Is Dwarf something to keep, and good alternative names for Dwarves

[Darth Credence]

I know a couple of people who identify as a dwarf. Not a little person, although they don't object to that one. The word starting with an M is the one that is truly offensive to them. FWIW, here is Warwick Davis (Willow, Wicket, et al) on the subject: https://twitter.com/WarwickADavis/st...23283550519296

[Psyren]

So,
A thing that has been rattling in my brain and won't go away.

RPGs as a whole, and D&D specifically, have been moving to be more inclusive and are taking off the sharp edges of there language usage and mechanics. Races are now Species, Ability scores are not tied to them, some of the game in the OSR crowd have been moving away from gendered terminology.

Should this mean changes to Dwarves in a stronger sense? I don't have more than a couple anecdotes on the subject but I have heard this one causing discomfort for people.

The answer is no, it shouldn't:

1) "Dwarf" is already one of the commonly accepted/politically correct terms for IRL people of short stature, so the word itself does not carry any of the ableist or problematic connotations you seem to worry it might. I don't know whether it was used pejoratively in the past before being reclaimed (similar to how the word "queer" was), but it doesn't carry any issues or baggage currently.

2) Dwarves in a purely fantasy context are also fine, because dwarves have historically been portrayed as broadly capable, heroic and forthright. Their biggest historical problem is a perception of rigidity or uniformity (elaborated on at considerable length in the previous Dwarf thread), rather than having any problematic labels or portrayals.

[Anonymouswizard]

]2) Dwarves in a purely fantasy context are also fine, because dwarves have historically been portrayed as broadly capable, heroic and forthright. Their biggest historical problem is a perception of rigidity or uniformity (elaborated on at considerable length in the previous Dwarf thread), rather than having any problematic labels or portrayals.

Arguably the biggest issue with fantasy dwarves is that they contribute to unintentional erasure of dwarfs in fantasy. Which probably isn't that big an issue in practice, I'm sure most GMs would okay characters of any fantasy race with dwarfism or gigantism*, but is something to think about.

Heck, Shadowrun could probably get a bit of lore out of the relationship between (metahuman) dwarves and dwarfs.

* and I know both terms refer to a number of conditions.

[KorvinStarmast]

The answer is no, it shouldn't:

1) "Dwarf" is already one of the commonly accepted/politically correct terms for IRL people of short stature, so the word itself does not carry any of the ableist or problematic connotations you seem to worry it might. I don't know whether it was used pejoratively in the past before being reclaimed (similar to how the word "queer" was), but it doesn't carry any issues or baggage currently.

2) Dwarves in a purely fantasy context are also fine, because dwarves have historically been portrayed as broadly capable, heroic and forthright. Their biggest historical problem is a perception of rigidity or uniformity (elaborated on at considerable length in the previous Dwarf thread), rather than having any problematic labels or portrayals.

Well said, +1.

[Witty Username]

1) "Dwarf" is already one of the commonly accepted/politically correct terms for IRL people of short stature, so the word itself does not carry any of the ableist or problematic connotations you seem to worry it might. I don't know whether it was used pejoratively in the past before being reclaimed (similar to how the word "queer" was), but it doesn't carry any issues or baggage currently.

Eh, I feel that is a bit depending on who you ask and in what context,
For example there is some discourse I am familiar with on whether it is the LGBT or the LGBTQ community, I tend to be the latter chuck. And even then it gets complex, on what is, or should be common parlance.

At least when I it has been brought up, Dwarf when applied to fantasy creature is usually benign, Dwarf when applied to real person debatable (I have usually seen it discussed as neutral to mildly negative, it depends on who you ask and why).

That being said, part of the reason I ask is because I have a small sample size, this is something that I have heard brought up maybe once or twice. But that puts it ahead of the Tasha's changes which Racial ASIs which I heard actually zero complaints about until after the book came out.

It sounds like the consensus is that I have noticed a non-problem which has at least calmed the brain rattle. I has just been on the mind due to how many things have come up as minor changes recently ( or in the last few years as the case may be, dear christ covid was long)

[Vahnavoi]

It's worth noting that while "dwarf" can be used as pejorative, it is by no means restricted to people with dwarfism, and can be applied to mock anyone for their short stature.

