There's a segment of players who just have no idea how to make an actually interesting character with a personality and interesting character traits or conflicts.  Because there's nothing intrinsically interesting about their characters, they have to come up with some way to make them seem interesting.  One of the most common methods these players use to make their bland characters seem interesting is to make them some odd or exotic race.  My boring character with no goals or personality will be interesting if I make it a cat person or a space elf or whatever.  They think human characters are boring because the only interesting thing about their characters is that they are wolf people or whatever.  What they don't realize is that being a plasmoid doesn't make a character interesting.  If your character wouldn't be interesting as a human, your character isn't interesting period.

There's also a ,mercifully small, group of players who insist on pushing their fetish into everything they do.  Furry players have a bad reputation because a disproportionate number of them fall into this category.  They don't just want to play an anthropomorphic animal character.  They have a compulsion to shove their fur fetish into everything they do whether it's wanted or not.  They will try to turn your game into furry porn.  They can't help themselves.  Not all furries are like this but there are enough of them that people have noticed a pattern and responded accordingly.  That person who wants to play an anthropomorphic animal character might not be a problem but letting them into your game is taking a chance.  It's a lot less trouble just to ban those races and be done with it.  It sill eliminate some good players along with the weirdos but it will also cut out a lot of problems before they become problems.

Yosemitemike,

Both of your reasons are why I have some randomness options in my games--even though the players main character is pretty much whatever they want.  I want some interesting races.  I want some cat people or wolf people or whatever.  However, I've found that a player that is perfectly OK with playing a random human will also not exhibit any of those annoying behaviors you mention.  It's a filter that lets me flirt with what would otherwise be risky, without really risking very much.  Of course, the other, greater filter is only playing with your friends or people closely vetted. 

There's a positive side to this, not just a filter. Generally, a person willing to play the random human will probably do a pretty good job with any of the other options.

Sure, that means that I might filter out some good players unfairly.  Since I never have a shortage of players, I'm not all that torn up about it.  Read an article once about an engineering firm in the Midwest whose first filter on resumes was to immediately trash any resume from an Ivy League graduate.  His reasoning was that many of them didn't know how to work.  The ones that did know how to work would have no trouble getting a job elsewhere.  Bottom line, not every potential player is owed a fair shot at your table. 

Quote from: Chris24601 on July 17, 2024, 11:26:39 AM

Quote from: LordBP on July 17, 2024, 10:14:55 AM

Quote from: Omega on July 16, 2024, 07:14:37 AMHumans, Dwarves, Half-Orcs and Half-Elves needed 1lb of food/day. Elves needed 1/3 lb, Halflings and Gnomes 1/2 lb. Water was a bit more complex based on temperature and activity.

The 1lb of food per day might work if they were sedentary, but if they are adventuring, then it would be more like 2 lbs or more per day.

Depends on the food.

A military MRE weighs about 0.58 pounds and provides about 1260 calories... or about 2200 calories per pound. The food storage is more efficient and spoilage is less, but the fundamental calories per gram of food doesn't change.

A 180 lb. man walking at 3 mph (the D&D standard over clear terrain) burns about 270 calories per hour... or about 2160 calories if they walked for eight hours straight.

I'd say the pound per day is rounded off and then averaged with less active days (dungeoneering presumes more like 300' per hour just half a mile of walking in an eight hour day).

If you needed to do a vast amount of overland travel (say a two week hike along a trade road) then, yeah it probably falls a bit short, but for typical D&D behavior of a day or two to a dungeon, a day or three of exploring it, and a few days back... yeah, a pound a day is probably "close enough."

Pemmican is around 3,500 calories per pound, grain around 1,600 per pound, and dried meat around 1,600 per pound.  For pemmican, it's better used as a thickener to a stew as the tallow doesn't melt in your mouth like other fats will.  You could use hardtack or a hard bread for the grain.  I won't get into vegetables or fruit as they usually don't have dense calories per pound, so aren't really useful to take on a trip (pure sugar would be, but might be expensive).

For the walking example, the 8 hours of walking still leaves 16 hours of sitting (80 calories per hour), so the total would bump up to around 3,400 calories which is going to be a couple pounds of food.

