I'm creating a set of races for use as PCs in a fantasy game, and I would like some advice.  I'm beyond bored with D&D/Tolkien races so I'm not doing any of those.  (Except elves - my co-creator loves elves so we have to have those.)  So far we have humans, bear people (I'm stealing the Sodeskayan Bears from the Helmsman books), a seafaring avian race, and some cursory ideas for others.  So ...

1)  What do you want to know about a race, especially one not well-defined in literature, in order to enjoy playing it?  Both for roleplaying and mechanics.

2)  What would you consider the defining characteristics for an RPG race?

3)  Is there any fantasy race you would love to see in a game that has not been done over and over already?

4)  Any general advice on this kind of project?  Any lessons learned from personal experience would be much appreciated.

If you want unique races, you could just replace the standard races with a make-your-own-race feature. Let the players choose what they want to play, and then use what they come up with to define the world.

The advantage of traditional races is they come with a pre-packaged set of expectations. You don't have to tell people what a dwarf is, you just have to tell them how your dwarves are different. That's important, because players usually want to play, instead of doing homework, like learning about new races. Your new races should stick to a few fairly distinctive and easy to remember traits, so you don't overwhelm the players. Let the rest be defined in play.

To answer your second question in a way that's probably not exactly what you intended, the defining characteristic of a PC race is they're playable. They can't be over or under powered, need to fit in normal rooms, have to be roughly as mobile as humans, need manipulative digits, should be intelligent and have a large degree of independence, have to be socially tolerable in the main areas of the campaign, they should be able to speak the common language at least passably, and probably a few other characteristics I'm forgetting.

Your third question has a false assumption. There's an infinite variety in just playing plain old humans, and the same is true of any other race that isn't too annoying. Unless you're doing a deep dive into what it means to be an alien -- and almost nobody does that, in RPGs -- it's character that's important, not race. Don't get too distracted by superficialities.

I just went through this exercise, with the exception that I do like elves and dwarves.  Obviously it very much depends on what you want to accomplish, but I would be wary of being different just to be different.  That said:

• Pick a race to mean something in the setting--or the implied setting if the game doesn't have one.  It's more important to do that than to show off special mechanics, which can be counter-productive in races. 
  
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  If the races you pick have obvious hooks into the normal system mechanics that make sense, you may be able to make the race stand out a little via those mechanics.  But the flavor of the race comes first--i.e. don't force it.
  
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  Remember that not every race has to be playable as a PC.  For example, I've got "halflings" in my current campaign--they just aren't a race that players can use. The race choices should be limited enough that players will consider the new options.
  
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  Start with about 50% more races than you think you'll want.  Ruthlessly cut the ones that don't shine.  Out of several attempts, you'll almost certainly have 1 to 3 duds.
  

BTW, worry about what the players will use, and not what anyone else will think.  I think more than half of the GMs here would throw out my game sight unseen because I ended up with:  Humans, Elves, Dwaves, cat-people, wolf-people, and some alternate humans with long-term magical growth into the 8 to 9 foot range.  However, my players were interested in playing every single race.  Since they are the only ones likely to see this system anytime soon, I think I can live with that.

take the components that define a race and let players pick and choose and build their own, treat all outcomes as variations of the same race; a raceless trans-human sort of designer beaker baby sort of thing.

My advice would be to create a humanocentric world but keep some space for mysterious kingdoms nearby. Then let the players decide what non-human races they want to play. If a player wants to play an elf, add elves. If a player wants to play a lizardman, add lizardmen. If a player wants to play cat people, it's time to find a new player.

This way you don't need to worry about the players being interested in a particular race as they already are.

As for designing the race itself, treat it like Chewbacka. At first all we know is that wookies are strong and have a bad temper. That's enough to get started and you can gradually add more details as needed. Another good example of this is Worf, some parts of his personality became typical of the new Klingons while some aspects became contrary.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on December 06, 2020, 06:46:03 AM
Start with about 50% more races than you think you'll want.  Ruthlessly cut the ones that don't shine.  Out of several attempts, you'll almost certainly have 1 to 3 duds.

Speaking from experience, I have to reiterate this one. I started out with 12 races and the final count is down to 10, but that number doesn't begin to tell the actual story.

One of the first changes that happened was that half-elves and half-orcs got merged into humans as subspecies. That gave me room for a couple of all new races.

My next set of development problems was summed up by joking line about the sprites eating my giants and my dragons.

All three were separate races to begin with, but the fluff for the sprites was boring as all get out, while the giants' was great and both were elemental-themed so I merged them along with some extra options like human-sized and beastly elemental-themed beings into a single species.

Later, continued work on my cosmology led to my original dragon origins (as demons who embodied themselves by creating cysts in reality that are mistaken as eggs) being too problematic (demons went from just evil entities from another dimension who might be able to grow -to- irredeemable spirits of corruption from the dawn of creation), but were close enough to the "Eldritch" that with some tweaking they got merged into the Eldritch as well.