The same can be said of "elf" and "hobbit" and their equivalents in several languages. Notably, "hobbit" was not a common word before success of Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings film trilogy. Equally notably, hobbits are almost entirely positively portrayed in those movies. So why would anyone use "hobbit" as insult? Simply because some hobbits are short and plump, so you can use that to insult someone who is sensitive about being short and plump. It isn't any deeper than that. It is entirely based on being rude about superficial similarity.

[MonochromeTiger]

Eh, I feel that is a bit depending on who you ask and in what context,
For example there is some discourse I am familiar with on whether it is the LGBT or the LGBTQ community, I tend to be the latter chuck. And even then it gets complex, on what is, or should be common parlance.

That's kind of an inevitable issue in any community, especially one where the key factor for membership is something that doesn't really guarantee a similar mindset between all its members. To focus purely on the part relevant to the thread, what terms are offensive is something that's going to vary between different people in any given community; it's not that those terms don't offend some or that they're wrong for being offended by them, it's simply that everyone draws the line in a different place. I've known multiple people who self identified by terms that I was told by others were offensive slurs (and for that reason I won't be repeating here), a few times I thought to ask why and the responses ranged from confusion over how those terms were a slur to offense over my unintended appearance of telling them what to call themselves or at the people who told me those terms were slurs to begin with for "trying to be an authority over people they don't even know." Suffice it to say that my two take aways from those experiences were to stop asking and to understand that on matters of personal identity one person's grave insult can be another person's point of pride and that people in general are way too confusing for me to do anything but take it on a case by case basis.

It sounds like the consensus is that I have noticed a non-problem which has at least calmed the brain rattle. I has just been on the mind due to how many things have come up as minor changes recently ( or in the last few years as the case may be, dear christ covid was long)

For the most part, you've noticed something that might only really be relevant to a set group of people within a set group of people. The ones it's relevant for it may be very relevant for but there's no way of getting an accurate number for how many they are short of lining up the entire world population and going person to person asking "does the word Dwarf offend you when referring to a fantasy race in fictional works?"

And yes, I am saying that's the question to ask because not only are the words important for determining offense, the context those words are used in is absolutely vital. Even someone who doesn't consider the word an insult can still get a bit worked up if someone clearly intending it to be such yells it at them but that's encountering it in an entirely different environment from in a game. It's important to take into account the feelings of those who are offended by or uncomfortable with something even if no one else present is, that shouldn't be dismissed, but it's also important to not make sweeping decisions expecting everyone to share their discomfort based off a very limited sample size.

[Psyren]

Eh, I feel that is a bit depending on who you ask and in what context,
For example there is some discourse I am familiar with on whether it is the LGBT or the LGBTQ community, I tend to be the latter chuck. And even then it gets complex, on what is, or should be common parlance.

At least when I it has been brought up, Dwarf when applied to fantasy creature is usually benign, Dwarf when applied to real person debatable (I have usually seen it discussed as neutral to mildly negative, it depends on who you ask and why).

In all cases you should know your audience, I'm not saying otherwise. Obviously if you're around LGBT+ people who dislike "queer" or little people who dislike "dwarf," you shouldn't use those terms. But there's a difference between "this subset of {group} doesn't like {term}" and "{term} is widely considered a slur."

But that puts it ahead of the Tasha's changes which Racial ASIs which I heard actually zero complaints about until after the book came out.

Can we not go here yet again? Please? The change was made. It's not being reverted. You can implement static racial ASIs at your table if you like, and third-party publishers like Humblewood are even doing so themselves on the official storefront. Let's all move on.

[oxybe]

Guessing that is related to the German word zwerg or Zwerge.
(I only learned the nominative case...)

And now instead of horrific hivemind bug monsters, i'm imagining a horde of tiny bearded children running out of school at the mention of a "Zwergling Rush".

[Errorname]

In the absence of a strong pushback against the name, I could still see myself being in favour of changing the name if there was a clear superior alternative. Like for example I don't think the name Barbarian is particularly offensive, but "Berserker" is just the obviously more correct name for the class and is a name change I would generally be in favour of. I just don't really think there is one in this instance.

[Rynjin]

I like the Elder Scroll's "Dwemer", even if they look more like dark elves in those games. That sounds both "dwarvish", and like Dwarf, so it's easy to use.