Wearing gear while walking/hiding is going to use more calories also as most will have at least 40-50 pounds of gear on them (armor, weapons, backpack with food/water, etc).

Combat is the biggest unknown as it could burn much more calories depending on how much the party was in combat.  If it's a lot, then the calories used per day might double or triple.


For the MREs, back when I was in the Army (a while back so they may have changed it), the allotment of MREs per person was 3 assuming no hot meals were provided.  Everyone ate all of the MREs and all the pogey bait that we could smuggle into our packs and carry, so we were probably eating 3,500 to 4,000 calories per day.

Quote from: Steven Mitchell on July 17, 2024, 05:52:07 PMBottom line, not every potential player is owed a fair shot at your table.

<gasp> You animal! Lock your doors, the RPG police are coming for you!  lol

Quote from: yosemitemike on July 17, 2024, 05:28:51 PMThere's also a ,mercifully small, group of players who insist on pushing their fetish into everything they do.  Furry players have a bad reputation because a disproportionate number of them fall into this category.  They don't just want to play an anthropomorphic animal character.  They have a compulsion to shove their fur fetish into everything they do whether it's wanted or not.  They will try to turn your game into furry porn.  They can't help themselves.  Not all furries are like this but there are enough of them that people have noticed a pattern and responded accordingly.  That person who wants to play an anthropomorphic animal character might not be a problem but letting them into your game is taking a chance.  It's a lot less trouble just to ban those races and be done with it.  It sill eliminate some good players along with the weirdos but it will also cut out a lot of problems before they become problems.

This can be a particular problem with Traveller. Aslan and Vargr are viewed as merely lion-men and wolf-men by furry fanatics even though there are over four hundred pages of in game lore written and published for each race. Aslan and Vargr were originally created to give players the quintessential chance to play beings, "that think as well as humans but not like humans". Traveller Book 0 says flat out that, "Aliens should not be humans in funny rubber suits."

I don't really have a solid solution for this except for kicking out anyone who tries to exercise their furry fetish at the table and reserving allowing players to run an alien until I'm sure that they will take it seriously.

Quote from: Chris24601 on July 17, 2024, 11:26:39 AMbut for typical D&D behavior of a ten-minute work day followed by 8-hours of rest

The typical D&D party doesn't work all that hard anymore.

Want a humanocentric campaign? Give humans more bonuses than non-human races. Very few players will choose races with less goodies attached.

Of course, the far easier way to run a humanocentric campaign is to make humans the only PC race.

Run the campaign you want. Let the players then decide if they want to play.

Fake 5e Races, my bad, Ancestries... no longer have stat bonuses at all.

But now everyone starts out with a feat instead of just variant humans.

Quote from: Omega on July 18, 2024, 04:50:33 AMFake 5e Races, my bad, Ancestries... no longer have stat bonuses at all.

But now everyone starts out with a feat instead of just variant humans.

To be 100% fair, they did give strong races traits like "you have proficiency in athletics and treat your size as one larger for lifting and carrying" and small creatures automatically have a penalty to lifting and carrying so that just makes the Strength attribute a "relative to your species" range instead of a universal one.

They have similar things like "add 1d8 feet to each long or high jump you make" or "proficient in stealth and squeeze as a small creature" or "advantage on perception checks" or similar that reflect innate racial traits in arguably more interesting ways than +2 Strength or Dexterity or Wisdom does.

I've never particularly cared for 5e in general (I never bought even the PHB) and I won't be buying the new stuff either, but in terms of system mechanics (such as they are) proficiency in athletics (scaling +2-6 to most strength related actions) and double lifting and carrying (so a 10 Str can carry as much as someone of another race with 20 Str) is much more likely to produce a feeling of "this character is strong" than a "+2 to Str attribute (so +1 to Str related checks)" ever will.

To be further fair, I went that way with my own design years ago as the numbers required to reflect both a sprite and a giant would be too far apart for the underlying math to work. So I opted for physiological differences to be mostly represented by traits rather than attribute adjustments.

As such, where 5e has gone (that change preceded D&D 2024 - it first showed up in Tasha's and the Monster Races book) isn't so much shocking to me as a "look who finally caught up?"

