The Death of Fantasy Slop

I feel the tide turning.

I saw a review of Nimble today criticizing the "too broad" fantasy race options and saying it didn't feel like a defined world; the modern "anything goes" mish-mash of fantasy backgrounds didn't feel real to them. The game itself and the rules were great, but that modern "fantasy slop" of "any race is valid" was tiring to them.

I love Nimble, but I feel that way too.

While I love having choices, I get that same old feeling of choice paralysis when walking down the cereal aisle as I do when picking a fantasy race. There are far, far too many options in these games; designers have given up on worldbuilding, and as referees, we are expected to "support any idea" that drops by our table. Forget that the world we built (or play in) does not have cat or demon people; if someone wants to play one, we have to make adjustments and change our world to fit their idea.

Normally, I would be cool with this. But lately, it just makes me tired. Fantasy worlds are planar bus stops, filled with anything and everything wandering through. For some worlds, that works, but I sense the general consensus is moving away from that direction.

People want defined races in a sandbox world with history and consequence.

Every fantasy game does not need to look like the cantina in Star Wars.

I miss the days of the core four: human, elf, dwarf, and halfling. That's it! If you want to play gruff and dour, play a dwarf. Practical jokers and foodies, play halflings. Elegant and noble, play an elf. Everyone else plays humans. It is a simplification, but the simplicity in a world where some games offer time travelers and cyborgs as race options is welcome.

Race-as-class reduces the urge to keep adding new races, since they would all be new class designs in the game and thus hard to design and support.

And this is not a question of "real world diversity," which is how many frame it. I was bused as a kid, and I loved the experience of different cultures and races. None of my best friends looked like me, and we all played D&D as the outcast nerds. We had black kids, a gay kid in a tracksuit, and me in our D&D club, and the modern feeling "not enough diverse kids played D&D back in the 1980s" is a complete lie. Teachers would confiscate our dice and books as "Satanic literature and trinkets." We didn't have phones or PDFs back then, either.

TSR had a diverse player base for D&D. The affordability of a hobby in general helps adoption across all backgrounds. This is why the OSR today is a far more diverse place than a hobby exclusively for the wealthy, which is where corporate gaming is headed.

And a world with "just humans" can be incredibly diverse (hello, Earth).

This is a question of game design.

As a referee, creating a world like that is hard. I could give up and make it that planar bus stop, but a part of me stops caring about the world and designing a cohesive history. With the core four, I can design a world and keep the lore and history straightforward. As a world-builder, my job is easier the fewer options I have. When the selection gets into dozens of races, my mind begins to overload, and the game is harder to referee, in that my worldbuilding now needs to take into account "X squared" numbers of interactions between all the races, and sub-factions within each race, so it could even be "X cubed."

How do dwarves feel about parrot people? Plant people? Stone elementals? Fae dragons? Coconut puppets? Tieflings? Half vampires? Skeleton races? Ghosts? Living dolls? Dark elves? Light elves? Stone elves? Mimic races? Changelings? Werewolves? Cat people? Weasel people? Magic cloud full of sparkle races? A random race stolen from the next popular anime person? Octopus people? Normalized mind flayer races? Beholders as player options? Displacer beast kin? And now figure there are subfactions within each one of those races...the good mind flayers versus the bad ones.

And I just give up.

It's a planar bus stop.

I am not doing worldbuilding for this mess.

Or I will just go play a game with fewer options and be happier.

Like our incredibly diverse D&D club in the 1980s did.