And if you make your dominant race something other than near human, you can give up on using "medieval" or any other human style as your reference. Why would an aarakocra civilisation build castles when everyone can fly?
Yep, that is why we're putting much of the emphasis on the
fantasy element, more so than "medieval".
I've already played this game back in 2E. The DM's world had the humans and elves wiped out by an alliance of orcs and drow, who then replaced them.
We're debating between a world that once
had humans, or one that
never had them...?
Land of the Giants. "Medium" is normally defined relative to humans. What if the planet was ruled by giants, and huge was the new medium? Humans are tiny.
And with giants, you could keep the medieval trappings.
We do have a "land of the giants" as part of the world currently, where all giant species originate from: giant lizards, giant eagles, giant... Giants, etc.
There is someone playing a tabaxi in one of my current games and I can tell she gets disappointed when I forget to have the NPCs in town react to the “weird foreign cat person.”
I suppose it depends on just how "weird" it is for her PC to show up? In a world with tabaxi, are they super rare? Or has the lands she is in right now never seen tabaxi? But if they are known of, and seen sometimes, why would it be a big deal?
I've run and played in a couple "animalistic-oriented" games. In one, our PCs (leonin, tortle, and a couple others) were unusual, but nothing to shock or surprise people because our races were known of, if not encountered before.
In the other, all our PCs came from a "zootopia-like" continent where all the races were "animal-heads": loxodons, tabaxi, kenku, etc., all of them were there someplace. Our PCs were emissaries to the other lands, traveling as diplomats as well as adventurers.
Both were a lot of fun! However, one thing we REALLY strive for is to get as much out of the human mind-set as we can and imagine what it is like to be those races.
even if you don't have Humans you're still going to most likely end up with something that is treated as basically 'humans' in one form or another, i don't see the point in removing them just to end up having them replaced.
We're trying very hard
not to...
I'm not sure you can avoid it. Not because of anything on your part, but because those roleplaying the non-human races are humans in human masks. It's extraordinarily hard to roleplay a non-human well on that front, because we the players are all human and our human perspectives will seep through all over the place. It's the only perspective we know.
Yep, that is definitely part of the challenge. I'm hoping with enough information on these races, people can have a better chance of making it work without "humanizing" them. I realize it will be a very difficult task, and perhaps impossible.
Are people thinking the question is "would you play in a DnD game with no humans?" Is that the question? I thought I read OP correctly.
Yep. That is it. But to clarify it means no human NPCs either, not just no human PCs.
