PDA

View Full Version : No Humans Allowed



Kami2awa
2015-01-19, 08:33 AM
Recently, I played in a Pathfinder game where about halfway through the campaign someone raised the question "Are there any humans in this world?"

The whole party were playing as either planetouched or entirely non-human, and up to that point we realised we had hardly met any normal humans at all. As it turned out, there were some in the world (we just hadn't encountered any NPC human yet).

This was actually, IMO, a really good thing - it leant a strong feeling of the fantastic and exotic to the world, and distinguished it from other settings quite significantly.

What do people think of the idea of a completely human-less D&D/Pathfinder world? Would it cause any problems with the game?

Grinner
2015-01-19, 08:46 AM
What do people think of the idea of a completely human-less D&D/Pathfinder world? Would it cause any problems with the game?

Seeing as how various races tend to be personifications of various facets of the human psyche, I've always liked the idea of a non-human world. It at least gives room for races without strongly-developed psychologies. The "one-hat race" was cool when Tolkien did it, but his non-human races were also mired in their cultural pasts. They had stagnated, so there was actually a good reason for their behavior. For less-developed settings, it's more difficult to justify that kind of behavior.

I wonder if you could work the one-hat race trope into a setting...?

Faily
2015-01-19, 09:46 AM
I personally think it would be cool with campaigns that don't have humans. Then again, I prefer to play non-humans myself in D&D, regardless of the mechanical superiority of Human. :smalltongue:

goto124
2015-01-19, 09:52 AM
DM: Pick a race.
Newbie: Hmm... human? I guess it's the easiest to play, both in mechanical and RP terms.
DM: Sorry, no humans.
Newbie: Wait what? Okay, elf. Wait, I wanted a warrior... now I have to handle racial stuff... fine, dwarf. Wait, my character's personality is rather un-dwarf-like... must I spend the campaign going on about how I'm different from other dwarves? Come on, just gimme a human.

Yora
2015-01-19, 10:06 AM
In my homebrew setting, humans are only one of the minor races, inhabiting some small remote corners of the continent. The major races are lizardmen, beastmen, elves, and goblin-gnomes.

Segev
2015-01-19, 12:15 PM
I ran a game where humans were extinct. And viewed by the remaining races as a half-mythological demon-kind that they used to scare their children into behaving with.

Historically, humanity had fought a war against almost all the other races (dwarves had been on their side), and nearly won before the elves managed to pull out a (genocidal) upset victory (thanks in part to a traitor) with the aid of the orcs, goblins, gnomes, dragons, kobolds, and halflings.

The only ... thing ... that was once human that still was around was the lich who dominated the southern half of the forest that once housed the elven empire. (They were reduced to holding the northern half only.) Said lich was the traitor who gave the win to the elves...and when they repaid his treason by bidding him die, he obliged and took most of the living things in their southern empire with him into undeath.

Most don't know the lich ever was human.

mr_odd
2015-01-19, 12:21 PM
In my world, humans are the majority (except for in specific racial lands). I feel like this can make other creatures feel more extraordinary.

Honest Tiefling
2015-01-19, 12:56 PM
In my homebrew setting, humans are only one of the minor races, inhabiting some small remote corners of the continent. The major races are lizardmen, beastmen, elves, and goblin-gnomes.

I read that as batmen. I am severely disappointed now.

Anywho, humans are great mechanically because they are rarely a bad race for any class, so every class has at least one decent option for it. I think this problem could be alleviated with enough variations with the races, or sub-races. And if a newbie can figure out a culture of a fantasy human just fine, they can probably pick up a culture for a fantasy catman as well. Just have at least one, if not a few options, that act very human-like or have simple deviations. Such as catmen who act as humans but also navigate using scent.

Yora
2015-01-19, 02:50 PM
Now you're going into the finer rules of specific RPG systems. I don't consider that a part of setting design.

HunterOfJello
2015-01-19, 03:00 PM
In 3.5 I used to allow a free +1 LA on race choices just so people would stop playing humans and actually play something interesting. All human parties in nearly all human worlds got really dull.

Honest Tiefling
2015-01-19, 03:06 PM
Now you're going into the finer rules of specific RPG systems. I don't consider that a part of setting design.

Eh, difference of opinion. I think sometimes it is good to consider the mechanics of the game when building the world and vice versa. When the two diverge too much it can also get really weird and immersion breaking in my opinion.

