The Mechanical Benefits and Worldbuilding Detriments of Ancestry Bloat

[Dragonsonthemap]

Hello Playground,

I currently play D&D with 3 different groups (and once did with a fourth that has left it for sci-fi), and there's two growing feelings among all of them:

1. The huge number of ancestry and heritage options (to use P2's terms, which we usually do; race and subrace, respectively) provide some nice, little, and desperately-needed character customization options in a system too short on them, especially with something like the Tasha's Cauldron customization rules.

2. The sheer number of different species these imply live in a world is becoming setting cancer.

Different groups, and different DMs in them, have taken different approaches; some games are in human-only world that let you use non-human ancestries and flavor their clearly non-human abilities has some extra magical talent; others have world with multiple species, but still collapse some into others and just say "oh, no, gnomes and halflings are the same species, that's just some individual variation among them." One group has tried to embrace a world that resembles the Mos Eisley Cantina, to mixed success; there's some interesting stuff that's come out of it, but it's sometimes reinforced the "humans with pointy ears" tendency in frustrating ways, and people suggesting that humans themselves are mythical creatures has become a running joke.

I personally like having worlds with several different species, but there's grown to be too many for me to involve them meaningfully in the world, and my experience has been that it's usually better if they are in the standard pseudo-medievalish settings of D&D, strengthening the sense of the setting as a world and of distinct species as distinct species, with interesting relationships with each other and interesting approaches to the world and life out-of-reach for humans (and it helps avoid having non-humans wind up as stand-ins for real-world human cultures, which is several problems).

Have others encountered this problem, and if so, how have you approached it? Has that approach worked?

Also, I am considered taking the "ancestry batching" approach (saying, for example, that gnomes and dwarves are the same species in a world), and doing it with more or less every options until I've got a setting narrowed down to roughly the number of species in the PHB but with close to all of the officially-published mechanical options available to players (there will, of course, inevitably be a few casualties, likely including centaurs and warforged). The one thing that bugs me a bit is that a large list of options are still being "bundled;" if you want to be a gnome who's resistant to mind magic, you can't also be a gnome who's got half-toughness, for example (Gnome Cunning and Dwarven Toughness), which feels weird if there's not supposed to be vast biological distinctions between people with the gnome cunning trait and people with the dwarven toughness trait. I've wondered if there would be a way to let people mix-and-match between "bundled" ancestry traits that could have some system to prevent ribbons from being traded for substantial mechanical benefits, or even to balancing the relative strengths of two distinct mechanical benefits (dwarven toughness is probably worth more than tinker, but might be worth less than gnome cunning?). Has anyone tried this?

[BRC]

So, the thing about 5e is that fairly few racial traits cannot be handwaved away as being normal aspects of an individual, especially if you drop Darkvision and rework languages.

This Human is Extra Strong and Tough, they use the Half-Orc Statblock. Without Darkvision, nothing in the half-orc statblock is explicitly supernatural. If you want Orcs to exist in your setting as a Thing, you can do that, but otherwise, just drop Darkvision and boom, Half-Orc "race" works great for ordinary humans.

Remember, Races don't need to model entire populations, just individual PCs. The presentation of "You have these traits because of your ancestry" can easily be thrown out the window (With the possible exception of, like Tieflings or Warforged, and even then)

High-Elves may not exist, but drop Trance and Darkvision, and you're left with a good model for a human who was born noble and whose education included Swordsmanship (Elf Weapon Training), Magic (Extra Cantrip), an int bonus, and an extra language. Fey Ancestry could even be reworked into mental exercises taught to children born in this particular noble house that makes them resislient to Charm Magic.

You don't need to establish that anybody beyond this single individual PC has these traits. So the Traits can be open as character choices, without Elves being a thing in this setting, so long as the player can figure out a reason why their character would have these mechanical traits. If you're willing to drop, or swap around ribbon traits (like, replace Dwarven Stonecutting with some other focus besides stonework), it gets even easier.


