In your opinion, what are the worst/most boring races in 5e?

[ciarannihill]

Dragonborn are the most unfortunate mechanically IMHO, but really the worst thing about races in 5E is that a lot of the extra races ended up in Monster Manual expansions (Volo's and Mordenkainen's) instead of in the first major PHB expansion (Xanathar's) which isn't a huge, huge deal for most people, but makes it way less likely to see interesting Kenku, Firbolg, Goliath or Triton characters in AL.

(Like you could easily do a super interesting Paladin of Conquest Triton who's whole deal is to save the ocean by conquering the surface, but can't play that character in AL because of PHB+1 and the fact that Tritons are in Volo's and Conquest paladin is in Xanathar's)

[Mith]

I'm not suprised, as when I offered to put the DM hat on again, my proposal for a campaign with PC's that were: "Half-Elves, Half-Orcs, and Humans only" was soundly rejected.

(I also specified that "You may take levels in Barbarian (Frenzy), Fighter (Champion), and Rogue (Swashbuckler and Thief), and the first two levels of Paladin and Ranger only", and that I may use "the 'gritty realism' slow healing variant", which may have factored in the other players rejection as well, or maybe they just didn't trust me to DM well after so long).

I would be totally play at this table. I get my Barbarian or Champion. I'm good.

[CantigThimble]

But if they are part of the world, why should it matter? (I agree when the world just don't have those things), i mean... to be fair, the PC party is not the "normal" for that world. (or most worlds)

I think that by 'normal' I mean something more like 'can fit in'.

If someone is playing the son of a human noble whose parents were murdered by a demon and he made a pact with that demon to save his own life, becoming a warlock, then that person is really highly unusual, probably unique in the world. But when that character walks into the average town the people there are just going to think "Oh, it's some posh human" or "It's some posh human who knows some magic". Starting a conversation with the character probably begins with asking where he's from or what family he's a member of, or maybe just by getting down to business and talking about what problems they have that a nobleman and a spellcaster can solve for them.

When someone is playing a race that's practically never seen in this half of the world, or doesn't speak the language, or moves by hovering a foot above the ground while green runes float around his head, then the first reaction is always going to be "What are you and what are you doing in my town?" That may be interesting once or twice but it gets old damn fast. The problem just gets exponentially worse the more of the party is like that. When one member of a party is out of place, then NPCs can assume, "Okay, that weird person is with them, and they seem normal so I can deal with this group pretty normally." But when you've got one normal looking person out of a party of 5, then that's just going to be madness.

I'm more okay with including more inhuman races when they're baked in as a major race. If everyone knows there are aarakocra villages in the mountains, the aarakocra fishermen come to town every other week to sell salmon and forts are built with defensible roofs to protect against aarakocra raiders then an aarakocra PC can 'fit in' in that campaign. But when the DM has built a world with a set of major races and then 3 players show up saying "I found this cool thing in Volo's" then either the DM has to change his world to include those as normally featured races, have NPCs treat the party like the circus that they are or totally ignore the party's appearance while roleplaying NPCs.

If you wanted, you could build a world with the lizardfolk empire, the bugbear commonwealth, the kenku republic and the firbolg tribes and make those normal races that everyone deals with, but I don't want to just stick a party of all those races in a standard fantasy setting and make that work somehow. The 'outsider' shtick starts to feel overdone VERY quickly. And this isn't even getting into my earlier problems of the difficulties of actually roleplaying truly inhuman characters.

[Nifft]

If you wanted, you could build a world with the lizardfolk empire, the bugbear commonwealth, the kenku republic and the firbolg tribes and make those normal races that everyone deals with, but I don't want to just stick a party of all those races in a standard fantasy setting and make that work somehow. The 'outsider' shtick starts to feel overdone VERY quickly. And this isn't even getting into my earlier problems of the difficulties of actually roleplaying truly inhuman characters.

Totally agree.

If the campaign world has a limited racial palette, that points to a strong and coherent thematic sense for the campaign. That's a good thing.

The racial palette doesn't need to be the default PHB races, of course -- it would be cool to see a game where the PCs are all from the lizardfolk empire, the bugbear commonwealth, the kenku republic, and the firbolg tribes -- and in that game, it might be disruptive to demand access to human or half-elf.


As an aside: as a DM you can get similarly strong thematic value with a limited monster palette, plus it's more implicit since it's something which the players will experience over time rather than right from the get-go, so you're less likely to step on any toes.

[Knaight]

Despite most of the socio-political fights of the 21st century being, at their real core, class battles over slices of the resource pie, we still want to pretend we live in a classless society. We don't really have that luxury with race.