ComaVision
2015-01-19, 03:10 PM
In 3.5 I used to allow a free +1 LA on race choices just so people would stop playing humans and actually play something interesting. All human parties in nearly all human worlds got really dull.

Seems to me the fault is with uncreative people if humans are boring in a fantasy world...

Arbane
2015-01-19, 04:00 PM
In 3.5 I used to allow a free +1 LA on race choices just so people would stop playing humans and actually play something interesting. All human parties in nearly all human worlds got really dull.

Yeah, humans are soooo dull. We've only managed to wring 6000 years of literature, song, art, and statuary out of them in the real world.

Honest Tiefling
2015-01-19, 04:04 PM
Yeah, humans are soooo dull. We've only managed to wring 6000 years of literature, song, art, and statuary out of them in the real world.

To be fair, a great deal of that is centered around boobies, ding-dongs, or bumping uglies.

Through I think I side on the idea that occasionally, a non-human world is interesting and viable for exploration. The challenge of it can be fun (how would a race that acts fairly human but lives for a long time differ in how they act?) as well as adding visually different entities. Or heck, people sometimes just want to do something different.

Forrestfire
2015-01-19, 04:10 PM
If I'm playing something nonhuman, I don't want to just be a human-with-a-funny-hat, I need to write up and play with a mindset that is actually different. Otherwise, what's the point?

Naturally, this means that I rarely play nonhumans. Write what you know, after all... I've been branching out lately, but making up a good system to play a character off of is hard, so it hasn't been much. It doesn't help that most of the time in D&D, humans are just the best race for a concept.

In any case, I feel like it wouldn't have much effect on the world, overall. The default fluff for the nonhuman races is just "humans but short" or "humans but arrogant and pointy-eared" most of the time, so it's just a cosmetic change unless a large amount of work is put into it to make it different.

DrDeth
2015-01-19, 04:21 PM
To be fair, a great deal of that is centered around boobies, ding-dongs, or bumping uglies.



To be fair, that describes quite a few D&D games....:smalltongue:

In one SF game (Gamma Word or Metamorphosis Alpha) I picked a Pure Strain Human as everyone else had picked a odd mutant race- each one of which was far more powerful than my poor little PSH. However, the game we were in had a large base which only let PSH into various doors and often had traps and robots attack any who were not PSH. I had to laugh. A lot.

Kiero
2015-01-19, 04:29 PM
I only play humans, and have no interest whatsoever in any game in which they are not available.

Furthermore, that "no humans in the party" phenomenon is precisely why I find so few Actual Play threads and other reports of other people's games interesting.

mephnick
2015-01-19, 04:37 PM
I find that non-human characters seem to be more boring than the human ones, purely because players that pick those races, pick them to make that kind of character.

Like every dwarf being a gruff Scotsman. Every drow being emo Drizz't. Every tiefling being a special snowflake outcast.

Give me a group of 5 humans with different personalities any day.

Grim Portent
2015-01-19, 04:41 PM
Like every dwarf being a gruff Scotsman. Every drow being emo Drizz't. Every tiefling being a special snowflake outcast.

People actually do this? :smallconfused:

I make my dwarfs necromancers seeking deification, my drow LE tyrants seeking to reform their kind into an iron fisted regime and my tieflings dedicated assassins of the lower planes.

mephnick
2015-01-19, 04:46 PM
I suppose I could just live in a boring gaming community.

JaminDM
2015-01-19, 04:56 PM
It would certainly be interesting; but I doubt that it would make a huge difference.

Segev
2015-01-19, 05:01 PM
To be fair, a great deal of that is centered around boobies, ding-dongs, or bumping uglies.

Considering the actual purpose, beyond the questionably cultural, of such fixations, it could be interesting to examine other races with alien reproductive strategies for their taboos surrounding it.

For instance, just as humans find the idea of public exposure of their primary and secondary sexual characteristics to be simultaneously titilating and taboo, what if warforged felt similarly about tools of crafting, and particularly about constructing other warforged?

If the treated it as the kind of private act that humans treat procreation...

DireSickFish
2015-01-19, 05:17 PM
I think it would be cool to do a game with Kingdoms where the kingdoms are separated out by races, with no Humans to homogenize everything. That way if you are a Dragonborn everyone assumes you're from the Dragonborn empire. Even if you really grew up in the Elf empire so it's easy to point you out and you don't really "belong" in either as you have so many elf tendencies but with the short lifespan of a Dragonborn.

