D&D as humanocetric ... or not?

[Tonguez]

For example, Humans have no racial language called out. There is no "Humanish" as there is Dwarvish, Elvish, Gnomish, ect. But, they speak "The Common Tongue" which every single race gets, and a bonus language. This implies that the "Human Tongue" is Common, and that the entire world speaks it.

That’s not how Common languages work though and English is a great example. Modern English is a pidgin that’s developed when old English was dominated by Norman French.

similarly Humans might have been dominated by Elf’s to create a new pidgin language which all humans were forced to speak speak and others pick up as a trade language.

Or, look to the Gods. In most settings, there are no "Human Gods". There are the gods of a thing, like "The God of War" or "The God of the Sun" and then there are the Racial gods, like "The Dwarven God of War" or "The Elvish God of the Sun, Moon, and Stars" And again, this implies that the dieties presented as "The Gods" are actually "The Human Gods"

Thinking of all gods as ‘human’ rather than gods is a bit contrived and if it is protrayed that way in a game thats just lazying DMing really and not something Ive ever really seen.
In the Forgotten Realm I can think of Gond the Lord of All Smiths, who manifests as a gnome and isnt Chauntea a halfling?

So, I find, that unless you take incredibly special interest and attention to the world, every world you run is Humanocentric, because the things the game world depict as the "default" or "common" versions are the human versions.
So, I find, that unless you take incredibly special interest and attention to the world, every world you run is Humanocentric, because the things the game world depict as the "default" or "common" versions are the human versions.

Humans are the most adaptable Race so there’s ic reason why they why they are so common across the planet as well as the ooc reason of the players and game writers being most familiar with a human base. I’ve got no issue with that being a base standard, but the whole point of races is to allow for fantastic variation and those are best judged against a human baseline.

 

[Azzy]

Pull something = turning my game into a soap opera. We explore dungeons, not characters. I expect characters not to have backstories. A characters' story is what happens in the game, not before it.

BTW, character goals are fine (invent the first item capable of ending the universe, taming a dragon, etc.), but no backstories.

blink

Well, that's one way to play D&D.

 

[WayOfTheFourElements]

blink

Well, that's one way to play D&D.

Exactly, if I want to write a fantasy novel, I write a novel. I've written a few. One isn't too horrible. But when I want to play a game about adventuring, I want to play a game about adventuring. I don't really enjoy mixing the two. They're separate activities in my mind.

 

[Quartz]

I've mentioned this in another thread, but there was a series of articles in Dragon about building a world. One of the tips it gave was that whenever you create or define something significant - like having a race - in your world you create an associated secret. With regard to non-human races that means that if you don't know the secret you don't get to play the race. Of course, you could work with the player to generate the secret.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I voted any, though it's technically a rather large curated list that's composed of the official options, homebrew, and some 3rd party material that I've reviewed and often tweaked to be in line with my own sensibilities.

However, in the campaign I'm running for my half newbie group (two long time gamers and their SOs who have never played before) I limited it to all of the official book races minus the ones from Ravnica. I wanted to leave options open for my experienced guys, but didn't want to overwhelm their SOs. Ultimately, everyone played a PHB race, although only one of them is human.

In my other newbie game (all of them new to 5e, although some of them had played TTRPGs before) I went with everything, although they also stuck to the PHB, with only one human in the group. One of them has asked me about offerings on my wiki. While we were having a similar discussion in this group, one of them said something to the effect of, "Why would I want to play a human in a fantasy game? I'm a human in real life."

As for my experienced group, they more often than not play the weirder offerings. While they don't hate the traditional races, after decades of play they've grown a bit bored with them and prefer something exotic that they've never played before. In the last campaign that I ran for this group two of the more out there choices were a living doll that had a corpse inside it, and a giant origami mantis. It was a new offering that I call the Unwritten which played significantly into the story of the campaign, whereby people who had been erased from existence could sometimes claw their way back to reality, replacing their lost forms with bodies cobbled together from discarded ideas. It lead to some really interesting characters who regularly questioned who they were and whether they had a place in the world. And in fact the two characters went in two completely different directions with the answer to that question.

As for myself, I'm fine with whatever. I've played in a human only campaign (2e) and it was fun. Given the choice, however, I prefer having options. The weirder the better. I'm currently playing a character in my friend's campaign who was a WW1 soldier killed on the battlefield and brought back by mad science as a freak (a hirsute living skeleton). I'm having a lot of fun with that character.

 

[The Mirrorball Man]

I honestly don’t understand the "every game is Rifts" perspective. In my opinion, restricting the available options is the only way to properly set a tone, and if a DM does not want to have Gungans in their Lankhmar campaign, that’s their call and there’s nothing wrong with it.

 

[jmartkdr2]

I honestly don’t understand the "every game is Rifts" perspective. In my opinion, restricting the available options is the only way to properly set a tone, and if a DM does not want to have Gungans in their Lankhmar campaign, that’s their call and there’s nothing wrong with it.

If you don't have a tone in mind before the characters are picked, you can't restrict for tone.

And with 5e at least, there's really not much reason to restrict for balance unless it's homebrew. Even 3rd Party is usually fine there because 5e is robust. So, unless I have already picked a tone/theme and made that part of my player recruitment pitch, the answer is "whatever you want, subject to balancing the mechanics of non-official stuff."

Personally, in practice I see what people want to play and then figure out what the setting is, so it can definitely incorporate what the players want to play. If they have fun, I have fun. I love worldbuilding for its own sake, but find that big pre-built worlds with all the details worked out tend to be detrimental to emergent play, and I worldbuild enough that I can now do it on the fly.

 

[Fanaelialae]

I honestly don’t understand the "every game is Rifts" perspective. In my opinion, restricting the available options is the only way to properly set a tone, and if a DM does not want to have Gungans in their Lankhmar campaign, that’s their call and there’s nothing wrong with it.

You can design a campaign to be inclusive of diverse races. Not every setting needs to be FR or the like.

When I build to allow a large selection of races, I tend to go the route of some variant of post apocalyptic fantasy. Smaller communities that have been forced to band together for the sake of shared survival. Who cares if the guy next door is an ogre as long as he's friendly. There are much worse things out there!

In one of my current campaigns, a theocratic empire made war on the monsters and "barbaric" humanoids, and banished them to a hostile chain of islands. They're forced to work together for shared survival because the outside world is dangerous.

 

[Sepulchrave II]

Humanocentrist here.

I prefer elves and dwarves and gnomes as faerie NPCs in the background, if at all. I suppose half-elves are acceptable under some circumstances.

I don't hold with any newfangled races.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

A DM is not a therapist. If you role play to heal some psychological wound(s), please, go see a therapist asap. You will hurt yourself more than you will heal. Yes, you might forget your problems a wee bit the time you're playing but it won't help you to heal in the long run.

DM in an RPG is for entertainement only. Anything else is plain nonsense. You're there to have fun and not to have a free therapy. Role Playing Therapy are not related to RPG at all. They might look similar from the outside but they're not related. Using RPG as a therapy is simply a no go. A DM is not a therapist.

What are you even talking about?