If animals could talk, which kind would be gamers?

[Vague Jayhawk]

I don't really know what animals would make good rpg gamers, but I had an immediate mental image of a group of rhinos sitting around talking about fantasy football.

 

[Kunimatyu]

From the perspective of the non-RPGing world, probably a slime mold or bacteria of some kind.

 

[Corbert]

Racoons.

Watch your shiny dice.

Don't forget the ferrets!

 

[Andre]

The question, though, is which kind of talking animals will be most likely to play D&D?

None. They would play H&H (Houses and Humans), kicking in our doors and taking our shiny stuff.

Oh, and the press would worry that they were all nature-worshipping homicidal maniacs.

 

[Agent Oracle]

Camels:
-Out in the desert, you have a lot of time to optimize your character build
-They would win every marathon game session.

 

[Mycanid]

Erm ... this is certainly a strange thread Whizbang. I honestly never thought about it.

mr_outside voice's suggestions seem good to me for the reasons he indicated.

Perhaps it might be better to ask what animals would play what classed character? (This assumes that all animals are playing, of course!)

At least these are the tracks my trains of thought are running down....

But for some reason I cannot get the old Gamma World zoopremicists out of my mind!

 

[Cthulhudrew]

Probably cats, which would make all of those furries out there sooo wondrously happy.

Then again, given their attention spans, maybe not.

How about spiders? I notice you didn't give any love to insects, arachnids, or arthropods in your question, you speciesist!

[Funny you should bring this up, btw. I've always thought a good story might be made out of dogs and/or cats developing sentient intelligence, after all the training and- mainly- the pampering people do with them nowadays.]

 

[Cthulhudrew]

Thinking about it, dogs would probably be CCGer's. They are famous poker lovers, after all.

 

[Vague Jayhawk]

Get one of those "dogs playing poker" pictures and just photoshop a dmg and some dice in there.
Fun stuff

 

[Moonstone Spider]

Probably cats, which would make all of those furries out there sooo wondrously happy.

Then again, given their attention spans, maybe not.

How about spiders? I notice you didn't give any love to insects, arachnids, or arthropods in your question, you speciesist!

[Funny you should bring this up, btw. I've always thought a good story might be made out of dogs and/or cats developing sentient intelligence, after all the training and- mainly- the pampering people do with them nowadays.]

Spiders would obsessively plan out their characters, getting every last detail right. They would make fantastic dungeon masters, but poor players because they would expect eveything to come to them instead of actively entering the dungeon to go kill things.

Clams would have the same problem, only even worse than spiders do.

Crabs and lobsters would have a clearer grasp of rules than the above animals, but like nearly all animals would pretty much have to play a VoP character because they couldn't understand the concept of personal property.

Octopi would be perpetually ticked off by Railroading, being geniuses at inventing odd uses for conventional stuff, and particularly their own racial abilities since octopi have such a boatload of special innate abilities. They'd rarely remember to carry items around but would be easily able to manipulate items they do have into doing their bidding. Woe to the GM who expects an octopus to follow his. Octopi would prefer LA+ races with tons of innate spells and special abilities.

Ants and Bees would be remarkably poor players. All of them would create the exact same character every time.