Discussion Characters / DungeonsAndDragonsRaces

Sorry I missed this, I thought I was properly Following this page.

I like to think of the creature folders as containing the overall notion of the creature through the editions, listing both the common tropes throughout those appearances as well as the ones evident in only a certain edition. So, rather than having a "1E-3E Tiefling" and a "4E-5E Tiefling" folder, we have one encompassing that kind of planetouched and specifying that their standardized appearance started in 4E, that their appetite for raw meat comes from 2E, while in all editions they're not necessarily as evil as they can look, though prejudice can cause them to become evil.

So for our froggy friends the grung, you could add a "Retcon" bullet to mention how they went from a Chaotic Evil, cannibalistic society to a Lawful Evil bunch divided into castes based on their skin color, and specify next to "Poisonous Person" that in 2E their poison was delivered by a fanged bite, while in 5E it comes from contact with their skin. You could also add a "Transplant" bullet to point out that while the grung debuted in Greyhawk, they were ported over to the Forgotten Realms for 5E since (to my knowledge) there's little interest in doing setting stuff for Oerth these days. Or maybe "Canon Immigrant" is the proper trope for that sort of thing? Since it's not like Oerth is destroyed or anything.

At any rate, it would take a major deviation between editions for me to feel good about two folders for the same creature, and in the grung's case, we're still talking about a race of Small, poisonous, hostile frogfolk. If the 5E grung were mole people known for their earth shamans, then yeah, that might be enough to consider splitting them off, but as it is, a few applications of "2E" and "5E" in their folder should suffice.

Current earworm: "Mother ~ Outro"

I suggest starting with splitting to the PHB, official sourcebooks, and if we want, races that haven't been updated to the current edition.

If it gets too long, maybe make it PHB, "Everything that appeared in an official sourcebook before Tasha's came out", "everything after", and maybe "Stuff that only appeared in Unearthed Arcana"

Edited by Peteman

So the good news is that, for reasons I do not understand, the page is no longer giving any size warnings, even though I was still getting them immediately after removing the duthka'gith, shardminds and wildren. The split issue is no longer pressing. That's likely to change if the dhampir, hexblood and reborn ever get ported over to here from the Ravenloft character page, and if 5.5E ever adds a new race, or revamps an old one, in an upcoming book. But the alarm isn't blaring at the moment.

I'll also remind anyone wanting to expand this page into an index of every playable race in D&D's 50-year history means that we'd be essentially creating a parallel creature index to the main one, accommodating the 100+ playable races, subraces and monsters. And I'm deeply skeptical of the benefit of doing that.

Current earworm: "Mother ~ Outro"

The current train of thought, as I understand it, is that only races which are playable in the current edition should go on this page. So if a 5E splatbook comes out that includes rules for playing the Dvati, they can come back to this page. Until then, they're on the creatures subpages.

The Danse Macabre Codex

I understand. This might warrant the addition of a commented-out explanation on top of the page, though, since newcomers are unlikely to be aware of it and may add such entries without checking out first the discussion.

There is an explanation at the top of the page, though admittedly in the body of the text rather than commented-out.

"Adventurers in the realms of Dungeons & Dragons come in many shapes and sizes and from as many backgrounds as you can imagine. A character's class is only half of the equation; their race plays an equal part in determining that character's history, how they view the world, and how the world views them.

Dungeons & Dragons has a Massive Race Selection to choose from, with over a hundred playable races and subraces introduced across its editions. For the sake of clarity and relevancy, this page will focus on the races playable in the game's current edition, i.e. 5th Edition. Most races playable in past editions appear on the main creature index.

Note that a race's world of Origin is by no means the only place they can be found. The aarakocra are usually considered to have originated on Toril, but have a presence on Athas, for example."

The Danse Macabre Codex

I agree that this page and the setting-specific ones are currently major problem children. I also agree the the attempted division by settings doesn't work well, because a lot of "setting-specific" races either predate their associated setting, appear in others, or both.

I think your proposal to narrow this to the playable races for the game's current edition has merit, but its main problem is the concept of "current edition" — as you also said, when 5.5E or 6E comes out whenever, whatever list we come up with wouldn't be "current" anymore. My idea would be to use this as a page for "core" playable races, and define that as race options included in the Player's Handbooks, and everything that doesn't fit that definition should be fed back into the main lists. That would give the page's definition enough flexibility not to have to be reinvented every time an edition comes out while also keeping a fairly narrow focus.

