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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Bacon Bits" data-source="post: 8148459" data-attributes="member: 6777737">No, not at all. Fantasy races are humans with rubber ears and plastic noses.The sole purpose of fantasy races is to make certain cultures especially different. To make them more unusual. It makes it easier to hand wave away why dwarf kingdoms live and work entirely underground or why elven and orc kingdoms live in natural forests when we say, "Oh, they're not the same species." But in reality, they're just humans that believe different things. That's why the cultures for other races are often monolithic. The purpose of them being another race is to mark their culture as inseparably, visibly distinct. What good would that be if appearance didn't mean anything? That's why goblins and hobgoblins and bugbears all act wildly differently. Not because they're not closely related to each other, but because they look different so they must have different cultures.Think about Tolkien's elves of Mirkwood and those of Lothlorien. But merely being ethnically different just isn't enough. How often have we seen that because they live in different places and in different ways that they must be racially different? Greyhawk's high elves and grey elves. FR's sun and moon elves. They must look different or be visually distinct because the purpose of a fantasy race is to visually identify an ethnicity. A culture. Not a species. This is like saying you've got Irish and English and Scottish people in your game, and they must look different. So different that it's visibly apparent that all English are English and all Irish are Irish and so on. It's weird.In reality, all fantasy civilizations are human, because we, the players, designers, authors, and developers, are human ourselves and we cannot invent a non-human civilization of sapient creatures. We've never identified one, have no examples of one, and can only create one based on what we already know. That's why we almost always make other sapient races humanoid. We don't know how to invent a culture and body for a non-human sapient creature. How could we?So, no, eliminating fantasy races doesn't fundamentally change FR at all, because fantasy races are just humans in disguise.Edit: Spelling</blockquote>

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