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Message: <blockquote data-quote="MonkeyDragon" data-source="post: 3004630" data-attributes="member: 23929">I think that your friend has ALMOST hit the nail on the head...but the thing he's missing is a big one.One of the big things about creating a protagonist in a book/movie/play/whathaveyou is that the protagonist isn't just a "good guy."  The protagonist is the person who the audiance sympathises with and identifies with.  You want the protagonist to succeed.  You can put yourself in his shoes and experience the world through him.  You root for him.Some things that impede a character from being a good protagonist are the inability to root for the person and the inability to identify with the person.  The evil raping murdering baby eating guy can't be the protagonist.  You can't root for that guy.  You also can't identify with him, because no one wants to find a mirror of themselves in such a person.If the protagonist is too alien, you're not going to be able to connect to him.  So it's true that if there's not a human element, you're stuck without a way into the story.I think your buddy's mistake is that he assumes that the human element has to BE human.  It doesn't.  As long as the characters are PEOPLE, we have our window into the story.  The best example I can think of right now is LOTR (I'm talking about the movie in this instance).  Sure, there are humans.  But if you look at it, the humans are as exotic and unusual as the elves.  The protagonist is a hobbit, and so we look at the world from a hobbit's point of view.  Or, as far as The Dark Crystal goes, it's not that the gelflings are human or human-equivalent, its that they're people.  Care bears are people. Even the meerkats in Meerkat are turned into people with the narration.So yes, I would play in a non-human setting and it'd be perfectly fine.And man, this turned out to be much longer than I thought it'd be.  Must be all my repressed posting from when my computer died.Edit:  In the time it took me to write this, several other people also made the points I wanted to make AND used the hobbit example.  Thus: I agree!</blockquote>

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