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Well, ultimately in order to properly play as a non-human you have to actually be non-human. Studying non-humans in their natural environment and how they interact with each other, other non-human Ancestries, and Humans might be enough, but you would never be quite sure that you got it correct. There may be something of their culture, personality, attitudes, or behavior that they don't show to you.
But that isn't really helpful, is it?
I'm not entirely sure how to best do this either. All that I have come up with is to envision the in-game world from a very realistic perspective. Try to analyze how the traits and differences of one Ancestry would change the way that the character would think and the attitudes towards things that they would have. And from there, how would those attitudes and thought patterns affect their behavior and actions.
For example, Androids don't birth children in the standard fashion. They go through a process of Renewal where the old soul 'dies' and moves on to the River of Souls and a new soul takes over the Android body. So every Android comes into the world as an orphan. Which likely makes Android culture very sensitive to the needs of young children and they may even adopt orphans of other Ancestries.
The ancestries was made by humans so it's not strange to then to act like humans.
That said each ancestry has a good description how their societies and personality works. You can read this to know how do you want to RP you char. If you this that's no enough you can check the golarion wiki to help to get more info about the ancestry.
That said if your GM is playing a different setting you probably have to ask to it what's the best way to RP your ancestry in that setting, many settings can RP each ancestry in a completely different way.
I have found the best practice for non-human NPCs is first consider "what is the role that this NPC has in the story" whether they are an ally, an enemy, an annoyance, a mystery, etc. That is the most important thing to roleplay, but if you they are a non-human you put that through the lens of "what is the basic premise of these people". Like Dwarves are down to earth but tend to be a little grumpy, Elves are detached, Gnomes are very interested in anything novel, etc.
Like if the party needs to convince the town blacksmith to do something for them, and the smith serves as a quest-giver a la "if you do this for me, I'll do that for you" you can play the character very differently. A Dwarf Smith might center how their work is important and they have all these other important jobs that are important to other people, so why should the party skip the line? An elf smith might be more "what's the point, really" as you're wasting their time with trivialities since they're working on making something beautiful that will last. The gnome smith might have a bunch of experiments in metallurgy going on that they really don't want to take time away from.
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The is the classic rubber forehead alien problem, which if your not familiar is that it's basically impossible for human to imagine a completely alien mindset because we are human. You will always have a human influence in your view of the world. Attempting to make characters drastically different from that can have them come across as flat caricatures of some human trait you want to convey.
I honestly don't know how one gets around it. Especially when they're so many potential non-human humanoids to try to inhabit what their mind space might look like. You really have to try to imagine "what if I lived 700 years instead of 70" or what if "I came into being in an "adult" body and basic knowledge of the world in my head but no history", perhaps that's like being an amnesiac. What would that be like?
But it's also still going to be through a human lens.
My recommendation is just try to focus on things that might be relevant to the party in how a specific character is unique from any other character, not necessarily focused on the racial aspect of the character, and lean into that when RP'ing with your group.
You don't have to be a gnome inventor to be an inventor who is incredibly focused on their work and their specific new inventions to try to brush off the party so you can focus.
This is all excellent advice!
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Another take:
The non-humans *are* just humans with funny ears
imagine an elf, dwarf, gnome or the like growing up in absalom
they are sorrounded by humans (and others) and even among them many different cultures
they are used to interact with the human mindset, most people around are *some variant* of that anyway
it is not unlikely that that has a very stron influence on how a character acts and thinks
why should a dwarf that grows up in andoran act that much different from a human in andoran? if he is not in the influence sphere of constant racism he might act like everybody else, drink a pint with the other people in the local tavern, might complain they don't have dwarven ale (if he knows it) or even say 'I would really like to try some dwarven ale some day' (if he does not) and maybe he even shaves his beard off because he came to like the a clean trimmed look
but he might very well identify as andoran in the first place and not as dwarf, especially if his (now) hometown has only a very small dwarven population
at least once in a while, especially in places in the world where humans are the biggest part of the populace, it is perfectly fine for non-humans to still act like humans
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I'll admit ive got some preconceived notions that play out when I run other ancestries. No character has to be this way but I probably use these preconceptions more often than not.
