I'm sick to death of dwarves, elves, halflings, and gnomes!

[ForceUser]

Why does every single campaign setting for D&D have to have all (or at least most) of these guys in it?

Greyhawk--has them all
Forgotten Realms--has them all
Kalamar--has them all
Ravenloft--has them all
Scarred Lands--has them all (except for gnomes)
After Winter Dark--has them all
etc.

I was excited when Nyambe came out, thinking these over-warmed fellows at least wouldn't be in an African setting. Wrong. There they all are!

I am so tired of the re-re-re-re-re-rehashing of these Tolkien refugees. Please, some d20 designers out there, give them a rest! The most innovative thing you could make would be a setting without yet more of these guys in it. (And slightly altered dwarves, elves, etc. don't count--they're still overused.)

I want either all-human settings, or something along the lines of Tekumel or Talislanta. I most certainly never, ever want to see Campaign Setting #47 with Dwarves, Elves, Halflings, and Gnomes. We already had more than enough of that fifteen years ago.

Make a homebrew! The great thing about homebrew worlds is if you don't like the standard races, rule-zero them! There are a lot of races in my campaign world, but the only non-human PHB race I use is the half-orc.

 

[Utrecht]

Re: Mokole

In terms of the lizard men, they had a nice amount of flavor text and alternate view points for were-alligators that talked about their long lives, their very different sleeping patterns, and the relationship they would have to the sun as sometimes cold-blooded creatures.

Again, I ask, how do you wrap your mind around a character like this and become them? To my way of thinking it is simply not possible - if I were to do it all that I would end up doing is playing a Human in a Lizard's skin - in effect reducing the "flavor" down to a bunch of stats. I.e. A Lizard man = Human with +x Natural Armor +y strength and -z Int.

It gets worse the further you move away from Humans. Truly how would a player play a Tiefling? or Aismar? How about a Tri-Kreen or even worse some type of hive minded race?

Because (as Canis has said) thier life experience is so radically different from what we as homo sapiens experience they would approach even simple tasks like eating or defecating in such a radically different way that they would become neigh unplayable.....

Again, YMMV - but then you are likely a better actor than I can ever hope to be.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

Originally posted by Voneth
A qubble from a lizardman acfidio. Lizards may have an aquatic lifestyle, not amphibious. Beyond it use of the word amphibious for vehicles, an amphibious animal is a different species of animal to a lizard, one being the need to have moist eggs with soft shells, unlike lizards. For the longest time, it drove me nuts that "lizardmen" in DND had to soak their eggs in water. One of the main reasons I eventlualy dropped DND for GURPS is because their lizardmen lived in the desert and seemed more logical (for a fantasy game.)

Even the crocodile and alligator, which seems to be the default creatures that everyone rubberstamps as their lizardmen, keep their eggs dry in a covered nest.

[biological rant]

I'm an animal physiologist, among other things biological. I know that lizards and amphibians are different. However, having an amphibious lifestyle does not make something an amphibian. Furthermore, there are and have been many "reptiles" that live amphibious lifestyles, as do a GREAT many other creatures. Such a lifestyle is characterized by requiring a body of water for at least a portion of your life cycle. The lizardmen of D&D have been described with amphibious lifestyles, so I was basing my comments on that. Crocodiles and alligators are not even closely related to lizards, btw. They are all reptiles, but "reptile" is a catch-all phrase for a diverse group of creatures that really are not all in a distinct evolutionary clade. Crocodiles have more in common with birds than they do with lizards. And turtles don't belong anywhere near the rest of them.

At any rate, D&D lizardmen are a hodge-podge of characteristics that really don't make much sense with the "lizard" label. Personally, I agree that lizardmen would make more sense in a desert or jungle than a swamp, but it seems like an extreme reaction to jump games with that as a significant reason.

[/biological rant]

 

[Geoffrey]

Playing non-human characters isn't, IMO, for a serious campaign. To truly do justice to one's character in a serious campaign, I believe that the character needs to be human.