As to "should you call them dwarves?" It doesn't concern me much because I'm used to it, but if it makes you unconfortable, that's a perfectly good reason to find an alternative.

Elder scrolls is an interesting case for naming them because only the first half of "Dwemer" actually marks them as Dwarves, the setting uses "Mer" as a catch all for Elves and it's worked into identifiers for pretty much all of them even when they have an "Imperial" name that actually says what fantasy race/species/whatever they're actually supposed to represent. So "Dwemer" was just "Elves who live inside the mountains" but also Dwarves, "Orsimer" are just Elves who worshipped a corrupted deity and were changed when he was but they're also Orcs.

So in essence the Elder Scrolls answer to why their Dwarves and Orcs are different and why they're called something different is "they're just types of Elves" and that's literally worked into their names.

It also does not help that Dwemer are...not Dwarves, in any sense of the word. They do not fit the general Tolkienesque trappings of the race (being largely a race of agnostic artificers most well known for building robots and other wildly incongruous technology, so more similar to Dragonlance's Gnomes if anything), known mostly for their contributions to academia and philosophy (their name translating as "Deep Elf" is meant to refer to "deep thoughts" like "Wow that's deep bro" not that they lived underground), are in fact a subtype of elf, and maybe most importantly: are not short. Dwemer stand about the average height for a human, making them somewhat tall compared to some other types of elf (eg. Bosmer). They were given the moniker "Dwarves" by a race of GIANTS which stood about 20 feet tall.

Dwemer brings a very specific image to mind, being very much an extraordinarily rare case of "Our Dwarves are Different".

Also I'm pretty sure it's copyrighted.

[Satinavian]

I'm not, like, deep in that scene (or even involved with it at all), but I've literally never heard Duardin prior to this thread. My exposure to Warhammer is through the Total War games, where everything is a dwarf. The cities are dwarfholds, there's a guy called Grombrindal the White Dwarf, there's an antagonist faction with a whole DLC built around it called 'chaos dwarfs'. If GW is doing a dwarf rebrand, they missed including it in one of their most mainstream products.

That is because for Warhammer Fantasy they used Dawi, not Duardin and only on ingame texts while calling army books, units etc. by dwarf and derived words which players then used as well. And even in TW:Warhammer they follow through on it with "Dawi" being exclusively used in any voiced lines of the dwarven characters while everything game element is called dwarf. True to the sourcce.

Duardin is from Age of Sigmar and part of a rather obnoxious attempt to rename all species to get exclusive trademark rights : orcs became Orruks, elfs became Aelfs, ogres became Ogors... The fantasy fanbase (that was already unhappy about the end of fantasy) mostly found this silly and ignored it.

But considering "Duardin" was primarily introduced to make it easier to sue other people for infringement, i would strongly recommend against using it for your dwarves.

[Anonymouswizard]

In the absence of a strong pushback against the name, I could still see myself being in favour of changing the name if there was a clear superior alternative. Like for example I don't think the name Barbarian is particularly offensive, but "Berserker" is just the obviously more correct name for the class and is a name change I would generally be in favour of. I just don't really think there is one in this instance.

Honestly at this point I'd rather just rename 'Rage' into something like 'battle focus'.

The fantasy fanbase (that was already unhappy about the end of fantasy) mostly found this silly and ignored it.

To be fair that's still our primary response to anything Age of Sigmar related, especially the Ground Marines.

We also find it noticeable that WFRP4e was released before the Age of Sigmar game.

[MonochromeTiger]

To be fair that's still our primary response to anything Age of Sigmar related, especially the Ground Marines.

We also find it noticeable that WFRP4e was released before the Age of Sigmar game.

It's a bit of a shame to be honest. Well the first part not the second. If Games Workshop hadn't nuked the Warhammer Fantasy setting and then made a point of holding up Age of Sigmar as its successor it probably wouldn't have gotten nearly the backlash it did. If Games Workshop hadn't made it very obvious that they were throwing elements from the more popular Warhammer 40k setting to try making it sell better it probably wouldn't have gotten nearly the backlash it did. Instead it did both, threw out a ton of fan favorite characters, still hasn't really elaborated on some armies like Lizardmen as much as they could've, and during all of that the elements from the new things that they held up as different and interesting are de-emphasized because they aren't important to selling minis.

