Could be that Humans are just a few percent more efficient in certain things which would give them an edge over other fantasy races.
D&D General What are humans?
- Thread starter Xeviat
- Start date
PRO: All humans get a bonus feat at level 1.
CON: It's this one -- Rainsmelling.
Undrave
Legend
The bastard killed the entire Egyptian pantheon!
Yaarel
🇮🇱 🇺🇦 He-Mage
In D&D terms, Humans are a Humanoid Beast.
Human is a species of ape, sharing a common ancestor with chimpanzee and bonobo. It is remarkable for the evolution of its brain, with an instinctive language capacity, as a social animal forming groups. It learns and forms group cultures for cooperation and to transmit knowledge to younger generations. Relatedly, it specializes in the use of tools. As part of group cooperation, it evolves diverse faces, to readily recognize individuals. It is an omnivore, both hunting and foraging plants, and is aggressive. But it is also able to empathize by learning to make sense of an other point of view, and inviting strangers as part of ones group.
Human is a species of ape, sharing a common ancestor with chimpanzee and bonobo. It is remarkable for the evolution of its brain, with an instinctive language capacity, as a social animal forming groups. It learns and forms group cultures for cooperation and to transmit knowledge to younger generations. Relatedly, it specializes in the use of tools. As part of group cooperation, it evolves diverse faces, to readily recognize individuals. It is an omnivore, both hunting and foraging plants, and is aggressive. But it is also able to empathize by learning to make sense of an other point of view, and inviting strangers as part of ones group.
Autumnal
Bruce Baugh, Writer of Fortune
I like that a lot, @Yaarel .
@Umbran : that’s actually Greg Stafford’s original purpose for the personality trait pairs that are so important (and great) in Pendragon. The first version was a GM’s tool for running the dragonewts, who aren’t necessarily the most alien race in Glorantha but probably are the most mysterious sentients there.
Unlike in Pendrsgon, each pair comes with three numbers that add up to 20, like Proud 12 / neutral 5 / Humble 3 (or Proud 1-12 / neutral 13-17 / Humble 18-20). You’d roll, and if you got high or low weigh enough, the trait at that end would dominate the dragonewt’s actions for that encounter. If you rolled in the middle, neither extreme dominated and you’d make individual choices as you would for other NPCs. You could easily adjust the weight of traits for particular locations, cultures, lineages, and so on. I continue to love the concept and find it a handy way to present priorities that doesn’t get into the swamp of racial attribute scores. In Pendragon, each culture has the same number of valued traits that have to be high (15+ on that trait in a totals-to-20 pair) to get annual glory points for being a proverbial example of the character’s culture, so none are “better” in the sense of earning glory more quickly. Just depends on what you want to emphasize in play.
(Also, trivia note for comics fan: Mike Mignola’s first published art is for the article in Wyrm’s Footnotes presenting the dragonewt personality system. He was a teenager and it’s not readily distinguishable from early Erol Otus on a bad day. But there it is.)
As for the overall topic…humans are like the plants that flourish first after fires, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and such. We call ourselves the Inheritors. Other species call us the Successors when they’re being polite to or afraid of us, the Scavengers when not. It’s not that we do noticeably better or even as well as everyone else when times are good. It’s that we keep relatively flourishing when times are bad, and really bad times kick us down too, we return to normal quickly.
Which means that when all the sentient species in an area get hammered so badly. That almost everyone is wiped out or have to flee, we’re the ones multiplying in the ruins. As a relative newcomer species, we’ve invented very little of our own. Like James Nicoll’s description of the English language, we pick up what everyone else left lying around and stumble our way into invention by putting ideas and things together in new ways. Sometimes this wipes out the experimenters. Sometimes it works but doesn’t help anything and the combo is discarded (to be invented again and again down the road). Sometimes it’s useful and spreads, and the human reputation for coloring so far outside the lines you have no idea where the lines are anymore is enhanced.
We don’t even have many gods all of our own. The pantheons in human-dominated areas are heavy on gods whose original followers all got killed or left their area and worship. Humans will put nearly anything in our mouths, and we do the same with our souls. “That sounds fun” and “Sure” are common things for the first humans speaking with an unfamiliar god to say in response to an offer.
If other species learn ways of better nailing down their stuff, we could be in real trouble, innovation-wise.
@Umbran : that’s actually Greg Stafford’s original purpose for the personality trait pairs that are so important (and great) in Pendragon. The first version was a GM’s tool for running the dragonewts, who aren’t necessarily the most alien race in Glorantha but probably are the most mysterious sentients there.