Two things.
1) A lot of people do just fine taking that luxury for themselves. Denial is a powerful thing.
2) I don't think this is the reason the terms are differently fraught. "Class" has a definition referring specifically to economic class, but it also has a general definition that's pretty close to "category", and it generally gets used for fairly high level classification. Heck, even the term "classification" does a good job demonstrating this definition. It's the use of that definition that makes it generally fit, particularly given that it used to be the only really high level classification system before the class-race split in AD&D. Even after that split it's by far the more major one.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Limited racial palettes and coherent settings aren't actually necessarily correlated. Another option is to make a place for things other than "oh, a nation of X. And a nation of Y."

My setting has as playable character races

* humans (present in 3/5 nations, majority in one)
* Dwarves (present in 1.5/5 nations)
* High Elves (present in 1/5)
* wood elves (present in 2/5)
* half elves (present in 3/5 and even with humans in two of those)
* yuan-ti (present in 1, lore completely altered)
* halflings (present as playable in 1/5, savage cannibals in another)
* hobgoblins (present in 2/5; goblins and bugbears are present but not playable due to alterations)
* dragonborn (present in 1/5, dominant there)
* orcs (using half-orc stats, present in 1.5/5)
* soul-forged (homebrew warforged, present in 2/5)
* aasimar and tieflings (present really in 1/5, they're rare throwbacks to normal humans)

The trick is that all 5 nations participate in the Adventurer's Guild (name is tongue in cheek), and the player characters are all adventurers. So they're drawn from all 5 nations. And being Sanctioned Adventurers means that everyone expects them to be weird, but tolerates them due to that status.

A few quirks:

* humans and orcs are magically altered (blame the elves) goblinoids.
* yuan-ti are magically altered humans (with snake soul fragments), as are dragonborn (with dragon soul fragments)
* halflings are mutant goblins
* dwarves (except adventurers) are married by the time they're adults and effectively act as a unit from there on.
* One nation is dragonborn, orcs, and goblinoids (which are all one species, just different forms).
* goblins are a quasi-hive mind--stupid when alone and smarter in tribes (to a point).

Everything has its place. And the races aren't monocultures either.

[Nifft]

Limited racial palettes and coherent settings aren't actually necessarily correlated. Another option is to make a place for things other than "oh, a nation of X. And a nation of Y."

Not having "nation of X" is a separate good thing, unrelated to limited racial palette.

Race-as-culture is a plague on creativity.

My setting has as playable character races

* humans (present in 3/5 nations, majority in one)
* Dwarves (present in 1.5/5 nations)
* High Elves (present in 1/5)
* wood elves (present in 2/5)
* half elves (present in 3/5 and even with humans in two of those)
* yuan-ti (present in 1, lore completely altered)
* halflings (present as playable in 1/5, savage cannibals in another)
* hobgoblins (present in 2/5; goblins and bugbears are present but not playable due to alterations)
* dragonborn (present in 1/5, dominant there)
* orcs (using half-orc stats, present in 1.5/5)
* soul-forged (homebrew warforged, present in 2/5)
* aasimar and tieflings (present really in 1/5, they're rare throwbacks to normal humans)

Can any arbitrary 10-50 new races be added in?

If not, you've done just what I'm recommending: you've picked a limited racial palette, and that's cool.

Limited palette doesn't mean four races. It just means you pick & choose what you will be using for the campaign, and you don't throw in the kitchen sink.

It's quite possible to collaboratively pick a racial palette, too -- just ask your players what they're interested in playing, and build a civilization (perhaps also collaboratively) using whatever races they picked.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Not having "nation of X" is a separate good thing, unrelated to limited racial palette.

Race-as-culture is a plague on creativity.

Can any arbitrary 10-50 new races be added in?

If not, you've done just what I'm recommending: you've picked a limited racial palette, and that's cool.

Limited palette doesn't mean four races. It just means you pick & choose what you will be using for the campaign, and you don't throw in the kitchen sink.

It's quite possible to collaboratively pick a racial palette, too -- just ask your players what they're interested in playing, and build a civilization (perhaps also collaboratively) using whatever races they picked.

My goal is to have a place (somewhere in the world) for every official race, plus a few homebrew. The only one I'm quibbling about is kenku, really. Mainly to annoy a friend, but...

But those will require an expansion of the playable area, and that will require players interested in going and finding them.