Looping that into something somewhat relevant to the topic, if you do try to replace something established understand that it will be met with resistance. Even in cases where it actually is objectively causing issues or failing there are going to be many who either really like it or are so used to it that just the idea of it changing is taken personally; I have on many occasions seen people talked into feeling outrage over changes that would make their lives easier simply because it's much easier to defend a status quo than to affect significant changes to it.

Change is scary, people can talk all they like about how they're fine with it and how they're looking forward to it but in the end we (and just about every other living thing) are creatures of habit and seemingly minor and insignificant changes can be enough to make everything feel strange and uncomfortable. Change done badly just intensifies that, and change for the sake of change without significant thought and consideration put into it is possibly even worse because not only are the people upset about it being told "yours was bad, this is better" whether they agree or not but they're being told it was being done for reasons that may not even be relevant to them. There may be some circumstances that the people pushing for the change are looking at that they feel are important, the potential for offense in fantasy race names here or the gradual decline in sales for Warhammer Fantasy in Games Workshop's case, but even if that's brought up and shown to people you're still changing what people know and regardless of the circumstances it will likely be an uphill battle even after you find an audience willing to back the decision.

Whatever the change being made the very first thing that should be done is to show it was worth it. If the change is done and then it just sits there that doesn't do anything but upset people who were against it by giving them an opportunity to ask "well what was the point then if you're just flipping a word around/ throwing our setting out?" In other words if you're making a big sweeping change to the status quo, even if it seems minor to you, have a plan for it beyond just changing things and calling it a day.

[Cluedrew]

Dwarrow or Dwerrow (I prefer dwerrow) feels like a fine alternative to me.

That's cool, and a great place to go to get an alternate name. It would be a nice to have a word that just referred to the fantasy race, even though it is usually pretty clear it is being used to refer to them.

That being said I do use the name "dwarf" in my own work because I do want all the connotations (and this sort of includes the negative ones) the word has to set the stage for all the stuff I want to do with the race. I got other fantasy races of my own creation and they have names of my own creation, but I also want some things to be clear from the beginning so I do use some standard fantasy elements to build a base and I give them standard fantasy names, that is how commutation works.

[KorvinStarmast]

And now instead of horrific hivemind bug monsters, i'm imagining a horde of tiny bearded children running out of school at the mention of a "Zwergling Rush".

But at least they can cry out "Go Go Go" as they do so.

[JusticeZero]

I'll be honest, I wanted out of the long shadow of Gygax's friends who pressured him into adding more Tolkien stuff than he'd started out intending.

My Session Zero tomorrow has three species, none of which are human, and the only remotely traditional species is a nonstandard gnome variant that channels their ancestors.

There are so many other sources of heritages than Tolkien, always was, and I'm tired of feeling that I have to rubber stamp Gygax's friends' preferences. There's nothing wrong with Tolkien, I just want out of that long, long shadow. Dwarves got the yeet. Elves? Yeet. Halflings? Yeet. Goblins? Yeet. Orcs? Yeet. Time to start from a fresh slate and populate my world from the sources I like.

You can even use them as a base to start your design work from. Quebel are blue and small-ish and wiry and have scales instead of hair; they can naturally soften stone, but they're not dedicated to mining or metalwork; they live in towns dug into cliff faces, ferment spicy food like kimchi, raise mushrooms and insects, and celebrate their ancestral escape from a natural disaster that slowly consumed their homeland in a toxic disaster. That's... somewhat Dwarf-like, enough that I can use their stat block, but clearly not. I am free from Tolkien.

[KorvinStarmast]

My Session Zero tomorrow has three species, none of which are human, and the only remotely traditional species is a nonstandard gnome variant that channels their ancestors.

What's your problem with humans? All of your players are human.

[Anonymouswizard]

What's your problem with humans? All of your players are human.

Hey now, don't assume, they could be running for dogs. Or Otherkin.

Honestly I'm much more likely to go 'humans only' than 'no humans'.

[MonochromeTiger]

I'll be honest, I wanted out of the long shadow of Gygax's friends who pressured him into adding more Tolkien stuff than he'd started out intending.

