Are non-humans neccessary in FRPGs?

[Doctor Xero]

Should this thread be closed to start new ones? Right now, we have a poll on which games have what races, a discussion on what makes a fantasy game fantastic, and the role of races in a fantasy roleplaying game.

I don't know about closing this one, but I've started a new one on the role of fantasy races in FRPGs.

Doctor Xero

[Shreyas Sampat]

FWIW, I think we can exclude Exalted from the discussion, Mr. Sluagh; the funny-looking people there are, for the most part, pretty much described explictly as "men in funny suits". The really unhuman types are (if the pattern holds) defined by their pattern of abilities, rather than any kind of description of their social behaviors.

[RyuMaou]

Even Conan had Fantasy creatures, if not necessarily whole races of them. Demons, dragons, giant serpents and bizarre magic-crafted creatures which lurk in the depths of dungeons.

It's beginning to seem that Fantasy creatures, if not races or available as player characters, do seem to be pretty essential to the definition of Fantasy. However, it isn't necessary to follow the same paradigm as DnD when using them, a mold which TRoS has mostly avoided, Shadowrun twists neatly, and Conan-type games avoid entirely.

Yeah, I meant fantasy humanoids that could be player characters.  An intelligent dragon is, basically, a god and doesn't count, in my mind.  

But, it is an interesting point.  If one removes the elves and dwarves and such, does there need to be compensating strangeness for the FRPG feel to be maintained?  And, one could argue that the sorcers in Conan weren't quite "human" any more either.  Remember the witch in the movie?  She was definately supernatural!

But, I also agree with the idea that someone else shared about a game being human-centric as A design goal, not the only design goal.  That's not enough to make a real, long-term game.

Very interesting input from everyone!  I may not have a definitive answer, but I have some things to think about!!
Thanks,
Jim[/i]

[M. J. Young]

My reaction is to cite Legends of Alyria. The characters are always human, although some have become deformed or empowered through mutation (yet still remain human) and others have been culturally dehumanized. It contains dragons and unicorns, and in a sense these are "characters" (there are no NPC's; any entity that is part of the action is a character), but they're really the gods of the scenario, and not the characters in the stories. However, this is best characterized (as Seth recently did elsewhere) as Technofantasy, so it probably doesn't fit. (Also, it allows for the possibility that there might be non-human intelligent races, providing the example of the Digger Paladins, a race of intelligent aardarks, as an option.)

I've done a number of fantasy settings for Multiverser; a few might be worth examining.

The Dancing Princess is essentially the old fairytale. The villains are demons in a parallel realm, but otherwise everyone is human. It's high magic fairytale stuff, definitely fantasy, and it plays extremely well without any fantasy races.

Sherwood Forest is much closer to realistic medieval, alternate historic. That may be part of why you don't see much "fantasy" without strong magic and magical creatures--at some point you cross the line and become "alternate historical". I'd think of Sherwood that way, even though there is a very low magic presence within the setting (so low it's possible to get through the game without ever realizing it's there, but it is).

I mention Bah Ke'gehn because it is clearly fantasy, highly magical, and sort of turns the question on its ear. The only humans here come from outside this world--the player characters being among them, a few others who arrived the same way the player characters did also present. It makes the humans the equivalent in this world of demons in our world, alien beings from another dimension who use evil technology instead of magic to do things. However, the beings here are the Bah, a race completely different from anything elsewhere, perhaps best described as a generally benevolent magical race most resembling demons in appearance.

The Farmland, in one of its two forms, admits a bit of magic and has nothing but humans in it. However, it's usually moving toward a climactic witch burning (the player character doesn't know it, but he's the witch), so magic is definitely not popular here.

Orc Rising turns things around quite a bit. I tend to describe it as a post-fantasy setting. There's very little magic (although in running playtests I've had to empower the elves just a bit to make them feel elfish, and provide a bit more holy magic to my clerics than I'd initially envisioned). Elves, dwarfs, and men are moving into modern civilization, and the issues spring really in large part because players expect humans, dwarfs, and elves to be the "good guys" and orcs to the "evil", and wind up in a situation in which the good guys (who really aren't evil and have good reasons for their actions) are oppressing, enslaving, and disenfranchising the supposedly evil villains, and then getting upset that the orcs fight against this. The good races are oblivious to the fact that their own treatment of the orcs is driving the orcs further toward violence, and the destruction of their culture and people is destabilizing them. Thus the fantasy tropes are used largely to create a situation for a premise which if presented as various Europeans and East Africans running slave trade out of West Africa (or any other historic slaving situation, such as existed in northern Europe or Asia or South America or anywhere in the world, really) might be too laced with personal feeling to be terribly playable.

