D&D 5E What is the appeal of the weird fantasy races?

[Umbran]

Maybe. I agree that those are not human experiences. However I am not sure the "funny hat" applies as all situations are approached from the perspective of a Human Mind.

Yes, but... there is no one Human Mind. Not all human minds are the same.

You lay on heavily as to how your parrot has a different perspective on the world than you do. Which I'll accept as correct. However, you completely miss how other humans also have different perspectives. If you have two working legs, you don't know the perspective of someone who has used a wheelchair all their lives. If you don't have the condition yourself, you don't know what it is like to live with PTSD. If you grew up poor, you don't know what it is like to be wealthy. Each of these things also changes how we perceive and conceive the world.

Ergo, you can't even really play any old human. By your logic, you can only play yourself. All players are really playing, "Dave in a funny hat." There is no "Human Mind". There is Dave's Mind, and Sally's Mind, and Juan's Mind, and they never really meet.

However, when we start considering this, there's a point at which it gets less credible...

A couple that's married for several decades says they know each other really well, and understand how each other conceives the world. Do you tell them that they are wrong, and fundamentally cannot know how the other thinks, feels, and conceives the world?

While you are busy trumpeting that we cannot know how a non-human mind works (as if absolute knowledge was really the valuable bit anyway), you bypass considering how the human mind really does work - by building models.

I have been married to my wife for over a decade and a half. To hear us talk, you could come to the idea that maybe we read each other's minds. Of course, we cannot. What we do is have very good models of each other in our heads, built and refined over long exposure. I don't know what she's thinking, with what I'd call scientific certainty, but with my model, I can make guesses with high accuracy, and verify that they are accurate.

Next, we find that humans can and do make models of non-human minds - our dogs, cats, and horses are excellent examples. From subtle differences in barks, meows, growls, body language, and so on, we can predict what an animal wants, and verify that by watching their behavior after we provide what they want.

I have a pretty good model of my cats. I can tell the difference between wanting food, petting, or play with pretty solid accuracy. Do I know how a cat thinks? Maybe not, but I have a really useful model of them in my head.

So, we can model other humans, and we can model animals. To be convincing, you'd need a really good reason why humans can do that, but fundamentally cannot come up with a plausible model for non-human sentients. Why is the next step impossible?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Emotions do not equate to intellect or understanding.

Yes, they do.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Yes, but... there is no one Human Mind. Not all human minds are the same.

You lay on heavily as to how your parrot has a different perspective on the world than you do. Which I'll accept as correct. However, you completely miss how other humans also have different perspectives. If you have two working legs, you don't know the perspective of someone who has used a wheelchair all their lives. If you don't have the condition yourself, you don't know what it is like to live with PTSD. If you grew up poor, you don't know what it is like to be wealthy. Each of these things also changes how we perceive and conceive the world.

Ergo, you can't even really play any old human. By your logic, you can only play yourself. All players are really playing, "Dave in a funny hat." There is no "Human Mind". There is Dave's Mind, and Sally's Mind, and Juan's Mind, and they never really meet.

However, when we start considering this, there's a point at which it gets less credible...

A couple that's married for several decades says they know each other really well, and understand how each other conceives the world. Do you tell them that they are wrong, and fundamentally cannot know how the other thinks, feels, and conceives the world?

While you are busy trumpeting that we cannot know how a non-human mind works (as if absolute knowledge was really the valuable bit anyway), you bypass considering how the human mind really does work - by building models.

I have been married to my wife for over a decade and a half. To hear us talk, you could come to the idea that maybe we read each other's minds. Of course, we cannot. What we do is have very good models of each other in our heads, built and refined over long exposure. I don't know what she's thinking, with what I'd call scientific certainty, but with my model, I can make guesses with high accuracy, and verify that they are accurate.

Next, we find that humans can and do make models of non-human minds - our dogs, cats, and horses are excellent examples. From subtle differences in barks, meows, growls, body language, and so on, we can predict what an animal wants, and verify that by watching their behavior after we provide what they want.

I have a pretty good model of my cats. I can tell the difference between wanting food, petting, or play with pretty solid accuracy. Do I know how a cat thinks? Maybe not, but I have a really useful model of them in my head.

So, we can model other humans, and we can model animals. To be convincing, you'd need a really good reason why humans can do that, but fundamentally cannot come up with a plausible model for non-human sentients. Why is the next step impossible?

