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Message: <blockquote data-quote="I'm A Banana" data-source="post: 6518875" data-attributes="member: 2067">I take your point, but it's probably worth pointing out that a movie and an RPG have different needs, here. A movie (especially a fantasy or sci-fi movie) has a need for a surrogate, a "baseline" character who can receive exposition and be the person voicing the audience's own views up on the screen. This isn't always the "protagonist" of the story, but it can be (it is in Star Wars, for instance, but in LotR the character that fit that best was probably Samwise). But it should be someone the audience can easily relate to. So it often is the "token human" in a cast of freakish aliens. Or the commoner among royalty. Or whatever.In a D&D game, each character is the surrogate of a player, so there's no need for such a role. I'm going to view the game through the lens of my gnome, Paul's gonna view the game through the lens of his elf, etc. A human doesn't give you any real advantage there - your character is your surrogate, and what they understand, so do you. You enter a place where a "normal human" might be seen as something alien and exotic and exceptional for one reason or another, from the perspective of your character. So rather than being the default audience surrogate, a human is just one more option among several, that needs to kind of stand on its own merits or fall on its own merits. It changes the calculus a bit!</blockquote>