Quote from: Banjo Destructo on July 17, 2024, 04:42:01 PM

Quote from: Shalashashka on July 17, 2024, 03:58:52 PM

Quote from: Banjo Destructo on July 17, 2024, 09:42:58 AM

Quote from: Shalashashka on July 16, 2024, 10:30:08 PMI'm gonna be honest here, I've only ever played one human character in my entire time playing dnd. He was a swamp monk who talked like Dale Grible and he sadly didn't survive the one shot. Closest I've come since are a tiefling and an assimar. I just don't have any interest in playing what I already am in reality.

Your class makes you what you aren't in real life.

That just doesn't interest me, personally.

You're intitled to your opinion and preference, but for me, playing a human wizard that is casting fireballs and other spells isn't that different from playing a gnome or elf wizard, because you don't cast spells in real life.
Playing a human fighter, as much as I might practice with a sword in real life, allows me to pretend to do so many things I can't do in real life, fighting against monsters and looting treasure, performing deeds and feats that would be impossible in real life. .
I just don't understand the "be what I'm not in real life" when it comes to wanting to be a different species, because nothing you do in an RPG is what you do in real life, so being a human character doesn't seem like a "deal breaker" unless you just hate being a human in real life? I mean maybe you don't, that's just the only reason I can come up with off the top of my head.

I don't hate being human, I just don't find it interesting to play as one if I don't have to. Of course, this really only applies to games with non-human races. If I'm playing Cyberpunk or something, I make a character to match.

Quote from: jeff37923 on July 17, 2024, 07:51:00 PM

Quote from: yosemitemike on July 17, 2024, 05:28:51 PMThere's also a ,mercifully small, group of players who insist on pushing their fetish into everything they do.  Furry players have a bad reputation because a disproportionate number of them fall into this category.  They don't just want to play an anthropomorphic animal character.  They have a compulsion to shove their fur fetish into everything they do whether it's wanted or not.  They will try to turn your game into furry porn.  They can't help themselves.  Not all furries are like this but there are enough of them that people have noticed a pattern and responded accordingly.  That person who wants to play an anthropomorphic animal character might not be a problem but letting them into your game is taking a chance.  It's a lot less trouble just to ban those races and be done with it.  It sill eliminate some good players along with the weirdos but it will also cut out a lot of problems before they become problems.

This can be a particular problem with Traveller. Aslan and Vargr are viewed as merely lion-men and wolf-men by furry fanatics even though there are over four hundred pages of in game lore written and published for each race. Aslan and Vargr were originally created to give players the quintessential chance to play beings, "that think as well as humans but not like humans". Traveller Book 0 says flat out that, "Aliens should not be humans in funny rubber suits."

I don't really have a solid solution for this except for kicking out anyone who tries to exercise their furry fetish at the table and reserving allowing players to run an alien until I'm sure that they will take it seriously.

I have never encountered that problem in Traveller, maybe because all the players I've had to deal with were very old school and thus had absolutely no interest in furry fetishes. I could be wrong, but I don't think that Traveller attracts the kind of weirdo people that D&D 5e does.

Quote from: Rhymer88 on July 18, 2024, 09:19:08 AM

Quote from: jeff37923 on July 17, 2024, 07:51:00 PM

Quote from: yosemitemike on July 17, 2024, 05:28:51 PMThere's also a ,mercifully small, group of players who insist on pushing their fetish into everything they do.  Furry players have a bad reputation because a disproportionate number of them fall into this category.  They don't just want to play an anthropomorphic animal character.  They have a compulsion to shove their fur fetish into everything they do whether it's wanted or not.  They will try to turn your game into furry porn.  They can't help themselves.  Not all furries are like this but there are enough of them that people have noticed a pattern and responded accordingly.  That person who wants to play an anthropomorphic animal character might not be a problem but letting them into your game is taking a chance.  It's a lot less trouble just to ban those races and be done with it.  It sill eliminate some good players along with the weirdos but it will also cut out a lot of problems before they become problems.

This can be a particular problem with Traveller. Aslan and Vargr are viewed as merely lion-men and wolf-men by furry fanatics even though there are over four hundred pages of in game lore written and published for each race. Aslan and Vargr were originally created to give players the quintessential chance to play beings, "that think as well as humans but not like humans". Traveller Book 0 says flat out that, "Aliens should not be humans in funny rubber suits."

