General Hangout!

[Nighteyes5678]

I have an open bias towards human bakers and every degree away from that ideal you get is another step up you have to reach.

Why? WHY YOU ASK ON THIS DAY OF MERRIMENT?

Because I don't know anything about you, dear generic player, but I know one thing: you are human.

You know how humans think, how they feel, how they live.

And, likely, you have a job that is relatively mundane like "baker".

By the nature of fantasy, you're already asked to imagine a character in a land of wonder, who might have encounters with the divine or monstrous, perhaps with innate power or unusual skill that is rare or impossible to find in this real world of ours. That's a lot of imagining! For most people, that's a lot to ask.

Not only do we ask you to imagine it, but you're being asked to write it. That's another layer of difficulty stacked precariously on the pile, and believe me when I say the coming plot and story will be winds that will blow and wobble said pile a tremendous deal.

This is not me sitting on my throne looking down at mere ants crawling about dreaming of the great beyond that only I can glimpse. I, myself, tend to write mostly humans for this reason. They have, occasionally, been bakers. Rather, this is me trying to acknowledge that writing realistic characters with depth and a history that aren't born on page one or that don't have wildly fluctuating actions and behaviors that baffle the mind is hard.

That said, some people can hit such characters and have them be goblins, unicorns, centaurs, griffons, dragons, and pixies. They don't merely read as humans wearing a different skin, but have a truly unique perspective and experience that requires the additional layer of complexity. In order for me to believe that you can pull it off, though, you need to convince me.

If push comes to pull, I'm probably going to bet on the human baker over the were-dragon half-orc centaur. One is more likely to be done well.

****

I wish you all a very warm seasons greetings and I truly hope that your lives are filled with unexpected joy and surprises that delight. Choose kindness, friends, even when the night is cold and hope is scarce.

[Fwog]

Great,

Not only do i have the worst WiFi imaginable to humanity

But finals are going to kill me

I will try my best to finish anything i can finish in these 5 days.

As for nighteye's opinion, Unfortunately own my bias for non human characters can be summed up in 2 sentences.

One,I'm a human surrounded by humans so I want a new experience.

And two, I want to spite every creative-fiction-hating literature professor out there by writing stories specifically about non human characters in a fantasy world.

[Psyconure]

I have found spite to be an amazing motivator

[GleefulNihilism]

23 minutes ago, Psyconure said:

I have found spite to be an amazing motivator

Same. Suicide is just not an option, I have too many people a have to outlive so that I may pee on their graves.

Edited December 25, 2023 by GleefulNihilism (see edit history)

[Varen Tai]

Funny story - Chris Avellone, the writer of the classic game Planescape: Torment, said a lot of the writing was born from spite. He hated games with elves, swords, and all the classic tropes, so he wrote one without any of them.

I should mention that P:T is a good template for some of this campaign - the character depth, the emotional realism, etc.

[Rumrunner]

23 minutes ago, Fwog said:

Great,

Not only do i have the worst WiFi imaginable to humanity

But finals are going to kill me

I will try my best to finish anything i can finish in these 5 days.

As for nighteye's opinion, Unfortunately own my bias for non human characters can be summed up in 2 sentences.

One,I'm a human surrounded by humans so I want a new experience.

And two, I want to spite every creative-fiction-hating literature professor out there by writing stories specifically about non human characters in a fantasy world.

There are some good dragon books out there...

[WumbologyMajor]

23 minutes ago, Nighteyes5678 said:

I have an open bias towards human bakers and every degree away from that ideal you get is another step up you have to reach.

Why? WHY YOU ASK ON THIS DAY OF MERRIMENT?

Because I don't know anything about you, dear generic player, but I know one thing: you are human.

You know how humans think, how they feel, how they live.

And, likely, you have a job that is relatively mundane like "baker".

By the nature of fantasy, you're already asked to imagine a character in a land of wonder, who might have encounters with the divine or monstrous, perhaps with innate power or unusual skill that is rare or impossible to find in this real world of ours. That's a lot of imagining! For most people, that's a lot to ask.

