Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Norfleet" data-source="post: 1105640" data-attributes="member: 11581">The reason that humans are a baseline for everything in RPGs is that humans are a baseline for comparing ANY species, for one very simple reason: All players are humans. Well, most of them, anyway. There are a few aliens, which nod quietly and pretend to know what you're talking about to avoid blowing their cover, and a few computers, which were programmed by humans, with the exception of those programmed by aliens to act like they were programmed by humans, and those all compare other critters to humans also, because they were set up by humans or people pretending to be humans.Just think for a moment: How would you evaluate the strength, speed, toughness, or intelligence of a lion? Probably relative to a human, yes? I mean, I suppose you could decide that everything in D&D would henceforth be evaluated relative to dwarves. Therefore, humans would become +2 Chr, -2 Con, move faster than the baseline race, etc., etc.Of course, the game was written by humans, so humans are used as the baseline. Even if your game became "human only", you'd still be evaluating the different races of human by some hypothetical "baseline" human, which may or may not exist as an actual playable race.Really, it doesn't matter which race you decide to make the "average".In fact, the "baseline" for D&D isn't technically a "human", so to speak. The baseline D&D race is no stat adjustments, 1 feat at first level. Humans have their own bonusses: No stat adjustments, +1 feat at first level, +4 SPs@L1, +1 SP/lvl.Of course, you can't PLAY this baseline race with absolutely NO bonusses....not that you'd want to, since it's devoid of anything interesting or useful.</blockquote>

Verification