There is legitimately an issue in all fantasy games where designers build a rich diverse setting with many different races that have their own exciting cultures and designs and differences, but if they include "human" about 50% of players choose human. This persists through boardgames, RPGs, videogames and LARP. The exact proportions vary a bit from game to game and from playerbase to playerbase, but it's very common.
Larian revealed some stats a while back for BG3, about 50% of players chose human, elf, or half-elf (the three most "human" looking races". If you choose one of the existing characters to play as, Gale is the most common. It's an encouraging result, there's more diversity in the picks for BG3 than most other games, but it's still very "human" skewed. Halfling, Gnome and Gith were much less commonly picked.
If you've been tabletop gaming for a long time, your instinct is to think things like "but why would anyone play as a human? that's boring!" or "I play these games for escapism and I want to play as something different to myself." or the like, but the reality is that there's a very large cadre of players who want to create characters or avatars that are "like them" - they want to self-insert, or they want to pretend they are their character, and have difficulty squaring that with being a gnome or a goblin or a Dragonborn.
As such, you can get this weird disconnect between your setting writing (where there's a large variety of different, interesting races in the world) and your playerbase (majority human) which skews your design towards a human-centric viewpoint that you don't necessarily want - especially if you put work into the design of cultures of other races, and you want players to explore a variety of ideas and styles.
So what's the solution? - a common design solution is to mechanically incentivise players to choose outside of human, by giving humans disadvantages, or giving other races unique advantages that are desirable. Is this the right approach? your mileage might vary, but it's one of the easiest "patches" to encourage diversity in the playerbase, so it's a common choice.
Does 5e do this? probably not - human is very mechanically powerful, especially at low levels where the variant human feat can make a big difference... but they did make humans more "boring" than the other races, hopefully encouraging more dragonborn and gnomes and half-orcs and so on.
Well in my case I like the idea of interacting with those wonderful and fantastical species, not being one of them. I am no traitor to my own species. Smh
That's because in real life we don't have any other sentient beings to genocide. There's animals we can extinct of course but it's just not the same :(
Not so sure. When it comes to human hatred, big differences, petty differences and made-up differences work just as well as one another to motivate atrocities. Elves and aliens would end up on the list, but I don't think they'd hold us back from being awful to ourselves. Ultimately there's no real logic, so in what order that would happen is anyone's guess.
True story. When the colonists showed up in the New World, you think the natives would've all banded together against the "alien" threat, but instead the invaders were often able to leverage historic fueds and tribal animosities to get the different groups to help fight each other. I at least know this happened in some instances in South America and Africa.
Especially given humans have real standout traits like being endurance hunters, somewhat rapid scarring and a high resistance to shock (advantage on constitution checks?)
Boring AND conceited. I always roll my eyes at this trope of "unlike all these different fantasy beings that are good are specific things, we can be good at everything". Seems like imagination falling short, that other beings would not have their own breadth of possibilities, and humans wouldn't have their own unique advantages that are particular just to them.
If I had to pick one thing, it would probably be something teamwork related. Humans are very social beings compared to other animals.
Humans in OneDnD have an insp point they can toss on shit now which is pretty cool, feels like an embracing of the trope that humans will act as a glue that can bridge cultural differences between other races.
Humans should get "All healing received is maximized (ie: treat it as if the dice each rolled their maximum value)" to reflect how humans weirdly bounce back from things that should have been fatal.
You sure? I believe I remember there being a story about a halfling or a gnome drinking an enlarge potion or two to get hot and sweaty with some giantess.
So basically your mitochondria decides your species?
Personally I like keeping it a little more complicated. It's the same race as the mother, unless the mother is a ditto, in which case it's the same race as the father.
Ah, good old Book of Erotic Fantasy. It's so gloriously stupid that everyone should own a copy. That table is by far not the silliest part of the book.
It's only bested by the official sex rulebook for The Dark Eye, which is an April Fools joke that spiraled out of control and has actual rules for intercourse – deliberately bureaucratic and unsexy ones included purely as a "you asked for it" joke at the reader's expense.
At first I read this as "these species can fuck each other". Then I realized that this is only concerning conception, all these species could fuck each other as they please.
If it applies to DnD's cosmology, than it has to mean with viable offspring, because half-dwarves canonically exist in the Darksun setting and they're called Muls.
Technically it implies that all these other races are diverged near humans, humans being relatively unchanged remain close enough to produce viable offspring, but with different non human races being diverged from each other to the point of non viability.
So basically the racial map for a D&D setting would have humans at the center, with half children in each of the spokes of a wheel, and every non human race being nodes located in the environment where they developed in extremity, and then from there you can build the environment under the premise of the conditions that developed elves or dwarves or orcs from the human starting point.
This would also have to include a backstory spanning tens of thousands of years.
well it depends on what the half in halfling is. if they're half human already they could be three-quarterslings which doesn't roll off the tounge very well.
Alternative: humans were specifically engineered to be able to half-breed with anything - even elemental beings - so that they'd be able to take over the world.
Base humans are generalists, which by their nature won't have something specific that stands out. +1 to each stat and I think an extra skill is nice if you like not being terrible at anything. Not great at anything is a tradeoff that other races don't have though...