All Gnomes and Halflings can probably be grouped into a single small humanoid species, with the racial/subrace traits just being individual variation. It makes sense that SOME gnomes can use Tinkers tools to build tiny clockwork devices, vs literally every Rock Gnome having that ability. Most Gnomes are farmers, who don't know a spanner from a monkey wrench, because any settled agrarian society needs a lot of farmers.


The other option is, if you're doing your own worldbuilding, let your players choose what they want to play, and then build those races into the setting, otherwise only using groups that you feel add something to the setting.

[LordShade]

#2 does feel very strange to me, as a DM. I felt like earlier editions of D&D dealt with this better. I'm thinking back to 2e Dragonlance, where:

a) The relationships and origins of the 3 main races--humans, elves, and ogres--was clearly defined;
b) The origins of the other common races, dwarves, gnomes, kender, minotaurs, and goblins--was also clearly defined, along with their societies and the regions of the world in which they lived;
c) Draconians played a major role in the setting, but were new, and not available as player characters;
d) and there were a handful of other minor races, which you could use or ignore as you preferred.

There wasn't a bloat of ill-defined, optional character races like goliaths, tieflings, dragonborn, kenku, or whatever that were supposed to be treated as completely normal by the standard races. To me, the Mos Eisley approach to the world implies something much more cosmopolitan than a world with mysterious ruins, unexplored jungles and hidden aberrations. Like, how is a semi-nomadic, uneducated villager in Abanasinia supposed to react to a half-man, half-bird creature? Everyone knows what an elf is and may react with suspicion, but that's miles away from a half-demon with horns that smells like sulfur. That's torches and pitchforks territory.

[Unoriginal]

Personally, I have no issue with DMing/playing a setting with tons of different sapient species. In fact I like it quite well.

In a world where the fire and the sky themselves can speak, I don't see much issues with cat-people or gnomes.

[Vegan Squirrel]

There's no requirement that you allow every race as an option in every campaign setting. You've alluded to this already with your human-only worlds and bundled races. And there's no reason you have to use the published races at all; the DMG talks about creating your own races and subraces. Clearly you want to give you players plenty of mechanical options, and that's great.

So I would suggest the following: Select the races that you want to have in the world, based on worldbuilding reasons.
Decide on what standard racial abilities to give them, whether that's one (or several) of the published races or your own custom built package.
Allow the custom lineage from Tasha's so that players can make their own customized package, specifying that the characters will still be members of your existing races (or hybrids, or unique due to magic, your call).
You can go through some of the racial abilities you'd like available, and categorize them as equivalent to a feat or a half-feat that can be taken in lieu of the custom lineage's feat. I don't know if anyone's already put together such a list, but you can limit the work by selectively including just a few interesting and unique options. A lot of racial abilities can already be approximated by the available feats, and you can let them combine two half-feats for more customizing without the work of judging racial abilities.
As for Gnome Cunning plus Dwarven Toughness, that seems about a feat to me, a strong one maybe, but reasonable. Resilient gives proficiency in a single save as a half-feat; Gnome cunning gives you advantage on Int, Wis, and Cha saves against magic. Advantage and proficiency are fairly comparable. While most Int, Wis, and Cha saves will be against magic, there are very few Int and Cha saves compared to Wis saves, so it feels like a close enough trade-off.

[Dragonsonthemap]

#2 does feel very strange to me, as a DM. I felt like earlier editions of D&D dealt with this better. I'm thinking back to 2e Dragonlance, where:

a) The relationships and origins of the 3 main races--humans, elves, and ogres--was clearly defined;
b) The origins of the other common races, dwarves, gnomes, kender, minotaurs, and goblins--was also clearly defined, along with their societies and the regions of the world in which they lived;
c) Draconians played a major role in the setting, but were new, and not available as player characters;
d) and there were a handful of other minor races, which you could use or ignore as you preferred.

There wasn't a bloat of ill-defined, optional character races like goliaths, tieflings, dragonborn, kenku, or whatever that were supposed to be treated as completely normal by the standard races. To me, the Mos Eisley approach to the world implies something much more cosmopolitan than a world with mysterious ruins, unexplored jungles and hidden aberrations. Like, how is a semi-nomadic, uneducated villager in Abanasinia supposed to react to a half-man, half-bird creature? Everyone knows what an elf is and may react with suspicion, but that's miles away from a half-demon with horns that smells like sulfur. That's torches and pitchforks territory.


