You’re building a fantasy setting for the RPG of your
choice. Which ingredients do you put in? Which “standard fantasy” elements
would you choose to leave out?
In gaming, "standard fantasy" pretty much means D&D-as-genre -- Greyhawk, Forgotten Realms, Dragon Empire, Golarion, and I'm good with that. It's my gamer "comfort food," and I'm happy to play in that sandbox.
My tastes in such settings are pretty bloody traditional. Some might even say "conservative." I like dungeons, dragons, zero-to-hero progression, powerful magic, exploration, ancient evils, you name it. It's probably easier to list the things I don't care for and define what I like by what remains.
No "non-core" PCs: This actually covers a lot of ground, but it's something I feel I came by honestly. I really hate things like orc PCs (in D&D, other games that have Orc characters are just fine), shardminds, aaracokra, aasimar, tieflings, goliaths, etc. OK, Goliaths aren't completely awful. Hell, I'm even iffy on gnomes and dragonborn, truth be told. Too often in my experience, players choose these options less to meet a particular character concept and more to derive a specific mechanical bonus. Unless your plan is to really explore the whats, whys, and wherefores of your weird, one-off race, I'm not interested. And if they're not weird and one-off, then we're rapidly deviating in our definitions of "standard fantasy."
No monocultures. While I like my bog-standard fantasy races, I'm not at all fond of assembly-line elves and dwarves. I want diversity and new takes that still ring true to the archetypes. For instance, I recently saw someone's take on elves where they're all refugees from faerie, where some great tragedy befell. The high elves are those who actually made the journey and were born on the other side; wood elves are the offspring who were born in this realm. Neat idea. In a D&D campaign I played in some years ago, the Eladrin from 4e were re-imagined as the Al-Adrin, given blue skin and an Arabian Night's feel. Elsewhere in the world, the high elves of the Emerald Lands had the same set of powers, but different complexion and identity. Easy.
No "Special Snowflake" characters: One of the things I really learned to hate about 3x and Pathfinder was the sheer amount of tinkering one could do with one's character, and how said tinkering was almost always in the name of optimization (with minor lip service to any other explanation). Like the gnome wizard, (gnome chosen to optimize character size and AC mods) who's player then permanently shrunk him down to about the size of a mouse, while boosting his Int into the high 20s. OK, a character like that would be completely great as a weird-ass NPC in a Clark Ashton Smith or Dying Earth sort of story. But as a PC in the Forgotten Realms? Not so much.
No psionics, either: this is fantasy, not the X-Men. Also, due to inevitable game balance questions, psionics just becomes another kind of magic, which cheapens both psionics and magic. Nope.
No firearms, for that matter. Mostly, because D&D just doesn't handle them well. That said, I kind of like the idea of a gun as a delivery tool for various magic attacks, which is kind of like what Pathfinder did (as I understand it). I might allow it, for a character with the right background, as kind of a one-off, if that's the most important thing about them.
No warlocks. This will probably raise some eyebrows, but I just don't get the warlock class. They mostly seem like an excuse to play tieflings, at least in my experience, they're mechanically fiddly, and their magic just feels imposed on whatever setting they're in. So, I generally just ask people not to play them.
No non-LG paladins. Not unless they're agents of evil, and therefore, not paladins. Again, I'm a traditionalist.
Anyway, that's probably enough. You get the idea.
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