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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Flying Toaster" data-source="post: 9723712" data-attributes="member: 7052563">Off-topic, but this has always made me wonder “special compared to what, exactly?”.  Fantasy races and alien extraterrestrials were invented by pulp writers and Appendix N authors trying (and arguably failing) to imagine a non-human perspective which (as far as we know...<img class="smilie smilie--emoji" alt="👽" src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f47d.png" title="Alien    :alien:" data-shortname=":alien:" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" />) does not exist.  When Gygax was questioned on this point he purportedly explained that he favored human characters for RPG purposes because the human players would not be able to really imagine being dwarves or elves or whatever, but this always seemed like faulty logic to me.  Those beings only exist because we collectively imagine them, and sometimes argue about what they should “really” be like.  Furthermore, his players were 20th century American men who probably struggled to imagine being medieval knights or clergy too, let alone fictional vocations like wizard, but that was evidently not a problem.  And despite occasional Gygax editorials in Dragon on the topic of “role play vs. roll play”, D&D developed from wargaming and was initially about Conan clones going tomb raiding, not about trying to explore the deep implications of living in a world where dragons and magic are real.I have long wondered if Gygaxian “human supremacy” was influenced by the tastes of pulp figures like Astounding Science Fiction editor John W. Campbell, who preferred alien-free science fiction and would not accept story submissions unless the aliens were weak and primitive.  Campbell eventually became unpopular with his own authors after a series of “just asking questions” devil’s advocate editorials which I cannot describe without breaking the “no politics” rule, but many EN World posters probably know about this already and anyone else can look it up for themselves.It is interesting to see just how far the pendulum has swung in RPG fandom since the 70’s, with some grognards and OSR fans complaining about D&D 5E parties full of half-demon, half-dragon, three-quarter-badger multi-class alchemist/ninjas, and fantasy cities that resemble the Mos Eisley cantina scene from Star Wars.  And then players who favor that style of RPG play respond by asking “Why would I want to play a regular human in a fantasy or science fiction game?  I do that already in real life!”</blockquote>

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