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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Li Shenron" data-source="post: 6490784" data-attributes="member: 1465">I am not a Tolkien expert at all, but actually this feeling I'm talking about in this thread came back to me once more after watching the latest Hobbit movie, which gave me a very different feel about demihuman races."The Battle of the Five Armies" -> Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits and Orcs are not as rare as provoking awe: everybody seem to take their existence pretty much the norm. But all of them live secluded somewhere else, and stick to their kind most of the time, except in times of war against common enemies. Furthermore, looking at the size of the "armies", it seems possible there is not that many of them in the world."Dungeons and Dragons" -> everywhere is full of Elves, Dwarves and Halflings (but also Gnomes, Half-orcs, Dragonborn, Tieflings... for fear than any player's PC is treated unfairly?). Even an apparently small percentage as 5% of race X in a town is actually a lot more than in Tolkien. It seems to me there just isn't anybody living within other races territories, just very temporary visitors at most.There are also strong tendencies in D&D to "humanize" non-human races as much as possible, for instance by assuming all of them have authorities, economy, laws, technology, professions etc. similar to humans. I am not sure, but I didn't get the feeling that Tolkien reveals much about those aspects, and if you don't reveal/explain too much then you can actually imagine they are completely different.</blockquote>

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