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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Abe.ebA" data-source="post: 3004796" data-attributes="member: 32545">The problem with non-human intelligent species is that we don't know any.There are basically two options:1) All of the things that we equate with being human that aren't purely based on our biology are simply precursors and/or side-effects of developing the capability for sentience or,2) Intelligence can develop entirely independently of things we consider integral to it like emotions, morality, empathy, curiosity, self-control, etc.If it's option 1 then any non-human species is going to operate along paths which are at least recognizable to humanity.  Their goals and motivations may be completely different or based on a wildly divergent biology, culture, or environment but given knowledge of those things we'll be able to grasp what a given non-human intelligence is doing and why.  If their biology etc. are similar we'll probably even be able to liken them to specific humans, albeit possibly ones with mental disorders.If it's option 2 then we may as well not even bother.  It's been shown numerous times in scientific studies that humans are, by and large, incapable of imagining anything that's outside of their experience.  Even if trying to imagine something truly alien we just take aspects of things we find distasteful or strange and slap them together (take Cthulhu: he's supposed to be unimaginably alien but is basically a scaly, winged man with a squid for a head).  Confronted by something truly outside our range of experience we humans have great difficulty dealing with it.  I seriously doubt that we would even be able to communicate with a species that shared no points of similarity with us much less ever understand their thought process.Dwarves, elves, halflings, draconians, saurians, anthropomorphicised objects and animals, and every other non-human race that appears in 99% of games, movies, and novels are just humans with a difference.  You take a few aspects that you want to highlight and slap them onto a human template to make a character.  People can identify with it because it is, fundamentally, human.  Any alien species which is presented as intelligent but understandable is always going to be basically human because we're the only intelligent species we know anything about.The only exceptions to the basically-human alien syndrome I can think of are a few of the Lovecraft species and a couple of exampels from sci-fi (like the badguys from Ender's Game).  They stayed alien because their authors explicitly state, "We can't understand them.  No matter how we try, we can't really even communicate meaningfully with them because they're just too alien."So yeah, you can have a no-human setting in an RPG campaign.  Elves, dwarves, etc. are all just slightly weird humans anyway and they're all being played by real humans who are going to give them human characteristics and personalities anyway.  But like someone else said, a setting with nothing but truly alien intelligences would make for incomprehensible viewing.</blockquote>

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