I tend to portray goblins from a self oriented and skittish perspective but easily excitable and kind of act first think later that could be confused for bravery. With that as the base I then consider if and how this particular goblin is different.
I feel like elves pay attention to quality that lasts since they live so long. This might come off as being snobbish about things and the sentiment of wanting things that last could extend to friendships and other relationships making them take longer assessing if someone will stick around. The complete polar opposite of this could be true for some elves realizing everything in this world is fleeting but them. Extreme views around either direction of this sentiment could make a good elf villain.
Dwarves I play as generally loyal to their beliefs whatever those happen to be. If its a deity or family or clan or a way of looking at the world once its cemented in them they hold onto it. If they believe they need look out for only themselves they may very well be very bad at trusting others.
I am coming around to Gnomes in pathfinder like i never had before running 2e. I am starting to look at obsessive traits in different ways. It can just as easily be expressed through patience and concentration of focus on a single thing at the exclusion of all else as it can be jumping from new thing to new thing. Just as looking at a new thing can bring newness so can delving into something deeper than you did before or looking at it from new perspectives.
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I tend to think about the stories or lore around ancestries, and try to go from there.
Kitsune have a lot of stories of them as tricksters, pretending to be human, being found out as kitsune after marriage, etc. So, I play that as part of their cultural ideal, with courtship involving escalating secret tests to see if a potential human spouse will reveal your secrets, and bedtime stories about the protagonist tricking a prince or princess into marrying them and living happily ever after.
Elves live for a long time and get kind of messed up if they go and live their "young" life around shorter-lived folks by making friends that all die and leaving them very unbalanced after a little less than one more typical lifespan. So, characterizing them as being raised with a certain emotional detachment and an emphasis on maintaining at least some long-lived connections so as to not become irreparably isolated.
In both cases, there's an ideal that's impressed as important for pretty logical reasons. Kitsune have a big advantage in being able to turn into and blend in with a much more populous ancestry, but that comes with distrust and suspicion when exposed, so the culture does its best to protect against that. Elves run a real risk of outliving all their close friends if they just go about it the human way- think about how more difficult it is to make close friends as an adult, only more so. As a result, elven culture emphasizes spending about the length of a typical lifespan around other long-lived peers, so that there's a social network to fall back on.
(... Honestly, reading Delicious in Dungeon and the accompanying bonus material is great for characterizing different ancestries, and fun to do.)
You don't need to completely represent an alien mindset, just cultures that have a few differences in their starting points.
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TBH, I struggle quite a bit to role-play as a Human IRL. I'm better at Android with their emotional processing differences, Gnome with the obsessive special interests, or Kobold with anxiety driven hypervigilance.
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I would suggest that you try to find/invent things that are interesting for your group - other players and DM/npcs.
It is totally normal for you to be "an alien", so maybe focus on things that the others do strangely, whatever that is.
As a real life example, i find it quite interesting to watch videos from immigrants describing cultural differences and see "my" own behavior from their perspective.
If we are talking about PCs, which I think we are, I would first urge caution about getting too far down a rabbit hole, especially if that rabbit hole leads away from being a cooperative team member who supports their allies. PCs can have incredibly bland personalities to start off with, or even just flimsy, one "quirk" personalities (e.g. my character likes to seek out and buy unique candies in town, when possible), and yet can still end up becoming very rich and deep characters once you can settle into the tone of the campaign and the rest of the players at the table.
I feel like it is not uncommon for too much character development or backstory upfront to saddle a campaign more than underdeveloped characters. Elves living too long is a problem that even the adventure designers acknowledge and slightly lament (it stretched out the time line of Golarion far more than necessary, and sometimes in difficult ways to reconcile), but for the most part, I think just leaning into one thing mentioned in a heritage or an ancestry feat, or one detail from an ancestry listing, and not trying to fold in much more (possibly even directly rejecting one of the common other elements) can really help make the character feel unique, but rooted in their ancestry.
If we are talking about PCs, which I think we are, I would first urge caution about getting too far down a rabbit hole, especially if that rabbit hole leads away from being a cooperative team member who supports their allies. PCs can have incredibly bland personalities to start off with, or even just flimsy, one "quirk" personalities (e.g. my character likes to seek out and buy unique candies in town, when possible), and yet can still end up becoming very rich and deep characters once you can settle into the tone of the campaign and the rest of the players at the table.
