Which is interesting because in the thread asking what race people prefer to play, the human is only at 10%. People here are obviously not being honest in the poll.
"Only". Human is still the second most popular race behind elf with a fairly large gap between them and the third most played with this survey.
As for why such differing results? I'd imagine this one has a much smaller base to draw from, as very few DnD players use this forum and even fewer would've voted.
I think the problem with these analysis and this is anecdotal but people who play humans likely are more stuck on them whereas people who play non humans are more willing to play a wide variety. So at the table its a 1 to 9 split of human to non human. The players who are non human will play elf one campaign, githyanki the next, tiefling the next while the human player will play human, human, human, human, maybe dwarf once, then back to human, human, human.
The divide is sort of I want to play the ordinary human experiencing a magical world people vs the im a human in real life why would I want to play humans people. And across most polls I think the latter is what wins out. The second group might have a favorite like tiefling or elf, but overall their drive is not human not elf. Polls with 50 races will hide what the real divide is.
The divide is sort of I want to play the ordinary human experiencing a magical world people vs the im a human in real life why would I want to play humans people. And across most polls I think the latter is what wins out. The second group might have a favorite like tiefling or elf, but overall their drive is not human not elf. Polls with 50 races will hide what the real divide is.
I can only add my own personal experience, but I don't think I've ever encountered a player who will only play humans; every player obviously has to choose human or non-human for their first character, but I feel like unless players are committing to a single continuous campaign, then they're going to play different races at some point. Even if a player is human for all of their "proper" characters they can still be a Tortle in a seafaring one-shot or whatever.
So I think mono-race players are definitely going to be in a tiny minority, and some of those are going to be because they've only had the one character so far, because unless you play a lot of one-shots or are really unlucky with your characters you're never going to get to play the vast majority of the character ideas you might have (unless you're a DM, in which case you can just force them all into your campaign to play as NPCs 😉).
While I'm sure there are some players whose thought process is "I've never been a tiefling so I'll be that", I think once you start to get a feel for the game what matters more is the concept behind a character, and it's just as easy to come up with a concept that fits a human more than a dragonborn or an elf or whatever. The question is whether you do, or whether it's your favourite one at the time.
I've always had a huge list of non-human characters I've been thinking of playing, and it keeps growing, and if you'd asked before I would have said there was little chance of me playing a human. But when my brother wanted to run a one-shot, and then later started his Strixhaven campaign I ended up picking human characters for both (actually forgot about the one shot, but that character was a blast). In both cases what settled it for me was how the backstory idea fit in with the campaign, so even though humans are but a tiny fraction of the many, many characters I have lined up, I ended up playing two.
That said, in 5e I have a rapidly diminishing list of races that I haven't played, as we're a group that is running several concurrent campaigns (so nobody has to DM continuously for too long) and we like our one-shots to dip back into former campaigns, or just do something weird for a change of pace etc. The race I'm currently least likely to play properly is an elf; for some reason I've never thought of one that appeals to me as a player, although I've got loads of elven NPCs I'm happy to play as a DM, not sure why.
Not that it would matter if a player was human all the time, it's a roleplaying game so if they're coming up with different takes on a human character that's still exploring various possibilities. It's when somebody wants to play almost literally the exact same character in every campaign/one-shot that I start to get weirded out, as I just cannot understand doing that. 😝
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Yeah assuming enough characters I don't think anyone only plays 1 thing, but I think people like 75% of the time play either human or non human. Just like people will have a favorite class and most often end up playing that. But they wont only play that. I assume any statement of only is an exaggeration in most cases. I think of only more as a persons default choice. Like my default choice is human, but my last character was a giff. If you look at my last 10 though probably 7 or 8 of them were human.
anecdotally, my first character wasn't human. however, most after that have been. honestly, i think it's often an 'odd man out' situation. i feel like i have to be bland to stick out, if that makes sense. a party of eladran and gensai and minotaurs and tritons (but never dwarves, for some reason)... all traveling in human lands. always so many humans everywhere running the shops, farming the land, sitting on thrones. i suppose it's nice that the humans rarely seem to see this wildly multi-cutural team as exceptional. but, i don't want to be another obvious exception. i want to start out unexceptional and build up neuance from there. I don't play human for lack of imagination, I'm just looking to explore something more than fish out of water or outsider.
honestly, i was most excited for spelljammer to play in many fewer human-dominated settings so i would feel comfortable playing not-a-human for once. hasn't panned out but i continue to hope.
