Demi-humans that are as diverse in temperament and culture as humans. Makes them just humans that are stout or have pointy ears.

D&D's main background issues come with having a huge legacy that just keeps adding to its lore. Nearly impossible to maintain consistency, if say the Tolkein world still had never ending additions to this day, even that glorious setting would become bloated and inconsistent. D&D's great success is partly why it has this problem in the first place, of course a GM can do weeding to counter this.

Without a doubt for me the alignment system is a nightmare. This is why nearly every over roleplaying game moved away from that system, but at the time it must have seen a natural fit, almost classical in its treatment of fantasy tropes. It is in my mind a perfect example of the legacy issues which beset any long term beloved project; they could just remove it...heresy!

But as always its down to the GM, I have seen D&D played were everyone had an alignment and they were hardly used as part of the players personality and more just a mechanic for certain rolls. If it works for you, use it, if not side line it.

I really hate the whole "menagerie of freaks" party that's become so common. My ideal party is two humans and two demihumans, not cat-person, turtle-person, dragon-person, and devil-person.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1031820I really hate te whole "menagerie of freaks" party that's become so common. My ideal party of for is two humans and two demihumans, not cat-person, turtle-person, dragon-person, and devil-person.

I agree, though I am a fucking hypocrite on this. I want all the wacky options (á la Palladium Fantasy), but don't want wacky parties.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1031820I really hate te whole "menagerie of freaks" party that's become so common. My ideal party of for is two humans and two demihumans, not cat-person, turtle-person, dragon-person, and devil-person.

One of the many reasons I prefer straight historical to fantasy.

I made an exception with my group's 13th Age game, because it used a specifically envisioned set of races. Besides humans, the only other humanoids were Planetouched. Our party consisted of two Humans, a Genasi and an Aasimar.

Put me down for alignments being anything other than a statement of factions.  There must be a balance between good and evil is the worst notion ever.  Personally, I  don't like overly diverse races.  A good dwarf from the ancient holds and an evil dwarf from the northern volcanoes are the same race they differ culturally and perhaps due to magic induced mutations.  I'm fond of chaos mutations because they allow for variety without the constant worry about where yet another humanoid race came from.

1. Common tongue/language. Sure, demi-humans (sort of) have their own cultures, and monsters do to, but we all speak the same language all over the whole planet. And the only time anybody you ever meet doesn't speak Common is when they are fucking you over or being dicks.

2. The previous mentions of demi-human's Race/Species/Culture and the ecology of dungeons sort of combine for my second peeve- the huge multitude of seemingly naturally occurring humanoid races. Why do they all exist? Over in that swamp is some lizardmen and that forest has some gnolls and them there hills have some ogres, and heck, on the way to any of them you could run into a random band of pert near anything. All completely isolated from any others of their kind and none have a breeding population large enough to support themselves but it is OK. I know some settings do actually explain it well. Others just throw up their hands and say "who cares? it's fun so it is good enough" and I roll with it and have fun but if I think about it, it does irk me.

Some of my pet peeves...

Non-human player characters.  I like the PCs to be normal folks exploring the world and encountering the strange and mysterious, not to be the travelling circus.

Anything that makes magic anything less than rare, mysterious, and dangerous.  Magic shops, magic schools, magical trinkets proliferating every freaking chest.  In the current setting I'm working on, every spell is tied to a specific place or person on the map, so acquiring them is an adventure.  Every magic item (of which I have less than a dozen of so far) is named, has a history, and a reason for being where it is.

Class, in the social sense, not mattering.  Again, the wandering circus showing up with a bunch of strangers decked out in ridiculous armor.  Who you are, where you're from, what you've done, and how you present yourself should matter.

Large groups of monsters.  I hate location descriptions of 50 hobgoblins camped out over here, 30 orcs over here, blah blah.  I don't necessarily demand every monster be unique, but they should be few enough and hard enough to find that the local lords wouldn't have just sent their armies out to fight them by now, and they should have a reason to be where they are and doing what they're doing.  Large groups of monsters just milling around is so boring.

Kind of goes with magic, but easy healing annoys me.  People just expect to be able to quaff down healing potions like it's Diablo so they can keep fighting stuff.  I want a setting that discourages senseless violence because even if you feel confident you can win, getting wounded sucks and takes a long time to recover from.  Even the toughest warrior should consider whether a fight is worth it cause getting stabbed isn't fun no matter who you are.

