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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 6520046" data-attributes="member: 4937">That's actually a really interesting perspective in and of itself, and I certainly can empathize but I still don't think we are quite communicating.My point is that since the attraction of a fantasy race is its inhumanity, I prefer fantasy races to be distinctively inhuman in some way.  However this is always a bit of compromise, because the less human the race, the harder it is for a player to understand the way the race thinks sufficiently to do it justice.  Most of the time, what I tend to see is fantasy races which are not different from humans in anything but a superficial fashion.  So for example, you have something as utterly alien as a Thri-krin, and in play you'd hardly know it was anything but a human unless you knew.Jumping out to a different context, consider the typical Hollywood treatment of something alien.  Consider the movie Ants.  The movie Ants - unlike say 'A Bugs Life' - spends a considerable amount of effort on getting the alien feel of the ants world right - for example, giving them six limbs, and a caste structure.  But the actual story it tells for these ants is a completely human story of boy of low caste meets girl of high caste and ends up becoming a hero.  It's a fairy tale of the sort that humans tell each, and probably is perfectly understandable to even a Chimpanzee or any other Simian if you could convey it to them.  But, the problem of course is that all worker caste ants are non-sexual females, who never would have an ambition or ability to mate with a juvenile queen, and that the male drones all die immediately after doing so anyway so ants themselves wouldn't understand the story at all.  It's a human story told with alien characters, and while that's ok at some level, there is really no what you call "shedding of humanity" going on here.  The Ants are basically only humans shaped liked ants.</blockquote>

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