What are your must have races and classes for a fantasy setting Veeky Forums?

Races:
>Stout: Dwarf
>Fairy: Wood Elf/Fairy/Angel
>Mundane: Human
>High Men: High Elf/Human
>Cute: Halfling/Gnome

Occasionally there's a sixth:
>Strong: Orc or Giant

The classes tend to be organized along the following archetypes:
>Warrior: Melee or ranged fighty, leadership and intimidation skills
>Expert: Single-target high damage, skill monkey, deception skills
>Priest: Healing, buff spells
>Mage: Area of effect damage spells, utility spells

Then you can combine them together in various ways: A Ranger is a Warrior/Expert, for example. And personally I've always thought the druid would be better as a Priest/Expert with less focus on spellcasting and more focus on shapeshifting.

Humans and furries, with them covering all the traditional fantasy race niches.

What's the difference between a class and a profession/vocation?

Profession/vocation usually doesn't grant hit points or attack bonuses.

>there are only two ways.
>Either Human only or tons of races.
>Anything in between is just doing Humans a disservice.
>Make sure you also include different cultures so that no race just equals one culture.
What about Human and around 4-5 other races, and each race including Human has about 2-3 distinct ethnic groups and each ethnic group has around 6-9 subcultures?

Also how about if each race is generally separated and around a continent apart from each other, which allows them t each focus on their own racial strife and troubles and identity, and its not until merchants and PCs go globetrotting, causing the party to have to roleplay what is like to be a stranger in a strange land where everyone else thinks you're a wierdo?

Humans
The Elder Race (genetically/culturally/technologically superior but human - your Melniboneans and Atlanteans)
Trogs/Ape-men
Elder Things (a la Mountains of Madness - any alien life form that has inhabited earth since before the first mewling primates scraped hides with rock flakes)

All you'll ever need.

>What are your must have races and classes for a fantasy setting Veeky Forums?
The Stout Race, The Graceful Race, the Mighty Race, and Humans.

Whatever you want there to be

Goblins. Every fantasy homebrew I've ever run has had goblins as playable.

>Humans
>Assortment of other things that adequately display the fantastical qualities of your setting

...

I am unable to determine what you meant to say by this

I've been toying with a human's only setting but with plane-touched ancestry thrown into the mix. So things like fae or infernal ancestry serves to allow different 'races' with there being subraces within each 'race'.

Winter fae ancestry presents with characteristics typical of high-elves; pale skin, tall, stoic, severe 'noble' features (giantism, claws, hard chitinous ridges can also present but rarely)

Summer fae = wild elves, dusky-skinned, short, mischievous, savage animalistic features (flattened doe-like noses, antlers and fur can present but rarely)

Primal (autumn) fae usually creates goblinoid creatures

Flowering (spring) fae tends to present with plant-like features

You still end up with a mixed bag of folk in every shape, size and style, but I think the origin is a little cleaner than having a world filled with dozens of sentient races from a hundred branches of evolution

>dozens of sentient races from a hundred branches of evolution
Your standard fantasy has everything made by gods, often in a concerted effort
Trying to apply modern understanding of species to fantasy is a terrible mistake

Good point, touche.

I'm not a fan of relying on higher powers like that, though, honestly, my main setting is on a nature-preserve style planet seeded by cosmic races with AI gods keeping watch. So, I'm a hypocrite.

Bro, your trip
youtu.be/YgHNtzxO0y8

Old race
New race
Savage race
skilled race
hidden race
Undead

elves or basically-elves

Everything else is to taste, including humans. Human-only settings tend to have humans who are functionally elves, because fantasy without magic is lame.

Mandatory teir: Human, elf, dwarf.
Typical tier: Halfling, Gnome, Orc.
Optional tier: Goblin/kobold, a "devil" race, a "furry" race, race with natural wings.
Wannabe tier: Elemental humanoid, playable evil monster people

Side rant: Fuck "Half-" races, fuck that shit forever.

Class is a gamism concept while profession is a narativism.

But user, what if you want to have orcish strength but still roleplay yourself, or have elven grace, magic and longevity but still roleplay yourself?

>Normal race

Cancer. Never do this.

This but minus the humans.
I find Redwall and Armello-inspired campaign settings fun.

>humans
>elves
That's it. No, really.

I have about 6 distinct cultures of western men, and some groups of dark-skinned men from the east, though only one of those actually interact with the western people, as they are the ones who picked up and moved west for some reason.

