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Maglubiyet
2015-03-23, 09:19 AM
How many people have done campaigns where the main concentration of PC's was all a single non-human race (not kitchen sink)? Like all elves or dwarves or something. Not sure WoD counts because the base civilization is still humanocentric. I mean completely alien culture, mindset, etc.

AceOfFools
2015-03-23, 07:38 PM
I played in a Pathfinder game where 3/5ths of the party were elves; and the human was a fae-blooded sorcerer that we would invite to our elven parties because he spoke elf and had the right mindset. The other was a bookish bard who would go to the library to study when we were off drinking wine and talking "shop" about our magic item creation feats.

World was fairly humancentric focusing on growing tensions between the elves and humans, so I'm not sure that counts. We ended up working for the human government to try to defuse the situation without it escalating to war, because humans bounce back faster from this sort of thing.

Rowan Wolf
2015-03-23, 10:05 PM
The first game we played after 3.5 came out the party I was in consisted of: A part of dwarves (twins) fighter and cleric, a halfing sorcerer/rogue, a half-elf wizard, and my elf ranger.

themaque
2015-03-23, 10:17 PM
I've been trying for an all Dwarves campaign for years.

Came CLOSE once. half the group made their characters together, and the other half made theirs together. We ended up with one small group of your typical adventurers, and one small group of dwarves working as a small military unit for hire.

Edit: Did not end well. not for being dwarves but being a military unit. We where all veterans or military brats so had a good idea of how to work things. The GM had... ideas about the military so it was just easier to roll up new traditional characters.

well... Mostly Traditionals. I made a 12 foot tall tree man. and YES I was able to work in the phrase "I AM GROOT".

Karl Aegis
2015-03-23, 10:22 PM
Pure Oni or pure Ayakashi campaigns aren't exactly uncommon for me.

DigoDragon
2015-03-24, 09:36 AM
I'm in an adventure right now where we're all house cats. :smallsmile:
We aren't humanoid, we don't speak English to humans, and I believe I'm the only one who has some basic literacy (like, 1st grade level at best).

We do have some magical abilities though, in accordance to legends about cats having mystical powers. :)

Joe the Rat
2015-03-24, 02:47 PM
I've been in a party that was all dwarves and halflings, mostly by accident. The setting was human-centric, and the fact that our characters had no vested interest in the problems of "these humans" was somewhat frustrating to the GM.

I'd love to try an "Everybody's 'X' " game sometime.

Veering slightly from topic, My dream campaign is a more-or-less standard fantasy setting, only with no humans. I'm looking at what happens when those ambitious explorers and conquerors and socializers and... er, socializers aren't there to cement the disparate races together, or smooth old tensions. What other tentative alliances might you see?

Miscast_Mage
2015-03-24, 04:05 PM
I've played in one PFS game where every player was either Aasimar or Tiefling. Funny enough in character we all got along smashingly.

I've also come close to another PFS game where the entire table were shorties(halfings, gnomes, and we had 1 dwarf), but one of the players decided to play a different character. An elf, I believe.

I really want to run an all-dwarf home campaign about a dwarven clan sometime; I just need to find players.

Another half-made campaign is about a crew of escaped orc slaves/servants after a caravan attack, trying to survive in the wild.

Benthesquid
2015-03-25, 05:57 AM
I haven't had a chance to play it, but I'm pretty sure the Pathfinder module "We Be Goblins," is this by design.

Thrawn4
2015-03-25, 08:46 AM
I am currently DMing an all dwarfs campaign in the Dark Eye setting. The first adventure was about the PCs helping their uncle to claim a mine, the second about another clan trying to get the claim by means of deception, and that started off a quest including a few adventures on the surface. It has been a lot of fun so far, as the setting is very detailed and the players put a lot of effort into it. I am especially intrigued by the fact that we manage to create a lot of different character types and ways of living, despite the fact that we still uphold the common stereotypes. It is also fascinating to view a well established setting from a single culture.

Ralanr
2015-03-25, 11:51 PM
Humans are a rarity in my group, one guy likes playing tiny nut jobs, another just hasn't played humans (She's played a Dhampir and an Elf as far as I can remember. Also an Oni), I just don't like playing humans (I already am a human. I don't feel like pretending to be one) so I usually avoid at all costs, even convinced the DM's to let me be a half-orc in an all human campaign. If there is a human in our party it's usually one.

This time we have two! :smallbiggrin: One of them is a hermaphrodite :smallconfused::smalleek::smallbiggrin:

goto124
2015-03-25, 11:54 PM
A human dwarf? :P

aspekt
2015-03-26, 12:47 AM
I've had an idea for one for a while, but I've got too many min/maxers who would not enjoy being restricted like that.

It raises all sorts of interesting hooks and stories though.

Saw an interesting campaign resource book that placed the players in the world as the Orcs. Not necessarily as an evil campaign either. More sympathetic, but still 'brutish'.

goto124
2015-03-26, 01:49 AM
Don't min/maxers play non-humans anyway?

