Depending on the game, I would.
There's quite a bit of excellent fantasy out there that doesn't have nonhumans in it. By extension, there's no reason a fantasy game has to have nonhuman races; as for an all-humans game, why not? I've usually stuck to playing humans, because extra skills and feats. The typical variance is if I get involved in a subterranean campaign. But on the surface, hey, gimme humanity every time. YMMV, obviously.
Oh, also serious answer time: One of my personal pet peeves in fantasy setting design (yes, I have fantasy setting design pet peeves) is when you don't want orcs in your setting, but end up with something that is essentially orcs with a different name. That's rule number 1: If you want to be different and unique, do something different and unique.
The opposite, however, is even worse. Including a familiar race, but changing them into something completely different. If they aren't orcs, don't call them orcs. Certain fantasy tropes come with some build-in presumptions. If you want to subvert those tropes, you either have to do a lot of explaining, or accept that it will cause a lot of confusion. This leads us to rule number 2: If you're doing something different and unique, don't pretend that you're not.
Definitely this.
Let me ask this then: In your opinions, is calling turning hobgoblins into orc different enough to set off that irritation? Hobgoblins as they are just make much better antagonists in my opinion, but the name hobgoblin implies that they are add-ons to goblins, and in the case of theh istory I've created, it's the opposite, but I can't start calling hobgoblins goblins...
Read Jim Butchers Codex Alera high fantasy no elves, dwarves, or orcs. Another to consider would be books by Brent Weeks.
I actually have read most of the Codex Alera series, and I do enjoy it. But I think it sort of falls into that human-only camp in that the only two you could call "PC" races were essentially humans with different supernatural powers (the name of the animal totem culture escapes me at the moment), and the villains were the hulking Wolf humanoids, and that was it.
There's quite a bit of excellent fantasy out there that doesn't have nonhumans in it. By extension, there's no reason a fantasy game has to have nonhuman races; as for an all-humans game, why not? I've usually stuck to playing humans, because extra skills and feats. The typical variance is if I get involved in a subterranean campaign. But on the surface, hey, gimme humanity every time. YMMV, obviously.
All human games are definitely okay in my book. Its when they aren't that one has to decide where they draw the line in terms of what is out there.
M.A.R. Barker's Empire of the Petal Throne doesn't use elves or dwarves, and it was the first alternative campaign setting TSR published.
Of course the Elder Scrolls setting has no extant dwarven race, and how much the extinct dwarves were like traditional fantasy tropes is questionable...
I think that non-human races don't offer as much grist for role playing as they tend to straight-jacket it--how many players choose a race and then deliberately play against type? OTOH, casting villainous races as the bad guys works well if you want to avoid moral ambiguity in who you skewer...
You do get to see Elder Scrolls dwemer here and there. I think they're slightly taller than humans, on average.
I think whether or not races help or inhibit roll-playing is best left to exotic antipathy thread currently going on in the Pathfinder forum.
I will say my decision to play a in a human campaign would largely depend on what the setting is. I would love to play in something like Westeros or Call of Cthulhu, or something of similar nature. A human only campaign makes sense there.
Let me ask this then: In your opinions, is calling turning hobgoblins into orc different enough to set off that irritation? Hobgoblins as they are just make much better antagonists in my opinion, but the name hobgoblin implies that they are add-ons to goblins, and in the case of theh istory I've created, it's the opposite, but I can't start calling hobgoblins goblins...
Uh. I suppose it would depend on the execution. Basically, my point boils down to this: If you include a fantasy race and call them "orcs", people are instinctively going to form some ideas of how what they are like. If your description of your orcs leave enough blanks, people are going to fill in those blanks with their own assumptions. If those assumptions of standard-fantasy-orc behaviour clashes violently with how your orcs should behave, you have a problem.
That's not to say that you couldn't design your own unique orc culture for your setting. I don't know if people have a lot of opinions on orc culture. But if your orcs are small, good-natured riverfolk with a natural tendency towards hairdressing, you might be better off calling them something other than orcs, rather than trying to fight the "common knowledge" of what an orc is.
