Humans as default

[HeavenShallBurn]

From my first post

Usually I emphasize the closeness between humans and orcs. Humans are agressive, expansionist, war-like, and not particularly tolerant. They're smarter and more organized than orcs but much like them. In some settings this is the source of emnity, but in others humans and orcs are long-time allies with a similar culture and half-orcs are fairly common.

As I said before usually I emphasize how violent, intolerant, authoritarian, and expansionist humans are. They are much like orcs, they just tend to be smarter and more organized. In my longest running homebrew humans and orcs are allies with cultures that incorporate a lot of elements borrowed from each other and get along well. To the detriment of other races.

 

[drothgery]

If we look at real world examples, humans are not the strongest animal, not the weakest, not the fastest, not the slowest. We may be the smartest, but positing other sentient races who are dumber sounds boring, so we make them as smart as us.

We've also got excellent eyes for detail and color compared to most animals (which I've never seen anyone use as a point of differentiation in sci-fi), and good hands for toolmaking (which I have seen; Niven's fithp had relatively poor 'hands', as do the Folk).

 

[Nifft]

eyes for detail and color compared to most animals (which I've never seen anyone use as a point of differentiation in sci-fi)

Vernor Vinge, A Deepness in the Sky.

Go read it right after you read A Fire upon the Deep, also by Vernor Vinge, which you must go read right now.

Cheers, -- N

 

[pawsplay]

There's an interesting sci-fi series where humans, a backwater race, get drawn into a galaxy-wide conflict because of their value as warriors. Compared to other civilized races, humans are semi-sociopaths with an unnatural response to danger. Eg: alien startles an unexceptional looking human. The human grabs his arm. The alien sees this motion almost as a blur, and marvels at the human's swift, powerful grip, and only many hours realizes the human is not some sort of soldier or wildman.

In Tolkien, humans are the "young" race, brash, corruptible, proud, but perhaps less vain than elves and dwarves. They are Eo's chosen because of their love of life and industry, qualities despised by Morgoth's jealousy.

In Moon's Paksennarion books, humans are disorganized, uneducated, and lacking in magical might compared to other races. Their sole advantage seems to be a stubborn ability to reinvent themselves in the face of adversity. For instance, the disciplined gnomes despair of teaches humans formation tactics, but eventally teach down a dumbed down form and gain respect for human's unpredictable courage and inventiveness. The elder, fey-like races view humans with a fair amount of contempt, but fear their numbers and resilience.

In Howard and Lovecraft, humans are the natural race, a sort of vain and morally troubled hairless ape, who nonetheless draws our sympathies as kinfolk when confronted with true monsters.

 

[Aldarc]

Does it bug anyone else that the only description D&D ever seems to give of humans is they're "diverse"? This is not something inherent to 4e (it goes back to 1e, but at least Gary Gygax made it seem like it had a reason).

Now, I know humans are the default race for most players. But i'm sort of dismayed by the idea of human abilities all being along the lines of (pick one extra this, and get a smaller bonus to this, but you can choose it yourself). Now, I realize in 2e humans basically got nothing but the ability to be any class (which was pretty powerful in and of itself in the system) and in 1e the demi-human races WERE classes.

But it seems to me the design choice comes from "well, we're humans, so they can be anything" and not from looking at humans as a general whole the way we look at Warforged or halflings. This is fine, I think, if you wish to have a campaign world where humans are the predominant race. I know this was Gary Gygax's intent with 1e; it's a human world, and there are a few members of other races.

But with 3e and 4e, humans feel much more like one race out of many, and in that case, i don't think it's versatility that sets them apart in the world at large. If I had to pick a defining trait to pin on humans, I'd say it's cunning, but that's unimportant.

I guess what I'm asking is does this bother anyone else? Do you like the humans as the default baseline from which the other races differ, or would you prefer to see humans with the same construction as other races, +2 bonuses to two fixed stats, bonuses to specific skills, and a unique racial power all their own?

I am so glad you brought this up, as this is the very issue I am dealing with in a campaign world that I am brewing. I want to turn the human "diversity" element around on its head such that humans simply lack any real niche, and because of that, they are the ones who will be doomed to disappear and fade away in the fantasy world. They are not the dominant race, but a dying minority who talk of the "diversity" element as a coping mechanism of their inferiority complex. Humans will eventually be replaced by other demihumans in the grand scheme of things. So as of now, I think I will make humans conservative backwater semi-nomadic shepherds and farmers.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Other direction: I think it's arrogant to assume that another creature cannot have the range of possibilities that a human can without a good explanation.

But we're not making assumptions about real beings. Dwarves, elves etc are whatever we want them to be. We made them. And it seems we like our fantasy races to exemplify a small subset of human traits.

I think we view ourselves as diverse and adaptable because we have nothing to compare ourselves to.

Yeah, in the real world there are no other sentient beings than humans so all we can do is compare ourselves to animals.

It's interesting to note that if we contrast ourselves with one of our closest relatives, Ed Greenwood the pygmy chimp, then the outstanding feature of humans is that we're really, really uptight about sex.

 

[Afrodyte]

It's interesting to note that if we contrast ourselves with one of our closest relatives, Ed Greenwood the pygmy chimp, then the outstanding feature of humans is that we're really, really uptight about sex.

I'd say obsessed with rather than uptight.

 

[Illadar]

Pawsplay, whats that scifi series featuring humans as warriors called?

 

[SWBaxter]

It's interesting to note that if we contrast ourselves with one of our closest relatives, Ed Greenwood the pygmy chimp, then the outstanding feature of humans is that we're really, really uptight about sex.

That's a behavioural difference, and far from the only one so it's hard to consider it "the outstanding feature." Biologically, the major difference between us and our closest primate relatives is brain size, both in overall terms and when considering the ratio of the different parts of the brain to one another. Presumably, other hominids - either real ones like neanderthals or fantasy species such as dwarves and elves - would be similar.

However, that way lies evolutionary discussions, and those have little to do with most D&D worlds because D&D worlds tend to be definitively creationist - there's a time in the not-too-distant past where the gods magicked the various sentient species into existence. As such, humanoid attributes are pretty much what the gods gave 'em. You could maybe reverse-engineer an interesting pantheon from strict "racial*" game attributes and roles and then applying them to the creator deities, though I think it'd look pretty different from the traditional D&D gods.

* I really dislike the use of "race" to describe the different D&D hominids available to PCs. Kinda wish 4e had switched to "kindred" or "species" or whatever. Oh well.

 

[hong]

I don't see anything wrong with 4E humans being diverse. It's a change from 3E humans, who were de best.


PLEASE READ THIS IN THE CORRECT ACCENT THAadvanceNKS