I've always been interested in wholly alien settings like Talislanta without any trappings of a human culture among the people, but I've seen numbers that humans are the most-played race in D&D over the years and have heard word of mouth that some players flatly refuse to play a non-human character.  Plus Talislanta's never been a commercial success to the best of my knowledge.  So I'm curious about folks' opinions on whether a setting must include humans in it to have a hope of doing well.

Quote from: Valatar on March 30, 2025, 06:45:07 AMI've always been interested in wholly alien settings like Talislanta without any trappings of a human culture among the people, but I've seen numbers that humans are the most-played race in D&D over the years and have heard word of mouth that some players flatly refuse to play a non-human character.  Plus Talislanta's never been a commercial success to the best of my knowledge.  So I'm curious about folks' opinions on whether a setting must include humans in it to have a hope of doing well.

I don't think that a setting needs to be human or have humans.  However I think that there is a couple of difficult problems in making a no-humans setting work.  The first is that you need to have some way for the audience to connect with the characters but not be so like people as to just be seen as humans in costumes.  Disney and Dreamworks movies with anthropomorphized animals are not no-human but in fact very human centric.

The other issue I've seen with no-human settings is that they get stuck on a single theme.  Being set around a single theme is great for exploring the subject, excellent for examining a nebulous concept from another point of view, but this limits role play quite a bit.  This isn't unique to no-humans settings but nearly all no-human settings are designed like this that I've seen.  I think a great example of single themed material shunting the RPG experience is Free League's Bladerunner game.  It's excellent for a couple of one-shots but it will wear thin very quickly.

I've outlined challenges as I see them but I don't really have any solutions.  However, it's a really cool thought experiment.

I don't think games absolutely need humans for a setting to work and I personally prefer to play non-humans in RPGs myself and always have.   That said... I don't think it's a good idea for a setting where humans *could* be included but specifically aren't simply because it limits your potential audience for what seems to be an arbitrary reason even if it isn't.   That's not an issue in games like Mausritter or Household where playing a human isn't possible.  Are there visually "near-humans" ala elves, dwarf, and halfling equivalents for people to play that traditionally humans to use as close enough stand ins or is the setting going full alien with people playing whisps of air and blobs of goo?   I think the problem is compounded the further away from humanity visually/asthetically you get for some players... and I say that as someone who wants to play a gasbag with tentacles if I ever return to Starfinder with their upcoming 2e.

Thinking about it, I have participated in a no-human Spelljammer campaign that lasted a bit over a year. That was just how it played out and I never even noticed until reflecting just now.

So for the length of that campaign at least, a no-human setting worked just fine for us.

The only settings I can think of that are always non-human are Transformers, Ritter Mouse, and that kiddy one about playing stuffed animals that come alive to protect their human child from monsters/bad dreams at night. 

Quote from: weirdguy564 on March 30, 2025, 09:57:29 AMThe only settings I can think of that are always non-human are Transformers, Ritter Mouse, and that kiddy one about playing stuffed animals that come alive to protect their human child from monsters/bad dreams at night.

All of those settings have humans, they're just not available as PCs.

By that standard, Vampire: the Masquerade and almost all of the World of Darkness games don't have humans as a PC option. V:tM is one of the few RPGs that came close to rivaling D&D in popularity. There are a huge number of similar monster-playing games around as well, from Whispering Vault (where you play vigilante-ish monsters) to Spookshow (where you play ghosts who work as spies).

There's also the Amber Diceless RPG, and a genre around that. Pundit's Lords of Olympus is a variant of that. Again, there's technically humans in the setting, but they're too puny to be PCs.

Humans serve as a baseline for regular people with good reason. All players are human and can thus relate to the "normal" behaviors of the general population. Without that familiar frame of reference it becomes more difficult to define other races. Even if no one plays one, humans in a setting provide that backdrop by which other races are compared.

I prefer settings with diverse human cultures over settings where aliens are funny looking humans.

Humans are 100% required for a setting to have commercial success.  Generally speaking they must be available as player characters as well.  Games where your character was born a human, raised as a human, and then became a superhero / found out he was from planet Vegeta or Krypton / was bitten by a vampire or turned into a werewolf- in all these cases you are still playing a 100% a human.

I think the only example in this thread of a game where you actually aren't a human is Transformers.  And I'll actually argue with this example:
1- The transformers seem to basically be humans, aside from the fact that they are robots.  They aren't alien, mentally speaking, even in the slightest.  When an autobot reminisces about his lost world, it's the same emotion and thoughts as a human in his place.
2- Transformers isn't actually a commercial success as a roleplaying setting, at all.

As far as "can you have a good plot, setting, and roleplay, in a world like Talislanta that went through some effort to actually not quite have humans", I think you definitely can, but I think these places are at the edge of the genre in part because of this.

I never played it but I think Jorune had no humans and the ads in dragon made it look a bit unapproachable. Like you have that much more to learn just to get to a sort of base knowledge required to play.

Although I can see this working well if it were all Dwarves or all Emlbesr something.

Quote from: Valatar on March 30, 2025, 06:45:07 AMSo I'm curious about folks' opinions on whether a setting must include humans in it to have a hope of doing well.

Yes.

No.

Isn't Mouseguard a thing?

Quote from: Fheredin on March 30, 2025, 03:44:31 PMIsn't Mouseguard a thing?

Unless I'm mistaken, Mouseguard is basically just medieval fantasy with mice who act just like humans.

The closest I've gotten with any success among players was a setting where all the pureblooded humans (and most of the pureblooded demihumans) had gone extinct, but what remained were nations of half-elves, half-dwarves (non-sterile muls), tallfellow halflings (canonically halfling/human hybrids in at least some settings), and half-orcs who had ethnically distinct kingdoms in a cold war.

Basically, humans with a few exotic features around the edges.

Quote from: Venka on March 30, 2025, 12:30:10 PMI think the only example in this thread of a game where you actually aren't a human is Transformers.  And I'll actually argue with this example:
1- The transformers seem to basically be humans, aside from the fact that they are robots.  They aren't alien, mentally speaking, even in the slightest.  When an autobot reminisces about his lost world, it's the same emotion and thoughts as a human in his place.
2- Transformers isn't actually a commercial success as a roleplaying setting, at all.

The Transformers RPG allows you to play a human as a component of a two-part "Binary-Bonded" (e.g., Headmaster) character.