Things You Learn...

Quite a few people seem to spend more than a little time savaging 3rd Ed./3.5 D&D, I generally don't (saving my bile for 2nd Ed...), as I spent several years playing it and, overall, had a great time. The fact that I've grown disillusioned with it does not destroy its worth.

One of the things that I started doing in Third that I've carried on with is the rule I started calling "It's on the table". The origins of this were due to some of my Third players being far better at mechanical jiggery-poky than I am. So, in an effort to save my sanity and keep the game being fun, I told them that they could use anything their black little hearts desired... but that I could, and would, use whatever horrific monstrosity they came up with against them at some later point, they had, as I put it, "placed it on the table" and it was fair game. Conversely, I said, whatever I use as an NPC is also on the table.

So far, in my current Ravenloft 1st Ed mash-up the oddest a player wanted to start with has been a half-orc, even though I stated that I am open to whatever they'd like to play. (I wouldn't necessarily let it be powerful, but it would be at least on par with the PHB assortment of races.) This being the case, all of the oddball races (and classes) have been NPCs (now, this is, at least sort of, Ravenloft, so all of the races have been at least human-seeming, but...) and now there is a small selection of potentially interesting options.

At present, on the table are:

necromancer (my own version of such a class)
mad scientist (a class of my own creation, a sub-class of magic-user)
half-ogre
weirdling (all of the semi-humans, such as the tiefling, but exact bloodlines may vary)
drow
Gamma World mutant

And that's about it... oddly when I started the post I would have said there were more, but I've checked and it's not so... (though weirdling is pretty open-ended now that I think of it).