Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6795618" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Alright. Having heard your request to read further, I have read the entire thing. I'll start, though, by giving a summary of the two paragraphs you're saying we can ignore. Paragraph 1 is, more or less, "players who want to play non-humans are powergamers, don't encourage them." Which we know to not be a generally true statement today. And paragraph 2 is, more or less, "I wrote AD&D to be humanocentric." Which, sure, that could quite easily be a factually true statement, but it's no longer relevant because, at least on the subject of dragonborn and tieflings, we're fundamentally not talking about that game--so, again, not applicable. I agree with your assessment of those paragraphs.Now let's look at the next few paragraphs.P3&4: The first half is a non-sequitur about the difficulty of making games with *no* humans. But showing that humans should be "featured" does not show they should be central and exclusive. He then argues that the DMs' jobs are so fantastically difficult that they'd need to be be Renaissance-level geniuses if we ask for more than humans, which is hyperbole of the worst sort. We're now surrounded by settings (whether tabletop or videogame) which feature distinctly non-human races in a believable fashion. That you can cite the Mos Eisley cantina at all--for or against--proves it's possible, even for a newbie director. Hell, Star Trek had a staff of people whose specific job was to come up with language symbols, and to flesh out things like the Klingon culture. So I think we can declare these, instead of irrelevant, factually disproven.P5: First sentence non-starter; not great. Lotta unfounded assumptions thrown around, like the idea that being non-human equates to being hunted by adventurers. And leading questions, asked not because the writer has established the centrality and exclusivity of humankind, but because he wishes to establish it. So the argument has become circular, mostly by confusing "humans should be present" with "humans should be the end-all, be-all." Particularly when stuff like "the natural bent of dragons is certainly for their own kind - if not absolute solitude" is only a rule Gygax made up to keep dragons out of the limelight (in other words, to make humanocentrism, and thus inappropriate to use as justification for it)!P6: Well of course Gygax is going to assume that it's only unintelligent players that are going to like playing monsters more than once. I mean, how could any TRULY intelligent person ENJOY that??? Moving past the (again) incredibly presumptuous rhetoric, and a return of the "people want non-humans for power alone" stuff we've already rejected, all we're left with is...um...actually, I don't think there is anything left. "Most smart players won't want to do this at all, if you show them how badwrong it is. Maybe some will still want to try it, but experiencing it will convince them of its badwrongness. Anyone who doesn't realize how badwrong it is, must be too stupid to succeed, and will thus remove the problem of their own accord." I don't think I need to say why I'm not interested in the "advice" in this paragraph.P6: Eugh, those first two sentences. "I've told you why it's badwrongfun, so now you know why I didn't try to help you have any badwrongfun." The rest is pretty generic, meaningless platitudes: "players have to live with the consequences of their choices," "be good to yourself and your players," "everyone benefits from good judgment and creative thinking." Not really what I'd consider profound advice.However, on thinking back over what was said here, I noticed three interesting sentences (ironically, both in the paragraphs we had agreed to reject). I hadn't seen two of them previously, because I only read the first paragraph. They are (emphasis mine):"On occasion one player or another will evidence a strong desire to operate as a monster, conceiving a playable character as a strong demon, a devil, a dragon, or one of the most powerful sort of undead creatures.""ADVANCED D&D is unquestionably "humanocentric", with demi-humans, semi-humans, and humanoids in various orbits around the sun of humanity.""While there might well be some near or part humans with the group so doing, it is certain that the leaders will be human."I don't buy the "humans always lead, humans are the center around which everything spins" idea. They certainly can be, but they don't have to be. But notice that, in the first sentence, Gygax appears to be talking about extremely powerful monsters: fully-grown dragons, "strong demons," vampire ancients, etc. That's a pretty different sort of thing from simply being non-human! Now, I don't know the definitions of "demi-human," "semi-human," or "humanoid" in this case, and as I understand it they might have been almost terms of art for Gygax (such that a poster, some time back, argued that gnomes were "humanoidish" but not "humanoids"...). But I feel like any reasonable definition of those terms should include dragonborn in one of them. Dragonborn are certainly nothing near the kind of being that a "strong demon, a devil, a dragon, or one of the most powerful sort of undead" is!So...I kind of wonder if the entire thing is unrelated, even by the standards Gygax is using. We're not even talking about making worlds where humans aren't the "sun" that the other races "orbit" (a turn of phrase that I don't quite care for, myself). We're just talking about a planet slightly more different than the ones that came before--maybe a Roche world! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue    :P"  data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" /> --certainly not a new star.It's not even a single axis.</blockquote>

Verification