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I am noticing a minor trend here with all the ideas bouncing out.
Not a single one removes anything from anyone to bring balance. They just add more stuff to humans. What ever happened to putting a few negative numbers to the other races?
And my complaint about all the race's being played like humans with extra features. No one goes through the effort of thinking and playing their character like they come from a different society. In most cases they should come from very different societies. They should be making social mistakes and having to deal with others social mistakes toward them.
Oh sorry its too hard to play like that. Then just play a human then. You are already one of those, it should be easy. Sorry about that but I hate people saying "but that is so hard". Sorry but non humans being played like humans is my biggest gripe since I started D&D back in the 1980's.
Why do you need negative numbers based on race/species? Those are really hard line gamey things that just limit choice. Why would you have cultural problems inherently? Don’t all these player options live on the same planet and share a common language. With common language and living in the same cities there would be no difference between a human, orc, or elf except a few genetic traits.
Why would they ALL live in the very same cities with the very same culture? That is a pretty mono-cultural view that does not take into account anything in any real world. the Earth has hundreds if not thousands of separate cultures all with differing moral view points and hundreds of different languages. Western and especially American culture is not the majority of cultures in the world.
Not everyone comes from the same hometown.
And especially for long lived races. Why would they have the very same outlook on life and culture that a short lived race would have?
If you can not think of a culture for a dwarf pick a remote human one and use that as a basis. Elves could be based on ST Vulcans, Orcs on ST Klingons.
If you have to jump through hoops to come up with some odd background to explain why your Orc acts like an ugly human then maybe you just do not want to play an Orc but just want some special racial trait that comes with it and would really just like a human with that racial trait.
I am noticing a minor trend here with all the ideas bouncing out.
Not a single one removes anything from anyone to bring balance. They just add more stuff to humans. What ever happened to putting a few negative numbers to the other races?
And my complaint about all the race's being played like humans with extra features. No one goes through the effort of thinking and playing their character like they come from a different society. In most cases they should come from very different societies. They should be making social mistakes and having to deal with others social mistakes toward them.
Oh sorry its too hard to play like that. Then just play a human then. You are already one of those, it should be easy. Sorry about that but I hate people saying "but that is so hard". Sorry but non humans being played like humans is my biggest gripe since I started D&D back in the 1980's.
Why do you need negative numbers based on race/species? Those are really hard line gamey things that just limit choice. Why would you have cultural problems inherently? Don’t all these player options live on the same planet and share a common language. With common language and living in the same cities there would be no difference between a human, orc, or elf except a few genetic traits.
Why would they ALL live in the very same cities with the very same culture? That is a pretty mono-cultural view that does not take into account anything in any real world. the Earth has hundreds if not thousands of separate cultures all with differing moral view points and hundreds of different languages. Western and especially American culture is not the majority of cultures in the world.
Not everyone comes from the same hometown.
And especially for long lived races. Why would they have the very same outlook on life and culture that a short lived race would have?
If you can not think of a culture for a dwarf pick a remote human one and use that as a basis. Elves could be based on ST Vulcans, Orcs on ST Klingons.
If you have to jump through hoops to come up with some odd background to explain why your Orc acts like an ugly human then maybe you just do not want to play an Orc but just want some special racial trait that comes with it and would really just like a human with that racial trait.
Again why would you inherently come from a some small orc tribe that doesn’t know about human culture? Why should all elves act like Vulcans. Even if most Elves did the player character Elf that happens to be in a diverse party wouldn’t be awkward like that at all (unless they wanted to be). It’s more likely they grew up in a diverse city. Just to give you real world reference of a diverse party that grew up in different cultures, but aren’t culturally awkward around each other I’ll give you my real life friend group. I’m Black and my wife is 1st generation American born Mexican. One of my best friends is nationalized Armenian who came to the US as an early teen. His girlfriend is 1st generation American born to Chinese. Our other friend is second generation American born Sri Lankan, and his wife is also Latina like mines, but her family has been in the US for as far back as she knows. My point is culture traits are role play and world specific and have nothing to do with stat blocks. Each of us do have very real cultural traits, but since we speak a common language and have years living in the same nation we are more alike than different.
