D&D 5E What's wrong with a human-centric fantasy world?

[Grainger]

If one awards, as is suggested in Cyclopedia, 1/20 of a level for good RP every session, the Elf whose best buds with the dwarves shouldn't get it, and should be told why.

I see... Legolas and Gimli were "doing it wrong". Never mind that their eventual friendship was one of the "messages" of Lord of the Rings. Tolkein was doing it wrong.. they should have been condemned for seeing past racial prejudices.

 

[ad_hoc]

Of course, if you're hoping to see WotC provide a published setting that does this, you may be in for a very long wait...

You can always just use older Ravenloft products.

I like low fantasy, sometimes less is more. For me high fantasy stops being fantastical because everything is common.

PCs are special so getting to choose special races is fine. In my games cities tend to be 90% human, 8% halfling, and 2% everything else.

Be an elf if you want but people will look at you funny.

 

[Wepwawet]

At any rate, the different life-spans create different lifestyles. Some off the cuff thoughts on this:

Elves have forever to do things, so they tend to be meticulous, serene, and aloof. An elf's life is worth a hundred of any "lesser" race's lives because a single elf can outlive all one hundred of that lesser being's lifespans stacked end to end. Elves have the capacity to look at other race's lifespans the way a human looks at a fruit fly: they live too short a time to really develop into "personhood". (Not that this is the default elven view, but that they have the capacity to see it this way.)

Dwarves have centuries to build, perfect, and train. They're not a "chosen" race and have none of the hopeful qualities associated with humans or elves. Their values are ingrained in them: a love of beauty (that can turn to greed), a love of strength (that can turn to power-lust), and a love of kin (that can turn to xenophobia). Add a few centuries of life to each of those values and you get traditions that cover every aspect of dwarven life.

Humans are the odd ducks in that they (a) die and (b) that death is considered a "gift" because they'll have some strange role in the world-to-come (whereas elves and dwarves will not). Their short lifespans make them jealous/admiring of the grandeur and depth of culture in other races. Human nations that survive tend to emulate the traditions of the elder races but with distinctly human twists.

Yes, all of that is true and I also think that's how ideally races should be played.

But most of my players don't want to study the ethnology of fantasy races nor think about how different their minds would be...

In the end it's simply about playing this character that can do all this cool stuff and go on fantasy adventures. So, even if I don't intend to, my games tend to be quite human centric anyway

 

[aramis erak]

Humans Are Boring.

Mind you, in the right setting, Humans are perfectly fine. But for the most part, I play D&D to experience the fantastic over grim, gritty realism... and that usually means non-humans.

Too much can be too much, however. In the current 4e campaign in which I play, I've erred in trying to recruit "too many" non-humans into the world at large and have created a sort of "everyone's different, just like everyone else" feel. Nothing's special, or if it is, it's barely touched upon by the exposition.

Demihumans are just as boring.

Meh. BadWrongFun roleplaying police. Lots of them here on this forum.

Once in a blue moon, I do something totally out of character just for the fun of it. It sometimes results in some of the best laughs at a table. If I had a carrot and stick DM, I'd laugh at him. I'm at the game to have fun. If my roleplaying of my PC in a non-expected or non-traditional manner bothers the DM, he needs to get a life.

And you'd usually be shorted some XP for it in any home game I ran. I found it tends to work pretty well with 90%+ of my players. The other 7 or 8 %? If it's becoming a problem, or they whinge on about how they're not getting that extra XP, I explain to them why...

See, for stuff I do for my home game, I let players have input. Their input includes choice of rules, choice of setting in many cases, starting location, and more... so it's really a social contract. If they can't handle the tropes, then they chose poorly. And going off trope in that manner usually annoys me.

I have ended a couple campaigns because the players agreed they couldn't handle the tropes inherent in the setting. (One of them was because the host decided he couldn't handle the setting... the issue of playing other than at my home. Game moved.)

 

[gweinel]

Nothing whatsoever if that's what you want - provided you can get your players to go along with it.

Of course, if you're hoping to see WotC provide a published setting that does this, you may be in for a very long wait...

However, not long ago, Mears said that he would like to have more cultural options for humans in the DMG.

 

[delericho]

It's certainly my preference that a player who chooses a non-human race should do so because they want their character to, in some sense, be distinctly non-human. That is, because dwarves are not simply short humans with beards, I would prefer to see a dwarven PC reflect some of that.

Indeed, even when the player is playing against type, for example by playing a dwarven wizard, I would still expect that "against type" to have a dwarven flavour. To give an example from Star Trek, Worf is distinctly different from other Klingons by virtue of his upbringing, but he is still not simply human in his thinking - his rebellions against the Klingon norm are still Klingon rebellions against that norm.

And, yes, it's something of a pet peeve of mine when a player chooses PC race solely for the mechanical aspects of the race (usually the ability modifiers), and then promptly ignores anything and everything 'dwarven' (or elven, or whatever) about the character.