That setting-specific race pages should probably also just be cut and shuffled back into the main ones.

Condensing this page to the core races is certainly doable, though it has the downside of having only nine races on the page. Unless 4E had some Player's Handbook 2 or 3's that I'm not aware of with additional racial options... oh, it did. Shifters but not warforged, and githzerai but not githyanki, huh? That's not confusing or headache-inducing.

Oy. Well, something to keep in mind when considering keeping this page focused on the "current" edition is that according to a Polygon article (I know) that quoted D&D principle rules designer Jeremy Crawford, Monsters of the Multiverse and its revised player races were all designed to be "backwards-compatible" with 5.5E or 6E or whatever is happening in two years, and it sounds like we'll be seeing additional updates to existing 5E material to continue the trend of keeping things usable (and making players re-buy old material). So if we say this page is for "the current edition's playable races," that shouldn't necessitate a great culling in the future. At least until a proper 6E or 7E comes along in a decade or so.

Or we could cheat and say this page is for "the current and previous editions' playable races," leading to more gradual retirement of race entries.

Current earworm: "Mother ~ Outro"

Examining some options here. And for reference, right now this page has 37 entries on it, though they are not created equal (not much to say about grippli, evidently). It's also at approximately 53% of page capacity, as calculated by my very scientific "copy-paste page source text into Word document and count the pages" system of measurement.

Going with "playable races for the current edition" gives us the nine 5E PH core races (dragonborn, dwarf, elf, gnome, half-elf, half-orc, halfling, human, tiefling), then the aarakocra, aasimar, bugbear, centaur, changeling, deep gnome, deurgar, eladrin, fairy, firbolg, genasi, githyanki, githzerai, goblin, goliath, haregon, hobgoblin, kenku, kobold, lizardfolk, minotaur, orc, satyr, sea elf, shadar-kai, shifter, tabaxi, tortle, triton, and yuan-ti pureblood (with a big asterisk by it) from Monsters of the Multiverse, which is supposedly going to be usable in the next edition. Past that is the locathah and grung, the kalashtar and warforged filling out the Eberron reps, the leonin of Theros, loxodon, simic hybrid, and vedalken of Ravnica, owlin of Strixhaven, and verdan of Acquisitions Incorporated, and finally the dhampir, hexblood and reborn lineages from Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. Grand total if I can count: 52 with that yuan-ti pureblood asterisk. Big, but again, not all races are created equal, the harengoin and fairies have no real lore to them. But we must remember, this total is subject to change whenever new books come out.

Going with "races from various editions' Player's Handbook" cuts that back considerably, since 4E was the only one to introduce additional player races in sequels to that core book, to my knowledge. In that case we get our core nine from 5E, a question of whether the drow deserve their own folder in this circumstance, then the eladrin from the 4E PH 1, deva, goliath and shifter from the 4E PH 2, and the githzerai (but not the githyanki), minotaur, shardmind and wilden from the 4E PH 3. That yields a total of only 17 or 18 depending on the drow's status, and an odd "gith" entry on the main creature list where one subrace is present and the other has a link to this page. As well as a question of whether the 4E deva should be conflated with aasimar.

If we say "playable races from the current and previous edition," that combines all the 55 races previously mentioned with those introduced by non-PH 4E supplements, to whit the bladeling from the 4E Manual of the Planes, hamadryad, pixie and wilden from Heroes of the Feywild, revenant, shade and vryloka from Heroes of Shadow, and finally the mul and thri-kreen from the 4E Dark Sun book. Which brings us to a grand total of 64 races, or maybe 63 if devas are aasimar. If we decide 4E Monster Manual appendices make monsters playable, add the bullywug and doppelganger for an extra-grand total of 65 or 66, again depending on the deva situation.

Now, the yuan-ti pureblood asterisk — they currently have only three tropes associated with them on the main creature index, but they're a subsection in a yuan-ti folder with a great deal more tropes common to the race as a whole, so porting their subentry to this page and leaving a link behind in their home folder doesn't quite work. Odd as it is to say, I'd propose keeping them on the main index and putting a link to it on this page, if we do end up keeping more than the Player's Handbook races on this one.

