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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9467077" data-attributes="member: 6790260">The term could have all sorts of meanings. I wanted to know which specific one you were intending. My apologies for giving the impression that I was leading you on. That truly was not my intent, and I'm sorry for antagonizing you, regardless of my intent.In response to this point, I point you back to what I said above about the commonalities between nearly all playable races. With the exception of elves and dwarves, whose experience of time would be dramatically different from a human's because they live so long, the vast majority of fantastical species in D&D would have life experiences perfectly cognizable to us. Dragonborn don't give live birth...but they still lay quite large eggs, which would be fairly similar. All of them need overall the same kinds of nutrients, just in varying proportions. They all have more or less the same range of auditory, touch, smell, and taste senses as humans, and vision only meaningfully differs because of darkvision (which, frankly, some folks make way more of than it really is, treating it as though it were "darkness literally never impedes anything" which is emphatically not true.)Culturally? They make music and eat sweets and honor their dead. They wear clothing and keep pets and engage in courtship rituals and mourn their dead.If the culture of, say, Vedic-period India and Renaissance Italy and Golden Age Islam and the Yucatec Maya are cognizable to you as relatable, understandable things, then there is absolutely no requirement that cultures where these species live would be so alien that you could not relate to them, not even in principle.If a culture where elves predominate* is relatable to you, I do not understand how one where dragonborn predominate is guaranteed to be unrelatable.*Phrased so because, in truth, few to no D&D-world-cultures would truly be mono-racial, and few to no D&D playable races would be mono-cultural. That is, you could have X-ish humans and X-ish dragonborn and X-ish tabaxi, and you could also have Y-ican humans and Z-lamander dragonborn and W-ian tabaxi--not all Xs are human, and not all humans are Xs.)I don't understand what merit there is to what kinds of people are expected to read the books. People--whatever demographic--are expected to find these characters relatable and compelling. None of them are human. The books are quite popular and, while some critics derided Jacques (he passed away in 2011) for being a bit staid/basic with his plot structures, there has never been any serious criticism that his books are somehow impossible to relate to because nobody in them is human. Physiological differences in the various anthropomorphic animals actually do matter, too. Some animals (like wildcats) are much larger than the mice and voles and such; many badgers have effectively Barbarian rage; there are owls and snakes and all sorts of creatures with radically different capabilities compared to the relative simplicity of the mice/otters/hares/etc.They go to church (well, they live in an abbey), they make flower cordials, they sing rousing songs and forge weapons and armor and covet valuable things. They are like us. But they are not us. The ways they are not like us sometimes matter. Often, they don't--because most of the things sapient bipedal binocular bilaterally-symmetrical beings would do are going to be relatively similar. They matter enough to be worth thinking about, even though other things matter more a fair amount of the time.</blockquote>

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