Personally, I have no issue with DMing/playing a setting with tons of different sapient species. In fact I like it quite well.

In a world where the fire and the sky themselves can speak, I don't see much issues with cat-people or gnomes.

Personally, my problem isn't really with tieflings or weird animal people or even shapeshifters - in fact, I'd like to preserve them as setting components - it's just that the sheer number means that they can't all be fleshed-out components of the setting. I would happily take any nine or twelve player options from published material and make a setting for them where they each have an interesting backstory and role in the feel of the world and the movement of the plot. It's just that I can't do that for 30 of them and not end up with most of them shallow dressing for one or two scenes.

[MoiMagnus]

One approach that works reasonably well if you're not the kind to do too much world-building in advance (but rather start with a half-build world that you precise between sessions), is "ancestries and classes that are not picked by the players during session 0 might not exist in universe".

Even for elements of the PHB, I tend to write them out of the universe when no player use them and I don't particularly need them for my worldbuilding (e.g Druids don't exist in most universes I create, and same for Halflings).

This also means that when one player actually want to play one of the ones I didn't include as "default in the setting", I'm very open to how they would want the ancestry/class to be integrated in the universe (how common they are, etc).

[Dragonsonthemap]

There's no requirement that you allow every race as an option in every campaign setting. You've alluded to this already with your human-only worlds and bundled races. And there's no reason you have to use the published races at all; the DMG talks about creating your own races and subraces. Clearly you want to give you players plenty of mechanical options, and that's great.

So I would suggest the following: Select the races that you want to have in the world, based on worldbuilding reasons.
Decide on what standard racial abilities to give them, whether that's one (or several) of the published races or your own custom built package.
Allow the custom lineage from Tasha's so that players can make their own customized package, specifying that the characters will still be members of your existing races (or hybrids, or unique due to magic, your call).
You can go through some of the racial abilities you'd like available, and categorize them as equivalent to a feat or a half-feat that can be taken in lieu of the custom lineage's feat. I don't know if anyone's already put together such a list, but you can limit the work by selectively including just a few interesting and unique options. A lot of racial abilities can already be approximated by the available feats, and you can let them combine two half-feats for more customizing without the work of judging racial abilities.
As for Gnome Cunning plus Dwarven Toughness, that seems about a feat to me, a strong one maybe, but reasonable. Resilient gives proficiency in a single save as a half-feat; Gnome cunning gives you advantage on Int, Wis, and Cha saves against magic. Advantage and proficiency are fairly comparable. While most Int, Wis, and Cha saves will be against magic, there are very few Int and Cha saves compared to Wis saves, so it feels like a close enough trade-off.

This is... really good. I'm going to work on a proposal for this. Wow, thank you!


One approach that works reasonably well if you're not the kind to do too much world-building in advance (but rather start with a half-build world that you precise between sessions), is "ancestries and classes that are not picked by the players during session 0 might not exist in universe".

Even for elements of the PHB, I tend to write them out of the universe when no player use them and I don't particularly need them for my worldbuilding (e.g Druids don't exist in most universes I create, and same for Halflings).

This also means that when one player actually want to play one of the ones I didn't include as "default in the setting", I'm very open to how they would want the ancestry/class to be integrated in the universe (how common they are, etc).

This is a good point, and something I should more into my approach to worldbuilding more, as I currently definitely meet any reasonable definition of "too much worldbuilding in advance."

[BRC]

One thing I want to do with my next setting, in order to get both a coherent world and some of that Mos Eisely flavor is the following


1) Create a series of "Cultures"

2) Each Culture contains at least one "Boring" Race (Elves, Halflings, Dwarves, Ect), and one Weird race (Firbolgs, Kenku, Orcafolk from 3.5 Tidewrack, Sentient Plant people, IDK)

maybe mix-and-match the racial traits a bit to be cultural (For example, anybody from Marinia can get their proficiency with water vehicles, whether their Humans, Orcs, or tiny sentient frogs who ride aroudn in enchanted tree bodies)

So that I still get the sense of "hey, this setting has a wacky mix of species beyond Humans With Pointy Ears", but don't need a new Culture and Place In The World for each of them.