Makes it a lot easier to catagorize NPC's into sides too. "Halflings in the Teifling lands, there must be an invasion!"

Segev
2015-01-19, 06:04 PM
I think it would be cool to do a game with Kingdoms where the kingdoms are separated out by races, with no Humans to homogenize everything. That way if you are a Dragonborn everyone assumes you're from the Dragonborn empire. Even if you really grew up in the Elf empire so it's easy to point you out and you don't really "belong" in either as you have so many elf tendencies but with the short lifespan of a Dragonborn.

Makes it a lot easier to catagorize NPC's into sides too. "Halflings in the Teifling lands, there must be an invasion!"

This actually is how the races in the campaign I ran where humans were extinct more or less worked. Elves stayed to the elven empire, dwarves to their clan caverns, gnomes to their universities-on-the-mountains, orcs to their cities on the plains, etc. Sure, travel happened between them, but there weren't really immigrants from one race who settled in the lands of others. Not in any sort of enclaves, and certainly not with intent to mingle bloodlines.

A half-orc/half-elf was the villain of the campaign; so much feeling like an out-cast that he glamorized in his own mind the fallen human "demons" of the past, believing them to be actually misunderstood. He sought to bring them back.

Milo v3
2015-01-19, 06:09 PM
I've made a few settings without humans, most of which was simply because I couldn't figure out what to do with the generic humanoids that are generic and good at everything aside from ruling over the other overspecialized species (though in one, it was because there was only one humanoid race that wasn't human, with the rest being quadrepedal, organic machines, avian or octopodes).

mr_odd
2015-01-20, 10:28 AM
People actually do this? :smallconfused:

I make my dwarfs necromancers seeking deification, my drow LE tyrants seeking to reform their kind into an iron fisted regime and my tieflings dedicated assassins of the lower planes.

One of our players literally just made a Scottish dwarf.

Mastikator
2015-01-20, 10:57 AM
I tend to think that the fewer races, the better. 3 or 4 is the sweetspot for my liking. Whether or not humans is on that list doesn't really matter to me though. As long as the remaining races have real heritages and the players are actually adhering to them, instead of just picking a race/class combo.

But for the most part I do agree that players tend to stereotype nonhuman races more than humans, and treat humans like blank slates. I don't know which is worse to be honest. :/

Yora
2015-01-20, 11:03 AM
I am more for 5 or 6, but otherwise agree that less is more. Lots of setting quickly reach 50 and more when you start to consider all the humanoid monsters.

Even with just 6 humanoid races, you generally still get a lot of very humanoid fey and highly intelligent monsters.

Joe the Rat
2015-01-20, 11:24 AM
The last game I was in could have gone this way easily. Most of the time, we not only had no humans in the party, we didn't have anyone over 4 1/2 feet tall until that damn elf showed up. It made it hard for us to engage with the plot, because we were in a human empire, and really didn't care about the "local politics."

No Humans is Easy, because it makes playing other races as "human with funny ears and a Hat" less arbitrary. It would look a lot like The Hobbit, right up until Laketown (Beorn could have simply been a giant talking bear with anger management issues). But if you replace lakemen with something not human (something with equal parts honor and greed, besides dwarves), and you've pretty much got it. You could give each race a real-world cultural analog, to give a unifying theme and a touchstone for characters.

No Humans is Hard, because you lack the social glue. Humans go everywhere and do everything. Elves are aloof, Dwarves stick to their mines and mountains, Halflings want to be left alone, Lizardfolk like their swamps. Beyond marauding orcs, most races don't particularly seem to like to reach out their influence, or need to interact without some sort of Strange Attractor. You don't have a "default race" for when race isn't a relevant concept for a character (player or otherwise)... or for deciding at what scale things are built.


For instance, just as humans find the idea of public exposure of their primary and secondary sexual characteristics to be simultaneously titilating and taboo, what if warforged felt similarly about tools of crafting, and particularly about constructing other warforged?

