D&D General What are humans?

[Umbran]

elaborate on this as I wish to know

The character, you mean?
Okay, let me see if I can lay out my thought process in coming up with him. This is gonna be long, so I'll put it behind spoiler tags for those who aren't interested....

Spoiler: Meet Smok Gekkota

Game rules do not give lizardfolk any specific issues with cold temperatures, or advantages in warm temps - so I decided they were not really ectothermic (cold-blooded). I played him as what's called "mesothermic" - they generate their own body heat more than a cold-blooded animal, but less than a warm-blooded one. Not really a role playing point, but folks might have asked.

I played him as an obligate carnivore - which means that he could, and would, eat things other than meat, he's required to get some meat in his diet in the long term. Plants didn't have all the nutrients he needed.

Some bits of reptilian biology: In the past, there was a model called the "triune brain", which included the so called "lizard brain" that handled instinctual action, the limbic system that handled emotions, and the neocortex, which handles logical reasoning, language, and such. This model was used to suggest that reptiles do not have emotions, as such, and the legacy lizardfolk lore leans into that.

But, it is poppycock. Today we know the structures in the mammalian limbic system that process emotional responses generally have analogs in reptiles (and birds). Those structures do, however, have some what different interconnectivity and relative sizes, so I chose to go with the idea that emotional responses are processed somewhat differently in lizardfolk.

In fact, in mammals, emotional responses are typically faster than logical ones. So, humans get angry, or scared, or joyful before we fully understand a situation, and if we want our logic to really hold sway, we have to work at it. For my character, I flipped that - emotional responses were only about as fast as logical ones - so my character effectively didn't have to fight his own emotions in the short term, which would appear cold and logical by comparison to mammalian reactions. But he wasn't Spock, and especially could form long term emotionally driven bonds, which is important later.

Mammals signal their emotional states a great deal in body language and facial expression. Lizardfolk, not so much. Their body posture is reserved, and their faces just don't have the musculature to be very expressive. This enhances the appearance of being unfeeling.

The flat affect is enhanced by vocal apparatus. Reptiles don't have a particularly adaptable vocal apparatus, which is why draconic is a fairly sibilant lanugage - lots of hisses, clicks, and other sounds made with the tongue and mouth, rather than vowels coming from the throat. I went so far as to posit that his normal vocal apparatus couldn't handle Common or Elven or most other mammalian languages.

Making most of those sounds required a variation of the mechanisms crocodiles use to "bellow", which takes a bit of effort. It produced a fairly monotone, rumbly voice, without a lot of change of tone to denote meaning or emotion. It is also a little weird for him, because that mechanism is mostly used in mating and threat displays to communicate body size, often over distance through water. So, he wasn't comfortable speaking except in draconic, because to him doing so always felt to him like whatever else he was doing, he was also shouting, "I am BIG and IMPRESSIVE!" And so he would limit how much he would speak, since nobody else in the party knew draconic. Early in play, this looked like "stupid barbarian" and I was fine with doing a slow reveal on how much he had going on in his head. But it also meant as a role-playing note he didn't go for idle chit-chat. He listened just fine. But he spoke up when it mattered.

Now, let's talk about culture.

We are talking about a people who live in warm swamps. No mining. So, not much metallurgy, not much stonework. Few large trees for lumber or firewood. Most of the materials they have rot over fairly short timescales in the environment they live in. So, they build few large permanent structures. Without structures, there's no where to keep stuff. And honestly, they don't need a lot of stuff. They have natural armor and weapons, and don't particularly need much shelter from the elements. Stuff weighs you down in the swamp.

So, we are talking about a very utilitarian approach to material goods. You don't keep stuff you don't really need. Most of the stuff you need you can make from the natural materials around you. So, acquisition of material wealth isn't really a thing.

Also, food storage in a warm swamp without salt mining is a bit of a problem. Even if you can dry or smoke meats, they'll tend to get moldy quickly. Food is mostly use it or lose it.

