@Amelia
You’re absolutely right that it comes down to the group and the players themselves. If the players are keen enough to take the time and role-play their character, including working in a back-story, then that’s great. I find that this is the exception and not the norm (unfortunately).

@J. Shepherd
It sounds like you’ve giving this a lot more thought than I have. Eventually we have to draw a line to keep things simple. The mechanics for race as they stand now are relatively simplified. Whether or not we choose to use them in our campaign or not is up to each DM. I think the kind of specific tailoring you’ve described is an interesting topic to discus, but would be too complicate to implement. Thanks for the comment.

@MAK
The PC background options are quite diverse and provide PCs with a good basis to make their PC unique. The problem is that too few players bother to use this part of their character sheet when role-playing. They see it as another way to gain a mechanical bonus (+2) to a skill.

@Dan
I really like this approach. Explaining the “racial” difference as just offshoots of the parent race (Human in most cases) is a easy way to handle it that makes sense.

As a DM, i too found the multitude of races available in the current edition DnD to be somewhat daunting in terms of socio-cultural intergration, but i think problems of this nature can be solved in fairly simplistic and cosmetic ways. Instead of highlighting each 4e race as its own autonomous group or faction, try intergrating or grouping like races together to give a more culturally unified feel to your DnD world. For example, the current campagin i DM takes place in a geographic region where mostly humans reside and i decided i really wanted to introduce a Longtooth Shifter into the PCs’ party (which by the way was already very diverse, having only one human PC in the group). So, instead of showcasing the Shifter as a different race i decided to introduce him to the PCs as a human who’s family was cursed with lycanthropy many generations ago. This essentially solved the problem of too much racial diversity and was also a wonderful roll-playing tool to surprise the PCs with (when the NPC finally “wolfed out” on them after being bloodied in combat). The “fix” was purly cosmetic: the NPC retained all of its original racial abilities, but was completely human in manner and appearance (most of the time).

This same tactic can be applied to any race if you are creative enough to bend the visual aspects of the races. I mean, after all, a character’s looks aren’t set in stone by the developers are they? If you want to play a Dragonborn but the world you’re playing in is Humans Only, then whats wrong with making the Dragonborn look and act mostly human, except maybe with skin that has a slight reddish tinge or (hidden) patches of scales – and poof!!! – a human with dragon-like hints who can suddenly breath firey death on his foes.

This worked well for a couple of campaigns where the character backgrounds were quite diverse. In the latest campaign, however, all the characters were from a very small geographical area, so making them come from very different cultures was going to be difficult to explain. This resulted in the current modeling, which is not based on culture but individual characteristics like “tough” or “quick”. The idea actually came from D20 Modern classes, but I changed it to portray races instead…
.-= MAK´s last blog ..Ville Makkonen uploaded =-.

I’m personally all for the idea of separating species and culture to be rid of the concept of “race.” When they refer to “race” in a game like D&D, they’re actually referring to species in most cases. I don’t think it’s reasonable to assume that, say, goliaths and githzerai are members of the same species. “Race” is an extremely arbitrary term in reality, to some people meaning any taxonomic group beneath the level of species, but to most people meaning nothing more than differences in the shape of a nose or the color of a skin. All H. S. sapiens are the same species and subspecies, and the differences between them are nothing more than minor genetic-population differences and all sorts of cultural differences.

I’d like this to be properly reflected in a game, where humans and elves are separate species, even if they can interbreed to create half-elves (which would most likely be unable to reproduce in a literal setting, but there’s magic in the world). I’d briefly considered devising a mechanic to separate “race” into species and culture, but there was no easy answer on how to do that. The first thing that comes to mind is that the physical stats (Str, Con, Dex) would be governed by species and the mental stats (Int, Wis, Cha) would be governed by culture, but that’s too much of a simplification. Clearly species can effect intelligence, and culture can certainly influence strength or dexterity. It’s something I’d like to revisit sometime, but there are always so many things to do.