If the treated it as the kind of private act that humans treat procreation...
Warforged Type Fellow: "By 's [insert deity's famous feature], What is he doing?"
Lovable Organic Local: "Umm... making a horseshoe?"
WTF: "He's [I]blacksmithing! In the middle of the market! In broad daylight!"
LOL: "Yeah... it's hot work, and probably helps to attract customers."
WTF: "'Hot work?!' 'Customers?!' What manner of den of depravity is thi- Oh dear , there are [I]children watching!"
<t-ting><t-ting><t-ting>

Hazrond
2015-01-20, 01:12 PM
Warforged Type Fellow: "By 's [insert deity's famous feature], What is he doing?"
Lovable Organic Local: "Umm... making a horseshoe?"
WTF: "He's [I]blacksmithing! In the middle of the market! In broad daylight!"
LOL: "Yeah... it's hot work, and probably helps to attract customers."
WTF: "'Hot work?!' 'Customers?!' What manner of den of depravity is thi- Oh dear , there are [I]children watching!"
<t-ting><t-ting><t-ting>

i loled. On the main topic, i almost never play a human character, with the closest i usuallyy get being some sort of planetouched (but not even those usually), myy characters are fun and as far as i can tell, are just fine even though i avoid most of the racial stereotypes (Orc warpriest? hes an outcast from his tribe who has slowly adapted to normal society over the last 3 years while also joining the local guard as both a medic and a blacksmith, hes nice, friendly, and willing to beat your face in if you try to cause trouble)

cobaltstarfire
2015-01-20, 02:40 PM
I don't generally play humans...but I like to try to build a family/society to color how my characters behave too, to run with the fact that they aren't human. How do they approach others, what kind of body language do they have, and how do they respond to situations?

There's also something to be said about the imaginative side, my current table is two very large dragonborn and a gnome who claims to be a pirate. It's really fun to imagine them in action it'd be kind of boring to replace them all with humans in my head.

veti
2015-01-20, 02:55 PM
To be fair, a great deal of that is centered around boobies, ding-dongs, or bumping uglies.

You say that like it's a bad thing.

I personally hate the humans-with-funny-hats thing. I think every race should be every bit as diverse as humans. I don't mind Drizzt not conforming to a "typical drow stereotype", I mind that there is such a thing as a "typical drow stereotype" that he feels he has to struggle against.

Knaight
2015-01-20, 03:00 PM
I've GMed games where no humans were PCs, and it worked just fine. One of them did have all robotic characters and was focused at least partially on the emergence of AI from the perspective of the new AI (other focuses included blowing things up, because of course they did). Another involved all biological creatures though, in which humans are prevalent, and are the local highly intelligent, more warlike, and generally dominant species which the PCs are in futile opposition to. That was with a deliberately experimental game that everyone went into knowing full well it was deliberately experimental. I've also had groups that incidentally ended up with no humans, including one where I decided to make things a bit more interesting by defining humans as the only mammalian intelligent species, and proceeded to get a group with no humans in it that ended up a whopping 25% vertebrate.

All of these worked, and the third was pretty traditional in most respects. Not having humans can work just fine. Only having humans can also work just fine, and is what I actually GM most of the time - though there are systems and settings where this restriction is problematic; I wouldn't recommend it in any edition of D&D for most groups.

TheThan
2015-01-20, 03:20 PM
In my homebrew setting, humans are only one of the minor races, inhabiting some small remote corners of the continent. The major races are lizardmen, beastmen, elves, and goblin-gnomes.

Ok i read that as brestmen, which is really goofy, a little dirty and probably weird.


Seems to me the fault is with uncreative people if humans are boring in a fantasy world...

Agreed.

The only time I’d ban humans is in a campaign where the point isn’t to be humans. You’re part of an orc tribe and are forced to wage war against other races to claim territory and expand or be annihilated; that sort of thing.

If you want non humans to be different then make them different. You can do this while playing up the standard fantasy tropes of various races. If you want people to play non-humans, make them cool and interesting.

Elves are long lived, make them be long lived, they’re extremely patent beings, there’s never any real hurry, after all you’ve got 1,000 or more years to live, it can wait. Consider that elves don’t really sleep, they go in to a meditative trance for eight hours, how would this affect someone’s personality, do they get tired or irritable when they go too long without meditation? Elves typically live in forests, how does going into a dungeon affect them? Are they Claustrophobic? Do they hate the feel of carved stone beneath their feet?

Dwarves typically live underground, how does this affect them when they go overland adventuring? Maybe those wide open spaces feel foreign and frightening. They’re shorter than humans and elves, maybe they feel they’re too tall and that the air is too thin, which is why the elves are so fruity, not enough oxygen to the brain. Maybe that’s why they get along great with gnomes and Halflings. Dwarves are incredibly stubborn, maybe there’s a cultural reason why, maybe compromise is considered a form of weakness and no dwarf would ever want to be seen as weak; so they stubbornly cling to their opinion long enough for them to feel like they’ve proven their strength even long after they've been convinced they're wrong. Maybe they just like arguing.

