I don't care what level Gandalf was or is.

Never gonna wind up playing him, neither will any players that I GM.

Hell, I don't even like levels in roleplaying games.

Gandalf was an NPC ally that was mostly trustworthy .
Thats all he really was.


- Ed C.

Quote from: Koltar;372361I don't care what level Gandalf was or is.

Never gonna wind up playing him, neither will any players that I GM.

Hell, I don't even like levels in roleplaying games.

Gandalf was an NPC ally that was mostly trustworthy .
Thats all he really was.


- Ed C.

and that is my point.

What's the problem with non human races? Most of them are no more or less like typical people (humans) than most of the character types in most games. Is james bond more or less like a typical human than a vulcan? Is a wookie all that less like a typical human than conan?

Just because a character is nominally human doesn't make him like a real human being(Before the big reboot, james bond was utterly non human.) and just because a character is physically non human doesn't make him all that different than some real people.

I often play non humans in RPGs and have had GMs say that I usually do a good job of it. I had a game where I was playing a mechanoid character who could not understand why the team was going to a nudie bar after work.

"So, you go to these places and have naked human women stimulate your sexual arousal, you spend a lot of money there and because it's forbidden to actually have sex with them you return to your homes and masturbate, essentially."

(Human PC) "Uh, well, yeah, sort of."

"So why not just go home and masturbate directly, saving the money you'd spend at the strip club?"


"Uh, well, the girls look nice and you can get lap dances for a few bucks."

"But no actual sex, right?"

"Well, yeah..."


"It must be one of those human things that no rational intelligence can understand."

(The GM and the rest of the players broke up on that. I got an extra XP for good role playing.)

I've had a couple GMs specifically ask me to run a non human player character in some games as they know I can do so usually, as long as it's a race I can identify with in some way and not something like a klingon, which is basically just an obnoxious, overbearing asshole with testosterone poisoning and not all that much of a 'non human".

Quote from: Pika from the PitsHell, man, in Old SKool D&D gandalf was 5th level by Canon from what I've heard.

Sorry kiddo, but even back when I played D&D....I always told people that the game did a particulary shitty job modelling LotR.  I read the piece AoF reperinted from the Dragon, and that just makes the point.

D&D ≠ LotR.  
So it does not make you wrong or right, nor I.  It just means that using D&D to call Gandalf and the rest of the crew underpowered in an RPG sense does not work,

Quote from: LordVreeg;372717Sorry kiddo, but even back when I played D&D....I always told people that the game did a particulary shitty job modelling LotR.  I read the piece AoF reperinted from the Dragon, and that just makes the point.

D&D ≠ LotR.  
So it does not make you wrong or right, nor I.  It just means that using D&D to call Gandalf and the rest of the crew underpowered in an RPG sense does not work,

Trying to base characters and performance off stories is a sucker's game. The characters in a story have a "level" equal to the needs of the plot, and subject to the plot's needs, not a consistent level of power.

The best a game can do is make a setting where things like the story can happen IF the dice roll right. In a story there are no dice, just the writer, his plot and it's needs. The characters performance is determined by those.

I don't get into arguments over that sort of thing, I just say something like "Well, gandalf must have rolled a critical there" or "the bad guys rolled a critical at that time but not the later one."

Given a near infinite selection of choices, my players have almost always chosen humans or core races. Me, I like weird races. I love anthro races in particular. But tend to run humancentric games. Humans maybe the most common race, but they aren't the only game in town. I would like to run a campaign where humans are just another minority amongst a true polyglotal population. I have always been bugged by how humans are always the 'vanilla' race. The default 'base' from which all other races diverge in some way or another. What if we find out that humans are the strongest race in the galaxy, or the fastest? Or the most lecherous... human doesn't have to be the default and they don't have to be vanilla.

I say just let it happen...

I mean we ARE talking about PC's, who regularly stomp through town fully armored, with flaming swords and toting severed monster heads...in the long run is it really going to be much worse if they have blue skin, horns, or prehensile elephant trunks where their nipples are supposed to be?

Quote from: Shazbot79;372908I say just let it happen...

I mean we ARE talking about PC's, who regularly stomp through town fully armored, with flaming swords and toting severed monster heads...in the long run is it really going to be much worse if they have blue skin, horns, or prehensile elephant trunks where their nipples are supposed to be?

Hey, my guys put the werewolf head in a bag!  
(after they used a herbal poultice preservation on it..so it was a good smelling severed werewolf head.)

In my experience, if a group is not composed of a certain  minimum number of humans (or whatever the main area race is), then the whole thing falls apart. And if the group is composed of more than half Weird-Ass-Races-That-Are-Super-Rare, it falls apart much faster than if the group is composed mostly of elves or dwarves.

I think the answer to this is to create a certain minimum quota in a gaming group of "humans vs. everything else" and also of "normal demi-humans vs. Freak Races".

RPGPundit

Quote from: RPGPundit;372957I think the answer to this is to create a certain minimum quota in a gaming group of "humans vs. everything else" and also of "normal demi-humans vs. Freak Races".

Personally, this isn't a viable option for me.  I would find it too limiting and restricting if the RAW dictated to me and my group how and when we could have non-human races played in our games.  

YMMV, of course, and I wouldn't fault anyone for creating some kind of House Rule to this effect for either a specific game or as a blanket rule for their group and games as a whole.

Quote from: LordVreeg;372950Hey, my guys put the werewolf head in a bag!  
(after they used a herbal poultice preservation on it..so it was a good smelling severed werewolf head.)

Wait...what are they going to use a severed Werewolf head for that they need to preserve it indefinitely? 0.0

I don't recall any spells that use werewolf head as a material component...

Quote from: Shazbot79;372971Wait...what are they going to use a severed Werewolf head for that they need to preserve it indefinitely? 0.0

I don't recall any spells that use werewolf head as a material component...

Shaz, I have my own ruleset.  It's used as a reagent in some Animist spells for creating protection from lycanthropy...but the fact it smelled cinnamon-fresh never stopped being amusing...

Quote from: Thanlis;372019That's your mistake right there -- you're conflating the world design with the PC group design. Sometimes they are the same, but they don't have to be the same. If you want to have a group of PCs that stand out and it's OK for them to be unusual, you just set the party of bird men and lizard men and angels into the mundane backdrop and there you go.

A good point.  The rest of the campaign world could be almost exclusively humans, but by definition, adventuring groups do not fit the norm.  It would be a good opportunity to explore themes of isolation and alienation as well.

Quote from: Xanther;372040My personal pet peeve about non-human species is they always seem to be clearly superior to humans in the game mechanic ways that matter to players (especially power hungry ones).  In my own homebrew non-humans are not clearly superior and can be clearly inferior in game mechanic ways attractive to power hungry players, even if the non-humans are superior to humans in setting/social ways.

Another important point I was going to raise after reading the rest of the thread.  If you want the demi-humans to be less common as a campaign theme, make them more mechanically mundane, at least as PCs.  If they are just short humans, or humans with pointy ears and not much else, I think you will find players choosing them less often, for the reasons described above.

Quote from: two_fishes;372057This sort of thing is one of the reasons I think it's always worthwhile to have a session or discussion of some kind before the game proper begins. You don't just generate characters, you discuss what the setting is like, and what it means to have these characters in this setting, and talk about ways to make it coherent and hooky for both the players and the GM.

Quote from: Peregrin;372059True.

When you're playing a campaign, eventually someone is going to wonder why the guy with the flaming (or icy) hair is running around with a bunch of relatively "normal" demi-humans, and why people in villages just accept him (or don't).

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