Non-humans are just humans wearing a Halloween mask. There's basically no difference save for a couple of mechanical ones.

Quote from: finarvyn on July 12, 2024, 05:20:37 PMAgreed, and RPGs are going down that slippery slope already. Players want to play character types which are typically monsters, so then rulebooks start creating rules for PC monsters, then somebody decides that not all of those monsters are bad, then folks feel bad about fictitious creatures feeling bad about other creatures being better than they are, then we wind up trying to be PC about creatures that don't even exist.

I blame Drizzt, as he's the first one I can remember that did this.

Drow as a player character race were introduced by Gygax in 1985 with Unearthed Arcana, before the first Drizzt story came out. But monster PCs go back much earlier. The Monsters! Monsters! RPG (by Ken St. Andre) was first published in 1976. Even earlier, I was just reading Gygax writing in the April 1975 Europa magazine:

Quote from: Gary GygaxWhat do you do if a player opts to become a Golden Dragon? Agree, of course. Allow the player to adventure only with strictly Lawful players, and normal men-at-arms would never go near even a good dragon. He would be Very Young, size being determined by a die roll. Advancement in ability would be a function of game time (the dragon would normally take about four years to grow to its next level) and accumulated treasure - let us say that for every 100 000 pieces of gold (or its equivalent) the dragon in effect gains an extra year of growth, counting magical items which go into the horde as fairly high in gold value. While the player will be quite advanced at first, those who are playing more usual roles will surpass him rather quickly, and in this was you'll not find a G.D. dominating.

Going outside RPGs, I remember reading John Gardner's novel Grendel as a teen in the early 1980s, which is a retelling of Beowulf from the point of view of the monster Grendel. It was first published in 1971.

I think it's to be expected that different options for PCs would quickly be explored. Role-players are constantly inventing new stuff.

Greetings!

Yeah, monster races for Player Characters goes way back. Blah blah blah.

The player culture has changed though, dramatically. That's the problem. Before, Player Monsters were a once-every-so-often thing.

Now, fucking weird monster races make up three quarters or more of every party, *and* such players play them as absolutely Woke fucking special snowflakes with autism and depravity dialed up to 12.

Do you see the difference? That's the difference. That's why so many old school players and DM's in recent years have become increasingly annoyed by this kind of dynamic.

Semper Fidelis,

SHARK

Quote from: Exploderwizard on July 12, 2024, 02:48:41 PMBest of all, NO race has any kind of darkvision or night vision.

Complaining about darkvision has become a bit of a cliche, but it really is a big culprit in this. It's just too damn useful, and being the only person in the party who doesn't have it is a huge pain in the ass. I wouldn't mind "everyone has darkvision", if everyone actually had it. Running dungeons for a party that's 70% darkvision becomes a hassle.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on July 12, 2024, 02:20:32 PMThe problem I can predict with the freakshow approach is that it messes with the logic of how adventurers determine "is it a monster or not?" If the PCs look like monsters, then how do they keep track of what monsters are okay to kill? Do they wait to be attacked? Do monsters have red circles around them to indicate they're hostile?

That part doesn't bother me so much. With so many classic monsters already having many interpretations, I expect to have my players ask me "Wait, are trolls evil in this setting?". I kind of prefer the ambiguity of letting people decide whether they want to give up a surprise attack and chance diplomacy for the possibility of not having to fight at all.

For me it's more just the "when everyone's super, no one is" trope and the fact that when everyone is everywhere all at once it tends to turn settings into grey goo.

Quote from: jhkim on July 12, 2024, 06:14:54 PMI think it's to be expected that different options for PCs would quickly be explored. Role-players are constantly inventing new stuff.

Yeah. I mentioned this in the other thread, but the BECMI line eventually put in options for playing all kinds of wacky creatures. Tall Tales of the Wee Folk alone had 13 player races. If you put a creature in the setting, someone's going to want to play it.

While I don't see why you couldn't do a humans-only fantasy setting, I think there's something of an assumption that a D&D game will have some non-humans around.

I had a group several years back that wound up entirely non-human, which to me was too far. Shortly after that game I had my revelation regarding races -- I had too many -- and cut it down to just humans and less than a dozen others.

To help incentivize folks playing humans, I then gave them -- on top of their normal "+1 anywhere" stat mods -- an additional +2 to their class-based stat (as an example: all of my "tank" classes have a an additional stat called Tenacity, which reduces damage taken). Because I decided that everyone's class stat starts at 10 at character creation, this gives human characters a bit of a boost that makes them attractive when put alongside non-human races that have a bunch of other bells and whistles.

The result since then has been parties that are about half-and-half human and non-human, which was the goal.

Quote from: DUCATISLO on July 12, 2024, 08:17:19 AMmuh humans have to be everywhere reee

like why not have them be the only race if you want the setting to be human centric then? GOD forbid humans are the under dog

AD&D Conan, the 2e & 3e Masque of the Red Death and 90% of the 3e d20 Modern Polyhedeon settings were human only. Think the 3e Dark*Matter setting was too.