You can do fantasy without the fantasy races.

So what's Tolkien's influence?

People who want to play in a fantasy game often want to do so because they like Tolkien and want to be in a world like his. Certainly D&D tropes are distinct from Tolkien tropes in a lot of ways; but they are recognizably similar, and playing a D&D elf is close to playing a Tolkien elf. To a lot of people, that's one of the main attractions of a fantasy game: playing one of those races. Take that out, and you lose part of your target audience. Pendragon is a great game, but you don't see a lot of D&D players jumping to it. Part of that is marketing, certainly. Part of it is the inability to play wizards and thieves. Part of it is the absence of such races. Why did OAD&D release the Arcana, the Oriental Adventures, and the Dragonlance materials? Why did AD&D2 offer so many settings with so many races, including the Planescape materials (in which a wealth of planar creatures were player character materials) and the space setting (permitting Illithids to be player characters)? It seems the more options you offer your players, the more players will sign up for your game. Maybe you'll only ever have one Minotaur Barbarian, only one Halfling Psionicist/Thief, only one Hengeyokai Kensai--but that's one more person who was interested in playing the game a little longer because there was something he hadn't tried before.

That's part of it, I'm sure.

--M. J. Young

[contracycle]

It seems the more options you offer your players, the more players will sign up for your game. Maybe you'll only ever have one Minotaur Barbarian, only one Halfling Psionicist/Thief, only one Hengeyokai Kensai--but that's one more person who was interested in playing the game a little longer because there was something he hadn't tried before.

Hmm, but this also tends to produce the "random bunch of misfits and social outcasts" phenomenon, which then militates against any kind of character investment in the setting as setting.  I think a huge amount of Heartbreaker-type work is aimed at focussing this blunderbuss-style approach so that the weird and fantastic is still present, but thematically and aesthetically organised.

[hitsumei]

Ironically, I've often found fantasy games with non-human races as, still, too humanocentric in their geopolitics...

Allow me to explain : if a majority of fantasy games have non-human races, you'd notice that, among them, a tiring (to my taste) majority have humans standing highest on the podium. Humans, not elves, dwarves or whathaveyou, are almost always _dominant_ : in number, hence in area colonized, in politically scheming/clashing realms. Naturally, this also gives them the most diversity in cultures, politics, religions, magic, while I bet that a steampunk _elven_ technomancy or some dwawish shamanistic-seafaring religion do not spring readilly to game designers' mind (just exemples, you see what i mean)... Wouldn't a game setting in which humans would be the _reclusive_ (or newcomers) ones not be fantasy? Does elves have to stitch to their forests, dwarwes to their mountains and orcs to their cave and/or more "original" non human races still be "somewhere on the borders of (CIVILISED) world"... generally not far from the "monsters".

Then, speaking of definition, do you really think that this word, "humanocentric", just imply games without non-humans...? ;-)

Are humans really necessary in a fantasy setting?

(As a side note : Im not sure this thread should have been split so early in the discussion... as my reply could have find its place in "the role of...."), but i hope you'll pardon my dilemna...)

[Scourge108]

I guess what I wonder is not why nearly all FRPGs have non-human races, but why do they nearly all have the same non-human races?  If it's a fantasy game, you can bet it's got elves, dwarves, goblins/orcs, and some kind of gnome/hobbit/kender thing.  Why was everyone so afraid to branch out?  I liked the weird races in Planescape, and even the different versions of the standard races in Changeling: the Dreaming.  I think Dwarves, Elves, and Hobbits have been done to death.

[Doctor Xero]

I guess what I wonder is not why nearly all FRPGs have non-human races, but why do they nearly all have the same non-human races?  If it's a fantasy game, you can bet it's got elves, dwarves, goblins/orcs, and some kind of gnome/hobbit/kender thing.  Why was everyone so afraid to branch out?