You get the idea

Banning humans just to force people to play something else is a lazy way of getting people to role-play. What will happen is you’ll get those same players playing humans with different hats. That’s not what you want you want the guy that rolled up a dwarf to play a dwarf, the guy that rolled up a gnome to play a gnome. Not humans with different hats.

Hiro Protagonest
2015-01-20, 03:31 PM
I'll be a robot.

And if it's specifically said this is done to encourage roleplaying, I will make it a robot barbarian and act like Groot. :smallamused:

Palegreenpants
2015-01-20, 04:31 PM
So, I've got five races of 'human' in my campaign world. Their defining characteristics are cultural. The other (nonhuman) races are more alien, and are not promoted as playable races. I'm of the opinion that race does not matter in RP terms, as everything is relative culturally.

Yora
2015-01-20, 04:53 PM
What I did with my setting was to make all the races "cultures" instead. There are 18 cultures with their own language, style of dress, weapons and armor, food, religion, economy, and so on. The culture is what defines all characters. That people of some cultures look similar in the face and can biologically mix is almost coincidental. While there is a species of "elf", nobody considers themselves as "an elf". Some times you get people from another culture intigrating and it doesn't matter a lot of they are the same species or not. I could call them "wood elf", "high elf", and "snow elf", but nobody says "hill human", "sea human", and "jungle human" either.

Lord Raziere
2015-01-20, 05:06 PM
Recently, I played in a Pathfinder game where about halfway through the campaign someone raised the question "Are there any humans in this world?"

The whole party were playing as either planetouched or entirely non-human, and up to that point we realised we had hardly met any normal humans at all. As it turned out, there were some in the world (we just hadn't encountered any NPC human yet).

This was actually, IMO, a really good thing - it leant a strong feeling of the fantastic and exotic to the world, and distinguished it from other settings quite significantly.

What do people think of the idea of a completely human-less D&D/Pathfinder world? Would it cause any problems with the game?

Not to me!

@ veti: agreed.

personally, to me every human in real life has a hat. its not just some hat that they share with everyone else, its a hat that they made themselves, hand-crafted and patched together, that no other person could possibly make. its called being an individual. we all wear hats, but no two hats are the same. its called being ourselves. so to me, a dwarf wearing a hat is just saying that they're an individual, and not really being specific enough as to what individual they are. even in a society with a hat, everything is change by the hat existing and therefore more avenues of individuality to explore.

a warrior culture doesn't just have EVERYONE be warriors, it affects everyone as to how they perceive warriors and what place they have in relation to everyone else. it also affects what kind of people are the outcasts and exiles of the culture, all that sort of thing, every culture has its hats, trying to avoid hats is like trying to avoid walking, because we all wear them, don't think you don't have a culture-hat, because you do. you just don't realize it. to call other cultures as wearing hats while you are not is....how to say it...ethnocentric. remember: your hat is being worn as well. you just don't see it. really, the other races? THEY THINK THAT YOUR THE ONE WEARING THE HAT. dwarves don't see themselves as drunkards, they see everyone else as people who can't handle what they see as normal drinking.

Metahuman1
2015-01-20, 07:57 PM
Further, a warrior culture doesn't mean everyone GOES to war all the time.

Many Scandinavian country's had warrior cultures in per-Renaissance times. But it was traditionally the men that went on the raids, or "Aviking" (I have almost certainly spelled that wrong, apologies.).

And many of there women would mop the floor with you if not kill you in very short order if you started something with them, and do it just fine on there own thank you very much. And this was considered a good trait for them by there cultural standards, cause if they were strong and good at fighting, and so was there husband, it was likely there children would be as well, or such was the logic.



As for a no humans game, personally, I'd take it a step further. I'd give them a nice chunk of LA and/or Racial Hit Dice for free so they can play something with enough oomph and few enough draw backs that they don't find themselves thinking about how much more awesome there human character could have been and instead can just be laughing there face off at how insane there Werebear Goliath Barbarian or there Lillend Crusader or there Half Fey Drow Wizard or there Succubus Bard or what ever insane thing that would normally have utterly prohibitive LA and/or Racial Hit Dice is instead.

And doing that in a world were there are no humans works very nicely methinks.