I love how few people play a human character but still play their non humans almost exactly like a human with nothing more than one odd quirk.
This is to be expected, though, since 5E lore is generally lacking for any "race" that isn't some variety of Elf or Dwarf. And clearly enough people complained about the Kenku Mimicry ability and their limitation re speaking new words for the editors to completely scrub that aspect from the post-Tasha's version. Even though D&D is supposed to be a creative hobby, it's proven difficult to convince people to run with their own creativity.
Not to mention that a lot of the lore that does exist doesn't make a whole lot of sense. WHY exactly are humans so extraordinary that they can get an extra Feat?? Somehow a bunch of other humanoids that live much longer lives get 1 less Feat than a V.Human. So the logic of the fictional world is already faulty, but "Hey, it's not like most of these 'races' have differences in their cultures anyway!" and "We gotta make up some reason for people to Want to play as a Human!" *YawN* IOW, why should anything lore-related add up to a more cohesive whole?
I am noticing a minor trend here with all the ideas bouncing out.
Not a single one removes anything from anyone to bring balance. They just add more stuff to humans. What ever happened to putting a few negative numbers to the other races?
And my complaint about all the race's being played like humans with extra features. No one goes through the effort of thinking and playing their character like they come from a different society. In most cases they should come from very different societies. They should be making social mistakes and having to deal with others social mistakes toward them.
Oh sorry its too hard to play like that. Then just play a human then. You are already one of those, it should be easy. Sorry about that but I hate people saying "but that is so hard". Sorry but non humans being played like humans is my biggest gripe since I started D&D back in the 1980's.
Why do you need negative numbers based on race/species? Those are really hard line gamey things that just limit choice. Why would you have cultural problems inherently? Don’t all these player options live on the same planet and share a common language. With common language and living in the same cities there would be no difference between a human, orc, or elf except a few genetic traits.
Why would they ALL live in the very same cities with the very same culture? That is a pretty mono-cultural view that does not take into account anything in any real world. the Earth has hundreds if not thousands of separate cultures all with differing moral view points and hundreds of different languages. Western and especially American culture is not the majority of cultures in the world.
Not everyone comes from the same hometown.
And especially for long lived races. Why would they have the very same outlook on life and culture that a short lived race would have?
If you can not think of a culture for a dwarf pick a remote human one and use that as a basis. Elves could be based on ST Vulcans, Orcs on ST Klingons.
If you have to jump through hoops to come up with some odd background to explain why your Orc acts like an ugly human then maybe you just do not want to play an Orc but just want some special racial trait that comes with it and would really just like a human with that racial trait.
Again why would you inherently come from a some small orc tribe that doesn’t know about human culture? Why should all elves act like Vulcans. Even if most Elves did the player character Elf that happens to be in a diverse party wouldn’t be awkward like that at all (unless they wanted to be). It’s more likely they grew up in a diverse city. Just to give you real world reference of a diverse party that grew up in different cultures, but aren’t culturally awkward around each other I’ll give you my real life friend group. I’m Black and my wife is 1st generation American born Mexican. One of my best friends is nationalized Armenian who came to the US as an early teen. His girlfriend is 1st generation American born to Chinese. Our other friend is second generation American born Sri Lankan, and his wife is also Latina like mines, but her family has been in the US for as far back as she knows. My point is culture traits are role play and world specific and have nothing to do with stat blocks. Each of us do have very real cultural traits, but since we speak a common language and have years living in the same nation we are more alike than different.
You are the exact person I was talking about.
You use your life and social experience to totally color your fantasy worlds. You also probably live in a large and diverse city and think the world should or even is just like you group. Well its not. I have a Chinese friend, she is still considered Chinese by their government. And she tells me of a very different culture than mine in America. I also have hill billy friends, even South Korean Each has a slightly different view point and even culture. 7 different religions.
