Mind of tempest
(he/him)
well the problem is all the monsters are designed as well xeno humans, not things antithetical to your life, you can marry an orc and have kids with who can keep going themselves that kinda takes the monster out of them, and then you go the fact that we have this product aimed at 11 year old so we can't make the monster to viscerally monstrous or the parents might complain.Anyway, here's my purpose for enjoying a bunch of different races with genuinely different abilities, characteristics, and moral outlooks: I think one of the great achievements in Tolkien's fiction was to make humans secondary, where the elves occupy center stage right up until the hobbits accidentally make everything much stranger than the wise had dreamt. Why? Well, because it makes the world I as a reader enter much bigger than me. It is much bigger than my specific hominid race: humans aren't quite an afterthought, but we are, in the consensus of Middle Earth, generally less impressive than elves or even dwarves. Because of this, when I read it I read about a world that doesn't need me or indeed anyone at all like me and has wonders far beyond our narrow human priorities.
A world that doesn't need me is the only kind of world I can really believe in. A world in which I occupy the center is far too egocentric and therefore implausible.
The worlds of D&D, then, become that much more viscerally plausible to me when they contain numerous races some of whom are far more impressive than humans. It becomes a bigger world in which any of my egotistical tendencies are immediately squashed. I like that.
I do still agree with John R Davis on something, though: today there are way too many playable races and not enough straight-up monsters. People have complained about racial stereotypes on our threads before, but I flatly do not buy their arguments, and my grounds for this are simple: archetypes--especially Jungian archetypes--are not stereotypes. People who think they are don't yet understand mythology.
few people want to redeem mind flayer as they will kill and eat you to survive not that I am against an aberration player race.
to be a monster you have to be monstrous either by form or deed with the latter as the thing that truly makes a monster
got to ask why yuan-ti? as I have heard few who like it, I would play one myself if they were not so busted they get auto vetoed but they will likely never be my favourite.People like choosing different races because different races are fun. It isn't deeper than that, because fun can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. Mechanics, creating culture, looking weird, exploring identity, there's literally an uncountable infinity of reasons why someone might have more fun with one race as opposed to another. It could even be, we already have a dwarf in the party, it'll be fun to have diversity and make something else, or it'll be fun to make a dwarf too and pal around with them.
Lots of people, especially older DMs, love to try and say that people only pick races for X, Y, Z reason, and I honestly wonder how much thought these people put into this otherwise very restricted and nonsensical opinion. The LGBT+ community didn't land on the Tieflings as their iconic race because of mechanics, and taking away the magic resistance from Yuan-Ti won't make them any less my favorite race.
The long and complicated essays and dissertations on why people pick certain races really are inherently flawed because of this. They are trying to treat all demographics as one demographic. I realize that you could say, Shardstone, you're doing the same thing by saying people are just picking races for whatever their definition of fun is! But...that's the whole point of playing a game. To, somehow, have fun, even if your fun only exists because you just want to pal around with your friends.