D&D 5E What's wrong with a human-centric fantasy world?

[Selkirk]

it actually might be more interesting to start with an all demihuman party of another race and have them encounter humans(maybe adding humans to the party). the limitations of an all human party is the boredom factor (there are 9 playable races for a reason ). but all that being said i really don't like the dragonlance/hobbit style party either-dragonborn/drow/dwarf/tiefling as merry mates doesn't feel right. it's tough enough to justify why these characters are teaming up when they have common backgrounds and histories. figuring out why the tiefling fighter would team up with the dragonborn cleric and the drow thief is best left to the novels.

 

[TrippyHippy]

I have had the idea, after watching a recent fantasy blockbuster movie, of playing an all Dragonborn campaign to take back their mountain stolen by sneaky dwarves….

But anyway, I wish people would stop arguing that all human parties are boring. They’re really not. I’m a big fan of D&D, but I’m also a big fan of RuneQuest. What Runequest has always had as an advantage over D&D is that:

a) Human characters are default in the standard Character Generation, but this is complimented by….
b) You can play *any* creature with a comparable Intelligence score from the bestiary, with guidelines given for obvious ones….and….
c) There is a massively increased emphasis on cultural variation in the game. The ‘racial’ template is essentially made redundant, and replaced by ‘Culture’.

So it can be done. It’s been done in other games too (including The One Ring for Tolkien-philes)….and actually, it wouldn’t really take that much to do in D&D either.

 

[Grainger]

I’ve read a few comments about how playing humans is ‘boring’ and that it’s more hard to make a society interesting. People need to get out more and read more. We have the entire history of the human race to play with! Humans come in all shapes and sizes, and boast cultures that encompass everything interesting that we’ve ever known.

Yes, yes, this 1000 times yes. In the UK, people often say that history is "boring". History is, basically, the most interesting things that ever happened. What they mean is "I had boring history classes at school". But yes, I never got the desire to split off aspects of human nature into fantasy races. It's all there in humanity anyway.

I suppose the main way in which fantasy races are different from humans is in longevity. An Elf that can expect to live 900 years is going to have a different attitude to the urgency of life, or to accidental fatalities, or warfare casualties than does a human. But aside from that, demi-humans are basically split off parts of human nature.

 

[Grazzt]

Just make your campaign how you want. There is nothing remotely wrong with banning any races.

Yep this. I banned halflings way back in 1e and gnomes not longer after. (Tieflings, dragonborn and all that fun stuff don't exist either and never will.) In our campaign, the majority of PCs are human. There's one half-elf PC. Rest are human. There were a few others many years ago (dwarf, half-orc) but they have since retired and been replaced by human PCs.

 

[JoeCrow]

The campaign world I'm running is is kind of human-centric as far as NPCs go; the overall population of the Five Kingdoms is about 92% human, 8% demi-human (going roughly halfling/dwarf/elf/other weirdos in decreasing order of occurrence), but I let the players be whatever they want. Adventurers are a bit more common in the Five Kingdoms than in other places for a variety of backstory/historical reasons, and the rarer races have an even higher likely-hood of going murderhoboing. I pretty much designed the world to be a place where there was at least a chance of all the cool stuff happening somewhere, so there's weird places on the edges for the freakier stuff to come from.

The crew ended up being your typical human/dwarf/elf/halfling demihumans-of-Bennetton bunch, but that was mostly because they started as the stock pregens in the initial playtest. Some other folks have jumped in over the last year, and we've got another elf and another human, but nobody's really opted for any of the odder types, even though there's places for them to be from.

I did a whole frequency breakdown of roughly how many of each of the PHB-legal races there are, along with a breakdown of how many active and inactive adventurer-classed folks there are in the Five Kingdoms, but that was mostly out of combination of OCD background-wankery and trying to figure out how hard it'd be for the crew to find NPCs with the right combo of levels and classes to cure their clerics little case of demonic-ly enhanced lycanthropy.

 

[Nebulous]

Human-centric is awesome. I would take a queue from other sources and make the human cultures and kingdoms give them individual bonuses and quirks to differentiate them. It all comes down to the players though. If they really like playing elves and dwarves and halflings or a warforged, it might not go over well forcing them to be a vanilla human.

But I always loved the concept where demi-human races leveled up about 3 times and became more "pure" examples of their species.

 

[Mercurius]

@Lil Shenron, nice inquiry. I just skimmed the first couple pages and then became impatient, so here goes. I very much agree with you that non-human races in D&D, whether the canonical rules or most games that I have played in, don't have the same kind of exotic, truly fantastical feel that I find to be more aesthetically interesting. Actually, Tolkien's elves (not Peter Jackson's) are, to me, "real elves" - they truly feel otherworldly, of the faery realm. Peter Jackson tried but didn't quite get there.