My gnomes are based on Irish/Scottish and the backwoods ones are German based. My Elves are more haughty French Tolkien esk. humans are more the English Knight/Merlin style. No I do not want everyone to play the very same way, play as you like, but your group of friends are so bland and homogenized. I bet your group have never even gone to each others cultural events.
How do people in Africa or China play D&D over there? How would their style be different? Expand your style. Play something other than a human Elf or Orc. How would you play an Elf raised by country Gnomes?
I never play anything other than humans. There are reasons to select the details that define your character that have nothing to do with pursuit of some particular mechanically advantageous build.
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I think the problem with these analysis and this is anecdotal but people who play humans likely are more stuck on them whereas people who play non humans are more willing to play a wide variety. So at the table its a 1 to 9 split of human to non human. The players who are non human will play elf one campaign, githyanki the next, tiefling the next while the human player will play human, human, human, human, maybe dwarf once, then back to human, human, human.
The divide is sort of I want to play the ordinary human experiencing a magical world people vs the im a human in real life why would I want to play humans people. And across most polls I think the latter is what wins out. The second group might have a favorite like tiefling or elf, but overall their drive is not human not elf. Polls with 50 races will hide what the real divide is.
I can only add my own personal experience, but I don't think I've ever encountered a player who will only play humans; every player obviously has to choose human or non-human for their first character, but I feel like unless players are committing to a single continuous campaign, then they're going to play different races at some point. Even if a player is human for all of their "proper" characters they can still be a Tortle in a seafaring one-shot or whatever.
So I think mono-race players are definitely going to be in a tiny minority, and some of those are going to be because they've only had the one character so far, because unless you play a lot of one-shots or are really unlucky with your characters you're never going to get to play the vast majority of the character ideas you might have (unless you're a DM, in which case you can just force them all into your campaign to play as NPCs 😉).
While I'm sure there are some players whose thought process is "I've never been a tiefling so I'll be that", I think once you start to get a feel for the game what matters more is the concept behind a character, and it's just as easy to come up with a concept that fits a human more than a dragonborn or an elf or whatever. The question is whether you do, or whether it's your favourite one at the time.
I've always had a huge list of non-human characters I've been thinking of playing, and it keeps growing, and if you'd asked before I would have said there was little chance of me playing a human. But when my brother wanted to run a one-shot, and then later started his Strixhaven campaign I ended up picking human characters for both (actually forgot about the one shot, but that character was a blast). In both cases what settled it for me was how the backstory idea fit in with the campaign, so even though humans are but a tiny fraction of the many, many characters I have lined up, I ended up playing two.
That said, in 5e I have a rapidly diminishing list of races that I haven't played, as we're a group that is running several concurrent campaigns (so nobody has to DM continuously for too long) and we like our one-shots to dip back into former campaigns, or just do something weird for a change of pace etc. The race I'm currently least likely to play properly is an elf; for some reason I've never thought of one that appeals to me as a player, although I've got loads of elven NPCs I'm happy to play as a DM, not sure why.
Not that it would matter if a player was human all the time, it's a roleplaying game so if they're coming up with different takes on a human character that's still exploring various possibilities. It's when somebody wants to play almost literally the exact same character in every campaign/one-shot that I start to get weirded out, as I just cannot understand doing that. 😝
Former D&D Beyond Customer of six years: With the axing of piecemeal purchasing, lack of meaningful development, and toxic moderation the site isn't worth paying for anymore. I remain a free user only until my groups are done migrating from DDB, and if necessary D&D, after which I'm done. There are better systems owned by better companies out there.
I have unsubscribed from all topics and will not reply to messages. My homebrew is now 100% unsupported.