Kobolds exist, but there aren't enough of them yet to be playable. Gnomes and goliaths exist, just not in the current playable area, as do most other official races. Most of the more "animal" ones are products of high elven soul-engineering, so they're mostly on the southern continent. The trick is that there just aren't that many of each race (same with certain monster races). The total population of dragonborn is about 100k. In the world. Gathered in one nation. When you don't have a "nation of X" or "race-as-culture", it's a lot more freeing.

I also heavily modify the lore of each race (for example, the two elf races are actually separate races related in the distant past, and neither lives all that much longer than humans, max 180 years or so). I dumped fixed-alignments for races (including outsiders and dragons), so you can have people of all races working together or against each other.

[MagneticKitty]

It's quite possible to collaboratively pick a racial palette, too -- just ask your players what they're interested in playing, and build a civilization (perhaps also collaboratively) using whatever races they picked.

I wish more dms did this. I want to play neat looking races without being a special snowflake.


I guess i never answered op. I think my favorite mechanically is elf. Trance / darkvision / resistance to charm are all very nice. Shame it's tied to such a boring race visually imo.

Favorite visually is probably lizardfolk. Shame theyre straight sociopaths. I would rather play a friendly one thats more fish out of water than completely non empathetic. That's why I've played kobold and dragonborn instead.

Least favorite mechnically.. standard human or rock gnome. Or kenku. I'd sacrifice their mimic and duplicate objects for the ability to talk.

Least favorite visually bland human (and human but with x) races.

[Finback]

That would probably be best for everyone involved.

Just don't be that guy who feels like its his sacred right to play a dragonborn because they're in the PHB and deliberately tries to sabotage the game for revenge when the DM says: "Sorry, only X, Y and Z races are allowed in my world." (Yes I have seen this happen)

I'm working on a world, with a very loose conceptual base on Harry Harrison's "West of Eden", in that the PCs will be able to choose from tortles, lizardfolk, kobolds, yuan-ti, and dragonborn. They have an alliance of nations, spread across their continent, and the PCs will be quested with discovering what lies beyond the Great Sea. Cue some adventures getting to the coastal city, organising a ship, some sailing antics, and then... The Dark Land.

Home to primitive cultures of humans, elves, dwarves and halflings; all of which are at best, using Bronze Age weaponry. Dwarves hide in the mountains, elves claim the treetops, humans the grasslands, and halflings, the swamps - the latter because I'm lifting some Dark Sun and halflings are cannibalistic headhunters.

Down the line, if my players WANT to use one of the Dark Land races, they can, but it might be that they are taken as a slave, or being hired as a native guide, of sorts. But there is no Grand Empire of the classic races; the only Grand Empire I'm going to use is the charred, decrepit cyclopean ruins of the Lost Ancients, the race said to have ended the dragons millennia ago (one of the goals is to find Where The Dragons Went, something the few dragonborn, a race on the edge of extinction, want to learn before they fade away).

That race were

Spoiler: SPOILERS

Show

goblins.

[Nifft]

My goal is to have a place (somewhere in the world) for every official race, plus a few homebrew. The only one I'm quibbling about is kenku, really. Mainly to annoy a friend, but...

But those will require an expansion of the playable area, and that will require players interested in going and finding them.

It looks like you're largely agreeing with what I've written, but from tone I'm not so sure you see it that way.

If you've got an area of disagreement, could you point it out?

I wish more dms did this. I want to play neat looking races without being a special snowflake.

Collaborative character & campaign building (through a "session zero" or similar) is a really great thing which I wish were more popular.

I feel like the default campaign template is based on tournament play (via Gygax), or video game emulation (via CRPGs), or literature emulation, or buying a module / adventure path and running through that -- and all of those involve a big up-front DM-presets-everything process.

Per my experience, an agile / improv process is a lot more fun, and long-term it's less work for the DM.

[Rerem115]

I guess I'm the weird/boring one, because I like playing humans. Granted, Vhuman is pretty attractive from a purely mechanical standpoint, which is a big part of it, but it ties into the other reason I like playing humans. Because they're the blank slate race, nobody bats an eye at whatever goofy concept I want to play; the more lighthearted tinkering arcanist, the actual Viking (the kind with democracy and trade routes, not horned helmets) skald, the disillusioned former guard turned bounty hunter, the steppe-nomad strongman with nothing left to lose, or the rakish 3rd son of a noble house looking to turn a fortune with his own quick wits and arm. Because they were human, I wasn't really pigeonholed into following or subverting certain personality tropes, and it let me build my quote unquote "special snowflake" characters without really looking like a traditional snowflake, all while meshing well with the lore of the world. Moreover, the boost offered by the feat gave me another foundation upon which I could build a personality for the character.