Unlike in Pendrsgon, each pair comes with three numbers that add up to 20, like Proud 12 / neutral 5 / Humble 3 (or Proud 1-12 / neutral 13-17 / Humble 18-20). You’d roll, and if you got high or low weigh enough, the trait at that end would dominate the dragonewt’s actions for that encounter. If you rolled in the middle, neither extreme dominated and you’d make individual choices as you would for other NPCs. You could easily adjust the weight of traits for particular locations, cultures, lineages, and so on. I continue to love the concept and find it a handy way to present priorities that doesn’t get into the swamp of racial attribute scores. In Pendragon, each culture has the same number of valued traits that have to be high (15+ on that trait in a totals-to-20 pair) to get annual glory points for being a proverbial example of the character’s culture, so none are “better” in the sense of earning glory more quickly. Just depends on what you want to emphasize in play.
(Also, trivia note for comics fan: Mike Mignola’s first published art is for the article in Wyrm’s Footnotes presenting the dragonewt personality system. He was a teenager and it’s not readily distinguishable from early Erol Otus on a bad day. But there it is.)
As for the overall topic…humans are like the plants that flourish first after fires, volcanic eruptions, tsunamis, and such. We call ourselves the Inheritors. Other species call us the Successors when they’re being polite to or afraid of us, the Scavengers when not. It’s not that we do noticeably better or even as well as everyone else when times are good. It’s that we keep relatively flourishing when times are bad, and really bad times kick us down too, we return to normal quickly.
Which means that when all the sentient species in an area get hammered so badly. That almost everyone is wiped out or have to flee, we’re the ones multiplying in the ruins. As a relative newcomer species, we’ve invented very little of our own. Like James Nicoll’s description of the English language, we pick up what everyone else left lying around and stumble our way into invention by putting ideas and things together in new ways. Sometimes this wipes out the experimenters. Sometimes it works but doesn’t help anything and the combo is discarded (to be invented again and again down the road). Sometimes it’s useful and spreads, and the human reputation for coloring so far outside the lines you have no idea where the lines are anymore is enhanced.
We don’t even have many gods all of our own. The pantheons in human-dominated areas are heavy on gods whose original followers all got killed or left their area and worship. Humans will put nearly anything in our mouths, and we do the same with our souls. “That sounds fun” and “Sure” are common things for the first humans speaking with an unfamiliar god to say in response to an offer.
If other species learn ways of better nailing down their stuff, we could be in real trouble, innovation-wise.
Bacon Bits
Legend
So, speculative fiction often wants to portray an entirely different set of cultures. It makes a world feel more real and larger. This brings some unusual problems because... Well, the fundamental problem with non-humans is that the creators of the games and stories do not have an example of a non-human sapient creature. We don't know what a non-human mind capable of communicating with us and interacting with our society, culture, and civilization on the same levels that we do would be like. Nobody has ever met one in reality. What their cultures would value, how they would organize their society, and how they would live are all entirely beyond conception. We cannot imagine what we are incapable of conceptualizing, and it's difficult to conceptualize something without an example.
Therefore, all fictional "races" or "species" or "ancestries" in any of these games or stories are not actually non-human at all. They're all humans. Everything is taken from humanity or expressed as an absence of some aspect of humanity. That's why I often call them "humans in rubber masks." Like the aliens in Star Trek, all the aliens mysteriously are humanoids about 1-2 meters in height with curiously shaped foreheads and nasal roots.
This kind of opens the question: If they're all just humans, why don't we use humans for everything? Well, some places do. But the advantage of non-human humans is that they're immediately identifiable as non-humans. They look different and their cultural identity as non-human is not something that can be easily concealed. You don't just "look southeast Asian" or "have Mediterranean features" or "have blonde hair, skin so pale it's pink, and piercing blue eyes" because those aren't recognizable as an individual culture to us. They were at one time in the past, but not anymore, and we don't like viewing humans that way anymore. Even including clothing, jewelry, tattoos, make-up, or other culturally linked styles isn't enough because humans often adopt elements from cultures they don't originate from. Worse, some cultures implicitly or explicitly accept diversity or uniqueness. Humanity is diverse and intermingled, and we want to portray a diverse world of unknown cultures to the viewer, reader, or player... and sometimes even unknown to the characters in the work. So we need it to be as crystal clear to them as it can be that an elf is irrevocably not a human.
So we need to imagine what humans might look like if they were obviously non-human creatures. -- That seems like a strange sentiment, but remember, we have no earthly idea what true non-human cultures and non-human societies look like. We can only imagine so much, and we cannot imagine what social constructs a truly alien mind would have or how they would differ from us. -- So, as I said, we want to know what non-human humans might look like, while also remaining familiar enough to understand their way of life. So we imagine human-like non-humans in terms of what humans are not. Yes, it really is that silly. So, elves all have pointed ears and delicate features because humans do not. Dwarves are all short and bearded because humans are not.
