[GMing] How Many Races?

[scc]

OK, I'm writing up some campaign notes for posting to the forum when a thought occurred to me: How many racial templates should I be offering?

Now such a question presumes that you are offering non-human racial templates (Or at rather multiple if humans aren't an option). Nor is it an easy question due to varying genre and time period considerations, or the various categories of races (Tough, strong, fast, intelligent, magical, etc).

So, revised question(s): How many categories of races do you suggest for a genre/time period, and how many races should be in each category?

[smurf]

I'm doing 5-6 I would like to double it but as noted it is hard to make a different themes.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by scc

OK, I'm writing up some campaign notes for posting to the forum when a thought occurred to me: How many racial templates should I be offering?
[ . . . ]
So, revised question(s): How many categories of races do you suggest for a genre/time period, and how many races should be in each category?

How many does it take to make history turn your setting into what you want it to become?

[vicky_molokh]

More thoughts:

A lot depends on what the categories are, and on whether races are even easily pigeon-holed into categories. You listed "Tough, strong, fast, intelligent, magical, etc". That already creates a strong predisposition towards a RaceOfHats sort of situation, e.g. the magical ones will tend to be mages by profession, the strong/tough will tend towards fighters, the intelligent towards bankers of the setting etc. This also maps races to cultures, which in turns reduces the variation and the number of commonly-encountered combinations.

Racial dominated professions make sense when there are myriad races and races are made to order, such as in Transhuman Space.

Conversely, when 'the world has what races it has', it's quite likely and fun to have professional trends not as clearly delineated. E.g. if one humanoid race has Nictitating Membranes and another doesn't, it's not a big enough deal to force the whole of one race's PCs to prefer playing divers. Or hey, that race with Photographic Memory - look how many uses the ability can have!

----

Another consideration: you speak of templates, but just how clear are the lines between races? Do crossbreeds have a specific template for each combination? Do second-generation hybrids gravitate towards one of the two original templates? Does the global society even have a way of naming people based on their templates?

[scc]

Theme might be better then category then, but there is always some sort of definition to a race, as opposed to it being a random collection of traits.

As for half-breads, they would count if they exist and are significantly different to their parent races (IE: half-humans where they just have half the stats of the other race don't count)

[Anders]

Half-breads would make great bakers... :)

I prefer a small number of races, no more than two or three (including humans). I don't like D&D settings where people seem to think that just because all the races are in the book you have to use them.

[Mailanka]

I agree with Molokh: It depends.

I regularly run games with no races. I find humans alone fascinating enough!

You can run a game where there are several highly detailed race, in that case you probably want to follow the rule of 5s: No more than 5 things, plus or minus 2. Thus, ~3-7 classes and ~3-7 races. There's a reason "Fighter, Mage, Thief; Human, Elf, Dwarf" is so popular. If you expand much beyond 7, it starts to become dizzying.

(You can "hide" complexity, though. I had a game with 9 splats, but really they were 3 groups: heroic clans, villainous clans, neutral clans. So you can have High Elves, Dark Elves and Wood Elves, and Deep Dwarves and Hill Dwarves and Elder Dwarves, and you can have various nations of humanity, but you explain it as: Elves, dwarves, humans, and when someone picks, you let them explore that particular splat in further detail).

If you want to run a game with "Like, whatever man," then you can just make up races on the spot. This is the Star Wars method, where the universe has more races than people can possibly track. There are a few that people tend to remember, like Wookie, Jawa and Twilek, but there's the whole mess of aliens in the cantina, and so if someone said "I want to play a blue-skinned space-princess," then we can come up with a new race ("I'm an Andromedan") and nobody cares much. If you include an arbtirarily large amount of races, like 30, then this is how people will treat them: As a mess of indistinguishably weird races sitting in a cantina. In that case, I would detail the 3-7 "most common," or find a way to categorize them ("Well, there are the dark races, the light races, and the wild races...")

[Pirtti]

Originally Posted by scc

OK, I'm writing up some campaign notes for posting to the forum when a thought occurred to me: How many racial templates should I be offering?

I find this depends entirely on what the players might like. Based on personal observation, maybe have a few categories but two or three races per category (for PCs).

As an example, I and three friends created characters for Eclipse Phase. EP is known for having a myriad of playable morphs, the vast majority of which are available right at the beginning, so choosing can get a bit overwhelming. In practice, however, we ended up with two uplifts (neo-avian and octopus) and two AI synthetics (humanoid and uh, a miniature combat helicopter).

Approximately half of these were no surprise, since I personally will always play androids in sci-fi and one guy will play an animal race no matter what. The lesson here is that despite a load of potential choices player preferences narrowed the actual choices down to two categories and two distinct morphs within each category, and thus I suppose it's important to have the race someone will always play and a variant race or two for the person who will try anything. You don't need much more.

[vicky_molokh]

Originally Posted by scc

Theme might be better then category then, but there is always some sort of definition to a race, as opposed to it being a random collection of traits.

As for half-breads, they would count if they exist and are significantly different to their parent races (IE: half-humans where they just have half the stats of the other race don't count)

Well, whether they exist is something of a . . . weird question. They exist unless there's some obscure alien biology rule that makes them not. E.g. just like human-species races of Australoids and Europeoids can interbreed, so can, presumably vulcanoid-species races of Vulcans and Romulans. Same with elven races - is there something preventing wood elves from interbreeding with high elves, other than society? While society can be a big force, exceptions do tend to slip through the cracks, just like they did on Terra.

As for theme, tell me: What is the theme of Europeoids? What is the theme of Australoids? What is the theme of Mongoloids? Things are not always so neatly narrativistic.

[Dragondog]

Originally Posted by vicky_molokh

Well, whether they exist is something of a . . . weird question. They exist unless there's some obscure alien biology rule that makes them not. E.g. just like human-species races of Australoids and Europeoids can interbreed, so can, presumably vulcanoid-species races of Vulcans and Romulans. Same with elven races - is there something preventing wood elves from interbreeding with high elves, other than society? While society can be a big force, exceptions do tend to slip through the cracks, just like they did on Terra.

As for theme, tell me: What is the theme of Europeoids? What is the theme of Australoids? What is the theme of Mongoloids? Things are not always so neatly narrativistic.

I'm pretty sure he's going with the GURPS default that there is one human race. And that half-breeds are about half human/half elf or half human/half Vulcan, to use your examples.