Meanwhile, my dwarves were so bog-standard boring at that point that I had seriously considered just merging them into either humans or mutants as a subspecies... I was maybe a week from pulling the trigger on that until I finally found their shtick in the idea that they kept losing parts of themselves to a wasting condition related to their creation and they replaced the losses with magically crafted artifice.

Lastly, my original Halflings (so named because they were half of the mortal world and half of the Shadow World) were just too creepy for others to be interested in playing (the only time they ever got used was when it was the last available pregen for a playtest) since they were explicitly the shadows of murdered children (the mythology was that whenever someone died before their time, their shadows became untethered from their souls and lingered until their appointed mortal lifetime was over; lacking souls, the shadows of adults twisted into goblins, orcs and ogres... but children's shadows had not had time to grow quite so bitter and so could be a playable, albeit selfish, species).

It didn't help that a strong desire for more traditional and playable orcs led to a redesign of the goblins, orcs and ogres, leaving the halflings only connected to generic shades so ultimately they were cut entirely.

At that point I was down to nine species, but some input led to the reintroduction of most of the halfling's shadow mechanics in Fetches; former psychopomps and hunters of the Grey Host (servants of the Goddess of Death hunts the undead who seek to escape the proper cycle of life and death) who became trapped in the Mortal World after a supernatural cataclysm. They got a built-in culture in their forming into wandering caravans that seek to continue their divine purpose of delivering aid and comfort to the dying and hunting the undead even in their exile that made them far more heroic in nature.

So, yeah... fully HALF of my initial species ended either being merged with others, had major modifications made to either lore or mechanics or were just outright replaced.

Quote from: Mishihari on December 06, 2020, 05:38:20 AM1)  What do you want to know about a race, especially one not well-defined in literature, in order to enjoy playing it?  Both for roleplaying and mechanics.

What do they look like?
What are they like? (In terms of attitudes, drives, temperament, etc.)
What are they good/bad at? (Strengths, Weaknesses, etc.--not just in terms of game abilities, but also in terms of what sort of professions/specialties they are known for in the world)
What is their role in the word? Why do these things even exist in the game world? What is their "Point"?
What is their relation with other races and the environment?

Quote from: Mishihari on December 06, 2020, 05:38:20 AM2)  What would you consider the defining characteristics for an RPG race?

They're playable and (hopefully) have a place in the world beyond "I'm just tired of trad fantasy races".

Quote from: Mishihari on December 06, 2020, 05:38:20 AM3)  Is there any fantasy race you would love to see in a game that has not been done over and over already?

Several, however, this question gives me the impression that you haven't even thought about what your world is going to be about yet and haven't settled on anything yet, so you're asking people to spitball random ideas. And if that is the case, then maybe you should be asking that question to your players instead, since they're the ones who're gonna end up playing it (presumably). If you're just cooking up a random setting and your only parameter is "no traditional fantasy races (other than elves cuz one guy can't let go of them)" sometimes the best bet is to tell your players and see what sort of races they'd like to see. Maybe even go the Dawn of Worlds route and cook up a world collaboratively.

Quote from: Mishihari on December 06, 2020, 05:38:20 AM4)  Any general advice on this kind of project?  Any lessons learned from personal experience would be much appreciated.

Start with defining what kind of world you want to build and see what kind of races fit in it, rather than the other way around, unless you have a particular race you specifically want to explore for some reason. Otherwise it will just be a random race just for the sake of doing something different. If you have no clue about what world you want to build and are willing to make it collaboratively doing something like Dawn of Worlds may help.

I'll definitely second the Dawn of Worlds method; particularly for a home game. It gives each player some input into what they want to see in the world, but still lets the GM be ultimate arbiter... either via extra points, extra turns or just "I'll take this under advisement" depending on the degree of control over the worlds history and cultures you want to give the players.

Most of what I'd want to know has already been covered, with one exception: The culture, or cultures if they have more than one. The first thing I want to know about a fantasy race is what they're like around each other when humans aren't around, and in what ways they think humans (and other races) are weird and different from them. Every being grows up thinking it, and its first way of life, is what the norm of reality "really" is, and in any mindset similar enough to human to play comprehensibly, this is likely to remain true.

Ideally this should be distilled into a couple of "playable attitude" notes. I'll use classical FRPG races here for example but you don't need to be limited to this, obviously.

- All but the very youngest elves are genuinely put off and irritated by the rush, bustle and impatience of most human towns. When you're immortal you're used to doing things in your own good time. (Conversely, if you haven't agreed to a deadline with an elf, you never have to apologize for missing it.)