Karl Aegis
2015-03-26, 02:29 AM
In this context, the word min/maxer is essentially meaningless. It most resembles a derogatory term meant to inspire anger in a targeted demographic.

Lord Raziere
2015-03-26, 02:34 AM
Don't min/maxers play non-humans anyway?

they only do so for specific builds.

often humans are a better choice if nothing else fits from their standpoint because they are often designed to be more versatile.

thus unless you can convince them to somehow accept the penalty of not having stat bonuses in the specialization they are min-maxing for...they won't go for it.

@ aspekt: oh, can you tell me what book that is? what its name was? I would be very interested in reading such a sourcebook on orcs!

BWR
2015-03-26, 02:49 AM
We've played an all-elf campaign which was a lot of fun. At least, it was intended to be all-elf but two players whined their way to get to play humans (for minmax purposes) never mind that they didn't fit the theme of the campaign. That's a clear-cut example of where the GM should have Just Said No.

Currently we have an all-dwarf campaign on hiatus. However, there are several dwarven sub-species with various traits so those annoying minmaxers don't whine about how bad dwarves are for certain builds. It sort of makes sense based on the setting but I personally feel it was unnecessary. Anyway, apart from a few GMing issues it's a fun game.

I'm not sure you can call these 'completely alien mindset', considering these D&D races are nothing more than reskinned humans.

goto124
2015-03-26, 05:07 AM
to play humans (for minmax purposes) never mind that they didn't fit the theme of the campaign. That's a clear-cut example of where the GM should have Just Said No. Snip. However, there are several dwarven sub-species with various traits so those annoying minmaxers don't whine about how bad dwarves are for certain builds. It sort of makes sense based on the setting but I personally feel it was unnecessary.

Really? These people want both crunch and fluff, and they're called 'annoying minmaxers'? Refluffing a human template to elves- does it hurt the setting so much?
Sounds like someone is really uptight on the setting. Understandable, but it's not that clear-cut.

BWR
2015-03-26, 07:06 AM
Really? These people want both crunch and fluff, and they're called 'annoying minmaxers'? Refluffing a human template to elves- does it hurt the setting so much?
Sounds like someone is really uptight on the setting. Understandable, but it's not that clear-cut.

Way to not know anything about the game or setting and make erroneous judgements.

Maglubiyet
2015-03-26, 08:06 AM
Before this degenerates into a(nother) sniping thread, let me try to redirect this by asking the question:

Is the choice to NOT play a non-human campaign based on "fluff" or "crunch"? (to use the terms being thrown around here) Since this is GitP, I'm guessing most people are D&D'ers. Are the game mechanics for humans too attractive to give up? Or is the idea of RPing non-humans just not appealing?

Many people might not want to feel hemmed in by having a narrow selection of races. It's also possible that the idea of a campaign centered on another particular race never came up...it would probably have to originate with the GM and be supported by the players to get off the ground in the first place.

Personally I think that everyone starting as the same race provides a good foundation for team development. PC's could all be from the same village or even family. Groups comprised of special snowflakes sometimes never gel, remaining an amalgamation of loners who happen to be going in the same direction.

I've seen some really cool ideas/games posted here. The all-dwarf and all-elf campaigns seem like they would have a lot of awesome potential. And that all-cats game (what system are you using for that, DigoDragon?)

BWR
2015-03-26, 09:01 AM
I often play humans in D&D but that's because the human cultures in the various settings tend to be more interesting than the non-human. If the game has little to no explicit setting or culture, just a vague, bland "D&D" paint slopped over it, then I consider choosing race based on minmaxing rather than roleplaying.

Alent
2015-03-26, 06:34 PM
My group is doing this with Starwars D20 right now.

The general gist of the campaign is an alternate universe story that goes something along the lines of:
"Episode 5.5: Emperor Thrawn phone home.

It is a dark time for the empire. With Emperor Palpatine's death at the hands of terrorists at Yavin IV, Grand Admiral Thrawn was summoned to the core worlds, where he drained the emperor's clone tanks and began reforming the Empire. Succeeding to the Imperial throne, the new Emperor Thrawn began first recruiting and then drafting non-human races into the Imperial army and reforming the bureaucracy in a cold and ruthless way."

We're playing as some of the first batch of non-human Stormtrooper volunteers before the drafts began, with one guy playing a omnisexual Falleen Scout patterned after the Russian Arms dealer in some movie I've never seen, another guy playing a Gungan stormtrooper who runs underground R2 cage fighting arenas for the rebels under the stage name Mikey Vic Vic, me playing as the group's pilot with a Squib (who answers all comms with "Do a barrel roll" for obvious reasons), and two NPCs, one of whom breaks the pattern by being a human scoundrel named Calvin, and a large orange cat thing named Hobbes.

It sounded stupid to me at first, since I'm not really a starwars fan anymore after the whole prequel trilogy debacle- But it's ended up being barrels of fun. We've been running around undercover as arms dealers working in Hutt space and ended up buying a half million credit piece of Hutt art for Thrawn.