I don't really have a solid solution for this except for kicking out anyone who tries to exercise their furry fetish at the table and reserving allowing players to run an alien until I'm sure that they will take it seriously.

I have never encountered that problem in Traveller, maybe because all the players I've had to deal with were very old school and thus had absolutely no interest in furry fetishes. I could be wrong, but I don't think that Traveller attracts the kind of weirdo people that D&D 5e does.

That's fair. I've mainly seen this from newer Traveller players than older Traveller players. I may also have a bias because I am an admin of the Traveller RPG group on Facebook and have had to ban furry fetishists who had posted porn in the group several times.

Quote from: LordBP on July 17, 2024, 06:30:15 PM

Quote from: Chris24601 on July 17, 2024, 11:26:39 AM

Quote from: LordBP on July 17, 2024, 10:14:55 AM

Quote from: Omega on July 16, 2024, 07:14:37 AMHumans, Dwarves, Half-Orcs and Half-Elves needed 1lb of food/day. Elves needed 1/3 lb, Halflings and Gnomes 1/2 lb. Water was a bit more complex based on temperature and activity.

The 1lb of food per day might work if they were sedentary, but if they are adventuring, then it would be more like 2 lbs or more per day.

Depends on the food.

A military MRE weighs about 0.58 pounds and provides about 1260 calories... or about 2200 calories per pound. The food storage is more efficient and spoilage is less, but the fundamental calories per gram of food doesn't change.

A 180 lb. man walking at 3 mph (the D&D standard over clear terrain) burns about 270 calories per hour... or about 2160 calories if they walked for eight hours straight.

I'd say the pound per day is rounded off and then averaged with less active days (dungeoneering presumes more like 300' per hour just half a mile of walking in an eight hour day).

If you needed to do a vast amount of overland travel (say a two week hike along a trade road) then, yeah it probably falls a bit short, but for typical D&D behavior of a day or two to a dungeon, a day or three of exploring it, and a few days back... yeah, a pound a day is probably "close enough."

Pemmican is around 3,500 calories per pound, grain around 1,600 per pound, and dried meat around 1,600 per pound.  For pemmican, it's better used as a thickener to a stew as the tallow doesn't melt in your mouth like other fats will.  You could use hardtack or a hard bread for the grain.  I won't get into vegetables or fruit as they usually don't have dense calories per pound, so aren't really useful to take on a trip (pure sugar would be, but might be expensive).

For the walking example, the 8 hours of walking still leaves 16 hours of sitting (80 calories per hour), so the total would bump up to around 3,400 calories which is going to be a couple pounds of food.

Wearing gear while walking/hiding is going to use more calories also as most will have at least 40-50 pounds of gear on them (armor, weapons, backpack with food/water, etc).

Combat is the biggest unknown as it could burn much more calories depending on how much the party was in combat.  If it's a lot, then the calories used per day might double or triple.


For the MREs, back when I was in the Army (a while back so they may have changed it), the allotment of MREs per person was 3 assuming no hot meals were provided.  Everyone ate all of the MREs and all the pogey bait that we could smuggle into our packs and carry, so we were probably eating 3,500 to 4,000 calories per day.

Water is going to be the bigger issue than food as you need 1-3 gallons per day depending on temperature/humidity and exertion.

This is going to be between 8 and 24 pounds per person per day which is much more than food.

Quote from: Chris24601 on July 18, 2024, 07:28:22 AMThey have similar things like "add 1d8 feet to each long or high jump you make" or "proficient in stealth and squeeze as a small creature" or "advantage on perception checks" or similar that reflect innate racial traits in arguably more interesting ways than +2 Strength or Dexterity or Wisdom does.

I do not recall any race getting that in 5e?

Quote from: LordBP on July 18, 2024, 02:09:29 PMWater is going to be the bigger issue than food as you need 1-3 gallons per day depending on temperature/humidity and exertion.

This is going to be between 8 and 24 pounds per person per day which is much more than food.

This is true. Even a gallon is heavy.

This is why you used to have pack animals or porters with the party and left them camped outside when delving. Newer D&D and most any other RPG phased out hirelings and so the PCs are lugging alot more than they would otherwise.