Playable Races

How many playable races is too many, Veeky Forums?

Why does everyone have such a huge bu- oh. I get it

Depends very much on the setting, although I suppose it would be at the point where races no longer had distinct niches of their own. If every race overlaps significantly with one or more other races, becoming indistinct and not really adding anything to the setting by their presence, you have too many.

Thicc

What if the over lap is minimal, but intentional?

If multiple races are connected in some way, them sharing some peripheral traits to represent that is fine, as long as each still exists in a meaningfully distinct way that might make them appeal to a player.

6

If you can't manage all the races, it's too many

2.

2 is too many.

1

Remove race entirely

You start to push it around 50. But by 100 or so, you're back in the swing of things.

My game has:

Greater Races: Magicians (their own race), Clockworks (robots), Nimbad (giant, probability-obsessed rats), High Dwarfs (fuckers are five and a half feet tall), Unblemished Elves (no tattoos), Precursors (alien bitches), Gutfaces (eldritch cultists)

Civilized Races: Hobgoblins (short and hairy ones), 3 varieties of Dwarf (italian, yiddish and hispanic flavor), 3 varieties of Elf (star, moon, sun), Victors (insect warriors with thousands of years of combat experience due to hivemind), Skullfaces (just people with skullfaces)

Lesser Races: 10 varieties of Man, Monkey Pirates (capuchins, therefore murderous rapists), Goblins (short and scaly ones), Hybrids of basically anything with anything

Free Peoples: Deerfolk (they eat people), Cowfolk (they eat people), Horsefolk (they strangle people and then eat people), Rabbittigerfolk (fuck yeah they eat people), 10 or 20 other varieties of beastfolk (they eat people), Scarecrows (idealistic), Skeletons (cynical), Salamanders (just salamanders), 3 varieties of Talking Spider (corduroy, linen and felt), Talking Snakes (worship birds), Talking Birds (worship snakes), Giants (ten feet tall and very fragile), Ceramics (sentient non-newtonian fluids)
My players are allowed to be Human Fighters or Human Clerics.

>Capuchins.
>Not Bonobos.
Try harder.

This guy gets it.

>My players are allowed to be Human Fighters or Human Clerics

Then why go to all that effort to expand all that shit out if none of it is useful to the players or relevant at all?

Serious answer: The campaign is about a small group exploring a very large, very hostile world that they know little to nothing about, so I have a long backlog of adventures and encounters for them to run into. A large pool of sentient races, with their stats and general behavior already mapped out, means there's always something new and frightening for them to find while they're on the run from the law, or hunting down a crippled demigod, or getting shipwrecked on an uncharted coast.

meme answer: bitches don't deserve my fine-ass hand-crafted fantasy races

I'd play a cynical skeleton

I really want to be a deerman though. I love fragile/peaceful looking creatures being secretly fierce. or even edgy.

I should also point out that I have actual capital-A Autism. Researching how a society of Danny Devitoes could use amaranth as a staple crop is my jam, so if I have free time I'll probably be doing that.

Please lend me just a portion of your autism. I can't decide or create any non-human races/cultures in my games, but I need them to create a really high fantasy setting. All humans is bad for that, in my opinion.

>My Players are allowed to be human fighters or Human Clerics

I think my attention span would run out well before I could explain all the unique aspects that define the sociopolitical rifts between the Weirmen in the south and their northern, Wickmen-allied brothers. Do you want a specific race of mine expanded upon, or do you need more general advice?

A good place to start, in my opinion, is to make humans not the central race of the setting. You can make them the default, like I did, but interesting things happen if humans are mostly ignorant barbarians in the deserts or the frozen north and someone else is building empires and erecting monuments to military prowess. Trawling weird 90's comics and tabletop games is also helpful, for filling in the blank spots on the map with kookiness.

Advice. Though some of your races are pretty interesting.

Is there any difference between the classes of races? (Greater, Civilized, Lesser, Free? Is free worse then lesser somehow?)