- Even dwarves who aren't themselves craftsmen are genuinely angered by the frequent human attitude of "good enough" that occurs in so many endeavours, because dwarven culture simply doesn't settle for second-best in craftsmanship. Doing something in a slapdash, half-assed manner for a dwarf is often taken as a personal insult. (On the other hand, if a dwarf sees you've done your absolute best for him at the expense of time and effort, he will value the result even if it's not up to standards he can use.)

- Food in halfling communities isn't just a refueling exercise, it's a genuine social commitment. Halflings not only love to eat but they hate to eat alone; turning down an invitation for a meal without an explanation or, worse, standing someone up for an agreed invitation will genuinely hurt most halflings' feelings -- they don't get violently angry about it but it can genuinely damage relationships. (Offering to cook for a halfling earns you a lot of credit, but being willing to pay for a very good meal elsewhere is almost as good.)

(Momentary obligatory reality check here: In principle any race as complex in its own right as humans should have as many cultures and subcultures as we do, or should have a plausible reason why they don't. In practice, of course, there's never enough room in any given game for this, and even a brief nod to something like two or three subcultures will make all of them sketchier and vaguer. But that's where giving room to the players to help flesh things out can be useful.)

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on December 07, 2020, 09:50:39 AM

(Momentary obligatory reality check here: In principle any race as complex in its own right as humans should have as many cultures and subcultures as we do, or should have a plausible reason why they don't. In practice, of course, there's never enough room in any given game for this, and even a brief nod to something like two or three subcultures will make all of them sketchier and vaguer. But that's where giving room to the players to help flesh things out can be useful.)

If the game is using class and race in the early D&D sense, then I agree.  If the race is as much an archetype as the class is, then you've got to embed some culture in that race for simplicity.  Much like your examples.

However, if the game is not wedded to that model, then I think it is very much useful to break race and culture out into different elements.  In fact, I'd say that this is far more useful than the D&D "background" approach.  Not least, it vastly simplifies the racial listings. 

Now, I've gone a bit extreme on this with my current design, because I had some very specific approaches that I wanted with cultures.  So I suspect my culture list of "Agrarian, Frontier, Herders, Itinerant, Urban, and Wild" is a bit much outside of that context.  This did let me get the basics of six cultures on a single 8.5 x 11 landscape, 4 column page, and the same with six races.  If certain combos are not likely in the setting (and they aren't, such as Dwarven Herders), then I can cover that elsewhere easily enough.  One could, of course, use something like the Runequest Barbarian, Civilized, Nomad, Primitive culture approach instead.   

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on December 07, 2020, 10:10:41 AMIf the race is as much an archetype as the class is, then you've got to embed some culture in that race for simplicity.  ...However, if the game is not wedded to that model, then I think it is very much useful to break race and culture out into different elements.

I agree, as much as possible, although I am also always interested to see, to coin a word, the biopolitics (cf. geopolitics) of a given nonhuman culture as well. The physical differences of a race are going to make a tangible difference to its culture as well, and often in ways outsiders won't immediately think about.

To grab the cat-people example from earlier, if you assume that they are, like nonsapient cats, obligatory biological carnivores, all of their variant subcultures will be shaped by their attitude towards not only getting hold of enough meat, but (if their psychology is oriented around hunting) how they can get hold of it in ways that will provide social contentment and fulfillment.  Even the most cosmopolitan and widely travelled of their kind will probably see agrarian cultures, or urban cultures where food is something you buy in a store rather than hunt for yourself, with amused condescension at best and outright repugnance at worst; calling one of them a "grazer" or "herder" might be a deadly insult.

Quote from: Stephen Tannhauser on December 07, 2020, 10:28:47 AM

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on December 07, 2020, 10:10:41 AMIf the race is as much an archetype as the class is, then you've got to embed some culture in that race for simplicity.  ...However, if the game is not wedded to that model, then I think it is very much useful to break race and culture out into different elements.

I agree, as much as possible, although I am also always interested to see, to coin a word, the biopolitics (cf. geopolitics) of a given nonhuman culture as well. The physical differences of a race are going to make a tangible difference to its culture as well, and often in ways outsiders won't immediately think about.

To grab the cat-people example from earlier, if you assume that they are, like nonsapient cats, obligatory biological carnivores, all of their variant subcultures will be shaped by their attitude towards not only getting hold of enough meat, but (if their psychology is oriented around hunting) how they can get hold of it in ways that will provide social contentment and fulfillment.  Even the most cosmopolitan and widely travelled of their kind will probably see agrarian cultures, or urban cultures where food is something you buy in a store rather than hunt for yourself, with amused condescension at best and outright repugnance at worst; calling one of them a "grazer" or "herder" might be a deadly insult.

Eh, I'm not totally wedded to that concept. I imagine that 'civilized' cat-people might reserve 'hunted' meat for cultural or religious holidays (for example, a coming of age ceremony where the young cub goes into the forest to bag an animal) and then just shrug and pick up sides of beef from the butcher the rest of the year, because it's more convenient.