Sidmen
2015-01-21, 01:00 AM
What I did with my setting was to make all the races "cultures" instead. There are 18 cultures with their own language, style of dress, weapons and armor, food, religion, economy, and so on. The culture is what defines all characters. That people of some cultures look similar in the face and can biologically mix is almost coincidental. While there is a species of "elf", nobody considers themselves as "an elf". Some times you get people from another culture intigrating and it doesn't matter a lot of they are the same species or not. I could call them "wood elf", "high elf", and "snow elf", but nobody says "hill human", "sea human", and "jungle human" either.
This seems odd to me from a human nature point of view.

To people living inside of a culture, they'd immediately grasp the differences between species within their own culture - even if the lifestyle was almost identical to their own. Sure, if an Elf moves from the Empire of the Axe into the Empire of the Spear, he'd be that Axeman bloke - even to other Elves. But to other Axemen he'd be the Elf; because that's what sets him apart.

On the other hand, I'd love it if I had cultures set up to give, like 1/3 of a starting character's traits, the class to give another 1/3, and the race to give the final 1/3. 5e kinda did this with backgrounds.

Honest Tiefling
2015-01-21, 01:10 AM
This seems odd to me from a human nature point of view.

To people living inside of a culture, they'd immediately grasp the differences between species within their own culture - even if the lifestyle was almost identical to their own. Sure, if an Elf moves from the Empire of the Axe into the Empire of the Spear, he'd be that Axeman bloke - even to other Elves. But to other Axemen he'd be the Elf; because that's what sets him apart.


What if they came from a culture that heavily downplayed racial distinctions? Sure, they'd know to give the heavy lifting to the half-orc and might describe a woman as that gnome lady, but they might pay more attention to the dress of the Axeman, because screw those damn dirty axemen. *shakes fist*

Yora
2015-01-21, 06:29 AM
This seems odd to me from a human nature point of view.

To people living inside of a culture, they'd immediately grasp the differences between species within their own culture - even if the lifestyle was almost identical to their own. Sure, if an Elf moves from the Empire of the Axe into the Empire of the Spear, he'd be that Axeman bloke - even to other Elves. But to other Axemen he'd be the Elf; because that's what sets him apart.
I don't think so. From all I've read on the subject, true racism is a modern invention. People did still hate people of other groups, but that was because they acted different or because they belonged to a group that was competing with their own.
If you are not with the enemies and play by local rules, people seem to have been quite accepting of foreigners.
The greatest hatred and fighting is usually between direct neighbours who look and live pretty much identical but are competing for some resource or are in a feud. They hate each other with a passion and might try to kill each other on sight, but if a foreigner shows up it doesn't usually matter if he is from the same country or halfway around the world. If you have no dogs in the local fights, you're cool. If you get hated for being a foreigner, that's usually because you belong to a group that has a conflict with the locals.
Who you are allied with makes all the difference.

Joe the Rat
2015-01-21, 08:15 AM
On the other hand, I'd love it if I had cultures set up to give, like 1/3 of a starting character's traits, the class to give another 1/3, and the race to give the final 1/3. 5e kinda did this with backgrounds.

Using the 5e model, I'd try to do this primarily with subraces. Shift the wholly biological and common traits to the race, and the aspects that are more culture/subgroup/nationality to the subrace. With the right finagle, you might be able to use a single "culture" set across multiple races (all Abeans of any species have this, all Beeans know this, etc.)

Why this instead of background? One, I tinker. A lot. Two, this leaves background free to be focused more on personal history rather than cultural identity. You could be a soldier, or scholar, or silversmith from any culture that has these occupations. The other way you could do it is make background variants for each culture (Eksian Soldier, Wyean Soldier, Zeean Soldier), but there is not a lot of room left in terms of features, unless you want to expand the impact of backgrounds across the board.

On other systems, this is taking the race write-up, and asking yourself which parts are learned, and which parts are grown. Elf stat modifiers, see-in-the-dark-or-at-least-twilight-vision, and resistance to sleep/charm are probably all from the species. Weapon training and skill affinities are more likely to be cultural. So different elf cultures would change the race weapons, for example.

Or you don't tie it into mechanics and make it a "language selection and roleplay" thing, like we do with Humans...