Not only do we ask you to imagine it, but you're being asked to write it. That's another layer of difficulty stacked precariously on the pile, and believe me when I say the coming plot and story will be winds that will blow and wobble said pile a tremendous deal.

This is not me sitting on my throne looking down at mere ants crawling about dreaming of the great beyond that only I can glimpse. I, myself, tend to write mostly humans for this reason. They have, occasionally, been bakers. Rather, this is me trying to acknowledge that writing realistic characters with depth and a history that aren't born on page one or that don't have wildly fluctuating actions and behaviors that baffle the mind is hard.

That said, some people can hit such characters and have them be goblins, unicorns, centaurs, griffons, dragons, and pixies. They don't merely read as humans wearing a different skin, but have a truly unique perspective and experience that requires the additional layer of complexity. In order for me to believe that you can pull it off, though, you need to convince me.

If push comes to pull, I'm probably going to bet on the human baker over the were-dragon half-orc centaur. One is more likely to be done well.

****

I wish you all a very warm seasons greetings and I truly hope that your lives are filled with unexpected joy and surprises that delight. Choose kindness, friends, even when the night is cold and hope is scarce.

This is precisely the reason I am unwilling to play a human, actually.

Indeed, there is an assumption that I am aware how human beings think, feel, and act. However, going through life as a neurodivergent individual has shown me that humans have so many tendencies that I cannot grasp -- illogical customs, idiosyncratic behaviors, and irrational emotions that cloud judgment in the face of choices that would be obvious in their absence -- that I honestly identify more with characters that approach humanity from the outside.

Before even going there, though, I also resent the idea that familiarity or realism is of any import in a genre like fantasy. It's incredibly myopic, in fact, to assert such an idea in the face of the fact that fantasy is meant to be unrealistic. The line is extremely arbitrary -- occurrences are allowed to be unrealistic, but characters aren't? Who decided that? How is it more likely that a person can be more realistic with events than with characters, when indeed it's just as unbelievable to have a human baker overthrow his city's lord as it is for there to be a dragon in disguise working politics behind the scenes to further some distant, farsighted goal?

In fact, plenty of game systems other than D&D demonstrate this very well. Savage Worlds has a kaiju supplement, and I don't mean one that adds kaiju as enemies. GURPS lets you play whatever you want as long as you can figure out how to build it.

Your argument echoes some of what Gary Gygax argued in the passage in the AD&D 1e DMG that argues that players should really only be alloiwed to be human and they should be grateful that they are even allowed elves as an option. Interestingly he also mentioned the "humans wearing a monster's skin" problem, but I assert that the idea that anyone who wants to play a monster character is just doing it to break the game and won't actually roleplay properly lies at the worst possible intersection of cynicism and traditionalism -- the sort that keeps to traditions not out of respect, but out of fear. Incidentally I lost all respect for Gary when I read that passage and have yet to recover the bulk of it.

The problem of "humans in funny suits" has come to fruition in modern D&D, but in a different way -- it's a result of WotC being attached to a notion of game balance that is fundamentally impossible in a game where only some characters can use magic. And I, as a person who has yet to even bother writing a character closer to human than a half-celestial (something that 5e doesn't even allow, which I find obnoxious), am perfectly content to keep attacking the challenge from different angles. It certainly doesn't make finding games easy, because the perception that non-human characters are somehow worse than human ones despite the latter being just as prone to being unbelievable and unrelatable, often brings me into conflict with the general mindset of D&D's community. This is the driving motivation behind my frequent attempts to play devils advocate against that tradition, actually. But again, it's also important to realize the falsehood driving it -- the idea that humans share enough in common to make them a viable fantasy trope at all.

The true fantasy setting -- that is, one that is most faithful to the idea -- has no humans in it at all, because a fantasy world with elves and dragons and dwarves would not be one in which petty short-lived apes with no aptitude for magic would even feasibly survive. This is compounded by the fact that virtually all fantasy human groups mirror either European or Asian cultures, with little regard for any other sort of human ethnicity, even before you account for the various different personality types and traits that fantasy stories gloss over because they are underrepresented or little-known in the real world. Many non-human characters in TV shows are far more relatable to folks like me (I'm not the only one) than even the most well-written human characters because they actually address some of the questions most people take for granted that are so difficult to understand to us.