Regular meat was not always a staple in our diets, though, which could make things interesting. A six-foot tall cat person might eat quite a bit of meat, after all -- more than a family of four in a quasi-medieval setting. And such critters might not recognize the idea of 'only nobles are allowed to hunt on these lands' and happily poach anything they can capture.

Quote from: Ghostmaker on December 07, 2020, 10:51:48 AMI imagine that 'civilized' cat-people might reserve 'hunted' meat for cultural or religious holidays (for example, a coming of age ceremony where the young cub goes into the forest to bag an animal) and then just shrug and pick up sides of beef from the butcher the rest of the year, because it's more convenient.

Absolutely. In fact that might turn into an internal conflict among the Felinoi, where you have a small cult of them vociferously clinging to "the old ways" in ways that sometimes cause serious embarrassments for the rest of their folk among the world at large.

QuoteA six-foot tall cat person might eat quite a bit of meat, after all -- more than a family of four in a quasi-medieval setting. And such critters might not recognize the idea of 'only nobles are allowed to hunt on these lands' and happily poach anything they can capture.

True; or, alternately, they may respond very strongly to the idea that "one does not hunt in a territory not yours" (a carryover from their own competitive days) and become widely hired out as forest rangers known to be absolutely brutal towards any poachers they catch, in return for sharing some of the noble's hunting rights.

So biopolitics are certainly not determinative, but they are almost always pretty influential.

Following on from the notes above, it occurs to me that a key answer to question #2, i.e.:

2)  What would you consider the defining characteristics for an RPG race?

is, What is its potential to cause conflicts for the PCs to get involved in?  This doesn't have to be as outright antagonists, although that's one way, but there has to be some way in which members of the race -- either en masse through their presence in the world, or as individuals through their interactions -- create interesting situations for the PCs.

The Elves are most interesting to your party when they're the only people with the lore to read that old treasure map, but you have to perform some weird task for them before the Master of the Glade will bestow his wisdom.  Being a caravan guard on a trip to the Valley of the Lizardfolk is just another job, until one of the Lizardfolk takes it as a personal insult that you're wearing a snakeskin belt (it would really have been nice if your caravan master had told you that!). And to use the Ghouls from GURPS, who are not undead monsters but a secret humanoid race who simply have to eat other humanoid brains to survive, discovering that a trusted NPC friend is one of them could put your PCs in many awkward positions. Ultimately it should all be designed around what will make for interesting adventures for the players.

This might be helpful, something I wrote for my 5e-lite game, haven't published yet:

---

There are usually five types of ancestries, using "traditional" fantasy as a basis.

Mundane (Human). The most numerous people of the setting. They have the largest cities and rule the strongest nation. Sometimes, they are able to breed with other species creating "half-elves", etc., but these are uncommon. They may value any ability (since they are the baseline), but Charisma might by common in cosmopolitan characters.

Tough (Dwarf). Usually a proud, stoic species who values toughness (Constitution) and Wisdom. They are often stable, brave, dour, and traditional types. Some might be resistant to poison, magic, heat, ageing, etc. They might be low on Charisma (lacking social graces) but are often reliable and full of personality. In many settings, they are crafty. Other example: cyborgs.

Graceful (Elf). These species are nimble and otherworldly, sometimes possessing innate magical (or quasi-magical) powers. Maybe they descend from fairy creatures or can travel through fairyland (or other planes). They favor light and missile weapons (Dexterity), and are often smart (Intelligence) or charming (Charisma). Their numbers might be dwindling as the world darkens or becomes more mundane. Other examples: gnomes, fauns, half-angels, half-demons, etc.

Aggressive (Orc). These are violent, expansionist, and often short-lived. They are usually bigger than humans are. Their technology is rudimentary, except maybe for implements of war. They value Strength above all, but also Constitution. Most prefer Wisdom to Intelligence and are too blunt for Charisma. Other examples: lizardpeople, beastmen, etc.

Small (Halfling). These are diminutive creatures, often overlooked by other species. They shy away from direct combat and are good at hiding (Dexterity). They may look cheerful, innocent or even adorable (Charisma) for other species, but some use this trait to deceive and manipulate.

In addition, some setting have intelligent alien species. While all the species described above are slight variations on humans, these are something completely different. Maybe they are six-limbed insect people, formless shape-changers, mutants that are completely different to each other, talking animals with no opposing thumbs, etc.

Other species are combination of two different traits (goblins are small and aggressive; gnomes are small and graceful; etc.) or exaggerated versions of the ones mentioned above (giants can be especially tough; werewolves might be incredibly aggressive; etc.).

You do not need to have all types in your setting, of course, and you can have multiple species of the same type. The "tough" and "aggressive" archetypes are often treated as synonyms, but I find the distinction useful – ignore that if you prefer.