Making Nonhumans different

[Yora]

There had been a rather off topic discussion about aging of elves and other such things some days ago, which essentially was about making non-human races actually different than pointy eared humans and 3 feet tall humans. People had a lot to say, and I think having a dedicated thread for it might be a good idea.

So, yeah... To get this going, what notable experiences have you made with nonhuman races being actually portrayed in a nonhuman way?

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

It's hard to ensure differences that aren't stereotypes or even "enforced behavior".

Thri-kreen of Athas has great RP rules for playing a thri-kreen, but anyone who actually follows them all is in trouble. For instance, thri-kreen instinctively try to dominate the "pack" (eg party), despite being generally less intelligent than sentient mammals. This means a thri-kreen PC joining a group should try to intimidate the other PCs (until defeated, fortunately this only happens once) but, worse, would want to challenge them to an unarmed duel. Other common adventuring tasks like buying equipment is nearly impossible for a thri-kreen due to their need to treat shopping like hunting. Whoever asks first is the hunter, so a thri-kreen personal shopper needs a high Initiative score (not something you could easily modify in 2e!). A thri-kreen might not understand the concept of "herding" or farming and might see animals in a pen as "fast food", causing the same kinds of problems that a kender handler would cause. I found the way to deal with them was to pick the non-troublesome character traits and only use them.

The last time I got to play a thri-kreen, the campaign only lasted one session. I made the mistake of letting other players know I was playing a thri-kreen before campaign start, so the other two players decided to also be weird - a warforged and a were-ape. The warforged couldn't understand human concepts like money either, so our social character was the were-ape. It's not easy pointing out all the problems this caused us. This, plus some really stupid combat RPing (eg the were-ape was a Book of Nine Swords character with something like Healing Strike, which he refused to ever use, resulting in PCs who were too scared to fight) is why the campaign only lasted one session.

Come to think of it, I think that kendler mention, and any mentions of tinker gnomes, support my points. For those who aren't familiar with kender, they're the replacement for halflings in the Dragonlance setting. They're the same height, but have minds more like children than adults (an adult hobbit, by contrast, is probably responsible, compare Pippin to Samwise, for instance). They're proportioned like children, so it's easier to mistake an "adult" kender for a child than a hobbit. Most kender were handlers, basically thieves without backstab (so they're less useful to the party to boot). They would constantly "pick up" whatever interesting thing they saw, so they weren't likely to steal in order to get rich or to fence something, or even to pull off a Leverage-like plot-relevant theft, but simply because "that ring looked pretty". Needless to say, any party with a kender in it would be constantly in trouble with the law from angry humans who weren't happy that their wedding ring was "stolen", their magic dust vanished and was then used in some unauthorized fashion, etc. Kender were portrayed as being chaotic neutral stupid, with attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity, exactly the kind of person you want with you on a dungeon crawl.

I think I'll leave gnomes away, as what's wrong with them should be fairly obvious.

I guess my point is, if you want the other races to act differently than humans, you need to ensure the differences don't cause problems in-game.

If we're using LotR as a guide, many of the races don't seem that different. Hobbits are rural British, they're more like pygmies than a distinct species. The "wild" elves of Mirkwood actually aped humans, being quite different than the elves of Rivendell. I'm not sure if dwarves were that different, other than tending toward greed.

 

[Rechan]

Do you mean in terms of behavior, appearance, origins, what?

Because IMO, regardless of what you do, players will probably play them as pointy-eared humans and 3 feet tall humans, because they are more focused on the adventure than acting like their race. Not to mention that people are drawn to those races because say, they like ale and whores and speaking in a bad Scottish accent, or because of that race's racial abilities, not its fluff.

