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KarlDark wrote:

I've only ever been in one campiagn where it was human only and it totally worked and was enjoyable... Legend of the 5 rings... not sure how it would work in 4e now but in 3.5 it was good stuff.

Big thing there is...L5R/Rokugan isn't actually a D&D setting. The Oriental Adventures splatbook effectively ripped off and d20-ified the actual Legend of the Five Rings game concept and retooled it for D&D use (there's a whole chunk on how to import D&D races and classes in the book, I believe, plus at least two non-Rokugan races and a class or two slapped in for good measure), but in the end the setting's not really meant for anything but humans and Nezumi. So I can see why the campaign was run with only humans allowed.

Anyway, to the actual topic...my personal pet peeves about campaign settings? Here's the major ones I can think of, complete with goofy titles, just for the heck of it. Be warned, some of this spills over more into the mishandling of setting creation/use by DMs, and isn't really a peeve with settings themselves...

1) "The world is not enough": otherwise known as too much friggin' detail. This is my biggest problem with published settings; I couldn't get interested in Forgotten Realms largely because it felt like there was far too much to take in with regard to history of every known part of the world, the involvement of various deities in the world and their little quirks (Lolth and her lot, I'm looking at you!), ancient artifacts, various groups of prestige and common knowledge, various named and powerful NPCs, etc. I felt that there didn't seem to be enough space for any sense of discovery or the sheer adventure of going into the unknown.

This particularly presents a problem when you combine it with players that have access to the backstory of the setting in the form of novels and the like; I'd never have run FR with a particular friend of mine who was obsessed with the various FR novel series covering Drizzt and Elminster; he'd be the first to metagame or otherwise use his knowledge--even unintentionally--to throw the proverbial wrench into any interpretation of the setting that wasn't like the books. Players might know more about the setting than the DM, and the knowledge can be further distorted by multiple authors' interpretations of it.

Not to say that this can't happen in a homebrew, but the release of information to the players is more easily mitigated to what's vital, and the DM can change the world to more easily fit around what the players do, so it's infinitely more mutable at a glance than something that's in print and has years of stuff to back it up.

2) "Why am I doing this again?": back to an over-detailed setting, the idea that there are NPCs of epic or near-epic level lurking in a world, particularly those regarded as great heroes or villains makes one wonder what some lesser villain or budding hero is doing there. Especially when it's implied that those great heroes and villains are still involved in the affairs of the world; those minor villains would either get squashed by the big villains so there's no challenge to their power-base, or knocked down by the heroes to keep them from getting to world-domination levels by common logic, so why are there uprising heroes who are somehow the only ones who can challenge them? Why are new heroes suddenly involved--even inadvertently--in stopping the affairs of some BBEG, at that?

3) "Low Magic": plain and simple. I want my high-fantasy, crazy magical world in D&D. I want to see Wizards and Warlocks throwing around dangerous elemental power or eldritch energy straight out of Hell or wherever, magic artifacts of ancient power, etc., because if I didn't want fantastical things, I wouldn't be playing a game that's geared toward sword-and-sorcery types of fantasy themes. If I wanted grim-and-gritty (what some people seem to equate "low magic" settings to, it often seems), I'd play nWoD mortals-only, or Shadowrun, or even L5R with the Shadowlands on the rise. Those can do gritty, dark, potentially life-threatening danger far better IMO than an outright neutering of magic in D&D. Especially because it always seems that higher level play in D&D is practically tailored to either the need for magic or at least weapons that're either magic or meant to disrupt it to bypass DR, etc.

4) "The Rule of Cool" and the "I Just Don't Like 'Em!": this is not always a pet peeve...sometimes it's a very good thing, as the former can help justify why things that are slightly illogical are so, or otherwise cover for minor oddities. The second can also be used for good to a lesser extent, but it can still cover for why a DM might do something. I don't like it when it goes too far, particularly in homebrew; some people use it to justify their dislike of a race/class/spell/etc. by making them utterly unplayable in their setting, or make one race/class/etc. stand out as overtly good, or otherwise strain the concept of "My world, my way."

For examples of what I consider good/bad uses of the "Don't like 'em" concept (Because rule of cool is harder to define as when it's gone too far), my BF freely admits to not really liking Elves, but he doesn't go out of his way to make them a hated creature that won't even be able to get into a town without people wanting to burn them at the stake, or making them pure evil. They're just less prevalent, and slightly more insular in their communities, so they might not be a common sight but are by no means seen as monsters. It's a solution that leaves room for the possibility that a player might want to use one, and the DM will have to work with it, but that it can be less than ideal for the player. Just not impossible to work with.

In contrast--especially with 4e--it seems like a lot of people want to do just that with races like the Tieflings or Dragonborn, and try to use their appearance/RAW history fluff/classic RAW fluff as their reason to vilify them, particularly the Tiefling. And often, it seems to boil down to the person saying "I'm the DM, so I'm going to do this because it's my world, and I don't like them!", without any sense that they know what their players might think, or that they've considered alternate and less overt ways to make the race/class/whatever uncommon or otherwise not as likely to be seen in their world.

Those are about the most glaring peeves, I suppose. And I know if I take it any further than this, I'll really wind into a rant...therefore, I'm leaving it here.