D&D 5E My players want Human Centric

[TheCosmicKid]

I disagree. I think you're selling readers short. I've read a lot of fantasy, and fairly little of it relies on anything near the level of stereotyping that, say, Salvatore does.

Most of the fantasy I've read doesn't actually rely much on nonhuman races at all. Robert E. Howard? Humans. Ursula K. LeGuin? Humans. Robert Jordan? Humans. Terry Goodkind? Humans. George R. R. Martin? Humans. Patrick Rothfuss? Humans. It really seems to be Tolkien's Middle-Earth that's the outlier here.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Most of the fantasy I've read doesn't actually rely much on nonhuman races at all. Robert E. Howard? Humans. Ursula K. LeGuin? Humans. Robert Jordan? Humans. Terry Goodkind? Humans. George R. R. Martin? Humans. Patrick Rothfuss? Humans. It really seems to be Tolkien's Middle-Earth that's the outlier here.

That's leagues away from a thorough list of fantasy works, much less an exhaustive one.

 

[Dausuul]

I just get really, really tired of elvesndwarvesnhobbits. There is so much more to fantasy than Tolkien and Tolkien-imitators. The rest of the genre has long since moved on, but D&D got its start in the late '70s when Tolkien-imitation was all the rage, and so it remains stuck.

If a setting must have that hoary old triad, it should at least do something interesting with them, like Dark Sun.

That's leagues away from a thorough list of fantasy works, much less an exhaustive one.

It's true there are a lot of nonhuman protagonists in modern fantasy, but pretty much none of them are elvesndwarvesnhobbits*. Most are vampires.

[size=-2]*Except for novels written in D&D worlds, which are shackled to the rotting corpse of 1974 and will be so forevermore.[/size]

 

[Ancalagon]

... god forbid they play in Yoon-Suin, where the biggest city is ruled by slug-men and humans are second-class citizens...

(I'm starting my campaign next week )

 

[transtemporal]

Your players need to check their human privilege! ;-)

 

[TheCosmicKid]

That's leagues away from a thorough list of fantasy works, much less an exhaustive one.

It's not supposed to be. It's supposed to illustrate a trend. These are among the most popular fantasy works of the past century. I challenge you to compile a list of counterexamples with such high profile -- human-elf-dwarf-hobbit stories that aren't either openly derivative of Tolkien and D&D or explicitly set in a D&D world. And even if you can produce such a list, it still doesn't contradict my point. The idea that an assortment of nonhuman humanoids is a necessary or desirable element to fantasy is simply false; the existence of these books at the top of fantasy bestseller lists proves that, no matter how many other books there are. In short: human-only worlds aren't only possible, they're normal. And yet I'm seeing a bewildering amount of negativity towards the concept in this thread. Does everyone saying humans are boring here also say that A Wizard of Earthsea or A Game of Thrones is boring?

 

[SkidAce]

I like both styles. Depends o the setting we want to play. Neither is better than the other.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I agree, though I might change “nonhuman” to “elves, dwarves, and not-hobbits.” Those worlds have plenty of examples of nonhuman races. Rothfuss has the fey, and Jordan has…I can’t remember. The horned furry people, and some sort of not-orc?

I think part of it is that we’ve, to a large extent, stepped away from the Tolkienistic paradigm, that had such a strong influence in the 70s and 80s. Not that I don't love Tolkien, but it's hard to have an original and interesting take on the "Fab Four" racial makeup that isn't heavily indebted to him.

Most of the fantasy I've read doesn't actually rely much on nonhuman races at all. Robert E. Howard? Humans. Ursula K. LeGuin? Humans. Robert Jordan? Humans. Terry Goodkind? Humans. George R. R. Martin? Humans. Patrick Rothfuss? Humans. It really seems to be Tolkien's Middle-Earth that's the outlier here.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

It's not supposed to be. It's supposed to illustrate a trend. These are among the most popular fantasy works of the past century. I challenge you to compile a list of counterexamples with such high profile -- human-elf-dwarf-hobbit stories that aren't either openly derivative of Tolkien and D&D or explicitly set in a D&D world. And even if you can produce such a list, it still doesn't contradict my point. The idea that an assortment of nonhuman humanoids is a necessary or desirable element to fantasy is simply false; the existence of these books at the top of fantasy bestseller lists proves that, no matter how many other books there are. In short: human-only worlds aren't only possible, they're normal. And yet I'm seeing a bewildering amount of negativity towards the concept in this thread. Does everyone saying humans are boring here also say that A Wizard of Earthsea or A Game of Thrones is boring?

You don't seem to understand that reading a book and playing a game are different activities.

 

[TheCosmicKid]

You don't seem to understand that reading a book and playing a game are different activities.

What am I supposed to do with a statement like this? Quite apart from the minor dig at me personally, it's textbook special pleading. "They're different." Okay, how? How is the difference relevant to this discussion? Does it follow that playing a game in the Earthsea or Westeros universe would be boring even though reading the book isn't? Are fantasy games that are set in such universes boring -- games like The Witcher, or Diablo, or Dark Souls? And is this alleged boringness limited to fantasy games, or are Civilization, Grand Theft Auto, and Portal likewise boring because they don't let you play as an elf? If not, why not?