You know what else goes bad quickly? The bodies of your own people. But you can't put up individual memorials that last. If you make the bodies of the dead important, you are going to be sorely disappointed. So... you don't. "Your friend died. That's sad. Now heave him into the swamp already 'cuz he's getting pretty ripe..." The memory of them is the important bit, not their physicality after death.

So, food goes bad quickly. And the bodies of the dead aren't important to you. And you are an obligate carnivore. And say you and the village just killed an ogre who wandered in...

You don't eat your own kind, because that spreads disease. But other folks? You don't hunt sentient creatures, because that's asking to be seen as a monster yourself. But if you already took all the risk in killing him for other reasons, you oughta get something out of it. He's just meat now anyway...

And those ogre bones will make a great axe handle...

These are an egg-laying people - their kids don't get mother's milk, so there's no strict need for maternal bonding, and thereby no real need for pair bonding of parents. But, we do have a culture and learning, so there is some child rearing done - but that can be on the community level. Eggs are handed off to a few creche wardens until they hatch and for a short while afterwards, but soon enough the young are wandering around the village, learning from whatever adult will teach them today. Child rearing becomes a community affair, with most adults having some responsibility, and some protective and rearing duties all the time.

And if some of your party members act, well, a bit immature, your lizardfolk compatriot may start to see them sort of like kids who need protection.

 

[Frozen_Heart]

That would indeed be very useful. Sadly, the feat isn't predictive, it only allows you to identify past events.

Scenario 1:
DM: You enter a room. The floor appears to be wet.
PC: I use Rainsmelling.
DM: It is a room. You are indoors. It did not rain.

Scenario 2:
DM: You enter an open-air enclosure. It is raining. The ground appears to be wet.
PC: I use Rainsmelling.
DM. As I said, it is raining.

Scenario 3:
DM: You enter an open air enclosure. The ground appears to be wet, and it is early morning.
PC: I use Rainsmelling.
DM: It is not rain, it is dew.

Scenario 4:
DM: You enter an open-air enclosure. The ground appears to be wet.
PC: I use Rainsmelling.
DM: Since you are human, you do not need to roll. It did rain.

Scenario 5:
DM: You enter an open-air enclosure. The ground appears to be wet. A tap has been left running nearby, with gravity-def pipes bringing water form a container above the adjoining building.
PC: I use Rainsmelling.
DM: Your keen human senses reveal to you that it has in fact rained recently, and the tap is trying to disguise the fact, by giving an alternative explanation for the damp floor.
PC: I look at the tap to see if I can work out who did that.
DM: Roll Investigation.
PC: I am only proficient in Rainsmelling.

I more meant the ability to detect if it had recently rained several hexes away on the grid map. Not the ability to tell it had rained on your head.

That way you can then spend a day travelling towards it to prevent dying of thirst.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

If Humans in D&D are Earth Humans, they should have bonuses to Con (we evolved to be persistence hunters) and Charisma (for reasons mentioned). Instead they're some kind of weird super ambitious everyman that is the major race in most settings because, uh...Tolkien, I guess?

Hmmh. By that reasoning every bipedal humanoid should gain +2 con.
It is not inherently human to be very efficient walkers.
Elves, dwarves, orcs should be equally adapt at persistence hunting.

 

[Aldarc]

Regardless of what we decide I really like the subtle 4e lore that the Human God that everybody forgot about is the one Asmodeus killed to ascend to god hood and the 9 Hells was formerly his domain.

Has some fun implications.

Which would kinda make Asmodeus the unofficial god of humanity.

 

[Frozen_Heart]

Hmmh. By that reasoning every bipedal humanoid should gain +2 con.
It is not inherently human to be very efficient walkers.
Elves, dwarves, orcs should be equally adapt at persistence hunting.

Sweating goes a long way into allowing humans to cool down, which is partially what makes us so good at endurance.