Because AD&D provides a common vocabulary for the gaming community.  

Because it pioneered our hobby, because it was once so widespread that it became known even to non-gamers, and because its initial races were very primal, AD&D races are better known than the races of any other fantasy gaming system.

Even gamers who have never played AD&D have a baseline understanding of the major races in that system.  So when gamers gather -- at conventions, at gaming stores, at university clubs -- they make reference to that system's game world.  For example, when I've talked about playing a Runequest elf with a gamer who's never played Runequest nor AD&D, I've had to explain to him what a Runequest elf is by pointing out how it differs from an AD&D elf.  I've never had to define an AD&D elf is by pointing out how it differs from an elf in some other system!  AD&D races are the baseline races in FRPGing.

I'd wager that more people who have never played AD&D nor read Tolkien know more about AD&D elves than they do about The Professor's vision of elves.

I think this is one problem 3E has.  They've tried to make the races more sophisticated, but in some ways they've lost that primal simplicity so that 3E elves are just one more variant off AD&D elves in the public eye.  That may be why, even today, people reference AD&D races more than 3E races.

Doctor Xero

[neelk]

It's beginning to seem that Fantasy creatures, if not races or available as player characters, do seem to be pretty essential to the definition of Fantasy. However, it isn't necessary to follow the same paradigm as DnD when using them, a mold which TRoS has mostly avoided, Shadowrun twists neatly, and Conan-type games avoid entirely.

Have you read Ellen Kushner's novel Swordspoint? It has no magic in it and no nonhuman creatures (aside from animals we would find on Earth), but is still quite obviously a fantasy novel. I'd probably use a very similar setting for any game in which I wanted swashbuckly action but didn't want to stick to historical referents.

[RyuMaou]

Have you read Ellen Kushner's novel Swordspoint? It has no magic in it and no nonhuman creatures (aside from animals we would find on Earth), but is still quite obviously a fantasy novel. I'd probably use a very similar setting for any game in which I wanted swashbuckly action but didn't want to stick to historical referents.

For something similar that includes fantasy races, you might try Goblin Moon and The Gnome's Engine by Teresa Edgerton.  If you can still find them in print, that is.  She shows the several non-human races in very NON-AD&D ways.  They're both quite good.

But, somehow, I don't think that an FRP game that doesn't include significant doses of magic, of some kind, is really a fantasy role-playing game.  Of course, YMMV.

Thanks,
Jim

[talysman]

here's my take on the question.

yes, non-human races are necessary in FRPGs. my explanation is similar to Mike Holmes, but I'm looking at it from the viewpoint of the history of fantasy literature.

there were basically two 19th century ancestors to modern fantasy: otherworldly fantasy, including fairy tales, and occult fiction or horror. occult or mystical fiction, as well as horror, was just regular literature with a supernatural gimmick. thus, things like William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki stories, Dracula, Varney the Vampire, and so on were stories about ordinary people in contemporary times (or occasionally recent history) who experience extraordinary events or meet an extraordinary character.

otherworldly fantasy, in contrast, was about extraordinary places. the template for this style of writing was the fantastic travel stories, for example the writings of Cyrano de Bergerac about his journey to the sun and moon. a large chunk of otherworldly fantasy actually involved an ordinary person who travels to an extraoridary place, either in an unexplored region of the earth, in fairyland, or in some other world entirely. think: Alice in Wonderland, The Worm Ouroboros, or the Barsoom novels of Burroughs.

now, the point of fantastic travel stories is to show how otherworldly this other place is. almost every example includes otherworldly people; the greeks, for example, had stories about the land where people had their faces in the bellies, or where people had only one leg. it's part of the tradition.

the one exception would be stories set in the legendary past, such as H. Rider Haggard's The World's Desire, which was about the further adventures of Odysseus. as long as the story was about a time and place that an educated person could be expected to have heard of, writers felt no need to make the main character an ordinary 19th century person.

thus, in the early part of the 20th century, we still see C. S. Lewis doing normal-kids-go-to-Narnia or historical-character-in-the-myth-of-Psyche, but we don't see him use both extraordinary main characters *and* and extraordinary location. Tolkien starts to bend this rule, but he does this by making his fantastic settings as close to a Dark-Ages-mixed-with-European-myth setting as possible, so his readers wouldn't get lost. we first see truly otherworldy settings with main characters that belong to that setting in the pulps, starting with stories about atlantis or other legendary locations. modern fantasy developed this style into a pure otherworldly approach with no ordinary elements.

