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

[doctorbadwolf]

Well all adventurers are exceptions.
My argument is that D&D's description of halflings as basically curious hobbits mean even fewer of them would be halflings.

But that isn't accurate. Nor does it follow. If they were just hobbits with more curiosity...that would make them more likely than humans to go adventuring.

If 0.5% of humans are adventurers, <0.5% of halflings are.


It describes halflings as being curious and going places but not actually doing anything.

this is a painfully bad leap of logic.

Because it cut out some of the main hooks to be an adventurer. A halfling adventurer is not a little wierld or kinda weird. Because if they aren't driven by massive curiousity or home defence, they are being very unhalflingy by description.

This is a reach almost as bad as the last one.

D&D's anti small people bias in weapons combat.

A halfling fighter is literally at least as good in a one on one fight as a human fighter. Not using polearms limits them from exactly one build. Meanwhile, they're better at the rapier and shield build.

yet another limitation that must be broken.

What are you even talking about? How is it a limitation?

Again I'm not saying halfling adventurers don't exist nor does it make no sense.
I'm saying as a race, the race is not described like people who would adventurer nor is it mechanically built for it.
So even a reason like curiosity or wanderlust sounds like an excuse to include it in the book as a common race as a PC option with subclasses as every halfling adventurer is not just an adventurer, they are are all Halfling Drizzt..

None of this makes any sense. Curiosity and wanderlust are a basic and fundamental part of the identity of the race. Not just in DnD, but just as much in Tolkien. I mean...have any of you read the books!? Bilbo ain't the first hobbit to go on an adventure, and when he does other hobbits follow in his footsteps, and pretty much every hobbit that gets called to go on an adventure, whatever the impetus, ends up going about it with gusto. Hobbits love adventure. They just also love good food and comfortable houses, and forget their joy of adventure the more comfortable they are.

5e Halflings are explicitly, canonically, less included to ignore adventure than that.

And like hell they're not mechanically built for it! LOL are you joking? They're built exactly for adventuring. They're built for getting in and out, for not getting caught by terrible luck and dying for it, for avoiding danger, what part of adventuring do you think they're ill suited for, exactly?

 

[zarionofarabel]

My niece started taking Tae Kwon Do when she was eight and about three feet tall, she's a very small kid. She might not hit super hard but she can still kick with a fair amount of force, she breaks the black belt level boards with little effort. In addition, when she has the big kitchen knife and is waving it around all willy nilly I stay out of her way, cause it's a big knife and she could easily slash me open with it. Just cause she's three feet tall by no means eliminates her as a threat.

 

[Shades of Eternity]

Because the weird and bizarre is fun. The role playing game that got my heart back in the day was rifts and part of the appeal is playing something strange. It's one of the reasons I created an RPG where I pushed the envelope for possibilities. The group consists of an undead hockey player named Dave, an anthropomorphic beaver who is an EOD specialist, a halfling sized bear that's a punk rocker with psychic powers, and a cat with ectoplasmic projections and is a heavy hitter. Why would I want to go back to generic human, elf, dwarf, etc with such options available?

 

[Gammadoodler]

In addition, when she has the big kitchen knife and is waving it around all willy nilly....

When???

 

[Chaosmancer]

Nope. Not at all. Converting D&D to a low-magic game is a major undertaking. It hits races, classes, feats, treasure, monsters--practically the entire game.

Converting to humans-only, or a limited set of races, is trivial. You just say "The only races allowed are X, Y, and Z," and you're done. The system does not fight you at all. In all my years of kitbashing D&D, I can't think of a change that has caused less mechanical hassle. I suppose it might be a little more work if you ran published adventures and wanted to excise those races entirely (instead of just declaring them off limits to PCs), but that's it.

Interesting.

Who did your players fight in those human-only games? Orcs? They were banned. Lizardfolk? Banned. Mindflayers? Banned. Dragons? Banned.

You would have fought... other humans. Maybe a few monsters like oozes and owlbears, but anything actually intelligent enough to make a plan would have to be human,

Unless by "human-only" you mean the only PC option is human, but the dozens upon dozens of other races and cultures were still allowed. Because that is what I meant by you having to fight the system. To make Game of Thrones in DnD is basically to throw out the monster manual, because there is only a single enemy race, and Dragons were basically drakes.

But DnD is designed to have dozens upon dozens of cultures in it. People expect to run into monsters that are intelligent and deadly foes. And limiting the game to the extent of having humans, and that is it, is incredibly hard to actually do in practice.

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Thinking about pedigree fantasy and all that reminded me of something. One of my friends favorite fantasy authors is James Brian Jacques the man who wrote the Redwall books. About anthropomorphic animals.

Another person I know truly loves the Warriors series of YA novels. Also about Anthropomorphic animals.

Also remember the Seekers being popular. Involves anthropomorphic animals.

I mean, you can't swing a three-inch stick without hitting an anthropomorphic character in fiction. New She-Ra had Catra, anthropomorphic cat lady. Thundercats, Ninja Turtles, Mickey Mouse, oh but these aren't "serious" works. Not like the Serpent Men from Conan (and in Marvel Comics) or, well frankly, the two different tribes of serpent people from Greek Mythology.