Especially when a social, sapient, tool using, linguistically advanced, felinoid biped person is going to be vastly more similar to a human than a cat is.

 

[FrozenNorth]

A Human playing an Elf can't be taken seriously as a Human has absolutely no idea of what it would be like to live for hundreds or thousands of years.

Most Elves in the games I have played are between 50 and 150 years old. By that token, most adventuring elves also have no idea what it is like to live hundreds of years.

Cultural notes are nothing but fluff, thus the only difference between humans and non-humans is the mechanical bonuses. Hence my position stating that the only reason to play non-human races is the mechanical bonuses. The designer obviously agrees with me as you just pointed out, non-human races were intended to be human with differences in fluff.

Your reasoning comes off as somewhat circular: all non-human races are completely alien, therefore a person who is playing a non-human race is just playing a human with funny ears.

So I will just leave off with this. There is nothing in the lore or in the mechanics of D&D that suggests that interpreting the non-human races as so alien that that humans cannot realistically play them is the correct interpretation.

Such an argument interpretation is not only not supported by the game, it also seems like a lot less fun.

So to quote a dwarf I once met, try playing a different race. It’s fun. The stars are beautiful outside.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Especially when a social, sapient, tool using, linguistically advanced, felinoid biped person is going to be vastly more similar to a human than a cat is.

...Who may have lived and grown up in the same town as the human.

 

[Crit]

I reiterate, considering intellect and understanding, Neanderthal would be completely alien to us. Your adherence to the idea that similarities in brain structure means similarities in intellect and understanding does not follow. We would need to hear first hand accounts from a Neanderthal in order to assess their level of intellect and understanding.

I agree you can get by without a hitch. I firmly disagree that it would cost the players. In my own personal experience I have seen it benefit the players. Players that have to play humans must give those characters depth through play. Players that play non-humans often play two-dimensional characters while continuously repeating the fact that their characters are somehow deeper than human characters simply because they are non-human, and this does not follow.

I disagree. It is by no means necessary. D&D wouldn't suffer without non-human races. In fact, considering the ongoing conversations in the news media about non-human races in D&D being degrading stereotypes of marginalized human cultures, I think it would greatly benefit both the game and the hobby in general.

Agreed. I just think that removing non-human races from the game would be beneficial to both the game, and the hobby in general.

Opportunity reply, and I'm procrastinating:

There's no reason to say that intellect and understanding are unrelated to the brain, though everything else undoubtedly is. Why would it be separate? Like I said, radically different animals to us aren't even alien, so something that's basically the same as us is nowhere close to that.

I think that removing races being costly is almost self-evident. People specifically want to play them, otherwise they wouldn't have chosen them for play. Cutting it out is at cost to them/us. You can't tell the same stories. What if I wanted to specifically play a Changeling criminal mastermind who uses their morphing powers? A Centaur, a Gith, or just any non human, for any reason? Playing a more complicated human is to your taste, but people should be able to get what they want out of the RP- you saying it's an improvement is subjective, not an objectively better player experience. This is why it's good to have the rules available, so you can just omit what you want and others can enjoy what they want. I don't think this should be compromised on, because it would cost human-preferring players nothing to keep things as they are (and gain nothing), but anyone else stands to lose a lot. DnD's identity is kind of based on this, just behind Dice, sitting at a table, and Classes. The only thing that'd be gained is actively taking away the possibility of other people's preferred fun. You can say it makes a better gaming experience, but why actively eliminate the option to play something different? The only reason the game exists is for people to have fun with it (and to make money, which only happens if people are having fun).

Redacting races for their cultures being offensive parodies wouldn't work, because if you replace the race with more humans and keep the offensive culture features... oof. The races are fine, just change the story around them. There's no way that having the offensive fictional races is more offensive than swapping them for humans portrayed the same, which is infinitely worse. Just make the story itself not offensive, and then it's problem solved.

I'll check in much later today, but I don't think there's a middle ground that can be reached in regards to eliminating a big part of the game and community. Would you eliminate other RPGs entirely because you think DnD is a better experience? If not, then DnD should not eliminate alternate play methods. Coexisting is completely possible here- it already does.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

...Who may have lived and grown up in the same town as the human.

Yep. Hell growing up in a town of Tabaxi means Tabaxi are more like humans than like house cats.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Maybe. I agree that those are not human experiences. However I am not sure the "funny hat" applies as all situations are approached from the perspective of a Human Mind.