Now that there's an appearance for these non-human humans, we can develop unique cultures for them. What these games want is a set of non-human cultures that have easily justifiable reasons to be unlike the human culture or cultures. Elves live in the forest and are aloof and disinterested in the world because human cultures are not those things. Dwarves live under mountains, love mining, crafting, and stonework, and value order and clans because human cultures are not those things.
That's the problem with humans. They're all negative space. That's the real problem. Humans are defined in most campaign settings by what they are not. That's what you must avoid. The problem is that in many settings, humans are a blank slate and are defined by that blankness.
The easiest example of where to look for how this should work is Lord of the Rings, including the 5e LotR or AiME books. When you pick a "race" in that game, you might pick Durin's Folk, Hobbits of the Shire, Elves or Mirkwood, or Elves of Lothlorien. Or you might pick Men of Gondor or Men of Rohan. We know what the Men of each domain are like. They are similar to each other, yes, just as the two Elves are. But they have identifiable cultures. If you then go meet the Men of Laketown, they have their own culture, too.
That's the key. You need to have a concrete idea for what even the human culture is, and I think you need at least two tangible, coherent cultures of humans with completely distinct cultural characteristics. The way to make humans interesting is to give them a culture to call their own. Because that's what we're actually picking when we say "race" or "species" or "lineage."
And the default human in 5e D&D? It has no culture. It's culture is "adaptability to any culture" which, while true, is... it's got no story. So, give the humans a story the same way you have for everyone else.
It should be clear that if you see a given structure that you know a human built it. But you should be able to do that. "Oh, these farms are built in the human style with a farmhouse, barn, small coral, and central well. The fields look like they were wheat or some other human-favored grain." It's visibly a human style just like stonework would visibly be dwarven. When the party goes to a human city, you can tell the elf players that they're surprised by how many children they see. "Why, you've seen two or three in just the last five minutes! It's like strolling through a nursery." You tell the dwarf player, "You see stonework and carpentry that, while plain, is simply everywhere and made in that robust and simple human style. It isn't beautiful and it isn't maintained to your standards, but you have to admire the sheer practicality and sturdiness of it all. It's like they know exactly what 'good enough' is."
Frozen_Heart
Hero
Ngl in a desert survival campaign, that would be insanely powerful.
(loljk 5e has no survival mechanics)
Shardstone
Hero
Has some fun implications.
cbwjm
Seb-wejem
I like using the ideas from WoW and 4e. Humans are diplomatic, have a will to survive, pick up a diverse range of skills and feats.
If I wanted to put it into game terms, it might look something like:
ASIs: three +1s to assign to any stat. I think this makes them a little more diverse than the standard +1/+2 since the could spread them out to three scores or assign them to a single score.
Will to survive: when you fail a save, add +4 to it, succeeding if it would change the result. Once per rest.
Diverse skills: pick any two skills
Diplomatic: not sure what I'd do here, I'd want something different from just granting persuasion but also I'm not sure what I'd put in its place. In WoW, this is just a reputation bonus which could work if factions are used heavily in game. But I'd want something more generic.
If I wanted to put it into game terms, it might look something like:
ASIs: three +1s to assign to any stat. I think this makes them a little more diverse than the standard +1/+2 since the could spread them out to three scores or assign them to a single score.
Will to survive: when you fail a save, add +4 to it, succeeding if it would change the result. Once per rest.
Diverse skills: pick any two skills
Diplomatic: not sure what I'd do here, I'd want something different from just granting persuasion but also I'm not sure what I'd put in its place. In WoW, this is just a reputation bonus which could work if factions are used heavily in game. But I'd want something more generic.
That would indeed be very useful. Sadly, the feat isn't predictive, it only allows you to identify past events.
Scenario 1:
DM: You enter a room. The floor appears to be wet.
PC: I use Rainsmelling.
DM: It is a room. You are indoors. It did not rain.
Scenario 2:
DM: You enter an open-air enclosure. It is raining. The ground appears to be wet.
PC: I use Rainsmelling.
DM. As I said, it is raining.
Scenario 3:
DM: You enter an open air enclosure. The ground appears to be wet, and it is early morning.
PC: I use Rainsmelling.
DM: It is not rain, it is dew.
Scenario 4:
DM: You enter an open-air enclosure. The ground appears to be wet.
PC: I use Rainsmelling.
DM: Since you are human, you do not need to roll. It did rain.
Scenario 5:
DM: You enter an open-air enclosure. The ground appears to be wet. A tap has been left running nearby, with gravity-def pipes bringing water form a container above the adjoining building.
PC: I use Rainsmelling.
DM: Your keen human senses reveal to you that it has in fact rained recently, and the tap is trying to disguise the fact, by giving an alternative explanation for the damp floor.
PC: I look at the tap to see if I can work out who did that.
DM: Roll Investigation.
PC: I am only proficient in Rainsmelling.
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