Originally Posted by Sozz
Current political mores have certainly tried to make all the races into humans but I think that the Tolkien races can be made to be as common or exotic as you like.

Ever since 3e I've found that the number of races ginned and made playable to be more problematic than anything, Tieflings are a good example, it used to be a template you'd add to an existing race, but I think for external reasons their popularity took over and now they're their own race. Now repeat that process a dozen of times for every interesting looking monster-race and exceptional extraplanar idea and I feel like it begins to unsettle the narrative, a lot like how comics books progressed from stories about fighting crime to stories about collapsing multi-verses into themselves to stop existence from ending....


Not to go deep into that, but I'm very much not a fan of the "current political mores" and how they impact... well, everything.

Yeah, you're onto something... But there's also a matter of "allow a weird race PC" vs "make weird races ubiquitous". Even if loads of people choose to play tieflings, in every campaign they can be "the odd one" without messing with lore. It's not an MMO where players are the ones that make the general demographics.

And there's another matter: the setting itself. A world filled with "weird" races doesn't have to feature over-the-top collapsing multiverse stories; those races could be "bog-standard" for that particular setting. (Though I suppose you might have meant jumping the shark in general.)

Both of the above said, I think FR should stay mostly populated by the Tolkien races; I'd keep dragonborn and tieflings "exotic" and drow "common in the Underdark". Which doesn't mean we can't have those rarer races as a custom PC option or as companions, like we had Haer'Dalis, Viconia and Aerie in BG2.