Yes, by virtue of being the everyman character humans are bland, even if Vhumans are strong mechanically. It's what you do within the blandness that determines whether or not the character is interesting.

[CantigThimble]

I guess I'm the weird/boring one, because I like playing humans. Granted, Vhuman is pretty attractive from a purely mechanical standpoint, which is a big part of it, but it ties into the other reason I like playing humans. Because they're the blank slate race, nobody bats an eye at whatever goofy concept I want to play; the more lighthearted tinkering arcanist, the actual Viking (the kind with democracy and trade routes, not horned helmets) skald, the disillusioned former guard turned bounty hunter, the steppe-nomad strongman with nothing left to lose, or the rakish 3rd son of a noble house looking to turn a fortune with his own quick wits and arm. Because they were human, I wasn't really pigeonholed into following or subverting certain personality tropes, and it let me build my quote unquote "special snowflake" characters without really looking like a traditional snowflake, all while meshing well with the lore of the world. Moreover, the boost offered by the feat gave me another foundation upon which I could build a personality for the character.

Yes, by virtue of being the everyman character humans are bland, even if Vhumans are strong mechanically. It's what you do within the blandness that determines whether or not the character is interesting.

You're not alone in this.

[Willie the Duck]

Two things.
1) A lot of people do just fine taking that luxury for themselves. Denial is a powerful thing.
2) I don't think this is the reason the terms are differently fraught. "Class" has a definition referring specifically to economic class, but it also has a general definition that's pretty close to "category", and it generally gets used for fairly high level classification. Heck, even the term "classification" does a good job demonstrating this definition. It's the use of that definition that makes it generally fit, particularly given that it used to be the only really high level classification system before the class-race split in AD&D. Even after that split it's by far the more major one.

Yes, I think you might have missed it, but I already addressed that D&D is using class in the same way as category or classification in my response to The Zoat:

Yes, that's how it is being used in the D&D context. I was answering 2D8HP's question about how (IMO, of course) the term escaped the hand-wringing that race occasionally gets. And (IMO) it is because the word class does not have the same bowel-clenching resonance with us in general (because we're not trained to expect a fight when we hear the word 'class' like we do when we hear 'race').

[PhoenixPhyre]

It looks like you're largely agreeing with what I've written, but from tone I'm not so sure you see it that way.

If you've got an area of disagreement, could you point it out?

I guess had taken "limited palette" as encouraging very few races, rather than having limits at all. You can have a "everything's available" setting without it being incoherent. It certainly takes more work than an incoherent kitchen sink, but it's not impossible.

Collaborative character & campaign building (through a "session zero" or similar) is a really great thing which I wish were more popular.

I feel like the default campaign template is based on tournament play (via Gygax), or video game emulation (via CRPGs), or literature emulation, or buying a module / adventure path and running through that -- and all of those involve a big up-front DM-presets-everything process.

Per my experience, an agile / improv process is a lot more fun, and long-term it's less work for the DM.

This depends on the group. I run two types of campaigns:

* limited time, short-session after-school groups. We meet for 1-ish hours, once a week during the school year. Most of the time at least one player in a group is brand new. None of them have independent access to the books (although they can borrow them if they want). Character building is session zero, but it's me guiding them through the process. Simultaneously building a world (and having multiple worlds going since I run usually two of these in parallel in any given year) would be way overkill and eat away at the actual play time.

* Adult groups. I have one on hiatus for the summer and another that I'm teaching 3 colleagues how to play. Many of the same constraints apply, although we have longer sessions.

I've found that, for me, the best thing is to have a long-running persistent-world setting. What each group does gets written into the campaign world for everybody who comes after them. PCs, once a campaign is over, turn into NPCs that future groups can interact with. People, in my experience, love to see that they can make a difference in the world, it's true. But that can be as a result of play rather than pre-game meta-play setting construction.

I do certainly leave lots of holes to be filled, and I don't write monolithic campaigns (too much effort for one). I start each group with a selection of seeds, issues in the world around them and let them pick which one to pursue. They can go off and do something else if they want or if they finish that adventure in time. This usually starts with a few "tutorial" missions and then opens up.

[KorvinStarmast]

I guess I'm the weird/boring one, because I like playing humans.

I have made more humans than all else combined in 5e. Currently active characters in three different games are: vHuman Ranger, vHuman Life Cleric, 1/2 orc Champion. In a fourth game that awaits DM returning from injury, wood elf monk

[Nifft]

I guess I'm the weird/boring one, because I like playing humans.

Some people like to be the Everyman exploring a world of wonders and weird things.

