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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Herr der Qual" data-source="post: 6519878" data-attributes="member: 6789144">See, I don't view dwarves from Tolkien story telling, rather, from the source material, Norse Mythology. The original stories of dwarves paint them in a fairly human light, as being portrayed as super-masculine they also have accentuated flaws of those traits. They are strong, so they fight, they are serious and take to killing over petty disagreements, they love the beauty of certain minerals and would not sever themselves from such a trinket easily. They are master craftsmen and are patient to a fault (in Norse Mythology Alviss (all wise) sat at a task given to him by Thor until he was turned to stone by the sun). It's not so much that they are completely alien, Dwarves, Elves and Halflings are played so often because they are portrayals of extremes of human behaviours. We have people in our lives that we can identify with them because they are not completely alien, Elves have their obsessions as well as halflings and dwarves. If you want to think biologically. They are stout probably because they are subterranean that's just good planning on the gods part, they are long lived which means they aren't poisoned by oxygen as quickly as humans and probably have a slower metabolism, and for some reason they can survive without vitamin D because they can live underground indefinitely. I think you are trying to imagine them as the most alien of creatures when elves and dwarves in particular were meant to be analogues of humans for moral storytelling in ancient cultures. Half-Orcs, Half-Elves, Dragonborn and Tieflings all have human blood and mostly human physiology which should make them fairly playable for anyone. Dragonborn and Tieflings in particular are described as having a non-human ancestor long ago, which means that they are predominately human, with a tinge of magic left in their blood from their ancient ancestors.A dwarf or elf would most likely call themselves a "man" or "woman" because we don't have another intelligent race in our world, so we can only express things this way, as it is a genitive term, when you learn another language like German you learn that the word for Man is Mann and Woman is Frau. In english this makes my argument odd  Mann is the root word of the english man, but the origins of the Germanic is the root of our understanding of ourselves therefore when say a dwarf learns common he would learn the common word for the dwarvish is man, and if their root works like ours he would understand himself as "being a man". Language brings us together.</blockquote>

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