I apologize for the wall of text, but anyone who makes this argument to me gets this sort of response; you aren't alone (lol)

[Fwog]

8 minutes ago, WumbologyMajor said:

This is precisely the reason I am unwilling to play a human, actually.

Indeed, there is an assumption that I am aware how human beings think, feel, and act. However, going through life as a neurodivergent individual has shown me that humans have so many tendencies that I cannot grasp -- illogical customs, idiosyncratic behaviors, and irrational emotions that cloud judgment in the face of choices that would be obvious in their absence -- that I honestly identify more with characters that approach humanity from the outside.

Before even going there, though, I also resent the idea that familiarity or realism is of any import in a genre like fantasy. It's incredibly myopic, in fact, to assert such an idea in the face of the fact that fantasy is meant to be unrealistic. The line is extremely arbitrary -- occurrences are allowed to be unrealistic, but characters aren't? Who decided that? How is it more likely that a person can be more realistic with events than with characters, when indeed it's just as unbelievable to have a human baker overthrow his city's lord as it is for there to be a dragon in disguise working politics behind the scenes to further some distant, farsighted goal?

In fact, plenty of game systems other than D&D demonstrate this very well. Savage Worlds has a kaiju supplement, and I don't mean one that adds kaiju as enemies. GURPS lets you play whatever you want as long as you can figure out how to build it.

Your argument echoes some of what Gary Gygax argued in the passage in the AD&D 1e DMG that argues that players should really only be alloiwed to be human and they should be grateful that they are even allowed elves as an option. Interestingly he also mentioned the "humans wearing a monster's skin" problem, but I assert that the idea that anyone who wants to play a monster character is just doing it to break the game and won't actually roleplay properly lies at the worst possible intersection of cynicism and traditionalism -- the sort that keeps to traditions not out of respect, but out of fear. Incidentally I lost all respect for Gary when I read that passage and have yet to recover the bulk of it.

The problem of "humans in funny suits" has come to fruition in modern D&D, but in a different way -- it's a result of WotC being attached to a notion of game balance that is fundamentally impossible in a game where only some characters can use magic. And I, as a person who has yet to even bother writing a character closer to human than a half-celestial (something that 5e doesn't even allow, which I find obnoxious), am perfectly content to keep attacking the challenge from different angles. It certainly doesn't make finding games easy, because the perception that non-human characters are somehow worse than human ones despite the latter being just as prone to being unbelievable and unrelatable, often brings me into conflict with the general mindset of D&D's community. This is the driving motivation behind my frequent attempts to play devils advocate against that tradition, actually. But again, it's also important to realize the falsehood driving it -- the idea that humans share enough in common to make them a viable fantasy trope at all.

The true fantasy setting -- that is, one that is most faithful to the idea -- has no humans in it at all, because a fantasy world with elves and dragons and dwarves would not be one in which petty short-lived apes with no aptitude for magic would even feasibly survive. This is compounded by the fact that virtually all fantasy human groups mirror either European or Asian cultures, with little regard for any other sort of human ethnicity, even before you account for the various different personality types and traits that fantasy stories gloss over because they are underrepresented or little-known in the real world. Many non-human characters in TV shows are far more relatable to folks like me (I'm not the only one) than even the most well-written human characters because they actually address some of the questions most people take for granted that are so difficult to understand to us.

I apologize for the wall of text, but anyone who makes this argument to me gets this sort of response; you aren't alone (lol)

As a fellow neurodivergent person, you eloquently put everything I had in my heart, Thank you so much

[Varen Tai]

So let me clarify - I am not looking for humans in a monster suit, but if you make a monster character (and we have a couple of really good applications with monstrous races so far), convince me that it's not a caricature of a character, but an actual character that roots into the monster culture and such. I prefer grounded stories, where even the monstrous characters have foibles and struggles, etc. I ran an All Paladins! campaign once, and one of my fave PCs was a minotaur paladin. He was utterly convincing as a minotaur. Loved him to death.