You also have Japanese mythology with multiple Bird people, fox people, Tanuki people, badger people, cat people, dog people.


So... why is it so odd that people might be interested in one of the oldest forms of fiction in human history?

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Also, I think it was most recently @Maxperson who made the point that people would freak out far more at seeing a Cat Person than an Elf. And.. look, this argument bugs the hell out of me.

Question: If I reached into my pocket and pulled out a small device that lit up and made strange sounds, then held it to my ear and started talking to it, would you freak out? No, of course not, you know what a phone is.

How about this, if you came into my house, and saw a large, four-legged predator that immediately started barking at you, would you freak out? No. You know what a dog is.

We have grown used to cell phones and dogs. Hell, laptop computers are less than 20 years old, and they don't freak us out.


So why, why for all that is holy, would a human being in a setting where they evolved alongside a race of sentient cat people for the past thousand years or more, freak out upon seeing one? Even if they arrived 20 years ago... that is a full generation of people, they would be known about.

Half the problems I think people have from non-standard races is that they treat them like they just showed up in the world with no warning. Like the entire world evolved, changed and grew into its current form, then suddenly, last month, cat people showed up! Because if they actually, I don't know, were a part of the world that had existed for as long as humans... people wouldn't freak out, just like they don't freak out to see a dog, a cat, or a horse. They are known factors.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Besides, arguing physical viability in D&D is kind of a waste of time..because fantasy.

It's not Earth, there is magic, all characters, settings, and actions are imagined. All "that's not realistic" does is start silly (if perhaps fun) arguments.

1. If only people would remember this sort of thing when discussing stuff like whether fighters and warlords can do stuff very slightly outside the limits of Olympian athletic performance...
2. Okay, so why should we expect the humans who live in a clearly fantastical, magical world to be so suspicious of fantastical, magical beings who live in it? It seems like trying to have one's cake and eat it too; the fantastical justifies any oddities about acceptance of the traditional races, but does nothing to justify the acceptance of "non-traditional" races. Why do people get to use IRL Earth "weirdness" to talk about Dragonborn and Tabaxi but not Halflings and Elves?

That's not an example, though. Assuming the DM is being a jerk, he can just tell you guys no. The dungeon pulls you in or some such. Assuming he's not being a jerk, then he has tacitly authorized your deviation and you guys go on in the direction you wanted to go. In both cases, his authority is absolute by RAW.

That sounds rather like special pleading to me. "Well it's not ACTUALLY the group asserting authority if the DM agrees to go along with it!" That's some pretty gorram weak "Ultimate Authority"/"Absolute Authority" if it can only be used when the DM chooses to go along with the group OR chooses to be a jerk.

This is a strawman/red herring argument, though. We aren't talking about realism here. We're talking about comfort zones. Is someone more comfortable with a cat man or halfling? Is he more comfortable with an elf or a dragon man?

If it actually is about comfort zones, people should stop referencing representation in fantasy fiction or appealing to tradition and fantasy racism and just openly say they're uncomfortable. 90% of the statements critical about these races don't seem even slightly about discomfort--they talk about special snowflake syndrome or violating DM "vision" or how non-human races lead to more stereotyped play or the like. Seriously, where are the people in this thread who claim they don't permit so-called "weird" races because they find such things uncomfortable?

And dragonborn are dense because they average 250 while being human shaped, and are noticeably stronger than humans. So, on average, they're at least as heavy as quite large humans, but they don't need more sleep or food than an average human. Point being, no, they aren't more believable than halflings.

Well, the books do say that (a) they're not just heavier but taller, like by a pretty fair margin (IIRC average Dragonborn height is 6'2"?) so their extra weight basically just means they're all the enviable "bodybuilder without having to work for it" type, (b) their metabolism is already different because they eat more meat than humans and implicitly regulate their body temperature differently because they don't sweat (it's why they have such large mouths and head frills), and (c) they are actually supposed to be stronger or at least hardier than typical humans (remember, 4e gave them a choice of +2 Str or +2 Con, and they all added their Con mod to their Healing Surge value, so they DO genuinely heal faster than humans do in 4e).

So...yeah, I can actually believe that they're all (or almost all) physiologically the type with a ridiculously efficient metabolism and enviably fast muscle-building capacity, with both larger and slightly denser bodies (since muscle and bone are heavier than fat by volume). Probably a slight nod to game design necessity, in that they should probably be even stronger and hardier than they are compared to humans, but the difference doesn't seem like that big a deal to me (certainly not when dwarves have the exact same density issue but worse because they can't appeal to height as a mitigating factor!)

And since we know the typical Dragonborn diet contains significantly more meat than a healthy human diet, that seems to support the idea that they need a larger influx of protein. Likely their strength, muscle-building capacity, and faster healing are all tied into the same physiological root, which IRL we might justify as a much stronger growth hormone response: they both build new cells and repair damaged cells faster, and thus need more protein to supply the raw material. Further, their metabolism is probably just generally more efficient than ours, since they may need to generate less waste heat (due to using lower-efficiency methods, like head frills and panting, rather than sweating to vent waste heat).

