D&D General No Humans? (Well, the players... but that's it.)

[Vaalingrade]

Our games usually end up that way anyway.

 

[Clint_L]

I really hate the fantasy trope that humans are the main species and everyone else is a minority (c.f. Tolkien). So I don't do that. But I like having humans as an option - my current main is human. However, if the campaign didn't include humans I'd be fine with that, too.

Personally, the species I could most do without in my games is elves. So many cliched elf characters.

 

[Krachek]

I don’t see problem,
But I guess that one race will eventually become the new human reference and serve to play human expectation.

 

[DrJawaPhD]

Zero human PCs is standard in my experience since we don't play with Variant Human or Custom Lineage free feats. Most common PC race seems to be Tiefling for the younger crowd and Dwarf for the 40+ crowd.

We always have some human NPCs here and there but nothing would change if they were some other race instead.

 

[RoughCoronet0]

I almost never play a human character, or even a demi-human, so I would be perfectly happy playing in a campaign with no humans.

Humans are very rare in my homebrew world as they have only arrived to the plane a hundred years ago, and even then a majority of them have draconic blood running through them so they aren’t even fully human anymore. So far out of the all the npcs and humanoid enemies the party has have encountered, only one was human.

 

[Zardnaar]

D&D no but could be convinced with an interesting campaign world with a theme eg lizardfolk world, planet of the apes/anthromorphic races.

Any other rpg sure but unlikely to play them tbh (more lack of players vs anything else).

 

[Deset Gled]

It might be hard to have a baseline, or are the dominant 'not-human' race just going to act like humans? In a world where there are not any other human-like races like elves, dwarves and halflings I wonder what races fill the gaps. I voted yes, but now I wonder if I would. I think part of it is playing something I can relate to, or at least sort of relate to.

This is my concern, too. It seems to me (completely anecdotally) that sometimes as more outlandish species get common in D&D, like Dragonborn or Teiflings, rather than games getting more otherworldly, they just start to seem more humanlike over time. YMMV, of course. But there's a POV that this is already what happened to the elf; once it was unique enough to be it's own class, now it's only a little different from a human.

A zero human game sounds like it could either be very, very heavy in the racial roleplay, or quite watered down. I could easily be talked into such a game if I like the GM and the players. It's not a turn off for me. But it's not a draw into a campaign for me, either.

 

[Distracted DM]

I wouldn't really notice humans not being an option in a TTRPG unless the game itself called it out. There are plenty of games out there where there just aren't humans... That's just the setting/game etc.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Remember: the question was zero humans, not xenofiction.

 

[Tonguez]

The thing is dwarfs and elfs and halflings are essentially humans, so allowing them doesnt change much really.

For instance I have played in settings where decadent goblins and trolls were the dominant race, humans were a vermin species (along with elfs and pecks). The goblin courts played very much like the 17th century Palace of Versailles filled with opulent decadence.

I could imagine something like the Dark Crystal, or playing animals and I still want to do an adventure where everyone is under 1 foot tall