I feel like it is not uncommon for too much character development or backstory upfront to saddle a campaign more than underdeveloped characters. Elves living too long is a problem that even the adventure designers acknowledge and slightly lament (it stretched out the time line of Golarion far more than necessary, and sometimes in difficult ways to reconcile), but for the most part, I think just leaning into one thing mentioned in a heritage or an ancestry feat, or one detail from an ancestry listing, and not trying to fold in much more (possibly even directly rejecting one of the common other elements) can really help make the character feel unique, but rooted in their ancestry.
Non human npcs I think.
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My bad. That does get a lot more complicated, because it is so story dependent. I think that the first two books of the age of ashes campaign do a great job of this with the goblins and the elves showcased in them. I guess "read a lot of literature that explores non-human consciousness to draw on?" would be my big long term answer, and my short term one would be, "try not to worry about it too much and start off with small little stuff."
But again if we are talking about a GM homebrewing an entire campaign, then you are taking on a lot of responsibility for yourself. I did this with a campaign I ran where the players were representatives from a city on a major river, trying to establish trade relations with another city far up river, through a pretty unknown and dangerous jungle between them. I had a number of factions between the two that were different ancestries and didn't all get along with each other to add some social elements to an otherwise pretty hex-crawling exploration adventure. I lent into some generic stereotypes about many of them, but tried to make sure to give each group somethin interesting and unique that grew beyond those stereotypes. The nomadic Lizard folk would build a village for a season and then move somewhere else on the river, but had a love of wrestling and having ceremonial wrestling events before feasts and political negotiations, for example.
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I think that your best bet when trying to roleplay a non-human PC is to think about their backstory, culture, and who they are as an individual.
So... I'll give the example of my character, Jinglemane. Jinglemane is a lion-centaur poppet. There is a bit of a difference between his self-image and the actual appearance he presents to the world (as evidenced by the picture in the link above.)
Being a lion, he really, really wants to bite people. Unfortunately, he is also a poppet toy with really soft felt teeth. So he got a leiomano (a club covered in shark teeth) so that he could 'bite' his enemies.
He was wished alive by a child, and he's very protective of children, and tries to be the BEST babysitter. Of course, he's the sort of babysitter who thinks that it is okay to help the child sneak out of the house to go on adventures - so long as he is there to back them up.
Poppets have to eat, but their diets in no way have to be balanced or nutritious. Jinglemane thinks dinners of candy are great. He looks at the world through a child's lens. He zooms around, jumps into action, and is endlessly curious. When he bleeds, he dribbles bits of stuffing around, which he finds highly embarassing.
More seriously, his 'kid' (a now grown-up geniekin human) was discriminated against in Katapesh, so he cares deeply about the rights of oppressed peoples and likes to rescue them. And then tell them stories, tuck them into bed and feed them candy. This is not always appropriate with some NPCs, but it is what Jinglemane knows how to do.
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So... me again. I think one of the best ways to discover how to play non-humans is to play non-humans with others in a group and build a culture together. In our Crown of the Kobold King group, we're all kobolds except for one lone dwarf. We've decided that being reptiles, we don't want to sleep in separate rooms. We sleep in a kobold pile to keep warm. And we often pile on top of the poor dwarf -- then he chases us out, locks the door, goes to sleep -- only to wake up the next morning covered in kobolds who have picked his lock and joined him. The dwarven player loves yelling in indignation, "My bed! My room! Aaaaagh!"
We've built upon our tribal culture, draconic customs, and love of traps -- together.
And although I talked about backstory in my prior post, I think that frontstory is even more important. What do you want to do? What is the story that you are building with other characters? How do you interact with the world?
Some of these questions can be even more fun to build with another player, deepening your understanding of your culture and of each other, and how each of you is different.
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Sometimes roleplaying a non-human humanoid as a human with funny ears and a quirk is enough. If the local blacksmith in a mixed-species village is a dwarf, and the player character simply wants to buy as sword, then a few mannerisms to show dwarven culture would be enough, "I forged that sword out of steel smelted by my cousin Dolph out of ore mined by my other cousin Nordan from East Craggy Mountain." Any significant differences in a simple sentence would change the conversation into a puzzle, like trying to figure out what Yoda says in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.