It also depends on the setting, I suspect. A standard fantasy setting is far more likely to set off the 'default orc assumption', than, say, a sci-fi setting where orcs are described as having naturally evolved into roaming bands of space pirates. Or whatever.
I think the hobgoblin niche is close enough to not be too far off the mark. Actually remember a thread a while back where someone didn't see the point of hobgoblins because they were too close to orcs (nonsense naturally, but there is a grain of truth in that somewhere).
Basically a viollent race that is more organized, i.e. capable of sustaining themselves as urban society continues to expand. Typical orcs I feel would go extinct after a point because they violently clashed with civilization and had to cling to the ever-shrinking batches of unpatrolled wilderness, which is already inhabited by clans of elves in my case, so it just doesn't work.
I was just wondering the other day if people would play a human-only fantasy RPG...I suspect the answer is mostly no.
M
Not me. I've finally got a group of PCs without a single human in the bunch (didn't start that way, but huzzah for reincarnate) and a wide variety of extra inhuman races for my homebrew world and couldn't be happier.
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Let me ask this then: In your opinions, is calling turning hobgoblins into orc different enough to set off that irritation? Hobgoblins as they are just make much better antagonists in my opinion, but the name hobgoblin implies that they are add-ons to goblins, and in the case of theh istory I've created, it's the opposite, but I can't start calling hobgoblins goblins...
Well, you could just call them "hobs". I believe that it's just a standard old-english variant of hobgoblin.
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Also, on the elf/dwarf note, I don't have a problem with them per se, but I have a problem with ALL of the long-lived races.
An elf's "venerable" age category is 5 times as long as a human's (absolute age is 750 years vs. 110 years almost 7 times), yet most individuals writing world histories limit their thinking to human lifespans.
In Golarion, the deity Aroden died 100 years ago. Ancient history for humans, but every PC elf was actually alive when he died!
(Elf starting age from CRB: 114 years to 170 years.)
Even to this day, I have issues with an elf being 110+ years old and being 1st level alongside that 20 year old human.
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The "Breadth of Experience" Feat (from the APG) should be (at minimum) a Bonus Feat for elves, not something that they need to take.
In fact, elves should either have a much lower starting age (say 40 years base) or be built with at least 15 RP using the ARG (bonus skill points and Feats mostly, but long-lived races shouldn't have Con penalties and should be immune to disease/resistant to poisons).
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Hmmm... I got a little off track. Sorry.
No, you don't need dwarves, elves, or orcs. Just make sure what you do use don't actually fill those roles, or there's no point in not using them. :)
Yeah I don't see refluffing orcs as hobgoblins to be that big a deal. You get that in Tolkien, what with the Uruk-Hai being a bit more organized and advanced type of orc, and referred to as Hobgoblins in the Hobbit.
It's when you "The setting has dwarves, but they are winged batpeople who specialize in baking" that is problematic.
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I was just wondering the other day if people would play a human-only fantasy RPG...I suspect the answer is mostly no.
M
If instead of presenting 15 distinct races, a game offered 15 distinct (human) cultures assorted with cultural modifiers and whatnot, I'm convinced you'd get people's attention.
Some players enjoy the exoticism of non-human races, but many others simply enjoy the mechanical and cultural variations that these choices entail.
Let me ask this then: In your opinions, is calling turning hobgoblins into orc different enough to set off that irritation? Hobgoblins as they are just make much better antagonists in my opinion, but the name hobgoblin implies that they are add-ons to goblins, and in the case of theh istory I've created, it's the opposite, but I can't start calling hobgoblins goblins...Well, you could just call them "hobs". I believe that it's just a standard old-english variant of hobgoblin.
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Also, on the elf/dwarf note, I don't have a problem with them per se, but I have a problem with ALL of the long-lived races.
An elf's "venerable" age category is 5 times as long as a human's (absolute age is 750 years vs. 110 years almost 7 times), yet most individuals writing world histories limit their thinking to human lifespans.