T. S. Elliot made a comment that you can have an ordinary character in an extraordiary setting (Alice in Wonderland,) or an extraordinary character in an ordinary setting (Dracula,) but you can't have everything be extraordinary at the same time, because then the reader has no point of reference. I was pretty annoyed when I heard this; I was certain he had to be wrong. still, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to be true.

so how does fantasy literature get away with this? by having races. at least one race is as close to what the reader is familiar with, despite being part of the extraordinary setting. they are the yardstick against which the reader can compare and contrast the other races. and if you have a more unusual race that you want the reader to identify with, then you have to have something *even weirder* to make the unusual race seem more ordinary by comparison.

so: you need non-human races (or humans with extraordinary features) because it's part of the tradition, but this only seems weird because of the presence of more ordinary humans -- who are there to provide a sense of familiarity.

[clehrich]

John (talysman) makes some excellent points; I have a couple minor quibbles and a follow-up.

now, the point of fantastic travel stories is to show how otherworldly this other place is. almost every example includes otherworldly people; the greeks, for example, had stories about the land where people had their faces in the bellies, or where people had only one leg. it's part of the tradition.

A quibble: If you look at the 16th-18th century utopian stuff, from More to Bacon (New Atlantis) and so on, it's not at all uncommon to see completely human "others", not uncommonly based rather loosely on tales about American Indians (in the 16th century) or Atlantis or whatever.  If the strong difference that's supposed to be interesting is a radically different political setting, it's quite common to find the "others" entirely human and familiar but living in a situation that is utterly extraordinary.

At the same time, this fits Eliot's description: Our contemporaries (ordinary) in an alien situation (extraordinary), whether the latter is inhabited by alien people or by human people in an alien environment.  So, just a slight fillip; otherwise fine...

T. S. Eliot made a comment that you can have an ordinary character in an extraordiary setting (Alice in Wonderland,) or an extraordinary character in an ordinary setting (Dracula,) but you can't have everything be extraordinary at the same time, because then the reader has no point of reference.

One important exception has come up long since Eliot, in what might rather dubiously be called postmodern fantastic literature.  Gene Wolfe's New Sun series admirably fits what Eliot describes as impossible, but it is precisely the point that we can't figure out what the hell is going on and it bombards us with alienness --- just as we begin to discover how it's not as alien as it looks.  Cool stuff, which among other things marks an actual difference between postmodern and modernist (i.e. Eliot).

at least one race is as close to what the reader is familiar with, despite being part of the extraordinary setting. they are the yardstick against which the reader can compare and contrast the other races.

Here I'd like to go a step farther.  I think Tolkien is cleverer than you implicitly give him credit for (although I know you were only covering him in passing), in that the identification race isn't human -- it's hobbits.  The humans are, let's face it, rather annoying as actual people, but just fine for heroic fantasy, i.e. Malory/Beowulf sort of stuff.  We can accept this and enjoy it precisely because the hobbits are like us, and they tell us how we should take the apparent pomposity and grandeur of, for example, Gondor.  When we find that the hobbits are both awed and slightly scornful, we know just where we stand, and can enjoy the grandiose high fantasy from within.  And then, at the end, Tolkien makes us see this whole fantasy at a level more like our (suburban English) lives, when we get to the Scouring of the Shire.

So do you need fantasy races?  Not necessarily, no, but bear in mind the many things they're good for.  If you wanted to do really interesting exploration with them, you might try having the humans be really exactly like us (i.e. boring middle-class folks who work 9-5 and so on) and then make the fantasy races very complicated, interesting, exciting, and dramatic.  Make us seem boring and tedious, and seduce us into wanting to be other.  Then turn it around and reveal how the other would really like to be us, because we don't have to put up with crap like destiny and gods walking around causing trouble and the fate of the universe and dragon-pee killing the roses.

Just a thought.