For longer interactions the non-human needs a cultural difference to feek non-human. This culture will be reflected in their beliefs, their priorities, and their homes. Paradoxically, the culture needs to be familiar to the players by copying a human culture or by representing a side of human nature in order to give a strong sense of the differences of the non-humans.
The source material for the ancestry provides the lore about culture. J.R.R. Tolkien based his hobbits, the inspiration for halflings, on the regular folk of the English countryside. That make halfling close to human. I am current visiting my in-laws in a house built by my wife's great-great grandfather and I can see that hobbit-like culture around me. The modern refrigerator stands next to an old-fashioned freestanding cupboard. Fish decoys (my wife's grandmother made them for ice fishing) hang from the crossbeams visible on the ceiling. The house is heated with the original fireplace but a furnace was added in the basement (which was added about 70 years ago) for emergency heat on especially cold days. That would be much like a halfling home. except the doorways and ceiling would be lower.
The long lives of elves is their most prominent feature. A recent anime called Frieren: Beyond Journey's End tells the story of an elf mage who journeyed with an adventuring party for 10 years and thought that that was a short quest. The show highlights how she lives at a slower, more relaxed pace than the humans around her, but has also refinend her magecraft to unbelievable levels in one thousand years. Yet she is still excited by a new spell to wash clothes. Elves have time to develop their interests, so an elven home would be like an art gallery where the elf could simply sit for an afternoon and admire the painting on the wall.
Dwarves value family like the halfling, but they don't visit each other as often. Instead, they remember and recite their clan lines. They live long like elves, but not so strangely long. In modern folklore they represent endurance, so highlight their endurance, such as working long hours without complaint.
That covers the ancestries based on Tolkien's works, and the rest of the races are stranger and less human. Gnomes came from the First World like elves did, but they crave excitement. They represent the playful tricksters from fairy tales, so they would rather give an oblique answer to any question than talk plainly. Mostly their fey capriciousness has been tamed into more civilized paths, such as adventuring rather than pranking.
The goblins are the other impulsive core ancestry. In Dungeons & Dragons they were originally opponents for the player characters, and Paizo put a twist on them to make them more maniac than evil. Pathfinder's zany pyromaniac goblins became popular enough to be promoted to a playable ancestry, so we now have dangerously zany uncivilized goblins and loveably zany civilized goblins. Treat them as too addlebrained to make their own culture, so instead their culture seems like a silly parody of another culture.
Orcs are the other opponents promoted to core ancestry. Their culture is based on human cultures that lived by raiding. They could be portrayed as a proud, warrior race, but usually they lack the pride and have only the war. Keeping the pride leads to a more interesting culture. My daughter once created an orc tribe that valued survival more than combat, because they had suffered hard times in the past. In the modern times, this led to their youth going off on coming-of-age survival challenges to prove themselves, such as exploring unknown territory or joining an adventuring party.
Leshies are the weirdest non-human core ancestry, so their culture would be weird by human standards. Their most significant differences from humans is that leshies don't eat and are not raised by parents. This makes many leshies childlike and other leshies wild. My players created a leshy culture for A Fistful of Flowers, in which the elder leshies created gardens that were a good environment for nature spirits to become leshies and then they would watch over the young leshies. This led the a raised-by-a-village culture.
In my Strength of Thousands campaign, I am enjoying roleplaying the NPC anadi Strands-of-Glowing-Dawn Tzenuwe. The anadi are giant intelligent spiders who learn to magically assume human form. The module Kindled Magic provides a half-page description of many NPC students at the Magaambya Academy.
A middle-aged woman who stands out among her younger peers, Tzeniwe sought the Magaambya later in life to gain an advanced education in the hopes of passing that education down to her children. ...
Tzeniwe is still painfully aware that many humanoids are terrified of spiders. Indeed, she’s more forgiving of repulsed reactions than her friends think she should be. Possessing a cooperative and generous nature, Tzeniwe often leaves her peers small gifts to make them comfortable, such as cups of chilled tea, delicious snacks, or even soft scarves and kaftans.
