Who prefers a human-centric campaign?

[Doug McCrae]

It's not D&D unless there's a balrog PC.

The First Dungeon Adventure

 

[Mercule]

Not quite as polar as you're saying, but I do favor psuedo-Medieval fantasy settings in which human is the default assumption, players choose non-human characters for a reason, most of the action takes place in or on the edges of human settlement, and the races display a certain amount of prejudice to one another.

Of those, the last is the most important, with the first being nearly as much so. I don't mind the cantina so much as I mind the implied rounds of Kumbaya.

 

[lutecius]

Who likes a human-centric campaign?

I do. I like high fantasy settings and most of my campaigns have some cantina-ish places but I prefer human-centric games.

I can live with a couple of pointy-eared PCs or even short races but I'd rather go human-only than have a party full of dragonborn, warforged and the likes. It's a matter of aesthetics.

I also mean a setting where humans may not be the only mechanical choice, but are almost the only Flavor choice. I.e. reskinning a dwarf or a half-orc as humans from a different area/tradition.

In my homebrew, elves and dwarves are demi-humans, mortals descended from or transformed by outsiders (the actual fey are truly alien and like most magical creatures, not native to the material world)

So the PC "races" may have mysterious abilities and unusual traits but they are still mostly human. And so is their mindset, even though isolated communities have developed cultures of their own in areas of strong planar influence (like deep mines and forests.)

does that count?

 

[El Mahdi]

deleted

 

[BenBrown]

I prefer all-human, but not necessarily in D&D. My other fantasy campaigns are inevitably all-human, but in D&D, I always feel like I'm cutting off options.

 

[Stormonu]

I prefer human/near-human games with no more than ONE weird PC in the mix. That can be as subtle as a group of humans and elves with a half-orc in it to a group of humans/elves/dwarves/halflings and a silver dragon PC.

 

[Henry]

I would say all aliens serve the literary purpose of exploring a particular facet of humanity, but that they serve this purpose best when in that facet they are quite alien to our experience as humans.

I'd say that for the above reason, all the races you just noted would still be just "humans in funny suits" in an RPG. In short, it wouldn't matter to me about a humanocentric vs. non-humanocentric game, they'd both end up exploring the same qualities. (In fact, some of the 4E races so far imply some of these qualities - I'm thinking of the Shardminds for instance in the "just born knowing" category, or the Wilden and Warforged for the "one gender" race.)

I agree, it would be a starker contrast if it involved warforged, versus say a human society that was essentially clones or genderless.

 

[Ariosto]

The anti-cantina faction (which includes me) isn't saying "ban elves".

It's saying "really, do we need shardminds and robot people and dragon people with boobies and 75 other random things WOTC just came up with to be player races? really? are we THAT bored of traditional D&D that we have to play ninja vampire space creatures of doom from another dimension and CALL that D&D?"

I was thinking that if y'all were bored of the past decade's D&D, then maybe ninja vampire space creatures would be a nice change of pace. I mean, the 4e shardmind seems totally passé after all these years of the (half-jokingly) stereotypical "school of fish with five classes".

A lot of this stuff reminds me of nothing so much as gaming -- yes, D&D gaming -- back in the 1970s and early '80s. The "feel" of the offerings doesn't send me, but a lot of things in games and comics and so on were like that "back in the day", too.


Personally, I like different things in different game-worlds. The strangeness of the aliens in Empire of the Petal Throne is to me part of their charm, so I would keep them collectively very rare as PCs. In Talislanta, on the other hand, there are no "ordinary humans" and I would not expect to see two characters of the same type in a party. In Stormbringer or King Arthur Pendragon, even encounters with non-human beings as NPCs are rare relative to what has always seemed to me typical in Dungeons & Dragons or Tunnels & Trolls.

 

[Tequila Sunrise]

I don't necessarily mind humanocentric campaigns, but I don't prefer them.

With regards to D&D, I've ran and played really fun humanocentric campaigns, but I think one of the game's big appeals is its 'everything but the kitchen sink' nature. And I don't think that nature is a bad thing for an inherently silly game like D&D.

 

[Ariosto]

I inwardly cringe every time I game with someone playing a dwarf with a Scottish accent.

Whence that stereotype, anyhow? Was it Gimli in Peter Jackson's "Ring" movies? (I don't remember the actor's accent.)

They have in my mind always been associated primarily with the Nordic and Germanic tales. The Scots have their blood-thirsty powries or red caps, rather of the "goblin" persuasion, but that's as close as I recall to distinctively Celtic Dwarves.

Thoroughly human dwarfs -- or just tribes with physiques of diminutive but usual proportions, often aboriginal and using older technology -- seem often associated in tradition, in many parts of the world, with magical lore, and thereby sometimes conflated with local fairy folk.

In that sense, the Picts who captured Robert E. Howard's imagination (e.g., his tragic hero Bran Mak Morn) might count as "dwarfs" -- although I think they are more commonly associated with the term "elf-shot".

I expect the real answer is more along the lines of a Mike Myers comedy routine, or maybe a video game -- or those Jackson movies.

Also, to answer your question, yes I would prefer a setting with no traditional fantasy races. None. What. So. Ever. In fact, a setting with no humans would make me fairly happy.

Many animated films, or puppet features such as Henson's The Dark Crystal, may come to mind, and anthropomorphic animals in books ranging from The Wind in the Willows (which I think includes humans as well) to the Redwall series.