Then there are the high elves, the wood elves who are like friendlier high elves, the dark elves who are really into mysticism with a hindu/persian culture, the more feral wood elves, reclusive magic snow elves who want everyone to stay the fuck away from their mountains, and the wild nomadic eastern elves who live in tents and hunt for survival.

I thought about dwarves but I don't think they are necessary. Maybe this is personal bias but I see them as more one-dimensional and I don't need a short mining people in my setting.

>"high elves"
>"wood/wild elves"
Wow, how cool and original.

Humans, and that's really it. Anything else is mutable. When I do add something I prefer to make them at least reasonably distinct from humans so you don't end up with guys who feel too too much like just humans in funny hats, even if that's what they're going to end up being anyway.

>Light-weight race that can fly/glide/jump pretty damn high.
68.media.tumblr.com/7699dda9f4c5f72253235fd07ac42721/tumblr_omwzfvB8LY1ruvxico4_1280.png

>there are only two ways.
>Either Human only or tons of races.

What do you say about a setting like The Elder Scrolls?

6 non humans
4 different humans

or
4 elf races
4 human races
2 beast races

>elusive and reserved, with alien features and bodies made for moving in overgrown vegetation
>bold and hot-blooded, with a steadfast physique
>curious and unconventional, mostly as an exaggeration of human's defining features
>pragmatic and flexible, as those beings that do not exactly have a thing they consider a common legacy, land, or culture, but live in symbiosis with others by taking on unique niches.

no humans, never more than ten culturally distinct factions

I have made up names for them, but those are colloquialisms everyone understands.

For the record they're the Elendi and Alänni

Humans.
Human-like sex robots for the humans to reproduce with.
Daemons of generic variety.

People need a baseline to compare things with, there's nothing wrong with that.

its alright if the other races arent "Tall human" and two variations of "short human" imo.

In TES these categories are realy different tho. For one the four human races realy are just cultures but the elven races are realy distinct from one another biologically.
Case in point: Khajiits are actually elves too.

But then again, might just me beeing nostalgic about Morrowind.

Yokudans aren't human though, and bretons are half-elves. Nords and Cyrods are most similar, both at some point coming from the original humans from Atmora.

> Minotaurs
> Harpies
> Satyrs
> Cyclops

>but the elven races are realy distinct from one another biologically
Not much moreso than the humans

>You could for example take Lizardmen and make em into a race of time travelers who traveled forward in time to avoid extinction.
I'm stealing this for some Turn-A Gundam shenanigans in a future game. CTRL-F moon race, replace with with lizards.

>links to tumblr png.
>instead of just posting the pic
>on an imageboard

FUCK I FORGOT IT'S SUMMER ALREADY

Not him, but:

+2 str -2 dex
+2 cha +2 wis -2str
+2 dex +4 str -4 int (infravision)

D&D is moronic in its dealing of fantasy races.

A dwarf should be able to withstand the corruption of magic through sheer willpower, have a constitution that allows him to work days without rest, literally piss beer, with muscles the size of tree trunks and a mastering of everything smithy... not +2 Constitution, –2 Charisma. That's even before considering obviously magical advantage, like blood made of molten lava or something like that.

Each race should feel really different, to hell the balance. Life isn't balanced. When you're born wealthy, you have an inherent advantage other someone born piss poor. Your race should be the same: yes, an elf is better than you. Accept it. Play one if you want the 'I am 8000 years old and can jump over trees and bench press dragon' experience. If not, play something else.

...

>A dwarf should be able to withstand the corruption of magic through sheer willpower, have a constitution that allows him to work days without rest, literally piss beer, with muscles the size of tree trunks and a mastering of everything smithy
Why?
>Each race should feel really different, to hell the balance. Life isn't balanced.
Luckily we can play games where life's unfairness can be ignored.

>Why?
Because playing a stout human isn't that fun? Or fantastic? Because it cheapens the idea of races? Because LoTR doesn't work like that, as most ancient mythology?

Because I want to play a real dwarf? Not some small humans?

...