But the other part of this is that players sometimes want special characters. They might want to be Drizzt, not Mr. Standard Elfy Elf with bow and cloak. With that in mind, you can still let the players play what they want, but with the understanding that they are probably outliers. Maybe an elf was taken in an orc raid and then sold in a slave auction, then escaped and grew up on the streets of a sprawling tropical metropolis. That elf might become a rogue or assassin, end up with tattoos and piercings, and perhaps feel a distant sense of longing for something else. I think the key is if the players want something outside of the norm they need to be able to contextualize it.

I think, in the end, what you are talking about is certainly valid, but that the onus is on the DM to create the context, what "normal" is. If you want more mystical, otherworldly and rare elves, do that. If you want dwarves to really feel like a difference race that has emerged from the earth itself, do it. But then let the players decide how they want to relate with that and encourage them to do it well. And, most importantly, have the world respond accordingly. If one of your players wants to play MC Shiggy the elf bard and the party meets a group of elves and he says, "What up, bros," then have the "real" elves treat him accordingly. In other words, don't cater to your players not taking things seriously or roleplaying absurdities.

As for kitchen sink, one of my all-time favorite RPG settings is Talislanta which has been called a "fantasy zoo" - it is more psychedelic, in a way, than traditional fantastic. But it works, and I think because it intends to be kitchen sink, it is going for that. I think what you are talking about is similar to the monty hall effect with treasure: too much of a good thing waters down the specialness.

 

[Nebulous]

Yep this. I banned halflings way back in 1e and gnomes not longer after. (Tieflings, dragonborn and all that fun stuff don't exist either and never will.) In our campaign, the majority of PCs are human. There's one half-elf PC. Rest are human. There were a few others many years ago (dwarf, half-orc) but they have since retired and been replaced by human PCs.

Yeah. The last edition really pushed the dragonborn. Play me, I'm new and shiny!

 

[travathian]

It doesn't result in better roleplaying, it results in DM preferred roleplaying. The latter is not necessary equivalent to the former. Training your players to roleplay in certain way is not supporting the social contract.

I kind of want to play in your campaign now. I think I will be a vegan, sober, pacifist dwarven fighter who instead of fighting simply engages all of his enemies in discourse trying to get them to surrender. Never mind his wis/int/cha are all 8's and he only speaks in dwarven limericks. Sucks for realism, the DM and the party, but I will role play the crap out of that guy!

Or you can realize the point that was being made is that too many players don't chose an elf to play an elf, they chose an elf for the dexterity bonus, proficiencies, etc and play however they want to play. Obviously a player going outside of their role on occasion is perfectly acceptable, but if your player plays that elf paladin like a dwarven barbarian all the time, there is nothing wrong with intervening. Some players are obviously better at role playing, and while you don't want to punish those that aren't, you can help guide them to either alter their character or just make one more fitting their style.

 

[KarinsDad]

I kind of want to play in your campaign now. I think I will be a vegan, sober, pacifist dwarven fighter who instead of fighting simply engages all of his enemies in discourse trying to get them to surrender. Never mind his wis/int/cha are all 8's and he only speaks in dwarven limericks. Sucks for realism, the DM and the party, but I will role play the crap out of that guy!

Be my guest. The other players would eat your PC for breakfast when they refuse to heal him, refuse to stop adventuring because he is hurt or out of spells, or if he does not go adventuring with the rest of the group, the DM refuses to give your PC any game time because he refuses to be a party member.

Taking an example to extremes does not mean that the roleplaying faux pas that people are talking about here, actually exists as a problem at most tables.

Or you can realize the point that was being made is that too many players don't chose an elf to play an elf, they chose an elf for the dexterity bonus, proficiencies, etc and play however they want to play. Obviously a player going outside of their role on occasion is perfectly acceptable, but if your player plays that elf paladin like a dwarven barbarian all the time, there is nothing wrong with intervening. Some players are obviously better at role playing, and while you don't want to punish those that aren't, you can help guide them to either alter their character or just make one more fitting their style.

"too many players"??? You have stats to back that up?


You call it guiding. I call it the DM trying to change how I play my PC.

It doesn't matter. If a player choses an elf for the dexterity bonus, proficiencies, etc and plays the elf paladin like a dwarven barbarian all the time, that's ok.

The Elven Roleplaying Politically Correct Police should keep their nose out of that player's PC. The DM can have a discussion if the player goes to heavy extremes with it that it bothers most everyone at the table, but most players do not do that (or at least IME). There may be, however, some DMs who are super sensitive to this because of some politically correct roleplaying idea that they have in their heads, but that's not a problem with the player. It's a problem with the DM.

It's ok to have an Elf who gets drunk a lot. It's ok to have a Dwarf that is a bookworm and never drinks.