Thri-kreen of Athas has great RP rules for playing a thri-kreen, but anyone who actually follows them all is in trouble. For instance, thri-kreen instinctively try to dominate the "pack" (eg party), despite being generally less intelligent than sentient mammals. This means a thri-kreen PC joining a group should try to intimidate the other PCs (until defeated, fortunately this only happens once) but, worse, would want to challenge them to an unarmed duel. Other common adventuring tasks like buying equipment is nearly impossible for a thri-kreen due to their need to treat shopping like hunting. Whoever asks first is the hunter, so a thri-kreen personal shopper needs a high Initiative score (not something you could easily modify in 2e!). A thri-kreen might not understand the concept of "herding" or farming and might see animals in a pen as "fast food", causing the same kinds of problems that a kender handler would cause. I found the way to deal with them was to pick the non-troublesome character traits and only use them.

You forgot that they are also all too willing to eat anything (especially elves); eating dead humanoid foes might really make your party nervous to let you watch over them when they sleep, as well as other awkward situations (even if making hungry looks at wounded PCs is funny).

 

[Hand of Evil]

House rules...

Elves have no sense of time, if they say they will be somewhere it is by season, not tomorrow or in a week. Roll a d4; 1= Winter, 2= Spring, 3= Summer, 4= Fall! See you soon...next winter! You can also use moon phases.

Orcs and half orcs will "bash" first. Open a door, hit it hard first then try door knob. Meet a friend, smack them first then say hi.

Dwarves, the beard is everything but gold comes close and so does beer. Respect comes to those that have them, you don't; well a dwarf does not have much use for you, so you better have a way of getting them!

 

[Rechan]

Dwarves, the beard is everything but gold comes close and so does beer. Respect comes to those that have them, you don't; well a dwarf does not have much use for you, so you better have a way of getting them!

So I assume dwarven females have beards?

 

[Hand of Evil]

So I assume dwarven females have beards?

Yes, yes they do.

 

[[OMENRPG]Ben]

This is difficult to do on a strictly behavioral spectrum, but good races/spceies have a lot of back story and history put into them to make them exciting and different to play.

I think one of the best examples of this is Star Wars, while the races can all communicate with each other fairly easily, there are a lot of visual and mental differences between them. In my own system, there are seven sentient species including humans. I have several paragraphs about personality and history in each of the species' descriptions, as well as very clear mechanical differences.

For instance, one of the races, who are small but have a particularly slow metabolism, require very little sustenance to stay satisfied. That is, they really only need to gorge themselves once every month to two months, and drink once every nine or ten days. This can give a lot of RP flavor and side-quests. For instance one of my playtest groups were trying to barter with a native populace for food (for the party's boss) but the farmers needed enough food to survive. Rather than have the negotiations turn violent or sour, the awowlee volunteered his food ration (given by the boss) so the family could survive for the next few days.

Another species, an aquatic insectoid, can hold its breath for more than ten minutes. They use this ability to hide under shallow water so that they can ambush unwary prey, similar to that of a crocodile or something like that. But, in the occasion that holding its breath is useful other than in water, such as when moving between parts of a space station that have no oxygen, this race can become supremely useful.

I think also that distinguishing species is a lot about the visual appearance of said species. Elves could be mistaken for humans from a distance, halflings/kender could look like pygmies/little people/children, dwarves are stocky and can also resemble shorter humans, heck even a pretty half-orc could look mostly human. It is quite difficult to mistake a hulking insect with mandibles and translucent purple flesh for anything human.

So, in my personal experience, you have to have baked in RP/history, you have to make a mechanical difference, and the species need to look particularly distinct from one another.

But, from another angle, are there not thousands of cultures around the world all within the same species? Japan is quite different than the Lakota nation, which are quite different from the Vikings, which are quite different from the Mayans. All are human, but their culture is very distinct.

 

[Nagol]

Wasn’t there a thread about this a couple of weeks ago?

http://www.enworld.org/forum/genera...al-making-different-races-feel-different.html

There are really two ways to make non-human behaviour and outlook different from humans: change their abilities or change their goals.

