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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Guest 7034872" data-source="post: 8688586">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 [USER=6799796]John R Davis[/USER] 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.</blockquote>

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