Only One Race in Fantasy RPGs

I noticed that it’s difficult to impossible to enforce cultural traits upon a player character’s personality and have fun at the same time. I’ve also tried the one species but variant cultures/splinter races thing in the last 4 campaigns I ran and found that most players still role play however they feel like doing so. And that’s fine, they need to inject their personality into their character, not every gamer is their to to be a hardcore actor, most just want to be the hero.

Instead what I do is treat each “race” as if it were a group of people. Think of two groups of people, each of the same species, but isolated from one another geographically, culturally, whatever. They may live in different social situations, one group of dwarves living in a city of giants and forced to do labor for peanuts, while another group of dwarves lives near the top of a forested mountain and although they have built a city into the mountain they have taken up hunting and foraging in the woods as a means of survival. Both groups of people will guarantee have their own cultural identity while being of the same race. As the dm, if you can role play this and the players recognize this fact then they may begin to follow your lead and lines of thinking when deciding how to role play their character.
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I’ve been extremely fortunate to game with players who play up their character races quite a bit, including personality, cultural quirks, story hooks, appearance and mannerisms, and so on. What’s more, the players in my games always strove to make their characters more than simply a racial archetype – in fact, one of the overriding themes of my first 4E campaign was how the different races in the party, over time, learned from each other and picked up on each other’s habits and outlooks.

They’ve run the gamut from the ‘classic’ races such as elves and dwarves to the ‘new wave’ options like dragonborn, tiefling, and warforged, and each time I’ve been blown away.

In fact, they’ve been so good at it that even the humans feel… well.. human in contrast to the others.

I think when it comes to race and roleplaying, each group’s mileage may vary. In my case, most of my players are (semi-)professional writers and artists, so that might explain the quality of their performance. Other groups might need a little extra prodding.

Of course, removing race from the game is certainly a valid option if a group finds it’s not adding much to their experience. Whatever works, I say. 🙂

I feel that the racial descriptions define 90% of the general populace the adventurers are different. That being said people can run what they want how they want.

I enjoy playing different races in D&D, and do my best to play it *as* a different race. One fun example is when myself and a fellow player were both playing genasi, so we had a lot of elemental pride, and schemed right in front of people in primordial. It was a blast, but I can see how that might not have much of a place in a different sort of campaign. It seems like the broader a story’s goals are, the less time everyone has to savor the little details.

I’ve seen both extremes in my various games. The Dragonlance campaign I play in (going on 7 years, off and on when the players can get together) is very aware of race; the Silvanesti are very aware that they are Silvanesti and not Qualinesti, the Kender is aware of her heritage, the Dwarf is quite Dwarfish, and even the different humans are aware of their different cultural backgrounds. That is, of course, a Dragonlance game, and the setting lends itself to playing up the racial/cultural differences across the world.

A Forgotten Realms campaign I played in some years ago might as well have been an all-human campaign. The whole group was a little shaken up when I joined as a Lizardfolk PC and made no bones about my racial attitudes toward softskins; suddenly the DM was thinking in terms of, “does this shopkeeper like this race?” Even with that, though, once the initial “join time” wore off, the PCs were treating my character like just another human. It worked out pretty well and we had a lot of fun with it, but we could easily have all been a single race.

Ultimately I think it boils down to–as do so many things–a groups particular gaming style. If political intrigue and social interactions are an important part of the game, racial backgrounds become an important factor in the story. If it’s a “kick in the door and fireball the room” sort of adventure, you can reduce it to two races: “kiss’em” or “kill’em.”

“How much would the game change if there were only a few races or even just one race?”

I’d like to still return to this question and the implicit requirement of a multitude of races in a fantasy game. What makes the game D&D? Is it the types of characters? The published campaign worlds? The style of play?

Is it only me, or does someone else think that having to explain away all the possible races (and classes) actually limits the stories you can tell? If your own campaign world does not have lizard guys who breath acid, are you actually limiting options for players who’d like to make a paladin? Or why do all the most powerful warlocks have horns and tails?

I mean, it’s OK to have all these races if you play on a published setting, because that’s the way the place is designed. But what if you’d like to have a campaign loosely based on … say crusades-era Middle East, with real world geography and some ties to real history (like our group) or in Conan’s Hyborian Age, or something based on the Game of Thrones. You could just say that everyone plays a human, but then you would be taking away a big chunk of player choice in the rules space.

When creating a character, I typically want to work from a base of good mechanics—racial features that match the class I want to play, for instance—but I always try and make sure the flavor and mechanics compliment each other. If a good choice for my spiked-chain fighter is to play as a longtooth shifter, I consider that the character will be a bit wilder and more gruff than a human fighter. I’ll consider what racial feats and backgrounds are available that will support the character’s class, skills, and personality as well as use those features to fuel the idea of what sort of personality this character has, which further feeds into the build. If there’s a good looking feature, I have to consider whether it fits both the personality and the mechanics, and if not, which of these should be modified, if either; I may not take the feature at all, or I may change the personality and the mechanics now that I’ve realized there’s this new and interesting thing I’d like to incorporate.

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.

Right. It wouldn’t necessarily make much sense in an open-ended game like standard D&D to have a specific list of cultures. I could see this being tied into an expanded “background” option/mechanic, though.