So there, lists and numbers to ponder.

Edited by Tacitus Current earworm: "Mother ~ Outro"

We could do something similar to what has been done with Classes.

Yeaaah, but there's a couple issues with that approach. Right away there's the question of whether to categorize races by "edition the race debuted in, period" or "edition the race was first given playable rules." Either way, it's going to cause the same problems as sorting races by which setting they debuted in, i.e. you're gating the entries behind detailed knowledge of D&D release history, so someone only familiar with the firbolgs' modern cow-like incarnation is going to be confused when they eventually find them on the "debuted in 1E/2E" page.

Then there's the issue that the pages for the first two editions are going to have a lot of entries on them, then 3rd might actually have the highest number depending on how we sort things, and then 4E and 5E are going to look comparatively shrimpy. If we go by "first playable" rules, then 5E is just gonna like a dozen races on it, including low-trope stuff like the fairy, grung, harengoin, and locathah. And at that point, why bother?

Bleh. But going by the "playable in 5E" parameters has some of the same problems, in that it's pulling 50 or so creature entries off the index, and some of those entries are going to be shrimpy. And so does "just in the Player's Handbook," since there's not going to be many entries to justify a separate page. I'm increasingly gravitating towards "screw it, everyone's on the main creature list, with a note about which editions they've had playable rules."

Current earworm: "Mother ~ Outro"

Summarizing the options presented thus far:

1. Current Edition Only - approximately 50 entries and counting

• Pros: Always relevant, easy parameters, good-sized page
• Cons: Future work during edition changes, possibility of reaching the page limit, not all entries created equal (elves and orcs versus fairies and grung)

2. Current and Previous Edition Only - approximately 65 entries and counting

• Pros: Allows rolling phase-outs when new editions are released, big page
• Cons: As above except with an even greater possibility of reaching the page limit

3. Players Handbook Races Only - about 17 entries

• Pros: Laser-focused, no danger of reaching page limit, no awkwardly small grung or locathah entries
• Cons: Splits the gith, 4th Edition is the only one that introduced new races in PH sequels, so small as to beg question of "why bother?"

4. Playable Race page for every edition - 100+ entries

• Pros: Comprehensive, multiple pages reduce risk of hitting page limit
• Cons: Big bite out of the main creature index, questions of "debut or first playable" and how to handle the likes of shadar-kai that get redesigned every edition, most entries will be in 1st-3rd Editions, do you know which edition firbolgs were first playable in?

I think going with "currently playable races only" works best, despite some caveats, as it has a good balance of pros and cons, but that is of course a matter of opinion. If I was going to be unilateral about this page's clean-up I wouldn't be bothering with the discussion page.

Edited by Tacitus Current earworm: "Mother ~ Outro"

Okay, let's me explain a bit about what I meant -

Make a page for each edition — 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th (whatever) — list each race in that edition, and the ropes associated with them in that edition. For instance, Human appears in all of them, gets their tropes for each edition, on each edition's page - 1st gets 1st stuff, 5th gets 5th stuff, 1st doesn't get 5th stuff, 5th doesn't get 1st stuff. Likewise, Leonin only shows up in 5th edition, and other such things.

The issue with that approach is that most races don't change much between editions, so we'd end up with mostly-identical entries for humans and goblins are the like reappearing across five pages. And splitting up the races that have notably changed, like the shadar-kai and their ever-changing backstory, across several pages also denies us the opportunity to neatly show how they've changed with Art Evolution or Retcon tropes in a cross-edition folder for them.

It'd be kind of like making character pages for individual entries in a series and only listing the characters that appeared in that episode/book/etc. along with the tropes they exhibited in that particular instance. It's redundant for the static characters and jumbles up the complex ones.

Current earworm: "Mother ~ Outro"

Right then. Unless there's any objections, I'll start 5th Edition-ifying the Playable Races page on the morrow. As much as I can, anyway, I don't have the Strixhaven or Acquisitions Inc books, so my troping of owlin and verdan is going to be limited.

Current earworm: "Mother ~ Outro"

I can help there - I own those two.

Maybe we should have them divided by setting book? Allowing races like Harengon as well.

Planescape already has a Races page, so condensing things seems logical. There's already a duplicate folder for the githyanki there, too.