I feel that having unbalanced races can be tough to deal with as a GM, if you have players that tend to optimizing more than narrative enthusiasts.
So I like that WFRP 2nd ED did balance elves in a way: They have above average stats, where everyones else have worse, elves have only 1 really bad starting career ("classes") but several very good ones, with the other races you are lucky if you have 3 good starting careers. The only drawback on elves is that they have fewer fate points ("get-out-of-jail-for-free-sorta-cards") than the others, with 1 or 2 for elves, and up to 3 for the other races. So it is somewhat blanaced in terms of stats, but the lore states that there should be vast racism towards elves because they are percieved to all be witches or something, and the general populance of the Empire do not take kindly to magic-users.

Fucking don't? Or play a system that allows human PCs to be as strong as an orc.

LotR dwarves are literally just humans made by a god didn't have the right picture to reference, mythology dwarves were just ugly, greedy midgets and/or dark elves, and a "real" dwarf is a human being with a genetic disorder.

Out of all fantasy races, dwarves are some of the most "normal" on table, beaten out perhaps only by LotR hobbits

Anything Godly

>What are your must have races and classes for a fantasy setting Veeky Forums?

I'm the wrong person to ask when it comes to >Races since I have a tendency to go absolutely fucking CRAZY (I want to be able to play as ANYTHING), but CLASSES:

>Warrior.
>Sneak Thief.
>Outdoorsman.
>Holy Caster.
>Wizard Caster.
>Ooga Booga Primitive Caster.
>Song Guy.

There, that's all the classes you need- everything is either a deviation or combination of one or more of these classes.
Caster have the largest variation due to how varied magical sources can be: book learning, bible thumping, fucked a demon right in her psuedo-penis, or you were raised by trees.

But a Paladin is just a Priest in plate, and a Barbarian is just a Warrior with an ethnic background in ooga, and so on and so forth.

Fighting man
Sneaky man
Healing Man
Guy who fights good, but doesn't wear heavy armor.
Guy who shoots stuff
Sometimes these are merged, squished together, or otherwise tweaked, but I really can't see a game working well without these, unless something highly specialized is going on.

Races, I either go Human only, Human (Archetypally speaking here, not necessarily by name), Orc, Elf, Halfling, and probably 1 or 2 wildcards, or Human+A fuckton of races who probably overlap with eachother, but that's not why the list is big.

>Mystical Magical Special Snowflake Race
Every race is a special snowflake race

This thread actually made me dig up some of my old notes about the races I have made for my games, tabletop or otherwise. Race creation is actually a process I am fond of to a great degree so I wont hesitate at all to make something if there's an excuse for it.

But to be on topic of the thread, I actually dont have that many races that I re-use, I more often re-use ideas or themes instead to give them new spins. I do have couple that I repeatedly bring back though due to me being so proud of them. Firstly is a "race" called the Unseen League, an adventurer/merchant group composed of rodents and small fey creatures, mainly fairies. The other not quite so often used is "Helplings", a simple race who's whole purpose is to help others.

>Every race is a special snowflake race

What about humans?

Bosmer grow horns and have other animalistic traits. Khajiit are literal cat people. Alright dunmer are mostly a difference in skinc olour but they are a drastic difference in skin colour.
Not to meniton that they also dont quite look as "pristine" as high elves look in their alienness.

Always fit minotaurs in somehow.

odd mix of physical characteristics, cultural characteristics and origin stories here

Nothing wrong with that.

>Nonplayable
No fantasy setting is complete without some kind of dragons.
>Playable
Kobolds, I'll never get tired of the little shits

>People need a baseline to compare things with
Why?
Just claiming it doesn't make it so.

For races I prefer all humans and then I can take the other typical fantasy races and make them much more freaky and rare NPCs, though certain individuals are probably half or part something and have clear traits because of it, such as a knack for magic due to Elf or fae blood or a much more robust build if they are part orc or troll. The vast majority of the population is till just regular humans. I feel it builds a setting to the players better to start out rather mundane in a human town doing what amounts to dangerous chores as fantastic elements become more and more apparent over time until by the end the story your off helping the last elf queen battle the mother of all dragons in the fallen city of the titans.

The only settings I like with a tonne of different races all being playable and part of the same society is in sci-fi, and even then human only sci fi is pretty good.

Assuming Clichea Genericum

Playable races:
Human
Elf
Dorf
you don't need anything else. Orcs are a must in the background, but don't need, and even shouldn't be available to players
halflings and gnomes are completely optional

Classes:
>implying classless isn't patrician

Having a jack of all trades is common and good game design.

>Assuming its a more 'classic/generic' setting like DnD rather than something more out there.