I think you begin to see the problem

What should I call it then? You have quoted three different analogies I have used to attempt to describe what I mean. If you have a better analogy to describe what I mean that people won't take offense to please let me know as I have already provided three different analogies to describe what I mean. I am sorry that I have been unable to come up with a better analogy myself. I do tire though of being told that because someone doesn't like my analogy I should abandon said analogy without providing a better one for me to use.

Playing a role?
Acting?
Engaging in speculation?
Speculative Roleplaying?

Any of those four seem equally accurate and far less offensive to the people who engage in them.

Our experiences obviously differ as I have always seen people be constrained by extra elements being added to their characters. As an example, players playing Klingons, or actors playing Klingons in a TV show, are constrained by the idea that Klingons are honor bound and proud warriors. So they have one of two choices. They can either stick with those constraints, and be something less than human. Or they can buck those constraints. In which case, why play a Klingon? As bucking the constraints means they are no longer playing a Klingon. They are in essence, playing a human again, as they are no longer constrained as a Klingon would be.

I don't see how they can end up being "something less than human". That seems like you are seeing only the box. Unfortuantely, I'm not incredibly familiar with Star Trek.

But to take some examples from DnD, let us consider for a second the Tabaxi. Tabaxi are cat people, so they have fur. This has implications. They would not really like clothes and armor very much, clothes especially because the primary purpose of clothes is protection from the elements and they have that already. So the clothing they wear would be minimal and highly decorative. They'd likely wear clothes that tied in single spots, like an apron, more than clothes they pulled over their head.

They have perception and stealth innately. Why is that? Hunting games, something common in cats. So a Tabaxi even as an adult might hide and sneak up on people, partially for fun, partially as just a way of testing and training each other.

Tabaxi have claws and they are a 1d4 weapon, pretty serious actually. It would not be unfair to consider them having a 1d4+1 attack at all times, meaning they can easily kill another person at any point. How would that affect them? Well, they would likely have some serious taboos about using violence, since it can so quickly lead to serious injuries. They'd be much more aware of hands, because the hands of a tabaxi are deadly weapons. If they got angry or threatening, they wouldn't go big and loud like humans, who tend to puff out their chests and shout. If it was a warning they'd growl and their fur would puff, but if it was "I'm about to kill you" they'd likely take a low stance and spread their arms. Ready to spring and rend, because their hands are deadly weapons.

They can see in the dark, and fur tends to keep them warm, so they would likely have houses that are built to disperse heat and create more shade, wide open spaces instead of the tight confines of the typical human house.

I could go on, but I think this helps illustrate the point.

I have my doubts that you imagining something means that that is how it truly is or would be. Very little fiction gets the future right despite the author imagining such things. I grew up on eighties science fiction and 2020 doesn't look anything like they predicted it would be. Back To The Future teased me with hover boards and yet they do not exist. The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey told me we would have artificial intelligence twenty years ago, and yet we still don't have it. Your imagination is not a miraculous thing that makes things you imagine real.

And I never claimed it was?

Is that the problem that you think we are declaring 100% truth and knowledge? Of course we aren't. I would never declare that I can 100% accurately depict a person from Canada let alone something from an alien society. But just because it isn't 100% accurate doesn't mean that it is worthless. Just because we can't depict something perfectly doesn't mean our imperfect depictions are not close.


Edit: Yeah, the more I read of your posts you are really leaning on absolute knowledge being a thing. It isn't.

We don't know where conciousness comes from in the human mind. There is no physical structure in the brain we have found, and nothing to indicate whether mind-body duality is really a thing.

We don't know why all creatures sleep. Humans an non-humans. All of us sleep, we do not know why.

And I'm sure the list goes on. We don't 100% understand humanity. That hasn't stopped you from trying to portray humans in your world, a world that fundamentally functions differently than our own. Why should it stop you from playing something non-human?

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Neanderthal would be completely alien to us.

This is an incredible claim. It is extremely unlikely to be true.

We literally coexisted and mated with them while growing our population much faster, until we consumed them into us as a species.

They were not alien to us.

 

[Gammadoodler]

This is an incredible claim. It is extremely unlikely to be true.

We literally coexisted and mated with them while growing our population much faster, until we consumed them into us as a species.

They were not alien to us.

I rather suspect by 'us' he means modern humans, though I'm open to correction.

I think the more fundamental problem is the viewpoint that one version of "imagine you're different than you actually are" is somehow superior to another.