That said, I think that seriously fun campaigns (even long-term ones) can have non-human PCs. I just want the non-human PCs to be interesting rather than trite.

That's why I want either all-human or weirdly exotic campaign worlds. The dwarves, elves, etc. stuff just makes me yawn.

I'm really excited with what I've seen of Umbragia so far.

 

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

...I think that seriously fun campaigns (even long-term ones) can have non-human PCs. I just want the non-human PCs to be interesting rather than trite.

That's why I want either all-human or weirdly exotic campaign worlds. The dwarves, elves, etc. stuff just makes me yawn...

Forgive me if this sounds snarky, but it seems that a number of people in this thread have taken the position that...

"it's been done before" automatically = "trite"

And "weird + exotic" automatically = "interesting"

???

Did I miss a meeting? Quality of characterization and versimilitude just aren't sticking points?

 

[dr jekyll]

"Noldor. The Deep Elves, the second host of the Eldar on the westward journey from Cuivienen, led by Finwe. The name (Quenya Noldo, Sindarin Golodh) meant 'the Wise' (but wise in the sense of posessing knowledge, not in the sense of possessing sagacity, sound judgement)......."

Perhaps Mr. Tolkein used the term in his notes, and then thought better of it in his published works. Find it hard to believe such a typical Englishman for his time would use that term for elves.

I found Nóm, is that close enough?

"Nóm, Nómin: 'Wisdom' and 'the Wise', the names that the men of Beör's following gave to Finrod and his people in their own tongue."

I don't have the other books Christopher Tolkien released, but I do know he changed the spelling of some of the names, Melkor being the one I remember.

dr jekyll

 

[ced1106]

That's why I picked EQ RPG.

Okay, so you have the demi-humans. But now, you can have races and classes that break the stereotypes, but not **too** much.

Besides. Everyone will want to play Dark Elves, Ogres, and Trolls!


Cedric.
aka. Washu! ^O^

 

[paqman]

I just wanted to add that the originality of Oathbould is bound(Funny sentence hey?) to get your attention. It is fantastic.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

BTW, I'm starting a thread for this jellyfish thing

I have to say, that, in a perverse sort of way, playing something really alien is, in some ways, easier than playing something familiar.

I mean, when I run into something like a telekinetic radially symettrical jellyfish, or even something mildly alien like a dolphin, it forces me to start thinking about what these differences mean and what sort of mindset something that different would have to have in order to deal, willingly and without going insane, with something like us.

Really alien races can force you to work through issues of perception, strength, and companionship that most people might find it unnecessary to think about when it is something familiar.

A lot of people, myself included, don't even think about it that much with regard to their own lives.

Think about something like a ghostwise halfling from FR:

they don't talk:

-the sound of speech is probably cognitively dissonant for them
-at the same time they can communicate with anything that understands language, they would know what a speaking race is without ever understanding the difficulty of trying to learn another language
-I bet hieroglyphics would be a lot easier, pictures for words, than phonetic writing, sound for words, for them to pick up

they get a +2 to dexterity:

-what does that +2 reflect, if they get the throwing bonus you might conclude, and I think this works for a lot of reasons, that halflings have a much better spacial memory than humans do
-than think about how that memory might affect the images and metaphors you use
-or even the way you organize and describe your household
"The cups are eight feet to my fernig."
<complex halfling term for they would be at 5' o'clock if the direction I'm facing is the 12 on a western clock face>"

I mean these guys are probably little spatial relations autists. You could probably have a halfling throw a dart, blindfold him, spin him without 'moving' him, tell him to hit the same spot, and he'll do it every time.

Think of the sucker bets at bars.

Once you do this, then you can't even look at ability scores without thinking about what they really mean in terms of how someone acts, speaks, and thinks.

 

[Roderick]

If memory serves me, there is a passing mention of a gnome-like race in the Silmarillion. In the tale of Turin, said Turin dwelt with a clan of little dwarves for a while. I think, they were called Nìm.