So, this is why I very rarely reject any character concept outright, I give you a chance to convince me that you can write it well. I get to be wowed on occasion which is why I give that space. So please, be super creative, just be aware that you will have to convince me that the character will fit into the tone of the story and that it is a real character, not a caricature. Because those characters are farther away from "human baker", as NE said, it becomes more difficult to write that character really convincingly, but it's not impossible and I encourage you to try!

Also, full disclosure, I am totally Asperger's myself, so I get the neuro-divergent thing, but I'm also a therapist IRL, which is why I love the deeper emotions and don't care for shallow characters. Love The Last Airbender and Babylon 5, but only like Star Trek, if that makes sense.

[PixCO]

Personally, it's a matter of variety. I've played plenty of interesting Human characters. And halflings, half-elves, dwarves, and half-orcs. So I tend to lean into the unknown and see new races as a chance to explore an entire world of lore that I hadn't before. It's no different than selecting a new class for the new experience.

I won't say I'll never play as a human fighter again. But at this point... why should I when there are so many other options?

[Varen Tai]

7 minutes ago, PixCO said:

Personally, it's a matter of variety. I've played plenty of interesting Human characters. And halflings, half-elves, dwarves, and half-orcs. So I tend to lean into the unknown and see new races as a chance to explore an entire world of lore that I hadn't before. It's no different than selecting a new class for the new experience.

I won't say I'll never play as a human fighter again. But at this point... why should I when there are so many other options?

And yet, I keep bringing up the human fighter for my last campaign. He was one of my favorite characters because he had so much depth that he was a profoundly compelling character despite the vanilla race in class.

Edit: In other words, any race and class combo can be a compelling character. It doesn't need to be something non-human, nor does it need to be human, it just needs to be convincing and the further from the center it is, the harder is to be convincing.

Edited December 25, 2023 by Varen Tai (see edit history)

[WumbologyMajor]

I don't actually believe human characters in fantasy aren't believable -- that point is just to address the sort of flaw in the logic that humanity is familiar and therefore realistic.

Either way, I'm probably too tired to do anything today, so we'll see how long this takes. Lol.

[Nighteyes5678]

I seem to have accidentally stepped into a bees nest!

I'm also neurodivergent and I think that everyone I love and am close to (with maybe one acception) is "neuro-spicy".

Everyone who responded with a reason why they don't like to play humans in a fantasy concept is coming from a place of love and imagination, which means that I have no doubt that I would love any character you wrote that wasn't human.

There's the picture/mirror phenomenon. It's when someone (in this case, me) paints a picture of "person" that is a warning. Some people look at that picture and say, "huh, that picture doesn't describe me at all", which is pretty much everyone who just responded to me. That's great! It's a picture of someone who isn't you! Other people look at the picture and confuse it as a mirror. That is, they think that I'm describing them because they see themselves reflected in it. That always says more about the viewer than the picture, and if that ever happens to you, then it's an exciting chance to learn more about yourself!

Also, spite is an excellent motivator. I'm frequently finding myself writing out of spite, and it rarely leads me wrong. Just please remember to always find the joy. Writing, and any creative pursuit, should always be playful and joyful.

So don't worry, I hear you. You give me a captivating were-dragon half-orc centaur and it'll beat out a shallow human baker any day.

<3

[Varen Tai]

Just now, WumbologyMajor said:

I don't actually believe human characters in fantasy aren't believable -- that point is just to address the sort of flaw in the logic that humanity is familiar and therefore realistic.

Either way, I'm probably too tired to do anything today, so we'll see how long this takes. Lol.

You speak truth to my own Asperger's heart. 😉

Looking forward to your unique submission!

[Varen Tai]

Also, as this is now relevant, how many of us are neurodivergent here? It occurs to me that this is exactly the kind of place and activity a lot of neurodivergents would like to participate in since we don't have to interact directly with other people around us and get to spend time writing cool things! 😁

Edited December 25, 2023 by Varen Tai (see edit history)