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<blockquote data-quote="Dausuul" data-source="post: 5893458" data-attributes="member: 58197"><p>As a way to address the divide between lovers and haters of dragonborn, this seems a pretty good solution.</p><p></p><p><mild tangential rant>It does touch on a longstanding gripe of mine, however, which is D&D's eternal assumption that Everything Has Elves And Dwarves, and Almost Everything Has Halflings. I mean, if you look at the broader range of fantasy fiction and classify the protagonists, what you come up with is something like this:</p><p></p><p><strong>Common Races:</strong> Humans.</p><p><strong>Uncommon Races:</strong> Part-humans, cursed humans, transformed humans, superior humans.</p><p><strong>Rare Races:</strong> Everything else.</p><p></p><p>Slim, pretty, bow-shooting elves and stout, gruff, axe-swinging dwarves are cribbed directly from Tolkien and show up almost nowhere else, except in the works of people who are imitating either Tolkien or D&D or both *cough*Eragon*cough*. Protagonists in other works are overwhelmingly human. Those that aren't human are usually human-plus, being either a hybrid of human and something else (half-faerie, half-demon, half-god), or a human subjected to some kind of transformation or enchantment (vampire, werewolf), or a Human Who Is Better Than You Boring Regular Humans (anyone with hereditary special powers).</p><p></p><p>Protagonists who were never human at all are quite unusual and tend to be one-offs. In all of fantasy, there is to my knowledge only one Melnibonean protagonist. I think you'd find more talking animal protagonists than elves or dwarves.</p><p></p><p>I don't know that there is much to be done about this. For better or worse, we seem to be stuck with elves and dwarves as part of the baseline in D&D, for the same reason we're stuck with Vancian wizards and +1 swords: They've been part of the game forever. But it would be nice to get at least a nod to the idea that a campaign without them is not a crazy radical thing.</mild tangential rant></p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Dausuul, post: 5893458, member: 58197"] As a way to address the divide between lovers and haters of dragonborn, this seems a pretty good solution. <mild tangential rant>It does touch on a longstanding gripe of mine, however, which is D&D's eternal assumption that Everything Has Elves And Dwarves, and Almost Everything Has Halflings. I mean, if you look at the broader range of fantasy fiction and classify the protagonists, what you come up with is something like this: [B]Common Races:[/B] Humans. [B]Uncommon Races:[/B] Part-humans, cursed humans, transformed humans, superior humans. [B]Rare Races:[/B] Everything else. Slim, pretty, bow-shooting elves and stout, gruff, axe-swinging dwarves are cribbed directly from Tolkien and show up almost nowhere else, except in the works of people who are imitating either Tolkien or D&D or both *cough*Eragon*cough*. Protagonists in other works are overwhelmingly human. Those that aren't human are usually human-plus, being either a hybrid of human and something else (half-faerie, half-demon, half-god), or a human subjected to some kind of transformation or enchantment (vampire, werewolf), or a Human Who Is Better Than You Boring Regular Humans (anyone with hereditary special powers). Protagonists who were never human at all are quite unusual and tend to be one-offs. In all of fantasy, there is to my knowledge only one Melnibonean protagonist. I think you'd find more talking animal protagonists than elves or dwarves. I don't know that there is much to be done about this. For better or worse, we seem to be stuck with elves and dwarves as part of the baseline in D&D, for the same reason we're stuck with Vancian wizards and +1 swords: They've been part of the game forever. But it would be nice to get at least a nod to the idea that a campaign without them is not a crazy radical thing.</mild tangential rant> [/QUOTE]
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