Chris Lehrich

[RyuMaou]

here's my take on the question.

yes, non-human races are necessary in FRPGs. my explanation is similar to Mike Holmes, but I'm looking at it from the viewpoint of the history of fantasy literature.

there were basically two 19th century ancestors to modern fantasy: otherworldly fantasy, including fairy tales, and occult fiction or horror. occult or mystical fiction, as well as horror, was just regular literature with a supernatural gimmick. thus, things like William Hope Hodgson's Carnacki stories, Dracula, Varney the Vampire, and so on were stories about ordinary people in contemporary times (or occasionally recent history) who experience extraordinary events or meet an extraordinary character.

Well, first, I disagree with this basic premise.  I think there were quite a few more potential origins of modern, Western fantasy.  Keep in mind, that is what you're talking about.  The view you present is a very, very Eurocentric one.  That being said, how does Beowulf fit in?  What is Grendel, really?  For that matter, what about so many of the Brother's Grimm fairy stories?  Where are the non-human races in, say, the Swan Princess?  Or the Frog Prince?  Or Sleeping Beauty? Or Tom Thumb?

so: you need non-human races (or humans with extraordinary features) because it's part of the tradition, but this only seems weird because of the presence of more ordinary humans -- who are there to provide a sense of familiarity.

But, how does that fit with, say, Asian mythology and fantastic literature?  I don't think it does.  Unless, of course, you count demons and other divine or semi-divine spirits as "other races".  OTH, I suppose if you define anything broadly enough, it's included in, well, everything.  
Take, as an example, the Journey to the West.  It features the Monkey King, who is not a "race" per se, but a very unnatural and unique being.  He travels through a fairly "normal" landscape meeting quite a few other, unique, supernatural beings like himself.  Clearly a fantasy, which has been retold in fairly modern times.  There was a movie done based on this story as few as three years ago.  I remember seeing it in Las Vegas on my honeymoon in 2001.

So, basically, I disagree with the "requirement" of fantasy races in fantastic literature.  Which, incidentally, is not the same as a requirement in a game.  I'm still not sure that it's not a requirement of a FRPG, no matter the setting.

Thanks,
Jim

[Itse]

I see many reasons for the status quo. Fantastic races are damn handy the way they are.

Fantastic races are not obviously analogical to actual human races, and people often don't see them as such. This is very handy for fiction, since it helps a great deal in handling cultural differences. Not only are the sides more easily identifiable and clearly separate when they are made somewhat fantastic, but it also helps to concentrate on the actual issue. If the reader/players connects the two races with realworld races, he will propably start adding things to the setup which are not meant to be there. In other words, fantastic races are somewhat succesful in dodging the potential problem of realworld racial prejudices dripping over into how the players see the fictional world. Also, fantastic races are an easy way to go around political correctness. These days you just can't have the bad guys be the ones with black skin, unless they are orcs or something similar, obviously non-human.

Creating cultures which are both credible and different from existing ones is very difficult. It's also hard to get the reader to understand that there are very fundamental differences. Making a race fantastic helps. It makes the point of "these guys are not like us" very apparent, and you can also create totally new premises for a culture. "These people don't get sick or die. That makes their culture different."  Creating fantastic races which the reader will believe and understand is extremely difficult, so it's safer and easier to go with the established ones and just tweak them for your own needs. It also saves a whole lot of work.

[contracycle]

Hmm, I still disagree, I ave felt for many years now  that fantasy races are at best supurfluous and at worst pernicious.  I disagree that they make tyhe handling of cultural differences easier and more explicit, because they obviate the issue precisely becuase its a race property, not a culture property.  I disagree that they allow RW racial issues to be dodges, rather IMO they allow such stereotypes to be projected under the guise of 'fantasy'.

Further, I think characters like Monkeyt, which are arguably divine, and the sundry glopblins and fairies that inhabit mythology, are not the same as FRPG races at all.  This is because those creatures usually inhabit a speciif, and often metaphoric, morally meaningful, place in the worldview of the culture in question.  They are not just funny looking strangers with strange customs, even if they are the stock villain.

I think that if the game is meant to deal with issues of cultural relatavism or similar, making the characters in it it nonh-human only undermines the attempt.  If I want to address such cultural issues, I think it is easier and more worthwhile to present human cultures.