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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Neonchameleon" data-source="post: 9024831" data-attributes="member: 87792">The answer to that is that almost all D&D species are so close to humans that I think that this doesn't apply. They are almost all bipedal, ~ 50% female, child raising, social creatures. They are all almost without exception based on the same broad post-sapience evolutionary strategy. So let's imagine some plausible ones that aren't."Sapient octopods". Real world octopus intelligence is basically capped in usefulness. They are immensely clever as a species, but they also reproduce through plankton and do not raise their young. This means that there is neither a need nor a drive for them to develop a language, which means that every octopus needs to work everything out from scratch and there's a limit to how far they can get. Or how far it's even worth getting. But what if there wasn't. What if there was some sort of mad magician who decided to give octopuses the gift of language and put on magical classes for them in a safe zone. So you now have an entire species with, for practical purposes, both intelligence and no familial bonds. And a weird non-bipedal invertibrate physiology unlike the minor differences between ogres, goblins, and genasi."Giant clothed mole rats". The naked mole rat is one of the very few eusocial mammals; that is a mammal where there is one reproductive female in the entire colony, maybe three males allowed to mate with them, and the entire rest of the colony is never going to have offspring so family bonds are weird as are gender politics. (This, on a tangent, is how Warhammer Skaven work). Family ties and clan bonds become different. And with it so do interactions. Warforged. Created for a purpose.But elves, dwarves, and orcs have never been that alien. They've always been flanderised aspects of humans.</blockquote>

Verification