, have no political importance. Heroes meet them in the adventure, kill them all (Howard Wings in the Night, Tower of the Elephant) or not and move on. They are usually never heard from again.

[K]

---
So to recap:
Inu Yasha: Three races: Yōkai, Human, Hanyo.
Angel: Three Races: Demon, Undead, Human.
Star Trek: Completely fucking unplayable.

Final assessment: your exact choice of examples shows exactly why you are wrong and I am right.

Final Assessment: you are high.

Angel actually has many, many demon races since they use the word "demon" just like Star Trek uses the word "alien.". That's why anyone in the Angel universe can actually look up a book and go "yo, it's one of those" (not like Charmed, where every demon is unique and in their one book). They actually need those books because there are so many demon races. Episode 9 and 13 of Season 1 are particularly good examples because they actually run around trying to solve racial problems.

Star Trek as a setting is as playable as any skill-based system. Like Shadowrun, you'd run around making a bunch of checks for skills you don't have in real life, and then the DM explains how cool you are. To break up the monotony, you actually have a combat once in a while but most of the time you make diplomacy or technical relayed skill checks. It's a detective mystery, except that you are not looking for clues to a murderer, but to a malfunctioning component (though murders happen in Star Trek too). The fact that RPG versions of Star Trek don't do this well is just bad RPG design, and not the fault of the setting.

Inuyasha is the same as Angel where the word "demon" is just a catch-all for anything non-human like the word "alien." There are actual tribes of wolf demons who only mate with wolf demons to produce more wolf demons. Sure, the demons of that setting mate with humans, but none of the settings I've mentioned don't do this. Human is the blank slate that other races mix with.

At the end of the day, you haven't backed up your prophecy of "there will be chaos and nihilism!" with anything other than personal belief. There isn't one real reason to not have many races since the option doesn't remove any stories you can tell and it allows a host of stories. Considering that it is also a more fun option with more player options and more DM options for stories, by any criteria it is better.

As for the idea that PCs should have some connection to the setting, I don't see any reason why. Playing "stranger in a strange land" is as much of an RPG hook as any other, except you also get to do racial RPG when people from your race follow you to where you are("on no, ninjas/my tribe/guildmen have tracked me down to repay an old debt/avenge someone/bring me back by force!).

At the end of the day, "few races" as an option just looks like lazy and uncreative design.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Look, the system has to be able to have whatever setting put into it. Some people want kitchen-sink settings with seven superfluous flavors of elf, and while that may or may not be lame, I think it's madness to try to stop them. That's what they want to do, let them.

So what are we actually talking about here?

Are we talking about world-building suggestions? How to better distinguish various peoples? How to mimic particular myths and legends in the system? Designing the marketable 'generic fantasy' setting for the system? What? i honestly don't know.

[K]

On the issue of "will the PCs murder the next race they meet", that's just a function of the alignment system and the XP system.

If you seriously have objective criteria that say "this race is evil AND worth power if you kill it", then people will murder it as a first option. If you don't, then PCs will actually not murder new people that they meet because they will have no reasons to do so.