[Unoriginal]

Personally, my problem isn't really with tieflings or weird animal people or even shapeshifters - in fact, I'd like to preserve them as setting components - it's just that the sheer number means that they can't all be fleshed-out components of the setting.

Not everything has to be fleshed out.

At a worldbuilding level, feeling compelled to explain everything in details remove more from the world than it adds to it, and it also leads to a nightmare-level workload and burnout for the author.

A world needs elements that are not spelled out, lands with little descriptions, the room to grow and change. The blank parts of the map are as important as the filled ones.



I would happily take any nine or twelve player options from published material and make a setting for them where they each have an interesting backstory and role in the feel of the world and the movement of the plot. It's just that I can't do that for 30 of them and not end up with most of them shallow dressing for one or two scenes.


Those characters come from somewhere, but unless the plot does make the PCs or the villains visit said somewhere, you don't need to go in details about it, because most of the time it is not relevant.

If there is Aarakocras on Am-Neh Peek, it is either an anectdotal detail (which doesn't need fleshing out), part of a PC's backstory (may need some details but not much), a relevant plot point (in which case some fleshing out is important, but you don't need to go deeper than what is absolutely needed) or a place the PCs are visiting (in which case it should be treated like any other location the PCs do visit)

[Droppeddead]

Not everything has to be fleshed out.

At a worldbuilding level, feeling compelled to explain everything in details remove more from the world than it adds to it, and it also leads to a nightmare-level workload and burnout for the author.


This. Times a thousand. In my latest world building there will be a bunch of things that I'm not even going to start explaining, even in my personal DM notes. Some things will simply have no answers, other things have been lost or forgotten forever, some things not even the gods themselves know. B)

[Vegan Squirrel]

Not everything has to be fleshed out.

At a worldbuilding level, feeling compelled to explain everything in details remove more from the world than it adds to it, and it also leads to a nightmare-level workload and burnout for the author.

A world needs elements that are not spelled out, lands with little descriptions, the room to grow and change. The blank parts of the ma are as important as the filled ones.
This is also a very good point. You can spell out the basics of the known world, but the common understanding of the known world is incomplete, and sometimes even flat-out wrong.

Here be dragons.

[Dragonsonthemap]

This is also a very good point. You can spell out the basics of the known world, but the common understanding of the known world is incomplete, and sometimes even flat-out wrong.

Here be dragons.

Broadly I agree with this, but when it comes to what options are available to players, I as a player like to be able to see whatever information a character with that background would have. That still requires a fair amount of information for a large number of different species and however many cultures they have or are a part of. I try to provide the same to players.

[Vegan Squirrel]

...
Here be dragons.Broadly I agree with this, but when it comes to what options are available to players, I as a player like to be able to see whatever information a character with that background would have. That still requires a fair amount of information for a large number of different species and however many cultures they have or are a part of. I try to provide the same to players.

... [notes your username] ... Of course you broadly agree with that! :smallamused:

[Amnestic]

Broadly I agree with this, but when it comes to what options are available to players, I as a player like to be able to see whatever information a character with that background would have. That still requires a fair amount of information for a large number of different species and however many cultures they have or are a part of. I try to provide the same to players.

I'm inclined to agree. The setting as a whole can be mysterious but if I'm rolling up [race] from [nation] I'd want to have a decent idea of what I can expect from meeting people. Do 'my people' have their own cities, towns, villages, enclaves? Culture? History? Religion?

That sorta stuff's important to me when thinking up characters. I don't need a doctoral thesis of 20,000 words or anything but at least a few paragraphs to get some ideas going. And a "few paragraphs" multiplied by 20, 30, 40 races is suddenly a lot of work for the DM.