Tzeniwe maintains human form all the time, except when her natural giant spider form was better during a battle against giant insects. But her anadi nature is not secret, because her two toddlers, Zachva and Zanvi, run around in spider form most of the time. Tzeniwe insists that they assume human form for formal occasions, such as graduation ceremonies, much like a human mother would dress her children in formal clothes. The absence of the father of Tzeniwe's children I treat as a cultural difference, in that her people do not expect the father to follow Tzeniwe and their children. I view the anadi as another raised-by-the-village culture.
Finally, we get to the even stranger intelligent species that are not playable ancestries. Some, such as dragons, can be so alien that they are only puzzles or adversaries. Others, such as boggards, can be tribal people with especially weird customs.
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To some degree I think This Thing We Do is actually about exploring humanity, so to that extent, I’m not sure it’s a bad thing if so-called “nonhuman” characters, as conceived and portrayed by humans, amount to an emphasis on some particular aspect of being human.
With seven billion people in this world, there’s a lot of variation in how we humans think, feel, and act. Fantasy ancestries may really serve as lenses to focus our minds as we explore those beautiful variations.
So... me again. I think one of the best ways to discover how to play non-humans is to play non-humans with others in a group and build a culture together. In our Crown of the Kobold King group, we're all kobolds except for one lone dwarf. We've decided that being reptiles, we don't want to sleep in separate rooms. We sleep in a kobold pile to keep warm. And we often pile on top of the poor dwarf -- then he chases us out, locks the door, goes to sleep -- only to wake up the next morning covered in kobolds who have picked his lock and joined him. The dwarven player loves yelling in indignation, "My bed! My room! Aaaaagh!"
We've built upon our tribal culture, draconic customs, and love of traps -- together.
Collaborative history and culture building is fantastic if your all on the same page.
I would say Kobolds pile up not just because they are reptiles but also because they are swarmers like rats. They don't have personal space as a people so huddle together often and have no concept of "bad touch" so often freely touch, grab or press against each other since doing so in a negative manor just wouldn't cross their mind. This leads them to crawling over things and other people without a thought.Kobolds are greedy, but unlike humans who tend to think of themselves first, a Kobold is their tribe and their tribe is them. So they tend to freely share with each other but always think about taking from others to benefit their tribe. Kobolds are always part of a whole, thus lone Kobolds are likely traumatized in some way not having that connection.
This is likely why Kobolds are seen as being paradoxically prideful and cowardly, because they know that alone they are weak but they have a tribe full of support that they know can overcome anything.
Simular to many smaller prey creatures they like small dark areas to feel safe in and might have some level of agoraphobia. They might tend to look up for predators fairly often, something humans are well known to miss.
I like to think of a few specific quirks of the Ancestry and then logic out how that would change their world view. Either compared to other creatures or just really following out how one single aspect could vastly change how they see and interact with the world.
For NPCs all you really need is one or two quirks about what they are, then figure quirks of what they do and how those mix to be who they are.
For example, you could have an aged elf set as a point of information gathering that the players return to several times either for quest hooks or clues. Being an older elf they don't mind spending a tiny amount of time answering questions because it's insignificant to the time they have. They could also be a bit dire or melancholy, saying things like "you'll be dead soon anyway", then after a few adventures a PC might say something about the elf missing them if they didn't come back and you could say "The old broker stops for a moment in thought then raises an eyebrow slightly in surprise before saying perhaps I would."
A dwarf in the same role would perhaps be more gruff but friendly, be more specific in what they want in exchange for information, perhaps wanting finely handmade objects. They might give vibes of ready to unleash furious power against anything that would harm you while under their protection but fully ready to unleash the same on you if you cross a cultural line. When the party returns after a mission and perhaps boasts in some way, the dwarf would scoff and nonchalantly say they knew you could handle it.
A Kobold on the other hand would likely be hidden in a small hole somewhere outside of town or in the rundown part of a city. They might only put the end of their snout out of the hole to talk and call each player by their footwear. With time and gifting many spoils they might slowly come out of the hole and crawl on the PCs, still calling them by their footwear, "what does soft toes and steel heel have that is mine? Yes, informations yours, shinies mine."
Most NPCs are just voices and filler, while the important ones you need to make stand out. So don't spend much time with random characters, they can all have the same singular defining feature or two depending on how prevalent they are in the area.