Other playable species might not sweat nearly as much (or at all in some cases), therefore not allowing them to stay cool during constant exertion.

 

[CreamCloud0]

So, speculative fiction often wants to portray an entirely different set of cultures. It makes a world feel more real and larger. This brings some unusual problems because... Well, the fundamental problem with non-humans is that the creators of the games and stories do not have an example of a non-human sapient creature. We don't know what a non-human mind capable of communicating with us and interacting with our society, culture, and civilization on the same levels that we do would be like. Nobody has ever met one in reality. What their cultures would value, how they would organize their society, and how they would live are all entirely beyond conception. We cannot imagine what we are incapable of conceptualizing, and it's difficult to conceptualize something without an example.

Therefore, all fictional "races" or "species" or "ancestries" in any of these games or stories are not actually non-human at all. They're all humans. Everything is taken from humanity or expressed as an absence of some aspect of humanity. That's why I often call them "humans in rubber masks." Like the aliens in Star Trek, all the aliens mysteriously are humanoids about 1-2 meters in height with curiously shaped foreheads and nasal roots.

This kind of opens the question: If they're all just humans, why don't we use humans for everything? Well, some places do. But the advantage of non-human humans is that they're immediately identifiable as non-humans. They look different and their cultural identity as non-human is not something that can be easily concealed. You don't just "look southeast Asian" or "have Mediterranean features" or "have blonde hair, skin so pale it's pink, and piercing blue eyes" because those aren't recognizable as an individual culture to us. They were at one time in the past, but not anymore, and we don't like viewing humans that way anymore. Even including clothing, jewelry, tattoos, make-up, or other culturally linked styles isn't enough because humans often adopt elements from cultures they don't originate from. Worse, some cultures implicitly or explicitly accept diversity or uniqueness. Humanity is diverse and intermingled, and we want to portray a diverse world of unknown cultures to the viewer, reader, or player... and sometimes even unknown to the characters in the work. So we need it to be as crystal clear to them as it can be that an elf is irrevocably not a human.

So we need to imagine what humans might look like if they were obviously non-human creatures. -- That seems like a strange sentiment, but remember, we have no earthly idea what true non-human cultures and non-human societies look like. We can only imagine so much, and we cannot imagine what social constructs a truly alien mind would have or how they would differ from us. -- So, as I said, we want to know what non-human humans might look like, while also remaining familiar enough to understand their way of life. So we imagine human-like non-humans in terms of what humans are not. Yes, it really is that silly. So, elves all have pointed ears and delicate features because humans do not. Dwarves are all short and bearded because humans are not.

Now that there's an appearance for these non-human humans, we can develop unique cultures for them. What these games want is a set of non-human cultures that have easily justifiable reasons to be unlike the human culture or cultures. Elves live in the forest and are aloof and disinterested in the world because human cultures are not those things. Dwarves live under mountains, love mining, crafting, and stonework, and value order and clans because human cultures are not those things.

That's the problem with humans. They're all negative space. That's the real problem. Humans are defined in most campaign settings by what they are not. That's what you must avoid. The problem is that in many settings, humans are a blank slate and are defined by that blankness.

The easiest example of where to look for how this should work is Lord of the Rings, including the 5e LotR or AiME books. When you pick a "race" in that game, you might pick Durin's Folk, Hobbits of the Shire, Elves or Mirkwood, or Elves of Lothlorien. Or you might pick Men of Gondor or Men of Rohan. We know what the Men of each domain are like. They are similar to each other, yes, just as the two Elves are. But they have identifiable cultures. If you then go meet the Men of Laketown, they have their own culture, too.

That's the key. You need to have a concrete idea for what even the human culture is, and I think you need at least two tangible, coherent cultures of humans with completely distinct cultural characteristics. The way to make humans interesting is to give them a culture to call their own. Because that's what we're actually picking when we say "race" or "species" or "lineage."