When making the setting I'm eternally working on I limited the 'core' race numbers hard. There's 5 or 7 depending on my mood. I'm not sold on two of them and might scrap them entirely.

[BRC]

Broadly I agree with this, but when it comes to what options are available to players, I as a player like to be able to see whatever information a character with that background would have. That still requires a fair amount of information for a large number of different species and however many cultures they have or are a part of. I try to provide the same to players.

I mean, this is part of the advantage of building the world after the players have described what they want to play.

First sketch out the world in the most general sense, enough to get an idea of the Campaign Concept

Then, once the players present their character concepts, reshape the world to fit their characters. If one player wants to play as a Firbolg, then work with them to figure out what role Firbolgs play in the setting. Letting the players help shape the setting goes a long way towards getting them invested in it.

Then, once that's done, finalize the setting, filling in any other gaps you feel necessary.

[Evaar]

This is a relevant article from Keith Baker:
http://keith-baker.com/dragonmarks-exotic-races-in-eberron/


As a general rule, I prefer to avoid adding too many new races to the common tapestry of the world. In my mind, the streets of Fairhaven don’t look like a Mos Eisley cantina. I prefer to focus on fewer races but to make sure each one has a strong place.

....

All of this comes to the most critical question: WHY does the player want to be a member of this race? Roleplaying is collaborative storytelling, and as DM you are working with the player to create a story you’ll both enjoy. Rather than you deciding unilaterally how a race fits into the world, the critical first step is to identify the story the player is trying to create. Is the player only interested in the mechanics of the race, in which case reskinning is an option? Are they tied to the exact appearance of the race, or could you reimagine it to better fit the setting? Is it important to them to be part of a community of their own kind, or are they OK with the concept of being the only member of this species that exists in the world? Are there other elements that define the character they want to play?

Of course he's talking about Eberron but the principles within can apply to any setting.

[BRC]

Re: The Mos Eisley approach, it's a cool one, but it does something very specific, which is to say that, just due to the economy of attention, most races lose a lot of core identity, and instead the setting itself pics up the "Mos Eisely Cantina" identity.

"You walk into the tavern, you see a group of dockworkers, two dwarves, a Hobgoblin, a Lizardfolk, a half-ogre, and an Aarakokra, they appear to be discussing the new Merchant Prince that has been buying up most of the wharves and warehouses".

This is a vivid image and creates a distinct feel of the scene and the city, but they're primarily Dockworkers, and the primary message is going to be about how the city is a cosmopolitan place where a bunch of different groups mingle, live, and work together.

And that's a cool and great image. But it doesn't really work with a desire to have each group serve a specific role and identity within the setting (Unless the setting is limited to this city). Whatever role you have imagined for Hobgoblins, these Hobglins are primarily dockworkers, getting a drink with their co-workers and complaining about the new boss.


Like, I find it more useful to think of "Cultures" than "Races" as far as things that serve a role in the setting.

For example, my current setting has a pseudo-france known as Demionde. The Traits of the Demish include:
1) Famously brave Knights who ride armored warboars into battle
2) A love of wine and good food
3) A rivalry with the nearby Goblin Republics
4) They are almost exclusively Halflings.

Demionde is probably the most homogenous of the different nations, but there are non-demish Halflings, and from a worldbuilding perspective, I think about the role that Demionde serves, rather than "What do the Halflings do".

[Unoriginal]

Broadly I agree with this, but when it comes to what options are available to players, I as a player like to be able to see whatever information a character with that background would have. That still requires a fair amount of information for a large number of different species and however many cultures they have or are a part of. I try to provide the same to players.

Would waiting for the players' selection before fleshing the ones they choose work for you?

[Renbot]

I find out what races and subraces the players want their characters to be. Then I axe a large chunk of the remaining ones out of the world. The only time my world has ever had aasimar or tabaxi or dragonboorn is if someone had really wanted to play one

[Dragonsonthemap]

Would waiting for the players' selection before fleshing the ones they choose work for you?

As a DM it probably would, most of the time. As a player I usually want to know how the DM's interpreting a given ancestry, though, so eh?