In Golarion, the deity Aroden died 100 years ago. Ancient history for humans, but every PC elf was actually alive when he died!
(Elf starting age from CRB: 114 years to 170 years.)
Even to this day, I have issues with an elf being 110+ years old and being 1st level alongside that 20 year old human.
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That's how I feel about long-lived races as well. I love the aesthetic of elves, and I like the idea that they are inherently more healthy/magical which gives them extended life, but the degree to which it's taken in Pathfinder I think is a bit ridiculous. The next time someoen opts to play an elf (which actually only happened once), they're going to be given the half elf age categories, and half elves will be somewhere in-between.
Dot for later.
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Non-human races are simply an exaggeration of actual human racial differences, and many are based off racist stereotypes (why do you think many modern fantasy games tuned orcs green?). There are two ways people usually go with fantasy worlds:
1- the Tolkein way where humans are basically mono-cultured representing the "norm" (feudal Europe). Then other cultures are represented by different species. The classic version seems to be elves are Asian-esque, dwarves are Scottish or Germanic, orcs are African. When designing your own you can give any culture you want to any species, but if a species has different cultures, then each is labeled a subspecies. Such as wood elves, high elves, drow, hill dwarves, mountain dwarves, etc.
2- Humans are the only civilized species and have a myriad of different cultures. If other species exist they are rare and all npcs.
When we start talking about "Cultures" I become nervous.
Cultural Misappropriation is a very serious thing and offends some people deeply and irrevocably.
and giving those culture pointy ears or green skin makes it better?
And I can understand why people get upset when Cultural Misappropriation happens, but at the same time I'd think there are ways to ground a race or fantasy culture in a real-world culture without doing so in a way that's racist or insensitive.
Well I prefer horror games, and for that a humano-centric setting (humans only) is preferred.
I'm the creator and developer of the Kaidan setting of Japanese horror (PFRPG) as an imprint under Rite Publishing. Since it's designed for use others besides myself, I've not limited the races to human only, however, being a fantasy version of feudal Japan, there are no elves, dwarves, nor orcs (nor gnomes, nor any half-version of them). There are hengeyokai, kappa, kitsune, and tengu. My versions of kappa, kitsune and tengu slightly differ from Paizo's versions, though I tried to keep them as close to Paizo's versions where I could.
But even if I were to play a Euro-centric setting there wouldn't be any dwarves, elves and orcs. I might develop some unique races if I thought it appropriate or necessary, but I'd avoid the mentioned races as a too-much-of-a-cliche that I never want to see again, but that's just me, I suppose...
Almost* every successful/popular fantasy setting/story includes elves and dwarves as familiar staples at least (when one is present, the other usually is too in some fashion). And while elves and dwarves are the heroes we clearly love to be, orcs, arguably Tolkien's greatest creation, are the people we love to hate (or love to be hated as, in some cases).This is so wildly inaccurate. I don't know that Moorcock has ever typed the word elf. Ditto George R. R. Martin. The kingkiller chronicles don't have them. The night angel saga doesn't have them. Hell, the last time I read about elves and dwarves was in shadowrun novels.
Fantasy, as a genre, is much, much larger than elves and dwarves.
You missed the stipulation I initially made excluding worlds with only humans (i.e. George R.R. Martin example). It's fantasy settings with non-human "good" remains that almost always have elves and dwarves.
EDIT: To say that they all have elves and dwarves is both wrong and not what I said. To deny that they are a staple in world that need to be accessable (games) is also wrong.
and giving those culture pointy ears or green skin makes it better?When we start talking about "Cultures" I become nervous.
Cultural Misappropriation is a very serious thing and offends some people deeply and irrevocably.
I'll be the first to jump into this splinter conversation:
I think it becomes a problem when people want to "base their races off real world cultures" without actually doing research, especially when they want to throw all of these cultures into the same geographical space. It just devolves into stereotypes and shallow comparisons.