Some people like being a weird thing that gets explored.

Both are good.

I guess had taken "limited palette" as encouraging very few races, rather than having limits at all. You can have a "everything's available" setting without it being incoherent. It certainly takes more work than an incoherent kitchen sink, but it's not impossible.

Medium-term it's probably less work than the incoherent mess, because you don't have an ever-increasing risk of needing to backtrack and fix some glaring inconsistency which wasn't obvious at the time that you added a new race / culture / whatever.

In terms of more vs. less, I'm of the opinion that most published settings and many DMs err on the side of too much rather than too little, so I'd encourage people to think about how few races they'd need to make the setting that they want, and then to add more if they think those could help the setting. Start from necessary elements, and add beneficial elements on top of that. That's specifically a reaction to the current biases that I perceive in the D&D community. If people tended to err on the side of too few races, I'd frame my advice differently.

Either way, the core of my advice would be the same:
- Find the smallest number of races you need for your setting.
- Find the largest number of races your setting can support, with each one distinct and interesting and memorable.
- Pick a number somewhere between the smallest and largest, and go with that.

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

I have made more humans than all else combined in 5e. Currently active characters in three different games are: vHuman Ranger, vHuman Life Cleric, 1/2 orc Champion. In a fourth game that awaits DM returning from injury, wood elf monk

The best players are the ones who can make utterly conventional race/class combinations interesting. Some of the worst are the opposite: they pick an obscure race - "I'm a kenkku mystic!" - and confuse that with character depth.

[Rerem115]

The best players are the ones who can make utterly conventional race/class combinations interesting. Some of the worst are the opposite: they pick an obscure race - "I'm a kenkku mystic!" - and confuse that with character depth.

That goes a decent way towards summing up my thoughts on 5e's character design. The way I see it, each class, and to a much larger extent, each race creates a framework built of the clichés and tropes associated with it, and this framework can be both guiding and restrictive.

For example, a couple of the people I know who have no idea how to role-play can play a Dwarven character just fine. Pretty much anybody can pull off a stocky, bearded, grouchy, beer-swilling, gold seeking little stereotype. In that sense, the tropes are a guide, since they help people play a character. However, since all Dwarves are seen through this lens, no matter what they do, they're either adhering to the stereotypes, or going out of their way to subvert them. While it can be fun to invert or avoid the tropes that go with a given race, the problem is that you still point out their existence. You're never playing something new; you're either playing something old, or making fun of something old. Again, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just a limit inherent in the popular culture created by Western fantasy.

With that in mind, I prefer to avoid playing races with too much, for lack of a better word, baggage, unless I'm going to play that straight to the hilt. For me, that means playing my Tieflings as Humans in red makeup,my Aasimar as Humans with spray tan, my elves as the politely introspective type, my Half-Elves and Halflings alike as plucky, cheerful sorts, my Dwarves as scaled up Nac Mac Feegle, and never touching Drow with a 10 foot pole. You just can't avoid the Drizz't comparisons, no matter what you do, unless you go full evil .

[Nifft]

You're never playing something new; you're either playing something old, or making fun of something old.

Is anybody ever playing something new?

Nihil novi sub sole, as those newfangled kids translated it recently.

[JakOfAllTirades]

I've seen a number of posts on this thread complaining "I don't like race X because I've always seen them played as stereotype Y."

This doesn't look like a "boring race" problem to me; it looks more like a boring player problem.

[ZorroGames]

I guess I'm the weird/boring one, because I like playing humans. Granted, Vhuman is pretty attractive from a purely mechanical standpoint, which is a big part of it, but it ties into the other reason I like playing humans. Because they're the blank slate race, nobody bats an eye at whatever goofy concept I want to play; the more lighthearted tinkering arcanist, the actual Viking (the kind with democracy and trade routes, not horned helmets) skald, the disillusioned former guard turned bounty hunter, the steppe-nomad strongman with nothing left to lose, or the rakish 3rd son of a noble house looking to turn a fortune with his own quick wits and arm. Because they were human, I wasn't really pigeonholed into following or subverting certain personality tropes, and it let me build my quote unquote "special snowflake" characters without really looking like a traditional snowflake, all while meshing well with the lore of the world. Moreover, the boost offered by the feat gave me another foundation upon which I could build a personality for the character.

Yes, by virtue of being the everyman character humans are bland, even if Vhumans are strong mechanically. It's what you do within the blandness that determines whether or not the character is interesting.

Recently began working on finding the Standard Human Character that peaks my interest. Now to pick which one I take to the AL game.