Are humans friends with any of them?

Do magicians look like humans or something else?

Greater races are immortal, or long-lived enough to make it a moot point. They do it with magic (Magicians, Unblemished Elves), futuretech (Clockworks, Precursors) or being such assholes that even the Grim Reaper doesn't want to hang out with them (Nimbad, Gutfaces). Civilized races build cities and use iron for shit like door hinges and forks. Lesser races have sustenance-level agriculture and basic metalworking. Free Peoples make tools out of wood and other people's muscle tissue, and any weird shit like living skeletons or vultures that complain about their carrion-dependent existence go here. Greater races are obviously a lot tougher, and generally better at everything, than any of the others, but the rest of the groups aren't too dissimilar.

Humans wander a lot, and as such are accepted in most places. They're the natural allies of dwarfs, who get a lot of use out of sneaky archer, and the natural enemies of the beastmen, who think that human flesh is delicious.

Magicians look like werestarfish, but they cover themselves in hooded cloaks and most people assume they're basically humanoid (goblinoid). If you've ever played Echo Bazaar you'll have a good mental image already. Several thousands of years ago they fucked the Gods over so bad that They went back to heaven (after destroying a continent and laying down a couple new miles-deep oceans), so they mostly lay low nowadays.

One of my players wants to learn some "real" arcane magic, but doesn't yet know that Magicians are Once And Future King-tier loopy morons, so I'm anticipating losing a few people to frog polymorphs

If you need more than one race to have a viable game you have failed at world building or are just pandering to make a sale.

if you need more than one character to have a viable game you have failed at world building or are just pandering to make a sale

Typically, I draw the line at around 12. With any more in most settings, races start to overlap both mechanically, and fluff-wise. Having three different warrior races makes the other two feel cheap.
Mechanically, more races is usually irrelevant, as outside of one minmaxers tardo build or some fetishist, maybe 4 races are going to be used, which just means more variables for you to account for.

So... no rouges?

We haven't felt the loss yet. In my experience, Rogues encourage bad behavior on the part of the players and aren't reliable enough in combat (which there is a lot of) to justify their existence.

Unless you want to know about a race that is red all over, in which case I'm sorry to have to tell you my ideas haven't fully crystallized yet.

If you need a character to have a viable game, you have failed at world building and are just pandering to make a sale

If you need sales to make a viable game, you have failed at world building and are just racing to build character

If you need a game to make it viable, you have failed at worldbuilding and are just pandering to mortals.

>uses terms like warrior race unironically
>complains that races feel too samey
Why are you doing this to yourself?

I don't know. I've been through a lot of source books, man.

Hilarious, but I'm legitimately stealing this
> Victors (insect warriors with thousands of years of combat experience due to hivemind),

I've got a sci-fi universe with pretty open rules, so anything goes.

NASA and similar organizations control who goes out into space, so characters must be Traveller Tier to even be submitted, so it cuts down on total jerks.

Read G. R. R. Martin's "Sandkings," and extrapolate. They wage endless war on anything big enough to justify killing it and feeding it to their mother-goddesses.

I love your creativity. You wouldn't happen to have a blog or wiki, would you? If not can I get some lore on scarecrows and ceramics?

I too would like to subscribe to your newsletter.

Most of this stuff is spread across three devices and several notebooks. I should probably try and centralize it so I don't forget something and create a plothole, but I can't muster enough agency to do anything about it.

Scarecrows are products of wild Magician fuckery (there are two kinds of magic, and the ones that the Magicians use creates a lot of supernatural pollution). A little bit of loose creative energy gets in some straw or such, that straw is stuffed into a well-worn set of clothing, that dangerous magical mess is left in the sun for a year or two and hey presto! you've got a walking and talking Scarecrow. They're imbued with the blood and sweat of honest toil, so the touch of natural things burns them. They're also, obviously, very vulnerable to fire and rot. Despite all these disadvantages they're universally cheerful, and spend what few short years they're given trying to help living things. They don't distinguish between animals and people, though, so for the most part only those in the habit of getting lost in the woods will ever see one. Interactions with players so far have been limited to them trading news and advice for old equipment, but I kind of want to have one of them involved in a fight scene, using the weapons of a fallen hero to save townsfolk or something along those lines.