My Session Zero tomorrow has three species, none of which are human, and the only remotely traditional species is a nonstandard gnome variant that channels their ancestors.

There are so many other sources of heritages than Tolkien, always was, and I'm tired of feeling that I have to rubber stamp Gygax's friends' preferences. There's nothing wrong with Tolkien, I just want out of that long, long shadow. Dwarves got the yeet. Elves? Yeet. Halflings? Yeet. Goblins? Yeet. Orcs? Yeet. Time to start from a fresh slate and populate my world from the sources I like.

You can even use them as a base to start your design work from. Quebel are blue and small-ish and wiry and have scales instead of hair; they can naturally soften stone, but they're not dedicated to mining or metalwork; they live in towns dug into cliff faces, ferment spicy food like kimchi, raise mushrooms and insects, and celebrate their ancestral escape from a natural disaster that slowly consumed their homeland in a toxic disaster. That's... somewhat Dwarf-like, enough that I can use their stat block, but clearly not. I am free from Tolkien.

Nothing wrong with that, if it works for your group then obviously it's working fine. There's just a difference between "I don't like the conclusions they reached and want something different" and "we should, as a whole, toss this stuff out and unilaterally change it." And no, I'm not saying you do this it's just the post felt like an easy enough springboard to talk about it.

The style of game Gygax and his friends made is originally very focused on the combat with the rest kind of tacked on and a fairly heavy "player suffering is entertaining" atmosphere, my groups generally prefer a larger mix of roleplaying in their Tabletop Roleplaying Game and would prefer if everything spontaneously going wrong at least tried to make sense instead of just Tomb of Horrors style "you touch this and half your character's details change" or "you stayed here too long with no way of knowing it would be dangerous, you immediately die with no save." As such I avoid it, and when they DM/GM they avoid it, but we also accept that another group may find that fun and we don't pitch our way as the "right" way or the things we dislike as what "should" be removed.

Alignment is a similar point. I hate it, despise it even, alignment comes up and inevitably you're going to have a table full of people who all disagree on dozens of minor points unless they know each other very very well; to us it's more of a straitjacket waiting for someone to come along and go "well that's not how that alignment is meant to be played" and recite their personal interpretation as some sort of law set in the very stone of the game than it is an interesting system. So we don't use it, we take the time to work out how we can switch mechanics to not be reliant on it and we cut any excess that we don't think is worth the trouble, every single one of us still participates in games with other groups that keep it and in some cases with DMs who use the excessively strict and inflexible views on alignment we specifically avoid.

The point of this entire rant is that what is too restrictive and needs to be cut or what is a flawed relic to avoid is very much up to the preferences of the players and DM/GM at the table. For everyone who is careful to avoid adversarial DMing or alignment disputes or cut out the "traditional" options for what to play there's going to be someone who is in it to overcome an intentionally unfair challenge or who needs an uncompromising "these are the good guys and these are the bad guys" narrative or who refuses to make a character that doesn't have Dwarf clearly written up next to Race/Species/Ancestry/ whatever the system is using. Part of the game evolving from its origins is that we have other options, we have the ability to say our take on it is completely different and we don't want to use the elements we dislike about the original, but at the same time those origins are still there and they're still valid and for any number of people they remain the way they enjoy playing.

Hey now, don't assume, they could be running for dogs. Or Otherkin.

Honestly I'm much more likely to go 'humans only' than 'no humans'.

I've had a few games where, without any consultation between anyone involved, we just unanimously decided not to play or even consider Human characters. Sometimes it was as simple as "Humans are so boring and standard and we want something different for this fantasy world" or just finding other options more mechanically interesting, sometimes it was more complicated like a specific narrative people had in mind or wanting their characters to fit in with specific places in the setting. Ironically in a handful of cases the fact no one went Human made their plans fall apart because everyone was so focused on the idea of playing something distinctly not Human that the lack of an "average person" divided things into either everybody overacting their own special thing with little to no overlap or somebody getting stuck playing "Human but with a single stand out trait like wings they can fly with or stone skin" just to establish some common ground.

Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't but I've had far more games where the people playing Humans were just bored out of their minds wishing they could do something special without needing spells or magic items for it or roleplayers wishing they could explore what kind of culture would form for a group that has some fundamentally different and fantastical biological difference from us than games where people felt a Human being in the group was a problem in any way.

