D&D 5E Humans Only

[ccs]

Sure. I already play Human characters alot. And that's without any sort of restriction. So what's doing it one more time?

 

[Don Durito]

Why would that be wasted effort? Surely you have NPCs from this culture!

In the end no. The game was after all based on the Silk road, and there were so many other actual historical cultures that I wanted to give a place to that it never felt important enough to really deal with them, and over time they were quietly forgotten.

And those non-humans that did feature tended to be ones the PCs had a connection to first.

Edit: it would of course be better when making non-human available to weave them into the setting so they are essential to the setting as a whole. The issue with this is that D&D now has so many different races that this feels limiting. (That and I find ancient elven empires and the like cliched and dull).

 

[Flamestrike]

Just curious: if you were offered a seat at a D&D campaign table, but there was a "humans only" rule for PCs, would you play. Assume all other things being equal -- it's a GM you know and trust, no other major limitations are presented, and it is going to otherwise be a "typical" D&D campaign of the sort you prefer.

Yeah sure, if there are valid story reasons (it's an earth like world without other races etc).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Both of these concerns strike me both ridiculous and a little insulting.

Calling my concerns ridiculous is a little insulting as a matter of cold fact, so maybe don't ask question you don't want answered, and then insult people for the answers you asked for? Don't ask for people's lived experience and then take a dump on it, eh? Also claiming my experiences are "insulting" to some unnamed, anonymous person is some pretty next-level stuff lol.

Are you like, insulted that I wouldn't play in your campaign or something? Surely you wouldn't want me to? There's not much worse than a player who really doesn't want to be there.

Why should they play something else? While I prefer a few other systems (e.g. Tiny Dungeon, Savage Worlds, Barbarians of Lemuria, and, occasionally Rolemaster) to D&D, some people don't want to learn and/or purchase other systems. I know other people that have similar experiences and, as a result, D&D becomes the compromise system for fantasy. However some of those same players not wanting to purchase and/or learn a new system (other than D&D) are fine with customizing the campaign by limiting options. Plus, D&D has a long history of house ruling and campaign customization to tailor the experience.

????

Where did I say "should"? This seems like it's based on you reading words that aren't there. I'm talking about my own preferences.

38 years and multiple all human campaigns later and I've never once seen this. This comment is pretty off base I think.

You say that, but I've seen it happen, multiple times, with human-only campaigns people are suggesting, IRL and on the internet. And the fact that you and Reynard seem so outraged and keen to dismiss it outright, even though it's my lived experience makes me feel like I might have struck a nerve, rather than being "off-base".

To be clear, I don't mean "that's what ur doing u racists!" or something, I mean "I guess you are planning on a single-ethnicity group of PCs from a single town" (or have done that before) and are alarmed that some people might find that a bit concerning.

I would have first guessed they were trying to play something historical that would have been roughly that way and didn't want the focus to be on the fact one PC didn't fit the setting. (Something set in Japan without Tom Cruise, or set in Scandinavia without Arak, or pre-Viking Americas without who knows what, or....). I guess I should feel lucky that I haven't played with folks who would have made me guess something unpleasant.

That's the thing though, isn't it?

This is D&D. From when I started playing it, back in 1989, it had a colourful and wild cast of species, races, cultures, ethnicities. The first settings I saw were Taladas, Spelljammer and the Forgotten Realms. All of them extremely diverse (and Taladas actually more "real"-feeling than Anaslon for it). Every party I read about in D&D novels was diverse-as-hell, at least in terms of background and species. Even outside of D&D, whilst LotR's hobbits may all be from one little town, they're mixing with a half-elf (in D&D terms), an elf, a dwarf, humans from distant cultures and so on. I didn't even run into the idea of an "all-human" campaign until it was mentioned in a setting book a year or three later.

So when I see "all humans" I narrow my eyes slightly, and I definitely want to know what's the goal. If it's to simulate some historical period, I'm probably out because that likely also means no/low magic (including magic items), no dungeons (per se), no dragons, and totally personal opinion, but I don't think any edition of D&D works particularly well for historical settings, nor would I pick D&D for a game definitely featuring little/no magic, dungeons, dragons, or direct equivalents thereof.

If it's "you must all be from this small village" I'm even less interested, because typically that does involve an ethnicity being specified, and as you point out, they don't want anyone outside that ethnicity because, for reasons unknown, they think the campaign would "focus" on them. I've never seen that to be true. If anything, the "one weird PC" tends to get excluded from stuff (which can equally be a problem, but of the opposite kind) rather than getting centered. If you ran The 13th Warrior as a campaign, Antonio Banderas' character would probably be excluded or on the edge of most scenes, not at the centre of them.

And it's not usually outright racism or bigotry behind "You must all be humans from this village" (which happens to be ethnically white), but rather the whole "Reject modernity, embrace tradition" nonsense that Tracy Hickman tweeted about. Which in my experience means the campaign is likely to be some sort of ham-fisted attempt to recreate Lord of the Rings or similar, at best, or at worst, some sort of attempt to "go back to the good old days*" when heroes were all muscular dark haired pale-skinned men who rescued blondes from swarthy wizards, or fighting off subhuman hordes (who curiously seem to all be non-white) with all the low-level but constant racism that implies.