Segev
2015-01-21, 10:20 AM
I don't think so. From all I've read on the subject, true racism is a modern invention. People did still hate people of other groups, but that was because they acted different or because they belonged to a group that was competing with their own.
If you are not with the enemies and play by local rules, people seem to have been quite accepting of foreigners.
The greatest hatred and fighting is usually between direct neighbours who look and live pretty much identical but are competing for some resource or are in a feud. They hate each other with a passion and might try to kill each other on sight, but if a foreigner shows up it doesn't usually matter if he is from the same country or halfway around the world. If you have no dogs in the local fights, you're cool. If you get hated for being a foreigner, that's usually because you belong to a group that has a conflict with the locals.
Who you are allied with makes all the difference.

Yeah, a lot of what people call "racism" is really "culturism." And, in point of fact, is not ALWAYS bad.

After all, you wouldn't want to have your son dating the daughter of the high priest of the Aztec Sun God, would you? Especially if her last three boyfriends wound up converting and deciding they liked the honor of being on the sacrificial altar?

"The only good orc is a dead orc," is a paraphrase of a common racist screed, but in a less modern culture, it comes about because "orc" is as much culture as race. Orcs are violent and bloody savages. No, really; to the village of dwarves that holds this view, it's not just prejudice: they see it born out every time orcs come to town. Generally to raid.

Even when they came "peacefully," it was as a war leader having parley.

It only makes sense that these dwarves would view the half-orc merchant with extreme suspicion, possibly asking him not-too-politely to stay out of their town. If he had sufficient motivation to persist, he could earn a "not like the others" reputation, maybe.

All of this has unfortunate implications (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UnfortunateImplications) in modern media portrayals, but if you divorce yourself from our modern perspectives, it makes sense in the limited world in which those dwarves live.

In point of fact, it's a survival trait. A dwarf raised by a community which refuses to give in to these horrific stereotypes might well treat the first orc band he meets out on the road with respect and kindness...and get beaten and robbed for his trouble. Especially if the orcs fein friendliness to get him to disarm, first, so they can surround and take him.

Meanwhile, the dwarven racist would have known just what kind of trouble those orcs would be, and would have taken every step he could to be out of their reach or ability to hurt him.

(I make no comment as to modern racism, here; I am merely pointing out that, historically, the "racism" was a reaction to cultures which are abrasive or hazardous to those who held the views. It was rarely a reflection of irrational hatred, and more a rational response to a pattern of trouble.)



In other cases, the racism was actually nationalism. The Hatfields hate the McCoys because they're at war.

J-H
2015-01-21, 11:23 AM
In (RL) history, religion and culture has often been more important than race or color or national origin. See, for example, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, the black Russian general, and great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Petrovich_Gannibal

Segev
2015-01-21, 11:28 AM
In (RL) history, religion and culture has often been more important than race or color or national origin. See, for example, Abram Petrovich Gannibal, the black Russian general, and great-grandfather of Alexander Pushkin.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Petrovich_Gannibal

Indeed. The truth is that race was just usually an easy identifier for those more subtle characteristics. And that remains very much the case for "gnomes hate goblins." It's not that gnomes have an instinctive hatred for green-skinned short humanoids; it's that goblins have, as a general rule, a culture that leads to behaviors which gnomes hate (often involving predation upon innocent gnome civilizations).

Segev
2015-01-21, 11:33 AM
If you want non humans to be different then make them different. You can do this while playing up the standard fantasy tropes of various races. If you want people to play non-humans, make them cool and interesting. I'm actually working on a document trying to do just that, starting with the elves who...


Elves are long lived, make them be long lived, they’re extremely patent beings, there’s never any real hurry, after all you’ve got 1,000 or more years to live, it can wait. Consider that elves don’t really sleep, they go in to a meditative trance for eight hours, how would this affect someone’s personality, do they get tired or irritable when they go too long without meditation? Elves typically live in forests, how does going into a dungeon affect them? Are they Claustrophobic? Do they hate the feel of carved stone beneath their feet? I played with in a campaign setting where I had the trance thing be a learned trait. The trouble being...we humans do a lot of our learning - that is, our commitment to long-term memory and conversion from "this event resulted in that" to "this is a general truth and skill I have internalized" during our sleep cycles.

Elves, lacking sleep, don't do this. Learning for their children is a long, protracted, difficult, slow, and nearly-futile process.

Trancing is the first thing they learn. It takes decades to get down properly, since they don't know how to begin to learn how to learn. But as they learn it a little at a time, they get a little better at it, as they use their rudimentary trance to learn a little better.

Adult elves trance for 4 hours a night to get the benefits humans do from sleep. That's why adult elves learn as well as humans, but took a century to GET to that point.