Most of my D&D peeves are actually about the system (steep power curves, high hitpoints, levels, alignments, classes, easy healing & resurrection, many of the races & monsters, much of the magic).

And most of the things that bug me about D&D settings arise naturally from those same things.

And it also bugs me that D&D settings seem to me to tend to not really be what I expect would naturally arise from the situations presented using the rules, if someone were to play out all the factions in a situation. Mainly it seems to me that the steep power curve would result not in the usual situation as presented in the monster-&-magic-dense settings I've mostly seen, where there are static known monsters arranged neatly in zones and levels of different difficulty for PCs to safely climb through on their rise up the power curve. No, I think what would happen would be more like the smarter things higher on the power curve intelligently hunting the things below them on the power curve for magic loot, XP, gold and domination over the others. Wacky happy-go-lucky PC parties who get any reputation would seem to be ripe targets for eradication and looting for magic items, and/or recruitment into larger stronger groups. The higher-level agents in the world wouldn't just be outside the focus of the PCs' situation waiting for the PCs to level up, but going about fighting for their place in the power hierarchy and pro-actively wiping each other out, and the steep power curve, high hitpoints, and especially the high-powered high-level magic would seem to me to lead to situations very different from what D&D adventure settings tend to look like. And, how it would play out seems sort of interesting but far too complex in terms of how much magic and how many factions there are and who has immunity to what attacks and who's scrying whom and all that.

Quote from: Sergeant Brother;1031780I don't like it when magic emulates modern technology, especially mass produced magical items. No magical street lights. No clerics as doctors, and absolutely no magic stores. Magic stores are my biggest pet peeve. I found this +2 magical axe in a dungeon, but I use swords so I'll sell it at the local magic store and then buy a +3 long sword, which is what I'm specialized with. Oh yeah, and put some healing potions and a ring of fire resistance on my bill.

That completely destroys the fantasy feel of a setting for me. Magic should be rare, it should be special, it should not be the equivalent of technological equipment in a modern or sci-fi setting.

Medieval worlds should have a reasonably medieval or pre-modern culture. It doesn't have to be super well researched and historically accurate, but it shouldn't break emmersion or suspension of disbelief.

I hate it when religion doesn't matter, when ckerics and paladins are just combat medics. A cleric or a paladin is the equivalent of a saint - a person so devoted to their god/region that they can perform miracles. It should be treated as such too.

Agreed. Magic is technology blows. I'm readings some 2E Greyhawk material right now and the night watch have potions of infravision, merchants have amulets of protection from ESP, wizards use telekinesis to help build fortifications. Ugh.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1031820I really hate the whole "menagerie of freaks" party that's become so common. My ideal party is two humans and two demihumans, not cat-person, turtle-person, dragon-person, and devil-person.

I've posted about this before, but there needs to be some way to incentivize humans as PCs. Otherwise yeah, you end up with the Superfreak Dungeon Kill squad, instead of a plausible band of mercenaries of adventurers.

Quote from: under_score;1031837Non-human player characters.  I like the PCs to be normal folks exploring the world and encountering the strange and mysterious, not to be the travelling circus.

I'm mostly the same, but it does depend on the setting. One of the ones we're currently playing in has demon-tainted humans as a perpetual underclass for as long as anyone can remember (with different faiths ascribing various reasons why they were cursed in their creation myths) while the Elves only arrived just a few human generations back from another realm and keep largely isolated from other species. In that setting a group of humans, dwarves (seen as just a race in the proper sense of the term of humans) and malfeans (the term for the demon touched) wouldn't be atypical (all are essentially commonfolk in the setting), but elves mixing with any but their own kind would draw immediate notice.

QuoteClass, in the social sense, not mattering.  Again, the wandering circus showing up with a bunch of strangers decked out in ridiculous armor.  Who you are, where you're from, what you've done, and how you present yourself should matter.

Again, I generally agree, but it is setting dependent. Something set right after a great societal collapse (ex. c. AD 500 in Europe) is going to be a lot more fluid in its social classes than one with long established hereditary nobility (ex. AD 1500 in Europe).

In the earlier period, gathering up a bunch of wealth, a reputation of skill at arms and a bunch of loyal warriors is what established you AS a noble in the first place. In the latter period doing the same would only be allowed with the permission of an already established noble and doing so on your own would probably see you labled an insurrectionist.

