How many intelligent races is too many?

Five. The answer is five.

Internal consistency is key. If every mid level mad scientist or crazed wizard can make beastmen or whatever then sure, go nuts. Or if there's a bunch of gods and they all demand their one special snowflake thing, then sure.

>free will existing

Hahahaha, oh you. Stop pretending to be retarded.

You straight up cannot have too many.
Ideally, you should have enough to make a proper cantina scene.
Anyone who says otherwise has poor taste.

Four.
Three factions keep each other in check, four invariably will start an arms race.

But if free will didn't exist, how could personal responsibility exist?

Imagine being intelligent, devoid of free will and painfully aware of that. Welcome to the Hive.

Yeah. There was a song about it and everything.

It's not his fault.

One to be quite frank.

I go out of my way to not make monocultural or overly themed races. Nothing tells lazy worldbuilding like "fighter race" "trader race" "jungle race" and the likes. Culture can change based on time and geographic location as well. For example, orcs and humans living on tiny trade islands on a sea filled with monsters have essentially merged culturally in my setting while the elven empire is in the process of breaking up because they grew so culturally different in their seclusion. The PCs are all humans and humans are numerous, dumb and xenphobic in this setting so they dont get to meet other races too often. Also, distrust and wariness is waaay harder to propely portray then RACE WAR NOW.

Monocultured races have more to do with the ability of the worldbuilder than the number of races. You could in theory have 50 races all with at least 5 distinct cultures. I'd say it's when you're getting a lot of overlap you should cut down.

would it matter all that much to you though?

Ironic racism aside, are Abbos fully human? I mean, they look and act like an IRL version of half-orcs.

No, there SHOULD be overlap. It makes the world feel like more of an actual world, instead of the backdrop of some video game. Several flavors of the same race meeting and flexing muscles is the best shit you can habe. Barbarians, orcs and norsemen competing in tests of strength, wizards coming from several flavors and methods of magic combining their shit etc.

When the number becomes tedium for yourself and/or your players and makes the game less fun.
If your table enjoys 4 races, leave it there. It it's more like 24, that's fine too.

Go for either a huge amount, or keep it down to five or something. Consistency is key for such things, but you either gotta have a giant mixed bag or something with lower amounts.

I miss when Veeky Forums was the normie board.

"You" are the deterministic processes which control what outputs result from what inputs, and specifically are programmed such that you can correct for error. Personal responsibility is a mistake resulting from your processes being noted, and those processes self-corrected by higher order ones.

The actual world has one race and so much cultural variety you can sort through 1000 of them before you see much overlap. There are hundreds of warrior cultures, but each does their shtick so uniquely it's rare to mistake one for another

TWO IS TOO MANY
ZARUS VULT

An Earth-like planet can support at best three, and it would be really crowded.

But current earth has at least five

Only one of those has built anything that takes up space, and that one is one of only two which possess the means (and hands) to /make/ tools.

>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?

I think mono-cultures is a good place to stop. If I can't think of at least 3 different cultures for a race in a given setting, even if it's as simple as rural/urban/tribal that all make sense within the context of a setting and don't feel forced, then I tend to leave them out.

Personally, I like to go humans and use tieflings, genasi, aasimar, half-giants, and other "xyz-bloods" to make things more fantastical rather than go with elves and orcs.

Do you make those tieflings, genasi, aasimar, half-giants, and other "xyz-bloods" as diverse full races like elves? It seems to me the human offshoots are even more prone to moncultures just by being "humans, but x" in literal definition

Fuck off, Ausfag. No one cares. New Zealand is more relevant than your shitty country.

They tend to be minorities within their respective human societies which means they usually have the outlook and customs of the local culture while potentially spinning off into their own thing due to being so distinctive.

Your not!Greek, not!Egyptian, not!Berber, and not!Babylonian societies all have different cultures and are all going to have different sized populations of Genasi living within their borders being dealt with in different ways, which in turn leads to the Genasi born and raised within those cultures being different.

And that's aside from those places where they might be in the majority.

Personal responsibility is an unnecessary meme. Just because your antisocial behavior is a result of factors outside of your control doesn't mean society at large is forced to tolerate it.

It's not the gear's fault it's the wrong size, but we still take it out of the machine and replace it.

Four.
One is the standard human for your average self-insert.
One is the underground dweller.
One is the sea dweller who can walk on land without any issue.
One more is the designated nature huggers, either with forests, mountains or swamps.

Okay.

>Humans occupy the central continent in a confederacy of nations held together by ties to the last fallen empire. Among them are colonies of halflings, who were taken as slaves in the ancient era and never really recovered. They are treated as lessers to the dominant races and have many ancient superstitions tied to them, which may or may not be true. Tieflings also live as minorities, descendants of an even older empire and the same one that enslaved the halflings and anyone else that they could get their hands on. They currently live in better standing than halflings, but both are marginalized groups.

>Across the plains are nomadic goliath who move herds of megafauna across the continent. They dominate a good portion of international trade routes and managed to keep themselves independent of the old empires.

>Dwarves are also spread out across the main continent, but concentrated in a mountain valley where they have fortified and do their best to ignore the outside world, refining their magic and crafting while in constant war with the neighboring kobolds (a goblinoid subtype), who have "stolen" much of their culture and technology. Dwarves outside this region are starkly different, being fairly friendly and accepting of assimilation into whatever the dominant culture is.

>To the north is a dictatorship not so secretly run by a pyramid scheme of immortal vampires. They trade with the outside world but don't take kindly to people entering or leaving their domain. Further north is an exiled tribe of goliath that survive off whaling and raiding. They do not possess the skin markings common among other goliath, and are as such considered cursed by their kin.

>South you'll find more goliath nomads and small city-states of dragonborn. The entire region is dominated by dragonkings, who've warred over the territory since the draconic empire broke apart a thousand years prior. Goblin clans also roam the wilderness, trying to keep a low profile yet constantly in power struggles amongst each other. Far south there are clans of bugbears unified by worship of a pair of (in their eyes) living gods.

>To the east is a giant rift rift in the continent, created in ancient times by powerful magic to push back hobgoblin invaders. In modern times the hobs live in a militarized empire ruled by a godqueen and have subsumed the remaining human cultures, with their only major enemies being a race of insectoids that scour the land in hordes to bring resources back to their underground mega colonies.

>The west is another culture of humans, one that was never absorbed by the old empires. They mingled with elven refugees that arrived several centuries ago from another world, building on their already druidic culture with elven magic.

>Further west across the sea are orcs. Their culture has largely broken apart and spread across the islands and coasts, competing with elven invaders for territory. They live under various theocracies linked back to a single old faith, yet each remains violently hostile to the other.

>The elves' homeworld is occupied primarily by elves, who at a point controlled a massive empire and subjugated the other races such as trolls, gnomes and formians. Civil war and the rise of dark elves poisoned the magic of their world and fractured their government, leading to it's slow death and the massive exodus of elves to the setting's main world. The drow now dominate the homeworld, making slaves of their kin, gnomes have allying with the remaining light elves, and trolls and formians forming their own confederation to defend against the drow. The formians however have been experimenting with dark magic, creating subraces like hags and changelings to serve them.

>How many intelligent races is too many?
>Real Answer:
When the presentation of them impedes player choice rather than enables it.
Too many options inhibits choice.
In my setting I literally have dozens of intelligent races. At least 56.
But I only present a few at a time and limit the playable to a minority of the most dominant.
The rest are just world building and possible encounter fuel.

>Arbitrary Numerical Answer:
4 to 8 intelligent races for the setting seems to be a good frame to stay within.

Too many is not enough.