I'm working on an Arabian fantasy setting and I'm reading A Thousand and One Nights as well as doing some cursory research into various ancient kingdoms in the area to try and develop the related races, not just "Oh well turbans and scimitars done".
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A good setting makes logical sense. You don't need any of the things you listed to make logical sense. It is, in fact, easier not to include unusual things, as then you don't have to explain why they are there.
On the other hand, then you lack unusual things.
There is a balance between having something interesting happen that makes sense once you think about it, and the absurd.
The absurd is the jumping the shark moment. Famously related to when Fonzie jumped a Shark, at which point the Fonzi character (and the world) went from interesting to silly.
This can also happen in campaigns. Sometimes campaigns start in this way...
If your setting makes sense, if you can explain why everything is happening without resorting to extreme Deus Machina, it is a functional setting.
If your setting also includes interesting and unusual things, all the better.
But the two concepts are often in conflict. Part of the reason to include tropes, such as the ones listed, comes from them being accepted and understood, coming with there own shorthand. No one is going to argue that you just made up stout little people who dig mines, nor do you need to flesh out the background of the race through backstory and exposition.
Everyone gets it.
But sometimes things...well...the amount of complicated and convoluted exposition required to explain isn't worth the outcome.
Why is Fonzie jumping a shark tank on jet skis? What has brought us to this point? Do I believe this is what actually would happen in this place and time.
If the answer is no...well...you strain credibility. Which can only be strained so far before eyerolls outweigh cheers and you have jumped the shark.
@Ciretose
How would one go about explaining how an adult dragon can fly with all that weight on it?
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So the question is: How essential are these three to your "high fantasy experience"?Not needed in the slightest.
Completely agree. I would say the same for any of the core races, uncommon races etc.. including humans. "High" fantasy is capable of broad concepts. No race choice is essential to me.
I was just wondering the other day if people would play a human-only fantasy RPG...I suspect the answer is mostly no.
M
As much as I like my vegepygmies, lizardfolk, wights, skeletons, shae and others as PCs I'm quite happy to play humans from time to time and would happily play in a human-only fantasy RPG.
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If you want a high fantasy game with non-traditional races, try Talislanta. Their primary tag line was "25 years, STILL no elves". A game based more on Jack Vance than on Tolkien. Played it constantly through 5 editions and can honestly say it is easily one of my favorite games of all time. Seems to me to be the perfect proof that dwarves, elves, and orcs are definitely NOT required for a good high fantasy experience. Not that I don't like them, because I very much do, but they are far from necessary.
Just my 2 copper. Your mileage may vary.
Have a nice day.
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@Ciretose
How would one go about explaining how an adult dragon can fly with all that weight on it?
Easy.
Write the words. "An Adult Dragon can fly." Somewhere in the source material.
More seriously, there is a long history of dragons in source material, in the same way there is a long history of dwarves, elves, etc...so when I sit down and say "That big lizard thing with wings, it is a dragon and it can fly" it is unlikely someone isn't going to know what the concept of a dragon is , as it comes with a history in fiction.
That history comes with dragons being able to fly, in the same way that the history of Ghosts includes the whole "Incorporeal" concept. When I say the ghost walks through a wall, people don't generally balk. If I said the dragon walks through a wall, I'll be expected to provide further explanation of why that particular dragon can walk through that particular wall, as it is not part of the accepted lore.
Which was pretty much the point of the post. When you use accepted and understood tropes, the work of suspending disbelief was done by the original source writers.
When you don't, you have a much, much higher likelihood of incurring eyerolls and jumping the shark.
Did you miss that?
Nothing about fantasy requires elves and dwarves. We just get stuck on them because Tolkien (inspired by Germanic myth) used them and then Gygax (inspired by Tolkien) used them.