But all that said... ultimately, it's the player's character. There is a multitude of things that I as DM am in charge of, and the PCs are one of very few that I'm not. So, if a player can't be bothered role-playing the race he has chosen, or even if he really chose the race purely for that +2 Con modifier, that's his prerogative.

 

[delericho]

However, not long ago, Mears said that he would like to have more cultural options for humans in the DMG.

Yeah, but the issue isn't one of adding more options for humans; it's more a question of restricting the prevalence of non-humans in the settings.

And that's very unlikely to happen - firstly because WotC are yet even to announce the FR book for 5e, never mind any other setting; but secondly because their past history would indicate they're more likely to do another kitchen-sink setting than something more restrictive.

 

[ExploderWizard]

I don't think any race is boring on its own. Unimaginative players are boring and they will bring the boring aspect out in any race or class that they play. As far as "playable" races go in our own world, all we have are humans, and we are a pretty diverse and interesting race.

 

[KarinsDad]

See, for stuff I do for my home game, I let players have input. Their input includes choice of rules, choice of setting in many cases, starting location, and more... so it's really a social contract. If they can't handle the tropes, then they chose poorly. And going off trope in that manner usually annoys me.

Knowing what I now know about your game, my input as a player would be to allow players to play their PCs as they see fit without you being annoyed as the DM when they do something a little off the wall. I'd also put in input that all PCs get the same XP. This concept of "giving the players a grade, some get As and more XP and some get Bs and less XP" sounds a bit grade schoolish. Why bother with keeping track of who did better and all that, and punishing/rewarding players? Is it a control issue?

It doesn't result in better roleplaying, it results in DM preferred roleplaying. The latter is not necessary equivalent to the former. Training your players to roleplay in certain way is not supporting the social contract.

 

[Astrosicebear]

I have a constant desire to decrease the degree of "kitchen sink" look and feel of D&D. It seems that every published setting or homebrew I play in is based on the assumption that "more is better", and that:

- there has to be many playable races
- playable races should include traditional PHB races
- all races should more or less have similar societies and therefore opportunities

This is fine, but it's certainly not novel or original anymore. In particular, the third concept above means that every race should have access to every class, background, spell, equipment etc. with only few minor exceptions.

For me a few downsides have manifested clearly in play, among which:

- all campaigns are more similar to each other
- everybody roleplays their PC identically, whatever the chosen race (speaking like a drunkard doesn't make your Dwarf PC really different)
- there is nothing "fantastical" left about fantasy races

I almost would like to toss it all away and just have the players play human characters, and focus on the individuals in order to decide how to roleplay them, instead of looking at "race".

In the past while we were playtesting 5e, in order to simplify the game setup (almost all players had never played D&D), I didn't even mention other races, in fact we didn't use races features at all (not even the human bonuses). It was only a short campaign of but a few evenings, but nothing felt missing.

Perhaps it doesn't have to use such an extreme solution. What if the options of playing other PHB races is still there (also in combination with any class), but all non-human characters are treated are rarely seen in the world? So you can play an Elf or Dwarf (or even an Elf Barbarian or a Dwarf Monk) but you'll very unlikely ever see an Elf/Dwarf NPC?

I want to try and push these non-human races out of the common and restore a tiny little bit of wonder about them, not jeopardize a player's desires. What would be wrong with this?

This is certainly achievable, but you have to develop the lore of the world you put them in. A small paragraph or two should do the trick. Let the players help define the lore of the fringe races. They can play whatever they want, but make sure they know the uncommon and rare races are indeed rare, and an "off-color" mix of race class would be cool, but very unique.

So lets say your human-centrist world is at the end of golden era. The great human empire failed 100 years ago, and fighting between provinces tore much of the empire apart. All thats left is provincial land holders desperately trying to retain their lands against usurpers, bandits, and barbarians, all while upstart kings come and go.

Elves of all kinds are all but extinct. Hunted to extinction by their age old war with the Orcs. Only a handful of elves exist and most were powerful magisters in the old empire, now forced to be reclusive sages or hermits. The Orcs on the other hand, a once mighty and proud race that was the Human empire's greatest ally, was reduced to near mindless savages by the Elves magical rituals at the end of their war, hundreds of years ago. Now most full orcs are savage beasts roaming the wilds, barely able to form social tribes. Half-orcs on the other hand are quite numerous and were used for the last 300 years as slaves in the Empire. Looked down upon all as less than human, they are treated with disdain and rarely pittied.

All other races are extremly rare and fringe.

But see, if you give your players a start and then define some extra mechanical based lore, it helps... so you could say elves are very adept at magic and tend to be wizards and sorcerers. Half orcs tend to be barbarians and fighters. They can play other combos, but they need a great story to go with it.