Fantasy Races and Originality

[gamecat]

...they are relics of a former, more enlightened age. They remember the old songs and battles that the younger races have forgotten. Sort of like people that still play 1st Edition DnD...

I always imagined Diaglo as a drunken georgian proclaiming his hat of d02.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

Me too.


I was reading a now-defunct d20 setting that bragged it had "no elves".

You are probably thinking of Talislanta, and it is far from defunct. Though it was fairly unique in that it had "no humans", either - at least, no race that really looked human.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

It's pretty damned Eurocentric to say that elves, dwarves, gnomes, and the like are just part of "human mythology". Hell, it's northern-Eurocentric to say so - there are no such creatures in Greek mythology. A setting which treated Greek mythological creatures the way D&D treats Germanic mythological creatures would have humans, satyrs, centaurs, dryads, et cetera as zero-LA options, perhaps.

(I say this despite the fact that humans are the heroes (or at least protagonists) of all Greek mythological tales that don't revolve around outright gods; northern European mythology didn't feature nonhuman adventurers as much as D&D does either.)

There's a hell of a lot more to human mythology than just elves and dwarves even if you don't look outside Europe.

As far as the original topic is concerned, the main problem with the traditional D&D races is just that - they're traditional. Like most traditions they can be rich and strike a deep chord in our imaginations, but again like most traditions they rarely do. Your average D&D gamer has played dozens if not hundreds of sessions with the same old tired Tolkienesque takes on the races, so it doesn't surprise me that we look for completely new (if often unimaginative) races to play rather than try to reinvent the same old ones that we've become burnt out on.

That said, when creative minds constrain themselves to a specific task they can succeed at it in unexpected ways - I would have sworn up and down that nothing Wizards of the Coast could put out would make me interested in elves, gnomes, and halflings, but Eberron proved me wrong. I still don't necessarily feel jazzed by everything the setting does with the races - for instance, dwarves are fairly bland - but it's still vastly more interesting to me than the standard tropes.

(The only other problem I have with Eberron's take on the standard races is that those members a given race who don't belong to one of the original cultures or to a dragonmarked house don't really have even their traditional associations. If you're an elf whose family has lived in Sharn for centuries, but you're not Aereni or Valenar and you're not in a dragonmarked house, what are you other than a human in drag? They exist - there are halfling crime organisations, though even they have ties to House Jorasco - but they don't have a hook in and of themselves. That's one thing I'd like to see in the future: more detail on how the nonhuman races live in the human-dominated lands when they're not just transplanted enclaves from other nations.)

I'm open to new races when they've got something original to offer. For instance, while I may never use them, I admire the design of the goliath race in Races of Stone because they have an interesting tribal culture of competitive cooperation and fun mechanical traits like their Powerful Build and skin markings. They offer something to hook the imagination whether you're focused on personality or abilities.

 

[fusangite]

It's pretty damned Eurocentric to say that elves, dwarves, gnomes, and the like are just part of "human mythology". Hell, it's northern-Eurocentric to say so

Sure you can say that of the words themselves. But the general elf archetype appears in many many mythologies; there are the Japanese fox people and tengu, the Persian peris, Huron little turtle people, etc. You may not get all the same "elf" attributes concentrated in one place but you don't even get that in Northern Europe, with the Irish Daanan and Saxon Alfs pretty far apart.

- there are no such creatures in Greek mythology. A setting which treated Greek mythological creatures the way D&D treats Germanic mythological creatures would have humans, satyrs, centaurs, dryads, et cetera as zero-LA options, perhaps.

That's a good point.

 

[Psion]

I find that on the issue of fantasy races, D&D fans seem to be particularly set in their ways. New races are greeted with hostility and suspicion among a seemingly large body of the D&D crowd.

Which is a shame, I think. There are lots of neat concepts to explore.

 

[Desdichado]

If people want to be original with "race," why not start by thinking about race in a non-genetic, non-essentialist way? Clearly, D&D biology isn't based on the Mendel-Darwin synthesis we use to explain and describe ideas like race in the world today; and yet, we act like it is; we expect that when races in D&D intermarry, their offspring will be what a modern geneticist would predict. We expect that someone's race cannot change during the course of their lifetime because you can't change your own DNA.

It seems to me that D&D ends up as an uncomfortable hybrid of sci-fi and mythology in terms of how it treats races. You've advocated going full-bore mythological non-scientific, but an interesting case could be made for going the other way (which is where I'm currently leaning). Getting rid of the magicallity (maybe simply magic would be right word here?) of the races and exploring themes like: what would it have been like to have two races of "humans" vying for dominance of the planet, ala the coexistence of Homo sapiens and Homo neanderthalis in Europe? Or, what if humans had been bred by some other race in the same manner that we have bred dogs, cats, horses, cattle, etc. into fairly divergent forms to fulfill specific roles? You can be a bit more exacting about the genetics and heredity and what it means.

Either way it's the kinda "half-assedness" of the approach to races that is the problem, but both are interesting ways to get around it.

And like Wombat and many others have said, an all-human campaign is tons of fun. Heck, many of the pillars of the genre on which D&D were based are settings that are pretty much human-only. I'd have no problem playing in a Hyborian or Newhonian setting, for instance.

 

[DMH]

It seems to me that D&D ends up as an uncomfortable hybrid of sci-fi and mythology in terms of how it treats races.

I found a quote on Monte Cook's board that sums this up nicely IMO:

Personally I think the vast majority of Prestige Classes combined with the veritable zoo of monsterous and half-monsterous PC races makes D&D into a heinously silly amalgam of a modern fantasy comic book and Pokemon on acid.

-Jubilex

 

[Desdichado]

Or that.

Yeah, I think he's gotta point.

 

[Psion]

I found a quote on Monte Cook's board that sums this up nicely IMO:

Personally I think the vast majority of Prestige Classes combined with the veritable zoo of monsterous and half-monsterous PC races makes D&D into a heinously silly amalgam of a modern fantasy comic book and Pokemon on acid.

-Jubilex

That's about like saying "With all the restraunts out there, and all the things we could get to drink, dinner is going to be real mixed up!"

You don't need to use it all at once. It's all about finding a mix that works for you, to make this campaign different from the last one, or the one being run down the road.

 

[BiggusGeekus]

You are probably thinking of Talislanta,

No, I'm not. I'm thinking of Diomin.