Yeah assuming enough characters I don't think anyone only plays 1 thing, but I think people like 75% of the time play either human or non human. Just like people will have a favorite class and most often end up playing that. But they wont only play that. I assume any statement of only is an exaggeration in most cases. I think of only more as a persons default choice. Like my default choice is human, but my last character was a giff. If you look at my last 10 though probably 7 or 8 of them were human.
anecdotally, my first character wasn't human. however, most after that have been. honestly, i think it's often an 'odd man out' situation. i feel like i have to be bland to stick out, if that makes sense. a party of eladran and gensai and minotaurs and tritons (but never dwarves, for some reason)... all traveling in human lands. always so many humans everywhere running the shops, farming the land, sitting on thrones. i suppose it's nice that the humans rarely seem to see this wildly multi-cutural team as exceptional. but, i don't want to be another obvious exception. i want to start out unexceptional and build up neuance from there. I don't play human for lack of imagination, I'm just looking to explore something more than fish out of water or outsider.
honestly, i was most excited for spelljammer to play in many fewer human-dominated settings so i would feel comfortable playing not-a-human for once. hasn't panned out but i continue to hope.
unhappy at the way in which we lost individual purchases for one-off subclasses, magic items, and monsters?
tell them you don't like features disappeared quietly in the night: provide feedback!
Why would they ALL live in the very same cities with the very same culture? That is a pretty mono-cultural view that does not take into account anything in any real world. the Earth has hundreds if not thousands of separate cultures all with differing moral view points and hundreds of different languages. Western and especially American culture is not the majority of cultures in the world.
Not everyone comes from the same hometown.
And especially for long lived races. Why would they have the very same outlook on life and culture that a short lived race would have?
If you can not think of a culture for a dwarf pick a remote human one and use that as a basis. Elves could be based on ST Vulcans, Orcs on ST Klingons.
If you have to jump through hoops to come up with some odd background to explain why your Orc acts like an ugly human then maybe you just do not want to play an Orc but just want some special racial trait that comes with it and would really just like a human with that racial trait.
Again why would you inherently come from a some small orc tribe that doesn’t know about human culture? Why should all elves act like Vulcans. Even if most Elves did the player character Elf that happens to be in a diverse party wouldn’t be awkward like that at all (unless they wanted to be). It’s more likely they grew up in a diverse city. Just to give you real world reference of a diverse party that grew up in different cultures, but aren’t culturally awkward around each other I’ll give you my real life friend group. I’m Black and my wife is 1st generation American born Mexican. One of my best friends is nationalized Armenian who came to the US as an early teen. His girlfriend is 1st generation American born to Chinese. Our other friend is second generation American born Sri Lankan, and his wife is also Latina like mines, but her family has been in the US for as far back as she knows.
My point is culture traits are role play and world specific and have nothing to do with stat blocks. Each of us do have very real cultural traits, but since we speak a common language and have years living in the same nation we are more alike than different.
This is to be expected, though, since 5E lore is generally lacking for any "race" that isn't some variety of Elf or Dwarf. And clearly enough people complained about the Kenku Mimicry ability and their limitation re speaking new words for the editors to completely scrub that aspect from the post-Tasha's version. Even though D&D is supposed to be a creative hobby, it's proven difficult to convince people to run with their own creativity.
Not to mention that a lot of the lore that does exist doesn't make a whole lot of sense. WHY exactly are humans so extraordinary that they can get an extra Feat?? Somehow a bunch of other humanoids that live much longer lives get 1 less Feat than a V.Human. So the logic of the fictional world is already faulty, but "Hey, it's not like most of these 'races' have differences in their cultures anyway!" and "We gotta make up some reason for people to Want to play as a Human!" *YawN* IOW, why should anything lore-related add up to a more cohesive whole?
You are the exact person I was talking about.
You use your life and social experience to totally color your fantasy worlds. You also probably live in a large and diverse city and think the world should or even is just like you group.
Well its not. I have a Chinese friend, she is still considered Chinese by their government. And she tells me of a very different culture than mine in America. I also have hill billy friends, even South Korean Each has a slightly different view point and even culture. 7 different religions.
My gnomes are based on Irish/Scottish and the backwoods ones are German based. My Elves are more haughty French Tolkien esk. humans are more the English Knight/Merlin style.
No I do not want everyone to play the very same way, play as you like, but your group of friends are so bland and homogenized. I bet your group have never even gone to each others cultural events.
How do people in Africa or China play D&D over there? How would their style be different?
Expand your style. Play something other than a human Elf or Orc. How would you play an Elf raised by country Gnomes?
I never play anything other than humans. There are reasons to select the details that define your character that have nothing to do with pursuit of some particular mechanically advantageous build.