I went to play D&D Encounters last night, which was a blast. I played a human monk with a heavy emphasis on control, and I think it worked out pretty well. I started strong, had a nova round in which I inflicted almost 50 damage spread amongst three enemies (first level character, by the way), and then proceeded to miss for the rest of the fight. It was fun anyway.

At any rate, after the game I got into a lively conversation with the DM about the huge number of races available in D&D. He was of the opinion that, with all these fantastical races available (he pointed to the tiefling and the dragonborn in particular, but I think there are others to which the label applies), it somehow dilutes the fantasy of the whole experience, making everything else a little less fantastical by comparison. After all, he said, if you can walk down the streets of Waterdeep and see a dragon-man walking with a drow, then why is it exciting when you meet dragon-men or drow out in a dungeon somewhere? They’re just regular people, after all.

I can definitely see where he’s coming from, and I think it’s a perfectly valid point of view. He likes his fantasy a little more traditional, even going so far as to say, “If it wasn’t in the Fellowship, you can’t play it in my game” (though he bends the rules a little for races that are at least passingly similar to Fellowship races, like gnomes and half-elves). I respect his stance and, were I to play in one of his games, I’d respect it with the character I chose to play.

I do not, however, agree with his opinion. I take more of a shotgun approach with race selection. I tell my players that every race is available, and I see what sticks. I find that, once everyone’s made a selection, I’m left with a number of characters for which rich backstory can be crafted, and for whom race can become an important story consideration.

I should mention at this point that, in the game I’m DMing, there’s not one human in the group. Elf, half-elf, dragonborn, tiefling, and warforged; that’s my party. And I like it that way; I’ll tell you why.

For the elf and the half-elf, race is not really that much of a factor, their races being fairly common. The dragonborn is big and intimating, and I like to imagine that a large part of that is because he’s a guy who looks a lot like a dragon and, in my setting, those guys aren’t that common in most civilized areas. So he turns some heads.

Tieflings are a little more common, having been in control of the Demesne’s territory a hundred years or so before it was founded, and they are not well-loved (though not hated, either). My tiefling player plays a proud, ambitious scion of an ancient noble house, and he’s determined to see his family and, by extension, the entire tiefling race returned to their place of power in the world.

The warforged thought he was, until recently, the only one of his kind in existence. He was created by an old hermit to act as a son and legacy in the world, and when the hermit died, he went out to find his place in the world. When he ran into another warforged who called him “brother”, that caused him to take notice. When he fought a mind flayer with warforged thralls, he noticed even more.

I think the thing that I like the most about all these available races is the same thing that I like about any instance in which player choice is expanded. The more choice a player has when making his character, the better he’s able to express the idea in his head in mechanical and story terms. If that means I have to find a place for a race that I hadn’t thought of before, I’m more than willing to do that; after all, it’s not my world. It’s ours.

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