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[Barastrondo]

You know what threads like this make me think of? It's kind of an old fantasy cliche, particularly in works where the protagonist is a person from our world who's transferred into a fantasy world. (Also in science fiction; I'm thinking, say, Last Starfighter here.)

So you have the protagonist entering into a fantasy world, and he or she spends a lot of initial time gawking. Maybe stopping to stare as someone Not Human walks past in the street, maybe saying "What are you?" in an incredulous tone to someone Not Human, perhaps someone who's just gone out of their way to lend assistance. Sometimes, if you're the kind of kid I was, you get frustrated with the protagonist having such a hard time coping with things that look different, particularly if you've devoured a lot of works in which this behavior takes place. In the meantime, everyone else in the fantasy world also basically looks cooler and more sophisticated than the protagonist, because they're used to a definition of "cosmopolitan" that includes non-humans.

To refer back to the Mos Eisley example, one of the things that makes Luke more sympathetic is that he doesn't act like this. He doesn't marvel at every alien race at the cantina that isn't a pink-skinned primate. He doesn't ask Chewbacca "Wow, what are you?"

That's the play style difference I think threads like this illustrate. Some of us like the idea of a dragon-guy or a werewolf-chick receiving a lot of goggle-eyed "What the heck is that?" responses.* Others like the idea of human types defaulting to a Han Solo archetype, who can hang with inhuman co-pilots and think nothing of dealing with an inhuman bounty hunter. The best thing about having a bunch of races is that you can even do both: have societies where dragonborn and half-orcs are well-integrated, but shifters have to conceal themselves due to the role lycanthropes play in the world.

I'll admit, though, that I'm posting from the perspective of someone who likes the ramifications of truly mixed demographics. Sometimes it's just more fun to try figuring out what giant sapient beetles would serve for dinner if they had humanoid guests, or what sort of transport you could buy from a lizardman teamster, without having to go through the requisite period of "What do you mean they're not monsters?"



*I think it is substantially less cool, however, to get all "I'm gonna punish the player for picking a race I don't like by having the world treat him like crap!" on a player. It so frequently comes across as using your favorite civilizations like grudge monsters, probably because it so frequently is exactly that.