I've got 27 non-human races + humans, but only humans are playable because reasons. I suppose it's a non-generic setting though.

>Human
>Dwarves
>Elves

>Warrior
>Specialist
>Magician

Race as Class
If you have trouble justifying the niche the race-as-class in question is supposed to occupy then the race is unnecessary.

>Race as Class
Literally the worst thing to happen to FRP since ever.

Can you give a single argument as to why race as class isn't infinitely superior to "I technically have an option but all the means is I'm going to choose the best racial bonuses that go with the class I want to play" race and class?

No elves, no dwarves, no halflings, no giants. Basically, anything that looks like a human's going to be a human. I find it helps to make a setting stand out more by not playing that game. It then gives me more room to add in things that are explicitly not human, but still playable. My favorite so far being mosquitocorns.

Race-as-class makes no logical sense unless your entire setting is bending over backwards to explain why only one species in the entire setting can learn to pick locks.

Race and class allows far greater exploration of the differences between races than race-as-class. Compare 'dwarves can't be clerics' to 'dwarves can be clerics, and here is how they and their religious practices differ from human and elven ones'.

>I technically have an option but all the means is I'm going to choose the best racial bonuses that go with the class I want to play
Not everybody is a munchkin, user.

>I technically have an option but all the means is I'm going to choose the best racial bonuses that go with the class I want to play

It's something I've been pondering (Some friends and I are working on a 4e style heartbreaker) for races. Removing abilities scores from classes entirely and making the racial stuff more showing in the other stuff. I mean, look at the 4e dwarf without any stat bonuses:

>+2 Dungeoneering
>+2 Endurance
>Speed 5 (6 is base)
>+5 racial bonus to saving throws against poison.
>You can use your second wind as a minor action instead of a standard action.
>You gain proficiency with the throwing hammer and the warhammer.
>Move normal speed in armour that would slow you.
>Reduce the distance of forced movement by 1 and get a free saving throw vs any effect that would knock you prone to negate it.

...that's pretty conclusively a dwarf. He's tough, good undergroun, he's not very fast and likes armour and one he sets his feet down he doesn't move. If anything, stats are kinda redundant as they just improve things he's otherwise good at.

>Race-as-class makes no logical sense unless your entire setting is bending over backwards to explain why only one species in the entire setting can learn to pick locks.
Only if you're a retard and think that "picking locks" justifies a whole new race. See my original post.
>Compare 'dwarves can't be clerics'
*Dwarven clerics can't be adventurers
Which CAN make sense because of religious reasons.
>'dwarves can be clerics, and here is how they and their religious practices differ from human and elven ones'.
As if that shit ever happens in game. Players are human and usually just play non-human characters as human-with-a-gimmick. Why not just play a human with that gimmick? It's not like humans don't have different cultures or anything.

Non-human races should be different from humans Because this is a role playing GAME the differences should be substantial or mechanical, on par with the difference between a martial and a spellcaster. Otherwise you might as well be playing humans only with different racial bonuses reflected different people, their cultures, and the benefits/curses placed on them.

ESPECIALLY HUMANS.

Because it's SHIT
>...that's pretty conclusively a dwarf.
No it's NOT. There is nothign there that says "For better or worse, this is a fucking dwarf"
>+Skills
That's not a dwarf, that's culture
>>Speed 5 (6 is base)
Why don't actual dwarf humans have a speed penalty? Why is this exclusive to dwarves?
>+5 racial bonus to saving throws against poison.
This doesn't even mean anything. Dwarves are good at resisting poison... Why? Because they are Dwarves? Why? Repeat.
>You gain proficiency with the throwing hammer and the warhammer.
See above
>Move normal speed in armour that would slow you.
See above
>Reduce the distance of forced movement by 1 and get a free saving throw vs any effect that would knock you prone to negate it.
This makes the OPPOSITE of sense. Something smaller and weighs less...is HARDER to move or knock down? What?

I realized halfway though this post I'm not arguing for race-as-class, I'm arguing for humans only.

>his makes the OPPOSITE of sense. Something smaller and weighs less...is HARDER to move or knock down? What?
Lower center of balance would actually make a thing harder to knock down. And dwarves don't weigh less; they're denser than people, like chimps

>Only if you're a retard and think that "picking locks" justifies a whole new race.
Nigger, are you retarded? The point I was making is that it's completely fucking stupid that only human adventurers can learn how to pick locks.

