D&D 5E What is the appeal of the weird fantasy races?

[Ace]

I'll admit I'm an old school D&D player/DM. I've never discounted a player idea in osr or 5e, but I still wonder. Turtle people (tortles) flying people (aarokara), dragon people (dragonborn)... and so on.

Why do people chose these races?

To me, elves and dwarves have a human element. But Turtle people, and cat people and demon people and dragon people seem like the new normal. Do people who play D&D now, feel more comfortable with role-playing animalistic type characters than before?

It is kind of off-putting when your player party is a bunch of bird people, elephant people, demon people, cat people... and so on. I mean are humans even relevant in D&D anymore?

Is it a role-playing thing, or just a ability bonus power-up thing?

is the normal for D&D 5e is ampthormorophic / furry role-playing? I don't think I've ever ran a group that had a single human in it.

D&D players like novelty and are faddish like everyone else. In the Late 80's early 90's it was "All Elves, All the Time." compounded by the unbalanced cheese in the Complete Book of Elves.

Heck novelty is a core element of both our hobby and the basis of sales. Tasha's Cauldron is nothing but a book of "shiny new toys." and sells a lot of copies.

OTOH Some years back my gaming group the one I played in not ran had a hard ban on anthropomorphic animal characters and not allowing or seeing "weird" stuff was the default.

Another group allowed cat people, something I've played now and again way back even before Thundercats .

It just depends.

Now as a DM my solution is just to limit non humans to suit my game needs. Often its 1 per 5 players or just half elves /ones that look human or sometimes none at all .

All huge diversity of people play this hobby and in many places with a little effort finding people that like what you like. The solution for not enjoying a trend in D&D is to build your group with those like minded folks.

 

[Charlaquin]

I get that some people want to "explore" other perspectives, but do we really do that in any meaningful way? We are limited by life experience, biology and built-in unconscious biases, limited in our ability to take on an alien perspective.

This is true, but the simple act of trying to explore an alternate perspective is still extremely valuable, psychologically speaking. While we may never truly be able to experience another person’s experience, trying to imagine doing so expands one’s own perspective and creativity and increases empathy. That’s why roleplaying is a common therapeutic technique.

 

[Minigiant]

I see it as

Traditional Fantasy Races of elves, dwarves, and even orcs are so often used that they are played out.
Subversions of Traditional Fantasy Races are also done so man times that they too are played out
The common cultures of the Traditional Fantasy Races are very centers on the same cultures and from the same time periods which are often are played out.
Humans naturally get bored of repeated things and are attracted to new things unless they have a strong bias (like nostalgia).

It's why you see the opposite in Asian fantasy media where elves and dwarves are relatively new and the new fad in gaming. Animal people has been done for centuries and doesn't have that same spark.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

I feel sort of lucky that I started playing D&D before I had even heard of LotR or The Hobbit. It seems ironic that these monuments of creativity have limited the imaginations of so many people. Although this did leave me for a couple of years wondering wtf a Halfling was even supposed to be.

 

[MGibster]

I feel sort of lucky that I started playing D&D before I had even heard of LotR or The Hobbit. It seems ironic that these monuments of creativity have limited the imaginations of so many people. Although this did leave me for a couple of years wondering wtf a Halfling was even supposed to be.

In a way I think it's helped D&D become such a successful game. I can sit down at a table with almost any other D&D player, even in a totally "unique" setting, and we all know what dwarves, elves, and halflings are.

 

[Zardnaar]

One of my big fantasy things is Shining Force, the ol' Sega game.

So... Bird people doesn't seem 'weird' to me given how that game goes. They're just, part of the world and part of how fantasy goes. Along with the phoenix, the jellyfish, the ratman thief you can promote into a ninja, tanks being sort of common, and the Gamera

Shining force had some very big D&Dism in it.

Speaking of Sega rpgs....

D&D 5E - Worldship?

Thinking of basing a game off Phantasy Star III an old JRPG from 30 odd years ago. I don't need to recycle the games plot but may outright steal the setting. Alissa III https://phantasystar.fandom.com/wiki/Alisa_III Basically the world is a giant space ship with 7 world's. Each world...

www.enworld.org

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I can imagine different societies that would be hard to justify among humans, when the race that created that society is notably different from humans. Forest Gnomes like to be 350-500 years old, are noticeably more cognitively advanced than humans, on average, are resistant to mental magic, and can talk to critters. And a very tall gnome is 4ft tall.