I think orcs are necessary in gaming, if you accept the premise that an "orc" is an magical being that allows "good" characters to have someone relatively non-threatening that they can slaughter indiscriminately without the players saying "Hey, are you sure your Paladin of Mercy and Redemption should just be slaughtering these guys indiscriminately?" They don't have to be called orcs. They just have to be numerous, ugly, and no-questions-asked evil. In my all-elf campaign world, I call them "humans," but they're really just orcs reskinned.
I run human-only games whenever I adapt the rules to a historical or historically-inspired setting. Which has happened more than once. My players dig it just fine.
On the topic of orcs, I once tried to tool a semi-orc/semi-goblin subhuman thing similar to something you might see in an old Conan story. Made them a big part of a campaign world I was running. Two of the players could not help but be wise@#$%$ and kept calling them orcs just to bug me, though there were definite differences.
Oh well. You can't please everybody.
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Nothing about fantasy requires elves and dwarves. We just get stuck on them because Tolkien (inspired by Germanic myth) used them and then Gygax (inspired by Tolkien) used them.
I think orcs are necessary in gaming, if you accept the premise that an "orc" is an magical being that allows "good" characters to have someone relatively non-threatening that they can slaughter indiscriminately without the players saying "Hey, are you sure your Paladin of Mercy and Redemption should just be slaughtering these guys indiscriminately?" They don't have to be called orcs. They just have to be numerous, ugly, and no-questions-asked evil. In my all-elf campaign world, I call them "humans," but they're really just orcs reskinned.
I think there is a need to have a "good" and an "evil" in any game that calls for players to kill things on a regular basis.
You could have a game where the players are Orcs who think humans are evil, and have the entire premise of the game circle around that.
But you are going to grind the game to a halt if you don't have clearly defined sides where ending somethings life is morally justified because they are "bad".
It doesn't need to be any specific things, it doesn't need to be "orc" or "Elf" or "Grumpkin".
But there needs to be "us" and "them" in a setting. Which is why translations to modern or real world settings are so challenging to pull off if you don't add something like zombies, or another defined evil.
But you are going to grind the game to a halt if you don't have clearly defined sides where ending somethings life is morally justified because they are "bad".
I actually usually avoid the trope about always evil/good races and it works out just fine. That said, I don't play with alignment either so... yeah.
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But you are going to grind the game to a halt if you don't have clearly defined sides where ending somethings life is morally justified because they are "bad".I actually usually avoid the trope about always evil/good races and it works out just fine. That said, I don't play with alignment either so... yeah.
Please read what you quoted and what you wrote and count how many things you inserted that I did not write.
I count 5.
While no one race is completely essential to a setting, I will say that I think for TABLETOP settings, the Big Three are... maybe more essential than in other cases (which isn't much to begin with), especially when one can expect new players regularly (which I do, every year at my club).
Comes back to that whole point of familiarity and accessibility. For a new player that already has to get his head around the rules system and the various classes, I'm more inclined to give him what he wants (which will almost certainly be the familiar), and make a game to fit it.
If I'm playing with the usual suspects, my roomates and close friends, I'm much more willing to say somehting like "Okay guys we're doing an Arabian Nights/Ramayana game and everyone can only be human, geniekin, vanara, or a four-armed homebrew race" which, actually, I'm planning to do soon with them.
Necessity? No. However, they are well established in the fantasy genre drawing on real world myth and popular literature. Unfortunately, there is a tendency in some people for them to devolve into stereotypes: the surly drunken dwarf with the bad accent, the snooty artiste elf in the forest, the crude violent "sub-human" orc. Some of this is a consequence of the shameless imitation of the "popular" that is found in human nature; just look at music, fashion, etc. Part of it is also a consequence of the "fan-boy" mindset; a single interpretation starts to define the whole in the minds of many (need I bring up that two-scimitar wielding drow?).
However, that's not to say that settings where they appear need to use them in the same fashion or that they need to be used at all. Humans appear in almost every setting for a very important reason: to provide a familiar baseline so that the fantastic is highlighted. It also helps prevent the "humans in funny suits" syndrome when establishing that baseline. Working from that baseline, the GM can add the fantastic in measured doses to the setting to match their interpretation; this can involve adding some or all of the "big three" and/or using races from other sources to flesh out the setting.