... and ones for mephits, modrons, slaadi and yugoloths, too. Hmm. That's a lot of dupes.

More generally, I wouldn't be opposed to keeping setting-specific material in one place, so I wouldn't object to such a move. We probably shouldn't create new pages unless there's enough material to warrant one, though; 40k bytes is usually the minimum length.

Yeah, it's kind of the issue when we have both generic D&D character pages and setting specific character pages. You'll actually see a similar issue with the Dragonlance characters page.

I definitely agree that more "universal" races should be kept on this page - humans, dwarves, elves, gnomes, halflings, half-elves, half-orcs, along with anything that wasn't really designed as part of a specific setting, like many of the races from 3e, such as spellscales. Probably also races that have multiple interpretations in multiple settings, such as dragonborn, who have their 3e lore, Nentir Vale lore, Forgotten Realms lore, and Eberron lore, none of which are identical.

Currently, we have setting specific character pages for Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance (which could probably use some splitting), Greyhawk, Eberron, Planescape and Ravenloft. I would argue that at the very least we should consider adding character pages for Nentir Vale, Mystara, Dark Sun and Spelljammer, given that these are all fairly large settings with multiple associated unique races. Sound logical?

Edited by WanderingBrowser

Any suggestions on Centaurs, Satyrs, Owlins, Hollow Ones and Custom Lineage?

Custom lineage is literally "design your own race", so it's too vague and tropeless to warrant a mention here. I have no idea what Hollow Ones are. Centaurs and Satyrs appear in multiple settings with fairly consistent lore, so I'd say they're generic enough to go here. Owlins and Harengon have no real "setting specific" lore, so they're generic races and thus they go in here.

^^^For clarity, if I'm understanding you correctly, your suggestion is:

• Generic and multiple-setting races stay here.
• Setting-specific races get moved to that setting's character page. If a generic or race-specific character page doesn't yet exist for that setting, we then make one.

Does that seem about right? I wouldn't be opposed to doing this, myself.

Additionally, how might we want to handle some of the dupes on the Planescape page like the mephits or slaadi? I think that there's a distinction worth making when a creature type appears as NPC monsters almost always and as player characters in just one specific situation (plus, it's not like you can play as the most powerful slaad varieties, I think), but I'm not sure how we should handle that division.

That's exactly what I'm suggesting. There's some room for wiggle room when you have races that are particularly associated with a specific setting but have been branched out to wider appeal, such as the planetouched trio of tieflings, genasi and aasimar, but in general it should serve us well.

Well, I'm open to suggestion, but we do have a Setting Specific Creatures page founded... we could either move setting monsters all to that, or split it up and just have a Monsters header or subpage for each setting - if memory serves, the character page for Setting Specific Creatures is largely a mix of duplicate entries and empty folders.

Okay, so, I've gone ahead and created the Nentir Vale, Dark Sun, Mystara and Spelljammer pages. The Nentir Vale page has folders with names and some partially troped entries set up, the Dark Sun page has headers for entries, but I can't fill them all in by myself. I'll try to at least get the races list for the Mystara and Spelljammer pages ready for adding tropes, but I can't predict when I can do so.

I would argue the opposite, that it's more user-friendly to scrap the "creatures and races" pages for the various settings (leaving their respective character pages to contain actual named characters native to the settings) and move those critters and races into the main index.

Yes, yes, how outrageous. But it's been almost 30 years since Planescape, githyanki have been Monster Manual regulars since 3.5, so what exactly is the benefit of sticking them on a separate subpage? It's either make sure that every time a giff is mentioned on this wiki that it's specified they debuted in Spelljammer, or force people interested in learning more about the hippo-men play "guess which setting this creature's from!" as they try to find their entry.

As an alternative to setting creature/race pages, I would suggest adding an "origin" line above the classification/CR/alignment notes. That way a user could say "huh, tortles debuted in Mystara" after opening their folder on the Races page, rather than saying "oh, I guess they're from Mystara" after clicking various setting pages until they found the tortles' folder.

Current earworm: "Mother ~ Outro"

For the curious, Hollow Ones are a Template in Wildemount - basically, with the DM's approval, you'd be an Undead, much like a Reborn, only you keep your prior racial abilities, plus some new ones.