[Satinavian]

What's your problem with humans? All of your players are human.

If they exclude standard races to highligth the new and unique races of the setting, there is certainly no race more standard than the human. What is worse, not only are humans so often included, humans are usually the most populous and the default race making the vast majority of settings humans centric and thus extremely similar.

Excluding humans is generally a very good step.


Unfortunately there are some players who prefer to play humans and always want them. But then there are also players preferring elves and always want those.

[JusticeZero]

What's your problem with humans? All of your players are human.

The original thought was to include them as the rare race that's substantially bigger than the default race and so unable to use most equipment and such they find, but it was cutting close to fantasy racism that I made a separate commitment to purge, so I removed it.

[Anonymouswizard]

I've had a few games where, without any consultation between anyone involved, we just unanimously decided not to play or even consider Human characters.

So have I, I was talking from more of a setting design perspective. There's very few things you can't do with humans, and kicking out elves, orcs, catgirls, and sentient blobs of slime helps bring focus that supports variety.

But as an adventuring party? Eh, I'll probably be playing a human variant like Tieflings or Aasimar, but I have no issue with nobody deciding to pick human. Actually I'd love to do an all-martians Rocket Age game.

[Satinavian]

So have I, I was talking from more of a setting design perspective

The answers are also more from a setting design perspective.

What most fantasy and especially D&D settings have in common is humans as the norm. Which means removing humans is the easiest way to make settings unique and memorable.

[MonochromeTiger]

So have I, I was talking from more of a setting design perspective. There's very few things you can't do with humans, and kicking out elves, orcs, catgirls, and sentient blobs of slime helps bring focus that supports variety.

But as an adventuring party? Eh, I'll probably be playing a human variant like Tieflings or Aasimar, but I have no issue with nobody deciding to pick human. Actually I'd love to do an all-martians Rocket Age game.

I can kind of understand that but then the idea of being able to do just about anything with humans but not something else is always odd to me. If we're talking strictly setting or narrative design humanity having the dominant spot as the most powerful and populous of the "big" races of a setting so they can fit just about any role just doesn't make sense, and the explanations of "oh they're generalists so they can fill any niche better than the specialized races/species around them" or "oh well they're just more diplomatic than the other fast breeding groups so they can avoid fights while their population grows" are weak handwaves more than anything.

It has the same bad taste as those "HFY" stories that circulate around the internet, they rely heavily on suspension of disbelief turning on as soon as a trait gets called unique to humanity out of the entire universe when it's not even unique to our species on earth and even more so when the "unique and special" trait that gets emphasized is something the other species in the story are clearly capable of. I could easily see Dwarves being the experts on trade and technology that gives them an early advantage over their rivals and puts them in a position of power compared to all their neighbors in the setting or Elven mysticism and magic giving them so many workarounds that they just get a crushing advantage in any conflict or dispute that keeps them on top indefinitely; what I can't see without forcing myself to just accept it is "well Humans are kind of okay at everything so we just hang out until these arbitrary disasters happen that reduce Dwarves to miners and blacksmiths and Elves to bowmen and teachers of magic all living in our cities that are somehow doing great."

The only explanation I've seen in a setting that makes sense for it to my mind is that there's divine backing, the Gods of the setting taking a personal interest in humanity and tossing advantage to their favorite toys. Even that falls flat however when just about every race in the setting has their own Gods that also have every reason to ensure their personal favorites come out on top of the competition. Attempts to fix this just end up in the same space of "well yes they also have those advantages available but they also don't because reasons" where someone has to force the idea that the Gods of the Orcs are somehow threatened by their worshipers being the strongest and most powerful despite that being what the Orc Gods are actively portrayed as trying to encourage or how the Gods of the Dwarves are just so passive that they sit back and let their worshipers fall into a swift decline despite their entire thing being supporting Dwarven society and keeping them strong and safe.

The answers are also more from a setting design perspective.

What most fantasy and especially D&D settings have in common is humans as the norm. Which means removing humans is the easiest way to make settings unique and memorable.