Quote from: ForgottenF on July 12, 2024, 06:40:55 PMYeah. I mentioned this in the other thread, but the BECMI line eventually put in options for playing all kinds of wacky creatures. Tall Tales of the Wee Folk alone had 13 player races. If you put a creature in the setting, someone's going to want to play it.

  I think one of the differences is that in pre-3E, those were often siloed into their own subgames, settings, or corners of settings. A lot of the anthropomorphic BECMI races that were mentioned, for example, were pretty focused on the revised Savage Coast from "The Voyages of the Princess Ark" and the later Red Steel subsetting. And how many people know that the RAVENLOFT line included rules for undead PCs in one of TSR's last releases?

  Since then, though, WotC has focused more on "D&D for D&D's sake," "everything is core," "One Game to Rule Them All and in Seattle bind them," , which has both diversified and homogenized PC options.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales on July 12, 2024, 07:55:29 AMAn idea that I had was to revise demihuman PC races to look mostly human aside from minor exotic features. E.g. tieflings have small horns, a tail and hoofed toes, but otherwise pass for human; dragonbloods look like humans aside from a few patches of scales here and there; etc. Treat them as human subraces rather than their own.

Personally I think going back to O and BX D&D would help. Neither granted stat bonuses for playing non-humans. And the racial bonuses were not huge.

Personally, the closest I get to a non-human PC is the occasional (less than 25% of my PCs) half-elf or perhaps a dhampir; basically at least one foot in the door of being human just with a bit of a foot in whatever is supernatural in the setting.

That said I don't begrudge others playing what they want unless its going to be specifically disruptive in a non-fun way for others.

There's also nothing wrong with an entirely non-human campaign. One I played in where I picked half-elf was because there were literally no pure-blood races left in the setting. All the humans, elves, dwarves, and orcs were extinct due to a magical plague and half-elves, half-orcs, and half-dwarves were the only playable races available (gnomes and halflings were also extinct, but there were no half-race versions of them to survive).

Which goes to highlight that you can do interesting things with a non-human setting, but its ideally something you'd build into the setting as opposed to "the world is mostly humans... except for the PCs who are some mishmash of extremely rare races just because."

Technically, I think even the latter could work if the GM built for it. Say the party is literally a bunch of escapees from some menagerie of the bizarre and their adventuring in a dungeon is more about clearing out a safe and secure place for them to live away from the humans than the typical party motivation of wealth and power.

Quote from: DUCATISLO on July 12, 2024, 03:33:45 PM

Quote from: Socratic-DM on July 12, 2024, 02:53:08 PMFurry Detected

old fart detected

Not even that. Just another hatemonger.

Quote from: Brad on July 12, 2024, 04:07:22 PM

Quote from: DUCATISLO on July 12, 2024, 03:33:45 PM

Quote from: Socratic-DM on July 12, 2024, 02:53:08 PMFurry Detected

old fart detected

Shut up, faggot. Go back to Reddit.

Homophobe detected? We thought better of you.

Quote from: Crazy_Blue_Haired_Chick on July 12, 2024, 04:29:22 PMMy problem is that the demihuman and nonhuman player races aren't mechanically distinct enough from base humans. There is no option in the Player's Handbook for Tieflings to use their horns to attack, for example. It's often more like a skin than a seperate species.

But that falls into the old Gamma World problem. People wanted to play mutant animals thinking they could game the system. Then bitched when they found out playing a mutant octopus did not in fact give you 8 attacks around.

Quote from: finarvyn on July 12, 2024, 05:20:37 PMAgreed, and RPGs are going down that slippery slope already. Players want to play character types which are typically monsters, so then rulebooks start creating rules for PC monsters, then somebody decides that not all of those monsters are bad, then folks feel bad about fictitious creatures feeling bad about other creatures being better than they are, then we wind up trying to be PC about creatures that don't even exist.

I blame Drizzt, as he's the first one I can remember that did this.

Gamma World and Metamorphosis Alpha allowed playing effectively monsters long long ago.

The first D&D novel Quag Keep had amongst the PCs a Lizardman, A Wear-boar, and a Pseudo-Dragon. Beating out Drizzt by a decade probably.

BX had an article with rules for making your own class/race.

3e seems to be where things took off though for playing monsters.

Quote from: jhkim on July 12, 2024, 06:14:54 PMDrow as a player character race were introduced by Gygax in 1985 with Unearthed Arcana, before the first Drizzt story came out. But monster PCs go back much earlier. The Monsters! Monsters! RPG (by Ken St. Andre) was first published in 1976. Even earlier, I was just reading Gygax writing in the April 1975 Europa magazine:

Lets not forget that before the game was published players were playing monsters. Monard mentions playing a Balrog and someone else was playing a vampire and so on.

Playing monsters in D&D and RPGs is not this NEW THING!!! that people keep making it out to be.

Quote from: SHARK on July 12, 2024, 06:25:25 PMThe player culture has changed though, dramatically. That's the problem. Before, Player Monsters were a once-every-so-often thing.

Not as every so often as people would like to believe.