I have played in all-human campaigns which were perfectly good, note, even a "you are all from a small village" (though there was no suggested ethnicity - it was a fishing village on a busy coastline so people could have been from all over). But I am pretty suspicious, and unless the campaign sounded fantastic and there was a good reason for it being human-only (that wasn't "this is a low/no magic historical campaign!")

* = NB these "good old days" didn't exist - not even Conan is really like that.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

So for anyone that answered no, does this mean there is absolutely no set of circumstances under which you would play an only human campaign in D&D? Or does it just mean you would tend to avoid such games?

I voted no, but it primarily means I'd have questions before I agreed, to ensure there was a legitimate reason for it and that the campaign actually sounded interesting.

It does happen. I've played in a decent humans-only D&D game, because my objections were overwhelmed by the justifications and it was pretty good (if sadly short-lived/unfinished as the DM moved countries part-way through and it was before good ways around that existed).

But equally I've seen "human-only" campaigns be shorthand for everything from "I'm going to make a cack-handed attempt to recreate LotR/Wheel of Time and clearly just limiting the party is the way to do it!" to "I have serious issues I want to run a D&D game to work through!". More often the former than the latter (I can only think of one which was definitely that and a couple which seemed like they might be).

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I of course would play in human-only campaign have done so in the past and I have run them. That being said, I prefer D&D to be somewhat fantastic, albeit probably more grounded than it is usually assumed to be, but I feel that if you want to run a gritty and realistic Game of Thrones style campaign, there are probably systems more suited to that than D&D.

Also almost human-only is very cool to me. I feel that in typical D&D where everyone is some sort of weird fantasy being it kinda loses its meaning and fantasticness. In one game I ran the setting was ancient celtic inspired broken fantasy land where non-humans were more mythological. Dwarfs hid under mountains, elves were strange and scary fey living in the forests. That strangeness will feel completely different whether the characters are normal(ish) humans exploring the world or whether they actually are these rare fantastic creatures themselves. All characters except one were human, and the one that was not was an half-elf. It was a nod to characters like Merlin with one magical parent and felt appropriate to the setting. That game unfortunately didn't last very long due scheduling issues, so we never really saw where it would have went. In one long campaign I played in for years the setting was on surface level human-only too. Fantasy creatures were just fairytales and humans and their medievalishly harsh and intolerant church dominated. And all character were humans... except one was a tiefling. Literally the only one in the setting. I think there were hints that some others had existed, but the setting's inquisition equivalent had taken care of them. Their ancestry was not distant, they were an offspring of a human and a devil and the character's devil father featured prominently at the higher levels. Our characters were opposed to the dominant church, so this reinforced the themes perfectly.

My current setting is far more fantastical and has al sort of intelligent creatures, albeit probably a paltry amount compared to your normal kitchen sink fantasy (I reworked the species and created some from scratch. I wanted them to feel part of the setting which is very different from your typical medievalish fantasy.) However, I'm glad that two of the four players made humans, as then the non-humanness of the other two characters has better contrast.

 

[Don Durito]

Too me D&D is a rules set and a game structure and not really a setting.

If the game is set in a world with fifteen different races, but features lots political intrigue and very little in the way of exploration and dungeons I probably wouldn't use D&D (although I feel I could if I really had to)

If the game is humans only but features explorations of uncharted wilderness and ruined cities, then I would use D&D.

 

[ReshiIRE]

No, god no, never. If I could actively not be a human in real life I would choose not to, and while I wouldn't mind playing a human in a game like Cyberpunk or anything set in somewhere based in the real world, I actively avoid being human at all in anything else. You offer me the choice not to be a human character, even as something like an elf or goblin or dwarf that I am not huge on, and I'll take it.

I just really want the escapism of being a different type of creature, in particular a reptile like creature like a Lizardborn or Dragonborn. Even if I as a human can only portray them as a human like person and not truly different, it still feels a lot better to me than being human.

Especially since... god, looking at the world, we kinda suck as a species. :V

 

[Maxperson]

You say that, but I've seen it happen, multiple times, with human-only campaigns people are suggesting, IRL and on the internet. And the fact that you and Reynard seem so outraged and keen to dismiss it outright, even though it's my lived experience makes me feel like I might have struck a nerve, rather than being "off-base".

To be clear, I don't mean "that's what ur doing u racists!" or something, I mean "I guess you are planning on a single-ethnicity group of PCs from a single town" (or have done that before) and are alarmed that some people might find that a bit concerning.

Sure. Believe what you want.

 

[Reynard]

It's interesting that some folks are making connections between "humans only" and realism, grittiness or low fantasy. That's the Game of Thrones influence, I guess, but it never really occurred to me. Both Arthurian fantasy and pulp fantasy lean toward humans only but both also support the kind of cinematic and high wonder fantasy 5E is good at. If I were aiming for low or gritty fantasy, regardless of the presence of playable non-humans, i would definitely go back to 1E or B/X (depending on how crunchy I wanted my game).