>Which CAN make sense because of religious reasons.
So you're saying that literally 100% of dwarven faiths stipulate that you can never find yourself in a situation that can be classed as an adventure? And if I want to homebrew up one that doesn't I have to either write a whole new class or bodge the dwarf abilities onto the cleric ones, thus creating race and class? And you expect me to not put the book down in disgust?

>the differences should be substantial or mechanical
And, you see, if you weren't shit at designing racial mechanics packages, they would be.

I mean, look at this . That's a dwarf. No matter whether he's breaking troll knees, blessing a mine vein, designing a new kind of arbalest, or filching idols, he's still a dwarf.

Besides, point-buy character creation is the natural superior to both. Classes and races should just be packages of options you can buy.

If I can't play a failed abortion that shambles alongside telepathic penguins from the otherworld and subsists on rainbow spiders that weave the tapestry of fate, then what's the point of having any races other than human?

>That's not a dwarf, that's culture
No, it isn't. Dwarves are physically tougher and skilled underground.
>Why don't actual dwarf humans have a speed penalty? Why is this exclusive to dwarves?
Why would they?
>This makes the OPPOSITE of sense. Something smaller and weighs less...is HARDER to move or knock down? What?
Dwarves weigh more than humans, and they're lower to the ground.
>There is nothign there that says "For better or worse, this is a fucking dwarf"
What WOULD say that to you?

>This doesn't even mean anything. Dwarves are good at resisting poison... Why? Because they are Dwarves? Why? Repeat.

'Because they are dwarves' basically is the answer. The same sort of answer to 'Why do elves run faster' or 'Why can dragonborn breath fire'

>Players are human and usually just play non-human characters as human-with-a-gimmick. Why not just play a human with that gimmick?
They are. Their gimmick is being short and grumpy. The game calls that archetype "dwarf"
I don't understand why people insist on thinking non-human races were meant to be anything other than caricatures and sterotypes of other cultures. If you wanna roll other races as 4 fourarmed aliens with 6th dimensional vision and a completely alien and unroleplayable mindset, go right ahead, but don't pretend like that's been the standard in fantasy at any point.

>Nigger, are you retarded? The point I was making is that it's completely fucking stupid that only human adventurers can learn how to pick locks.
And my point was that it would be stupid to make a race whose specialty was "can pick locks" something anything intelligent could do.
Basically: Not an argument.
>So you're saying that literally 100% of dwarven faiths stipulate that you can never find yourself in a situation that can be classed as an adventure?
It's possible, they aren't human. It could be a similar thing like how queen ants don't really leave their hills.
> And if I want to homebrew up one that doesn't I have to either write a whole new class or bodge the dwarf abilities onto the cleric ones, thus creating race and class?
Do you have a reason to make them Dwarves, do they have a trait that cannot be taken away so you can't just use humans with that trait instead?
>And, you see, if you weren't shit at designing racial mechanics packages, they would be.
But you don't even know anything about how I design my races.
>No matter whether he's breaking troll knees
Not dwarf specific
>blessing a mine vein,
No reason a human couldn't
>designing a new kind of arbalest
See this is the kind of shit I'm talking about.
None of the shit you just described as being a dwarf trait is something only dwarves do.

>I don't understand why people insist on thinking non-human races were meant to be anything other than caricatures and sterotypes of other cultures.

Because there are a lot of settings where those races are just was wide-ranging as humans are?

To go to Veeky Forums's D&D whipping boy: You won't expect an Evermeet Elf to be the same as one from Myth Dranor or the streets of Waterdeep.

don't you have some youtube video to comment deus vult on

>None of the shit you just described as being a dwarf trait is something only dwarves do.
There is nothing only dwarves can do.

>None of the shit you just described as being a dwarf trait is something only dwarves do.

So what IS a dwarf trait then?

Are you retarded or something?

And there are far more where they are not. I'm all for cultural variance in other races; makes a world much more believable. But that's a niche within a niche. Projecting that onto the whole genre as if it was commonplace is just didshonest

A short human

Which settings have them as a singular stereotype? Even Tolkien didn't. Mirkwood Elves were very different people, culturally.

>Even Tolkien didn't.
Well, you only really get one sort of Hobbit. Or two sorts if you differentiate between 'sit on their ass at home' and 'go adventuring', but that applies to pretty much every race.

Mind you, those hobbits are also all from a single town. If humans had only one town, they'd be pretty mono-culture too.