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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 8285336" data-attributes="member: 7006">Seems to me that nobody really just wants to admit the truth of the matter... that ALL races / creatures / monsters we D&D players are playing are just "humans in masks" (as the meme goes.)Because other intelligent races besides humans don't actually exist... none of us have any idea what kind of intelligence a fictional version would have.  All we know is what we know of ourselves.  So we have no choice but to choose specific HUMAN emotions / traits / knowledges and GIVE them to all of these fantasy creatures.  Which is why we end up stereotyping all these creatures... in order to give us SOMETHING to play that seems "alien" enough to be its own thing by having ALL of them act in this way (I.E. some humans are logical, so we'll make ALL Vulcans logical so that they are "different" than the humans).But when we do that... all we are really doing is still playing a human trait.  We are just playing other humans with the "mask" of a dwarf, or an elf, or an orc, or a Vulcan, or a treant."Treants in my world talk really slow and spend exceedingly long periods of time making decisions."Yeah?  Well, there are plenty of human beings who do that too."But my treants take much, MUCH longer to do those things than any normal human being."Doesn't matter.  Even if you are going comically over-the-top... you are still just playing human emotions and traits.  Your treants are just exaggerated humans, because YOU are a human, and thus anything you try to do is colored by only knowing what you know as a human.So what does that mean?  It means that every single thing in this game (and indeed in any RPG) is influenced by human emotion and human morality because they are invented and played by humans.  And thus it is impossible to REMOVE the humanity from anything in the game.  And so... any claims of "But X isn't human!" (and thus trying to remove any sort of human morality from them and use them as something else... cannon-fodder or whatever) is patently false.As a result... like it or not, there are going to be people who rightly see the humanity underneath every single creature in this game and are going to notice just what parts of humanity get attributed to them and how the supposed "good guys" in the game are meant to react to them.  And when people are able to make one-on-one comparisons between actual humans and the "human in masks" that are various types of D&D creatures... you can guarantee they're going to comment on it.</blockquote>

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