I did have to spend two weeks arguing with the player of the Falleen about the scale of the YT-2400 in the book being wrong in a way that took building a 3D model of the YT-2400 in Google Sketchup and finding several seriously crazy fandom shipbuilding sites to prove. Someone seriously needs to teach the Starwars shipbuilders that 1m != 5ft.

Vrock_Summoner
2015-03-26, 07:39 PM
I've actually played in and ran a number of D&D games fitting this description. My personal most enjoyable was one I ran, which was an all-gnome game, though the setting itself was probably more densely populated by elves than anything else (though the players stayed almost entirely in the gnome lands and only once ventured into another country, which was populated basically 49/49/2 with humans/dwarves/other, so the only real evidence they saw of the world being full of elves is that nearly every foreign traveler they saw (be they pilgrims, mercenaries, tourists, or even adventurers) was an elf.

I think people who talk about how boring and stereotypical other-race cultures are unlucky, because they're clearly missing out on the biggest perk of racial stereotypes (... Maybe I should edit that to "species stereotypes." Saying there's anything good about racial stereotypes makes me feel weird), namely variance from a new perspective. And I understand why they're missing this: most settings are, as mentioned, human-centric, meaning that most non-human groups have at most one representative culture. For example, in most settings, there will be one "dwarf kingdom," and one "elf kingdom," while humans will basically be ubiquitous. So you're only getting one kingdom's (or, in most campaigns, really just one capital city's) culture, while you can see a lot more variance from the humans living in different conditions. But even humans tend to have stereotypes to their culture, and most interesting human cultures are such due to how they "differ from the base culture." In a setting (or even part of a setting) where humans aren't the big representation, you can have fun doing this from the other perspective, where our stereotypes of gnome culture are considered the "norm" for the PCs (as in, that's what the PCs grew up with), and then the cultures they see have interesting differences that still make sense within the context of the gnome condition. (Also, I just love replacing the "human" in the term "the human condition.")

I've had some other examples. I once played in an all-elf war-ish game where we had to resist the onslaught of a largely halfling kingdom. (Isn't that a weird concept to wrap your head around.) And I've run numerous other kinds; I took the setting from the aforementioned all-elf campaign, and ran an all-halfling game where we were part of the kingdom (though the game I ran took place some 200 years before the halfling kingdom invaded the elven woodlands, making it a technical prequel despite the events of the games having nothing to do with one another). Lastly in full campaign terms, I've run probably the most specific game of all time, where all the players were part of an orc royalty-only paladin order, which took the non-heir royal children of kingdoms for training, so everybody was both an Orc, and a Crusader. Yeah, you heard me, I went for the better ToB version of Paladin :smalltongue:).

I've had a couple of giant- or ogre-only one-shots, which were interesting.

Outside of D&D, hm... I mean, anybody who's ever played Mouse Guard has fulfilled these conditions. It'd be easy to do in FATE or GURPS, mostly because the race in those games would largely be setting dressing with no associated mechanics or pre-built racial stories/stereotypes.

Ralanr
2015-03-26, 08:50 PM
You've played/Dmed games that featured Orc royalty paladins, Halfing kingdoms, and said kingdom actually invading an elven area?

Please tell me the halfings won. The picture of a high and mighty (Which it may or may not be) elven kingdom falling to a bunch of halfings is just beautiful to me :smallbiggrin:

Vrock_Summoner
2015-03-27, 10:11 AM
You've played/Dmed games that featured Orc royalty paladins, Halfing kingdoms, and said kingdom actually invading an elven area?

Please tell me the halfings won. The picture of a high and mighty (Which it may or may not be) elven kingdom falling to a bunch of halfings is just beautiful to me :smallbiggrin:

Come on. You know I have to disappoint you. The game describing that particular invasion had the elves as the PCs. There really weren't many ways for it to have a satisfactory end that didn't have the PCs saving their homeland. Though if it makes you feel any better, the halfling kingdom remained largely prosperous and it had already established control over several of the territories of other elven kingdoms, so there's at least some implied elf smashing being done by the halflings. :smallbiggrin:

Though in hindsight, that was one of the few games I ever got to be a player in... I don't think I'd have minded being the invader once.

Ralanr
2015-03-27, 02:52 PM
Come on. You know I have to disappoint you. The game describing that particular invasion had the elves as the PCs. There really weren't many ways for it to have a satisfactory end that didn't have the PCs saving their homeland. Though if it makes you feel any better, the halfling kingdom remained largely prosperous and it had already established control over several of the territories of other elven kingdoms, so there's at least some implied elf smashing being done by the halflings. :smallbiggrin:

Though in hindsight, that was one of the few games I ever got to be a player in... I don't think I'd have minded being the invader once.

Implied is good enough for me! :smallbiggrin:

Fuglen
2015-03-27, 03:38 PM
I am running an all elf campaign right now. The plot being an ongoing war between the dwarf and the elves. I allowed the players to decide from the start which side they wanted to be on.
Two sessions in and they are enjoying it a lot. It helps the group when they are all the same race. Would highly recommend it to any GM.

Jay R
2015-03-27, 09:53 PM
The only time I've done this was while playing Kobolds Ate My Babies.