A species whose normal diet (which is below the level of abstraction for D&D rules) looks more like but not identical to Michael Phelps' training diet, coupled with high metabolic efficiency and (compared to humans) unusually potent cellular response to growth hormones, would fit the bill quite well. Obviously the breath attack is not plausible IRL, but neither is innate ability to cast spells and elves (high elves, eladrin, and drow) get that no problem.

As for interrelations between races? Dudes, humanity has never been consistent on that issue and never will be. We pretty clearly consisted (nudge nudge wink wink) with Neanderthals and Denisovans--modern humans have genes inherited from them--yet we also readily engaged in ethnic cleansing programs with the flimsiest justification for most of our history. Some of our most famous pieces of lily-white English literature star "Blackamoor" or Palestinian/Middle Eastern characters, yet the notion that Roman Londinium might have had a little racial diversity due to travelling merchants is almost scandalous to is today. We're weird and dumb about what we do and don't accept. Being perfectly blunt? We'd probably end up accepting Dragonborn not because of anything noble or reasonable or even practical per se, but because we'd tried to conquer them and failed. Little helps the "you have to see us as equals" like "trying to NOT see us as equals got your asses handed to you."

(And as an aside, as someone who does scour the internet for good-looking character art regardless of species, Dragonborn are definitely broader at both the shoulders and the waist than humans are. They may be "human shaped" in the sense of having a human body plan, but both skeletally and muscularly they differ in meaningful ways from humans.)

 

[QuentinGeorge]

It was fairly widely believed in medieval times that dog-headed people lived abroad, and the belief was less of "hideous monsters die" but "they can be converted to Christianity, right?" (And indeed, St. Christopher was believed to be such.)

 

[Crit]

Amongst this sea of halflings, gnomes, dwarves, Dragonborn and elves, I just wanna say that Tiefling is easily the least out-there of the obscure races, physically and socially. They're just regular humans with horns and tails, and you could bet that "realism" would put a bunch of half 'lings out there if their Internet presence is anything to go by. I think devil-people may be one of the oldest fantasy races, as old as Devils in general. With that said, half-human half-animals are also extremely old concepts predating modern interpretations of fantasy races, so in that sense these aren't any more obscure than the rest.

Any race with sufficient world building won't have any more problems that the others. I don't think that a Tabaxi would turn any more heads than an Elf in a world where people know those exist and have existed for much of history.

 

[Maxperson]

That sounds rather like special pleading to me. "Well it's not ACTUALLY the group asserting authority if the DM agrees to go along with it!" That's some pretty gorram weak "Ultimate Authority"/"Absolute Authority" if it can only be used when the DM chooses to go along with the group OR chooses to be a jerk.

It's not any such thing. He's not going along with their authority in any way. They asked if they could split off and he gave permission. Both were done tacitly, but at no point did the players have any authority over the DM or the game.

The DM can also use that authority in ways that aren't being a jerk. In about 90% of my campaigns, you cannot be a Drow. Their racial baggage is too disruptive to a campaign. If you ask, you are going to be told no.

If it actually is about comfort zones, people should stop referencing representation in fantasy fiction or appealing to tradition

Why not? Those things are part and parcel of why a lot of people are more comfortable with the core races. Familiarity breeds comfort.

and fantasy racism

There is no fantasy racism going on here.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

It's not any such thing. He's not going along with their authority in any way. They asked if they could split off and he gave permission. Both were done tacitly, but at no point did the players have any authority over the DM or the game.

The example given was not "they asked if they could split off and he gave permission." The example given was that the DM established what he intended to do, and the players straight-up no-saled it and went in a completely different direction. They didn't ask for anything. They simply did it and expected him to generate an adventure to fit. How is that not the DM bowing to group will?

The DM can also use that authority in ways that aren't being a jerk. In about 90% of my campaigns, you cannot be a Drow. Their racial baggage is too disruptive to a campaign. If you ask, you are going to be told no.

So it's literally not even possible to have an adult conversation with you about how we might find common ground on the subject?

Why not? Those things are part and parcel of why a lot of people are more comfortable with the core races. Familiarity breeds comfort.

Because "I don't approve of X due to it not appearing often enough in fiction" =/= "I don't approve of X because I find it uncomfortable." You have to actually defend why NO ONE has ONCE mentioned "comfort" with these things, instead only using stuff that might possibly be a proxy for it.

There is no fantasy racism going on here.

Uhhhh...what thread are you reading? People have repeatedly and explicitly talked about how a major problem of playing a race like Dragonborn is that they will be met with fantasy racism, potentially even treated as kill-on-sight purely because they have scales or horns or green skin, or that having different physiology must result in a completely alien mindset, or...

That's racism, in a fantastic setting. It is literally presuming that a being is violently dangerous because it has one phenotype rather than another.