Changed abilities can offer variant strategies for development and/or dealing with a tactical situation. D&D has always tried to change their abilities (e.g, darkvision, movement speed, attribute modifiers). The difficulty is these changes have been tempered by balance considerations and a requirement that the race be reasonably able to operate in a setting fit for humans. That means the changes are generally mild and thus have a very slight impact on the strategies pursued by the players.

I’m in more favour of changing their goals. Variant short term goals lead to constant behaviour shifts and variant long-term goals lead to different decisions on what situations to engage. 2e tried this with classes with its alternate xp system. The Fantasy Trip had variant xp for demi-humans. As I said in the other thread, the change in reward structure wil drive different behaviours from the players and that change in observable behaviour is what really provides the appearance of otherness.

The trick is to make the make the variances different enough that the PCs will pursue different tactics that are equally common/capable of being achieved with their expected abilities.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Dark Sun made dwarf goals different. Very different.

Dwarves generally took on foci (which could last for months), such as "winning that competition" or "protecting that village". If a dwarf died with a focus unfulfilled (or I hope I read that wrong and was killed while abandoning their focus), they tended to become banshees (nothing like your typical banshee, basically just cursed undead).

Dwarves didn't have to have a focus all the time, but it seemed to me that dwarven banshees should have been more common

In 4e, the generic dwarf warrior has a focus ability. He would focus on one opponent until they were dead, gaining +5 damage. This ability doesn't transfer over to PCs in any way though.

Halflings also got a very different culture, although it only applied to dealings with halflings (unless they were savage halflings, in which case they still wouldn't harm another halfling), while half-giants were incredibly impressionable and would tend to copy the nearest "cool" person. In the second novel, Rikus could tell he was losing his army's respect to a dwarf sun priest who joined up when his half-giant buddy showed up wearing an identical forehead tattoo to said dwarf despite not having any reverence for the sun. Half-giants also modified their alignments to match their idol's, which was too meta-gamey for my tastes. (Sadly, I don't recall much of this being mentioned in the 4e book, but I'm running my campaign on 2e flavor.)

 

[Yora]

This is difficult to do on a strictly behavioral spectrum, but good races/spceies have a lot of back story and history put into them to make them exciting and different to play.

One of the last fantasy settings that really suprised me was the world of the Dragon Age game. It is a very genric setting on the surface without really adding anything new or unique, but it's the backstories that really explain a lot how the different people tick.

The primary religion of the humans was founded by a prophetess who rallied the supressed masses to rise up against the decadent ruling class of mages. While her followers eventually destroyed the empire and left the mages only with the very core of the heartland, the prophetess was captured before the end of the rebellion and executed by the mage-lords. With the church being very strong, almost all humans are raised in fear that mages may once again try to enslave normal people, and the church hunts down all free mages who try to avoid joining the official mage guild and live in its facilities.
From the human perspective, the Templars, who keep watch over the mage guild and hunt down those who refuse to join, are heroes who protect the people from very serious threats. Mages who try to avoid the Templars are regarded as criminals who are planning evil things in secret.

At the same time, the shamans of the wood elf tribes are also mages. To humans, that makes no difference. All mages have to live with the guild, or are evil and must be killed. To the elves, it means that humans try to destroy their culture by murdering all their religious leaders and lorekeepers. Which really doesn't leave much room for compromise.
To the humans, the church is the protector of peace and the Templars the only thing that saves them from being enslaved by demon-possessed mages. To the wood elves, the Templars are evil murderers, serving a terrible god whose servants are trying to annihilate the elven race.

In a pnp game, this would make a party that includes both Templars and wood elves impossible, but I don't think that a setting needs to be made in a way that supports every possible random combination of characters. But I think it is a great example how a little bit of backstory makes a huge impact on how characters of different races percieve the world around them.
Let's say the PCs encounter a Templar who is hunting an actually evil mage who is about to summon demons and let them lose on innocents. Wood elves would hate to help him in any way at hunting mages, but from a human perspective there really is no need why they should be hostile to him.