Had a few settings where humanity just wasn't there, either they died out offscreen or they were never there to begin with. Funny thing, unless the players involved were really focused on exploring that specific aspect of the setting it didn't really change too much. Might have been because of how my groups usually handle portraying humanity in our games though, we avoid the standard approach of "this big area is medieval-stasis England, over here is not-China and not-Japan, here's not-Africa, and over here is the anachronistic Wild-West America if somebody wants to run around with guns." Having differences in how things are done because humanity isn't around to have cultural dominance over everything isn't as strange and unique when the humanity people are used to seeing in their game isn't just 4-5 mono-cultures based on an extremely narrow view of history crammed onto the map.

Then again part of it could be as simple as managing player expectations. You're going to have a very different experience with your players wandering through a tundra dominated by Catfolk/Tabaxi if they understand that they're there and able to thrive for a reason instead of just going in expecting them to just be there on the map for no reason and an opportunity to make a bunch of bad cat jokes. If a local culture is fleshed out, especially if it has its own subcultures fleshed out, it's just easier to accept that it's there without really spending ages questioning how or why.

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

The answers are also more from a setting design perspective.

What most fantasy and especially D&D settings have in common is humans as the norm. Which means removing humans is the easiest way to make settings unique and memorable.

It might be easy and it might be memorable but I'm not sure that means it's good. My immediate reaction, when I hear that someone has banned humans and elves and doesn't want their species to be humans-with-bumpy-foreheads and all that jazz is to think 'god, that must be such an annoying table.' Either there's a ton of lore that the player is expected to know and care about that inevitably they don't (at least not as much as the guy who came up with all of it), or the players are so focused on being different that they stop being able to interact with each other and the whole thing collapses under its own weight, or the players ignore all of it and play their characters as basically recognizable human archetypes because some level of commonality is required for the table to function.

Characters have to be able to communicate with each other and in ways that the players can understand and explain. Human-with-bumpy-forehead is a pejorative for 'the species present in this setting are capable of diplomacy', and as such I've never found it convincing. Attempts to get away from it towards more alien archetypes generally don't work great for collaborative tabletop games. Fiction -- fine, sure, absolutely. But that's not what we're doing here.

[Anonymouswizard]

I mean at the end of the day your sentient ball of slime is just going to end up as a funny looking human anyway, might as well embrace it. It's why I like Tieflings, Aasimar, Genasi, and all that lot: they're pretty honest that you're just a cool looking human with a couple of weird bits glued on.

There's nothing wrong with Vulcans, just make sure you use them well. Or these weird 'foresr vulcans' that D&D seems to have.

[Satinavian]

Characters have to be able to communicate with each other and in ways that the players can understand and explain.

The non-human races are able to communicate in properly interact with each other in the traditional settings. Why should they lose the ability just because humans are absent ? They won't.

[Anonymouswizard]

The non-human races are able to communicate in properly interact with each other in the traditional settings. Why should they lose the ability just because humans are absent ? They won't.

I suspect these are the kinds of players who'd actually use the rules for languages. A d forgo an established 'common tongue' (which I tend to call Imperial, after those ancient empires In every setting).

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

The non-human races are able to communicate in properly interact with each other in the traditional settings. Why should they lose the ability just because humans are absent ? They won't.

In the traditional settings, non-human races are always derided as humans with bumpy foreheads. What's the point of removing humans and keeping standard-dwarves, standard-elves and standard-halflings? You're just leaning into what makes those races basically just humans even more; you've emptied the "this is what you are used to, it's neither exotic nor strange" narrative space.

If you actually want to move towards more alien nonhumans, you're going to be adding friction to the experience of playing them and interacting with people who play them. If you make a kenkku PC and you play it out of the book, straight -- born with an innate, desperate desire to fly, communicates only with mimicked phrases and sounds, completely without any creativity, imprint onto a companion to follow and mimic -- you're going to annoy the hell out of everyone at the table, and the book even suggests that you play less literally. Playing a by-the-rules kenkku at the table is annoying enough, and they can speak, in a way, are bipedal and can make recognizable gestures, can hear the normal range of sound and so on. Imagine what it'd be like encountering myconids without the dodge of telepathy-enabling spores.

I think in a lot of ways people trying to make settings more exotic are trying to address something that's caused by player behavior and group dynamics. Players interact with each other as human beings and, as a result, their characters behave like humans towards each other and to the world. DMs need that common ground.