How many intelligent races is too many?

What's the rule of thumb for when it's just time to stop? Is it when you find yourself starting to make monocultural races?

Also discuss demographics in your setting, I need ideas to steal.

Well, we seem to get on just fine with one. Sucks that it's the dolphins though.

>just one

>dolphins
>intelligent

Talk with some mice and then get back to me.

can you give me a quick rundown on intelligent races

Humans, niggers, collie dogs, dolphins, whales, orcas, chimps, bees.

I would say one way to get too many is when you run out of new ideas and start making snowflakey spin-offs of your existing races instead. I want to be clear this is not the same as having one race with multiple cultures. It's more like when you're adding your fifth UNIQUE AND DISTINCTIVE!!! elf sub-type, like when all you're doing is making exceptions to exceptions to exceptions.

Frankly you don't need more than one sapient species in a setting. You can have more and make it work of course, but only retards think that having only one is boring.

Well consider the larger scope of the world. What proportion of the world can a man walk before dying. Divide the world in to suitable areas and give it a civilization, entirely of your creation or inspired by real world cultures that thrived in similar environments. Then you have a reason for there to be an intelligent race there.

My setting revolves around the idea that each race has a distinct advantage in certain environments. Elves, focusing on the savanah and forest, relying on selective hunting, keeping an oral history, and maintaining tradition through familial and tribal ties.
Dwarves are resistant to the poisonous, noxious gasses found underground, and their stable build allows them to keep steady when the earth shakes with seismic and volcanic activity.
Orcs with their strength and toughness take up the tundra and fjords, whaling and hunting the megafauna.

Humans, being great traders and crafters, take up the coasts and tropics. Growing food, and trading their goods across the seas and oceans.

Uncommon races like gnomes, halflings, goblins etc, are usually minorities and are found among the various major races, but keep them small in number.

By dividing the world into areas I can then find holes to fill for races, but I limit myself by the size of the world.

Geography and maps before Anthropology and Races.

>bees
>having free will

>members of Homo sapiens sapiens native to the species' origin point
>somehow not human

One issue with that - humans are plains animals.