So, I can imagine a society of people who are more impressed by cleverness than strength, who have friendships with rabbits and foxes, whose elders are 500 years old, who are less afraid but possibly more knowledgeable about mental magic (having experimented more safely with it), and I can read about gnome lore and origins and create something with inspirations from real world myth but not grounded in "realistic" human cultures.

Thats fun.

There is also the matter of creatures as symbols. An anthropomorphic tiger person has associations that appeal to people in the context of playing a certain kind of character, that a big burly human doesn't.

Lastly, many of these races have a certain place in the world in DnD that people want to explore. Unless a DM does a really good job of describing a wide range of cultures AND the players are willing to actually read up on them and get to know them asw well as they know the story of the teifling in the phb, a human won't as easily have that same place in the world.

Indeed, a human whose culture is thought to deal with devils really cannot have the same place as tieflings, unless they're marked so indelibly by their demonology that they...might as well be tieflings.

 

[toucanbuzz]

It is kind of off-putting when your player party is a bunch of bird people, elephant people, demon people, cat people... and so on. I mean are humans even relevant in D&D anymore?

Is it a role-playing thing, or just a ability bonus power-up thing?

At my table, it'd be thematic. When I ran Curse of Strahd, my gamers felt it would be more immersive and gothic to limit our races to human, half-elf, elf, and dwarf. Out of the Abyss - the opposite as a fantastic, high fantasy setting. In our pending Kingmaker campaign (heavy European medieval influence, game of thrones-esque story plots), a player could open more roleplay doors by opting human and perhaps playing a bastard or member of one of those noble houses, whereas those storylines wouldn't work for a cat or bird man.

Story. When they introduced D&D 5E at Gencon, I grabbed the pre-fab human fighter (who was former mayor of a town buried by a volcano). A couple others built characters. The DM, contrary to what I expected, spent a solid amount of time encouraging us to go in order around the table and make up a story about how we met the guy to our left, then back again to explain why we all stuck together to sail to Phlan. When we got to the guy who made a Dual-Wield Drow Paladin of Mask, he was clueless. He kept talking about how he was a dark elf, as if that in itself was a story. He kept focusing on getting us to recognize how unusual his character was compared to the others. In contrast, somehow the rest of the table (even a guy who'd never played D&D before), worked up a story about rallying around this generic human former mayor and taking our skills to Phlan, getting someone onto the council, and forming our own guild. Now we had a single cause, even if it were in a 1-shot that had nothing to do with taking over the town council.

So, no matter what you play, and I've said it before, it should be played because you believe it will make the game more enjoyable for everyone else, not just yourself.

 

[SiCK_Boy]

What kind of implications? If you're talking about racism... from what I read people who experience racism in real life don't really feel like playing it out in their fantasy game.

Implication may have been the wrong choice of word. I agree that few people want to roleplay racism just for fun.

I meant it more in the sense of exploring said non-human society and its relations to the world of the setting. For example, the description of the dragonborn is insisting very heavily on the importance of clan for a dragonborn (probably even more so than it is for a dwarf). If I was to play a dragonborn for anything else than just the "cool factor" of being a firebreating dragon-humanoid, I would expect to get a chance to explore what the clan of my character is, how it formed my character's world perspective, etc. I would expect it to matter in the game, not just as a vague afterthought. I have yet to meet a dragonborn player who spoke about its clan as more than a throwaway line in its background.

Being offered to play a game where the whole party is a group of dragonborn, with stories based around the power dynamics in the clan or trying to free our clan from the tyranny of being associated with some old evil dragon overlord? I'm in.

Seeing someone just play a dragonborn because they want to have resistance to electricity and spout mini lightning bolt from their nose when they get angry? Sure, if that's your thing, go for it... but in that case, I'll probably still consider you are just wearing a halloween costume. That's still fine.

One of the point I keep making is that the way the game is designed, race is barely relevant to what your character is "most of the time"; in fact, it will matter only as much as you, as a player, or the DM, are willing to make it relevant, but the way the game rules are structured and the way the game world is presented in those game rules doesn't support deep "exploration" of what any given race is about or mean.

 

[Arilyn]

D&D is usually pretty light and frothy. Players want to try out new and different combos. Nothing wrong with that. In fact, when I have players all making non standard races, it gets my creative juices flowing.