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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8334496" data-attributes="member: 42582">I think the notion of a "natural feeling story element" is challenging in this context. Because when we're talking about received tropes, naturalness can be a manifestation of that received character.Speaking just for my part, I get a bit tired of framings/settings that treat agrarian and urban social and economic forms as the norm for humans, so that other forms of human life get framed as "primitive" and threats.There is a complexity or a compounding, here, that results from the fact that RPGing, as an activity, is undertaken by people living in urban, literate societies. Which means it's easy to project that as a norm - so part of the "strangeness" of a creature is its distance from, or contrast with, those social forms.A further compounding factor is the heritage of JRRT - The Shire is presented as, at one and the same time, an agrarian pre-industrial paradise and as having material plenty comparable to nineteenth or even twentieth century Britain. So familiar cultural elements - romanticised British villagers - are merged with a familiar material culture not in any sort of realistic fashion, but by authorial whim that reinforces the normative projection described in the previous paragraph.One way to try and break down that normative projection can be to engage with a wide range of history and social science. Another, based on human experience rather than intellectual techniques, is to talk with someone who is an accomplished professional in a scientific field about her childhood eating with banana leaves and gourds (ie when her society had not undergone extensive processes of industrialisation and state formation, and hence - among other things - did not have a material culture that rested so heavily on factory production of crockery and cutlery). Breaking down that normative projection means breaking down the association between humanity - in its full meaning - and a certain sort of material and intellectual culture and social and economic organisation.In D&D, given its standard processes of play and associated mechanical systems, I think this is not just about Orcs vs humans. It's also, for instance, about rules for AC.To somewhat echo [USER=82106]@AbdulAlhazred[/USER], there's no reason to think this should be easy.If we're talking about animalian people, we get proud lionfolk and group-centred dogfolk and sneaky, slithery ratfolk. Maybe also tail-chasing catfolk, though they mightn't be a good fit for typical D&D.If we get to non-mammalian animals, or even more obscure mammals like echidnas or pangolins, it's more obscure how we would project their apparent emotional lives (do frogs even have emotional lives?) onto animal people. But I think this is pretty different from what [USER=21169]@Doug McCrae[/USER] is discussing. D&D lizardfolk aren't created by trying to imagine, in some sci-fi-ish way, what an intelligent lizard might be like - for a start, there's no particular reason to think that an intelligent, humanoid, egg-laying reptile would be a gregarious animal. They're a version of a pulp trope - you could take the entries for lizardfolk and "tribesmen", swap the names, and not have anything that is being said about either group of people change.My knowledge of Star Trek isn't that great - bits and pieces of the original TV series and original movies. On that basis, it seems to me that the purpose of Vulcans is to serve a storytelling function, about the relationship between human intelligence and human morality. This is done by having Vulcans be hyper-intelligent but lacking in the sorts of emotions that underpin particularity and permissible self-regard (as opposed to strict impersonality) in human morality.I created a Burning Wheel character a few weeks ago, for <a href="https://www.enworld.org/threads/burning-wheel-actual-play.680804/" target="_blank">a new campaign</a>. The character is a Dark Elf in JRRT's sense - mechanically, in BW, this is expressed by having the standard Elvish Grief trait turn into Spite. Like all BW Elves, Dark Elves can sing magical songs - one of these can allow other Elves to turn their Grief to Spite as they realise the futility of hope. In certain circumstances, a Dark Elf can turn Spite back to Grief - this requires (inter alia) being forgiven by a (non-Dark) Elf whom the Dark Elf has hurt in the course of play. A Dark Elf may also, in the right circumstances, turn his/her Spite into Hatred - a trait normally possessed only by Orcs.So besides some cool images, the function of Elves and Orcs is to give a certain sort of mechanical expression to these emotional aspects of the human experience - Grief at the suffering of human due to their "fallen" nature; Spite (or, less evocatively, extreme realism/pessimism) at the futility of continuing to struggle for genuine achievement or redemption; Hatred as a response to all the horrible experiences the world throws at us. (Dwarves, in BW, have Greed as their Emotional Attribute.)There are also material cultures associated with these different "stock" (the BW term for D&D's "race") - Dwarven armour, Elven cloaks, Dark Elves dark metal weapons that long to draw blood, jagged Orcish blades and Orcish wolf-riders - but at least in my view, these are not foregrounded in the same way in BW as in D&D, and hence the pulp-y and racialised tropes do not predominate.Of course that's my view and experience. Others might differ.</blockquote>

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