And the default human in 5e D&D? It has no culture. It's culture is "adaptability to any culture" which, while true, is... it's got no story. So, give the humans a story the same way you have for everyone else.

It should be clear that if you see a given structure that you know a human built it. But you should be able to do that. "Oh, these farms are built in the human style with a farmhouse, barn, small coral, and central well. The fields look like they were wheat or some other human-favored grain." It's visibly a human style just like stonework would visibly be dwarven. When the party goes to a human city, you can tell the elf players that they're surprised by how many children they see. "Why, you've seen two or three in just the last five minutes! It's like strolling through a nursery." You tell the dwarf player, "You see stonework and carpentry that, while plain, is simply everywhere and made in that robust and simple human style. It isn't beautiful and it isn't maintained to your standards, but you have to admire the sheer practicality and sturdiness of it all. It's like they know exactly what 'good enough' is."

i'd really love if they tried to really extrapolate how other species cultures would logically differ from human society stemming from their own biological traits, similar to that, oh i forget what it's called but there was a thought experiment setting that tried to look at how a world would actually develop if things like teleportation circles and plant growth all those other magics that logically should have a massive impact on society did have the impact they should. (edit found it, it was the tippyverse)

like for elves who only need to trance for 4 hours a day, maybe that might create a whole 24 hour society where everything is open all the time and instead of having dedicated bedrooms there are little bubble room motels that you check in for 4-hours at a time that are treated more like public benches, and the idea of shutting everything down for nearly half of the day so people can sleep is insanely inefficient to them, how does your entire species being resistant to charm effects influence their society

maybe dwarves with darkvision, tremmorsense and an innate constant knowledge of just how far underground they are, resulting in pitch black cities where the only light is from the fires of the smelting forges, where colour is a near alien concept to them as is logically inked writing, but record things in texture and sound

or halflings, what would be the results of a species having nigh-supernatural luck and they know it

 

[fuindordm]

or halflings, what would be the results of a species having nigh-supernatural luck and they know it

Halfling matchmakers are actually part of a millenia-spanning consipracy to breed generations with more and more luck. Kind of like the Bene Gesserit or Pearson's Puppeteers, but more benevolent.
Marriages are not arranged so much as determined through complicated games of chance and survival.
One of the most attractive traits a halfling can have is a near-death experience and the scars to prove it.
From their own perspective, halfling communities are ideally placed--the big folk do all the heavy lifting of industry, military defense, etc. Most halfling communities are self-governed protectorates, and luckily the big folk are fine with that.

 

[James Gasik]

Hmmh. By that reasoning every bipedal humanoid should gain +2 con.
It is not inherently human to be very efficient walkers.
Elves, dwarves, orcs should be equally adapt at persistence hunting.

Except dwarves have lower speed, problematic, and well, while they don't have it now, Elves have for much of the game's history had worse Con (though if you believe that Complete Book of Elves, that's barely a hindrance at all!).

 

[James Gasik]

Halfling matchmakers are actually part of a millenia-spanning consipracy to breed generations with more and more luck. Kind of like the Bene Gesserit or Pearson's Puppeteers, but more benevolent.
Marriages are not arranged so much as determined through complicated games of chance and survival.
One of the most attractive traits a halfling can have is a near-death experience and the scars to prove it.
From their own perspective, halfling communities are ideally placed--the big folk do all the heavy lifting of industry, military defense, etc. Most halfling communities are self-governed protectorates, and luckily the big folk are fine with that.

I'd rather deal with the Kwisatz Haderach than Teela Brown, thanks.

 

[UngeheuerLich]

Except dwarves have lower speed, problematic, and well, while they don't have it now, Elves have for much of the game's history had worse Con (though if you believe that Complete Book of Elves, that's barely a hindrance at all!).

I don't see 25ft as a hindrance for endurance hunting. Never seen Gimmli keeping up with Atagorn and Legolas
Ok. Elves are worse. So no need for +2 con bonus for humans.