The point being, if you want your setting to have social mobility you better structure your setting so it's plausible.

QuoteLarge groups of monsters.  I hate location descriptions of 50 hobgoblins camped out over here, 30 orcs over here, blah blah.  I don't necessarily demand every monster be unique, but they should be few enough and hard enough to find that the local lords wouldn't have just sent their armies out to fight them by now, and they should have a reason to be where they are and doing what they're doing.  Large groups of monsters just milling around is so boring.

I don't mind it if it fits the setting. A lot of times in the early D&D material the monstrous humanoids were basically just proxies for 'that tribe on the other side of the valley' without the ethical ramifications of genociding a tribe of neighboring humans so you can take their land for yourself.

Likewise a setting that's lacking the degree of central authority and civilization hangs by a thread with barely enough forces to hold the lands in their immediate proximity having large groups of monstrous raiders hiding out in the woods two days travel from civilization isn't that hard to envision. A density of about 1/square mile would essentially be hunter-gatherer level density, so a 10 mile x 10 miles stretch of unexplored forest hosting 2-3 bands of 20-30 orcs or goblins each wouldn't be pushing credibility to my mind.

Conversely, dropping the same in the middle of a square mile of woods surrounded by long settled lands would be ridiculous in exactly the manner you describe.

This also, tangentially brings another pet peeve of mine up... Barbarian being a character class (particularly when linked to the raging mechanic) instead of a background or social class. It does a massive disservice to a setting to paint all the many groups historically called barbarians with such a tiny subset of a subset.

Heck, the fact that a book accurate Conan the Barbarian wouldn't even be a member of the D&D barbarian class but some sort of multiclass fighter/rogue (maybe a ranger if the edition isn't married to making them two-weapon fighters with animal companions and spells) says just about everything about how malformed the barbarian as class approach is.

It took me a ridiculously long time to realize it, but I finally discovered that one of the reasons for the "freak party" was that some players really enjoy having mechanical widgets to pick from in the "race" department.  I guess I had always assumed that the motivation was all about being the freak on purpose, even though in retrospect, there were signs that it wasn't so.  I'm not that terribly bothered by the freak party most of the time, but some of the players were.

Once I realized that mechanics were driving the problem, the solution was obvious.  Have several different kinds of mechanical packages for humans, and a few of the races I wanted to support.  To make it easy, I cannibalized mechanics from some of the races I didn't want.  For example, I've got "humans" represented using human, half-elf, and half-orc mechanical packages, with the serial numbers filed off and the descriptions changed.  I've got over 20 players in multiple campaigns in this world now, some with multiple characters.  It's about 50% "human", 30% "elf", and the rest a few dwarves and halflings.  And that's with a lot of new players picking pre-gens that skewed non-human for variety.  I think overtime it may transition to an even greater human proportion of PCs.

If this isn't just some odd characteristic of my groups, then it would seem it is exactly counter-productive in D&D to have one brand of humans and then a bunch of sub-races for each demi-human.  It should be the other way around.

I never did like the hybrid 'races' like 1/2-elf or 1/2-orc.  Now there are 1/2-dragons and 1/2-devils (Dragonborn and Tiefling).  

About the General Store.  I've always used the market day concept from BIMT (Back in Medieval Times)  The town or village square essentially becomes a department store on Market Day.  Keeps the verisimilitude; does away with pixel-bitching.

Dungeons as apartment complexes for monsters.  Unless there is a landlord.

Ah, Tolkien-esque elves.  Never liked 'em.  I prefer elves more like the creatures of actual folklore.

Quote from: Franky;1031885I never did like the hybrid 'races' like 1/2-elf or 1/2-orc.  Now there are 1/2-dragons and 1/2-devils (Dragonborn and Tiefling).

"Let me tell you about my exciting character - he's 1/8 elf 1/4 half-orc 1/8 halfing 1/8 dragonborn-tiefling-devil 1/8 half-dragon 1/8 brownie 1/8 bugmoose-centaur were-jaguarundi Fetishist/Unicorn-Rider!"

Quote from: Skarg;1031891"Let me tell you about my exciting character - he's 1/8 elf 1/4 half-orc 1/8 halfing 1/8 dragonborn-tiefling-devil 1/8 half-dragon 1/8 brownie 1/8 bugmoose-centaur were-jaguarundi Fetishist/Unicorn-Rider!"

Rocks Fall.  It dies.