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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lonely Tylenol" data-source="post: 3681090" data-attributes="member: 18549">I think that the key to successfully roleplaying a nonhuman character in a compelling, alien way, is to keep a short list of three or four sentences that describe the basic assumptions that the being filters all interaction through.  For a dwarf, these might amount to:1. There is nothing new.  Everything has been seen before, and so tradition holds the answers to all questions.2. Nothing is worth doing if it does not turn a profit, with the exception of religious observances.3. Other races are inherently unreliable.  Only dwarves can be counted on, especially in the face of temptation.These are just off the top of my head, and they're pretty typical.  But if you keep them written on a card in front of you, and refer to them often when making decisions, they can help to colour your actions in a way that might help to reduce the "humans in funny clothes" problem.  It's important to remember, as well, that these aren't just cultural opinions.  All dwarves tend toward this sort of behaviour, for the same reasons that humans tend toward the sort of behaviour that humans tend toward, for example: accumulating possessions and displaying them in a public manner, congregating in groups for no reason other than simply to talk to one another, occupying themselves with diversions like chess or cards that allow them to practice pattern-recognition, occupying themselves with diversions like sports that allow them to practice physical activities, etc.I think the biggest barrier to successfully roleplaying a non-human is that players and DMs forget what it is that colours a thought process to make it different.  Having a simple set of reminders that you consider when decisions are made helps to push you down a certain track of behaviour.On the other hand, the reason why humans have the sort of logic and reason they do is because it succeeds in helping them to survive.  Given that, we should expect that most other sentient thought processes will be more or less like human ones.  I expect that outsiders, who deal with very different environments (or even different physics) would be different, but most critters from the regular world probably think pretty much in a similar fashion.  So the differences are likely to be subtle.  Dopplegangers and elves are capable of understanding each other.</blockquote>

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