Ceramics are intelligent slimes who are obsessed with physical appearance. They live in the heart of a deadly swamp thousands of miles from civilization, but have somehow encountered a few examples of marble statuary. This has led to them splitting into several religious factions that incessantly bicker over the perfect male proportions they're Veeky Forums Their bodies are usually jello-like, but when struck they harden very suddenly. I haven't really thought of a way to kill one yet.

Now do talking spiders

If.

Not much to say. There are three kinds of them, but they differ in the texture and color of their carapace, not in the substance of their thread. They're roughly the size of large tortoises and live upon lagomorphs and rodents and other small, juicy things. You can talk with them a bit, but all they ever want to discuss is small, juicy things. You can buy large quantities of webbing from them if you've got something soft and sweet, like pudding or honey, to trade.

The implications of giant arthropods are a little unsettling if you think through them all the way. Bugs can't scale up that far if they follow real physics, so what's the explanation? Are they, perhaps, egg-laying mammals that have mutated extra legs? If it's magic, what's the source? Is there some ancient God of Spiders, long since forgotten by mortal man, who uses the last of His once unlimited power to sustain these creatures? What does He think of adventurer assholes going around stabbing what remains of his congregation? And this is the important bit; would he be willing to grant divine boons in return for favors?

As long as you can give each race its niche and roles. Then it works. If the race is just one Dimensional then it fails.

I've got 14 playable races, and I'm considering adding 7 more. In short they are:
Humans - +Con, -Mag, speak English
Shades - +Mag, -Str, baby elementals, so no native language
Orcs - +Str, -Int, speak English, and are part plant
Goblins - +Int, -Cha, speak Hebrew
Dwarves - +Cha, -Dex, speak English, closely related to humans, and get devastatingly homesick when away from mountains
Kobold - +Dex, -Wis, speak Russian
Troll - +Wis, -Con, speak English
Gnoll - +Con, -Int, speak French
Minotaur - +Int, -Str, speak French
Gargoyle - +Str, -Cha, speak Hebrew, are basically sentient golems, made by Goblins
Cait Sith - +Cha, -Mag, speak Japanese, they're all secretly cunts
Naga - +Mag, -Con, speak Russian, very lewd.

Magic would be better renamed to Faith, or something.

Oh, also, Trolls are closely related to Orcs.

This is in the real world?

Sort of. I wanted to have languages other than Common, but I was too lazy to make up/steal any fake languages, so I just renamed real-life languages.
Cait Sith speak Japanese (called Moon in setting), because they were taught by talking rabbits from the moon, called Aurin.
Naga speak Russian (Draconic), because all the other reptiles speak it, even though they're descended from Basilisks, and not Dragons.
Also, Angels and Demons speak Al Bhed, and foreign races speak Spanish.

I have whites, asians, italians, irish, slavs, natives, and negroes. I think that covers pretty much everything.

Those are some staggeringly inconsistent categories you have there.

I forgot to mention that most non Common-speaking races also speak Common. That's just their native language.

Also, Minotaurs are actually +Int -Dex
Satyrs are +Dex -Wis, and are basically Canadian
Thri-Kreen are +Wis -Str, and speak German.

>+Cha Dwarves
>+Int -STR Minotaurs
>Russian snake men
What is this magical realm?

There better be a damn good reason you have Italians as a stand-alone race.

He's a special snowflake from the boot of Europe

Dwarves are like kindly grandparents. Except you drink with them.
Minotaurs being -Str was a typo.
Not Russian snake men. Giant Russian snakes, They are just giant snakes who speak Russian, and flirt with anything that moves, but are incapable of following up on it, because they all pretend to know so much about that sort of thing, that almost none of them managed to learn how.