For instance, perhaps you want a setting based on Michael Scott Rohan's Winter of the World trilogy (based itself somewhat on Finnish/Norse myth). In this setting, dwarves are the ancient race that's withdrawing from the world (although they maintain their underground lifestyle and skill with crafts), elves are the "youngest" race (altered from human stock by a forest deity) and rustic hunter-gatherers, and there are no orcs (instead, evil deities have corrupted some human cultures to attack the others). There are a few more twists (dwarves are actually Neanderthals that achieved civilization before being decimated by the evil deities prior to the rise of the new races, elves are "ruled" by humans given long life by the forest deity as part of the alteration process, etc.), but those are the bare-bones.
Alternately, you could throw out all of the "big three" and instead roll with a human-centric setting with a leavening of "supernatural crossbreed/planetouched" races such as aasimar, changelings, damphir, fetchlings, ifrits, oreads, sulis, sylphs, tieflings, and undines. In this setting, there may be giants, but no other humanoids beyond the humans/part-humans; other creatures may take humanoid form (dragons, fey), but are generally more "magical/monstrous" or mutable in appearance.
Throwing out the "big three" and humans is rarely done and ends up too often with "not-dwarves," "not-elves," etc. basically filling the same roles or "humans in funny suits." Even if the setting avoids the "everything the same, except for the (appearance and) name," they tend to have problems with "if everyone is special, no one is" and/or define the "specialness" narrowly (leading to more stereotypes).
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I was just wondering the other day if people would play a human-only fantasy RPG...I suspect the answer is mostly no.
M
I would, and i do on occasion. It is refreshing. We also usually play without magic then.
To the OP, i have dwarves and elves and orcs in my setting. They are recognizable, but behave more like real people and less like they behave in novels of Elaine Cunningham (I hate her novels and her blatant disregard for the rules).
Definitely not. I hate Tolkien stuff, partially because I feel Tolkien was a bad writer with books that made for meh-to-bad movies, and partially because they're always played the same, and when they're not, it comes off as trying too hard. Why have dwarfs when they do everything possible to not act like drunken idiots, you know? I hate how it seems out of character to NOT play a stereotypical dwarf of elf, but with how pervasive they are, they've just become outplayed and boring.
I think the Elder Scrolls is the only setting where they did it well, and even then, the High Elves and orcs are extremely boring. And there's no dwarfs.
Dwarves are elves who live underground. They ain't really Dwarves in TES.
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If it helps the OP I use all 3 in my games with various levels of mutation from the stereotype. Elves are 2 cultures in decline being either mesoamerican inspired xenophobic jungle elves native to the continent that are quickly becoming extinct after their numbers were decimated after their war with man or fey worshiping urban elves who's connection with nature was severed long ago and began worshiping said fey to gain another route to their power. The latter are also going extinct as they have abysmal fertility levels and have major issues producing viable heirs and bringing them to term. Because of this many of the elvish houses have resorted to conceiving half-elven heirs to take over their holdings should they pass before their half blood heirs or they manage to conceive a true heir.
Now this little change has given me whole new worlds of content to play around with from their relations to half-elves and humans, how they deal with nature, and have an interesting and essential new variable in their new much stronger connection to the fey. The trick of it all is that if you want to include a race like elves or what not you need to figure out what you like about them that makes you want to add them, what about them you think is lame, and what you think would be cool to add. After that keep the s@*+ you like and the things you enjoy that complements those traits (pointed ears, connection to nature, magical inclination) remove the stuff you don't like (weird passiveness to the world around them that is obviously changing, the weird homogeny within a chaotic culture, lack of interaction with the outside world) and then add what you want (mesoamerican culture, the consequences of integration amongst elves and races with such different biology and cultures, built in fey interactions). The most important thing to remember is to start weaving your new content together with the old and be ready for new a weirder things to mutate out from your changes as time goes on and players get involved.