Human’s superpower is being the stand-in privileged class.
Humans write the story. Best power of them all.
There is legitimately an issue in all fantasy games where designers build a rich diverse setting with many different races that have their own exciting cultures and designs and differences, but if they include “human” about 50% of players choose human. This persists through boardgames, RPGs, videogames and LARP. The exact proportions vary a bit from game to game and from playerbase to playerbase, but it’s very common.
Larian revealed some stats a while back for BG3, about 50% of players chose human, elf, or half-elf (the three most “human” looking races". If you choose one of the existing characters to play as, Gale is the most common. It’s an encouraging result, there’s more diversity in the picks for BG3 than most other games, but it’s still very “human” skewed. Halfling, Gnome and Gith were much less commonly picked.
If you’ve been tabletop gaming for a long time, your instinct is to think things like “but why would anyone play as a human? that’s boring!” or “I play these games for escapism and I want to play as something different to myself.” or the like, but the reality is that there’s a very large cadre of players who want to create characters or avatars that are “like them” - they want to self-insert, or they want to pretend they are their character, and have difficulty squaring that with being a gnome or a goblin or a Dragonborn.
As such, you can get this weird disconnect between your setting writing (where there’s a large variety of different, interesting races in the world) and your playerbase (majority human) which skews your design towards a human-centric viewpoint that you don’t necessarily want - especially if you put work into the design of cultures of other races, and you want players to explore a variety of ideas and styles.
So what’s the solution? - a common design solution is to mechanically incentivise players to choose outside of human, by giving humans disadvantages, or giving other races unique advantages that are desirable. Is this the right approach? your mileage might vary, but it’s one of the easiest “patches” to encourage diversity in the playerbase, so it’s a common choice.
Does 5e do this? probably not - human is very mechanically powerful, especially at low levels where the variant human feat can make a big difference… but they did make humans more “boring” than the other races, hopefully encouraging more dragonborn and gnomes and half-orcs and so on.
Surprisingly, I think I disagree with most of what you’ve said in this comment.
While I understand that it can be discouraging for a creator to have the species and cultures that they have worked on not really be explored by the majority of players I don’t think it is an issue most of the time.
It also seems a bit odd to me to lump elf, half-elf, and presumably also dwarves in with humans, given that they usually make for the hard core of fantasy races. If those aren’t considered distinct then I’d wager that maybe the issue isn’t that they are less distinct and cool compared to other races but something else. Either that races that are seen as “distinct” actually lean into some sort of “gimmick”, or that people simply pick what they think looks good, and they aren’t into how Gith look, for example.
While I know there is a large group of people playing Human mainly, I feel like that reflects the fantasy that is being set up by most games that I have engaged with. Humans are the “standard” and other races are exotic, deeply different, and usually rare. At least that’s what seems to me like the most common fantasy setting type (and also my preference). That’s why I don’t mind when the majority plays humans, as that does reflect the story of the game. It seems more odd to me when the party strolls into town and they have a tiefling, drow, aasimar, and lizardfolk. When all those races are stated to be unique, strange, and alien to most people and those players don’t really get a chance to shine with their “weirdness” in the party because there is no baseline that they can compare themselves against. After all: when everyone is super, nobody is.
The only time I can recall this creating a ludo-narrative dissonance is in Guild Wars 2, where humanity is supposed to be a dying (alien) race with few members left. By all accounts the people of the land should be a majority of charr (cat-people, basically). But of course, the “human female meta” as it is called (meaning people playing conventionally attractive human, female characters with “the sexy outfit”) is greater, and as it turns out most people are playing humans. The result being that what you see when walking around is mostly humans when it “should” be mostly charr. A lot of people just play characters they think “look good”.
As for why people are playing humans. I think there is a reason that you haven’t touched on. I, for example, will play a human for almost every one of my characters unless I have a good reason not to. This is because I base my characters around a theme or a story and I want the focus on the character to be on that theme or story, and not on their species.
I also don’t think designers make humans boring or bad on purpose to discourage players from playing them. They could just not include humans if that is what they wanted (Plenty of good examples of this. Mousegard and Humblewood for RPGs. Deep Rock Galactic, Dwarf Fortress and a ton others for video games). I think most often it comes down to people not knowing what to do with humans. Most fantasy races tend to be “human but x”, so when you are making a human you don’t really have anything “but”, meaning that you usually end up is a situation of “humans, well, we all know what a human is, don’t we? I can’t see anything special about humans that one of these other races don’t embody in a greater capacity.”. (Side note: I like how GW2 handled this. The 5 races have fairly good and distinct themes. Charr are militaristic, Asura are obsessed with knowledge, Sylvari are young and still figuring out the world, Norn are shapeshifting and spiritualistic, and Humans are devoted to their gods who brought them to this world.)
No, I’m not lumping dwarves in with “human, elf, half-elf”. Elves and Half-elves in many games are visually very similar to humans, sometimes a bit taller sometimes a bit skinnier, but often near indistinguishable apart from the ears. Personally, I’m a big fan of games that make their elves more “weird” so they feel more fantastical - but those are pretty rare. Players who feel uncomfortable self-inserting into races that “don’t resemble them” often find that elves and half-elves are close enough to not be a deal-breaker. (This can be seen fairly clearly in the BG3 choices - where elf and half-elf and human all have about the same number of players, but dwarf has significantly fewer players.)
There are plenty of games out there where humans are not “the default” and, yes, I’m largely talking about these. In my initial post I did talk about how this is not so problematic in DnD.
I’m intrigued by your statement “I’ll always play a human unless I have a good reason not to, this is because I base my characters about a theme and want the focus to be on that.” - Why is it the case for you that you can focus on the story/theme with a human, but not with gnome or an elf or a dwarf? If your theme or stories vary from one human character to another, then race isn’t playing into your focus… so wouldn’t this also work if your characters were all dwarves?
In my many campaigns of 5e DnD, I’ve actually now played “gnome wizard” three times. All three were focused around their story and theme, and felt completely different to each other, both in personality, and in the main content of their character and story… The fact that the characters were gnomes wasn’t really ever a significant part of their narrative. I don’t really understand why this variety or focus would only be possible with humans.
GW2 is indeed a good example of the problem I’ve been discussing, where the worldbuilding and play experience have a disconnect. It’s probably the largest IP where that disconnect is noticeable to regular players.
I have, in fact, played many games where the designers have made humans “bad” or “boring” on purpose to discourage players from that, and even some where they explicitly advertised their games as such - because they want their games to be fantastical. I’ve played plenty of games where the designers built a bunch of races to populate their universe, and explicitly cut humans out of the game altogether, because they’re always viewed as a default if they’re included, and they wanted their players to immerse in the worldbuilding they’d made.
I’ve read fantasy books where the authors have specifically talked about avoiding having “humans” in their setting, because they believe the readers will automatically empathize with the human characters by default, and they wanted complex factional politics where the reader was capable of choosing any of the characters on different sides of a conflict as the one they identified best with.
This does happen in fantasy game design, especially from designers who are more concerned with baking in-depth cultures and variety into their settings. Often these are smaller indie projects with less visibility though.
There’s also an issue where fantasy fiction can’t get away from this idea of fantasy “races” with “cool powers”. It adds this additional layer of representation that needs to happen when it’s already difficult to make real human cultures and groups feel represented in a game without infinite NPCs or world-building. Humans tend to be one or two cultures and the other “races” get coded as others. Most games would be better off without including the unquestioned trope of “fantasy races” (yes, D&D included) unless they actually built their setting and game around the idea (which most have not).
There is an advantage of “baby’s first introduction to the idea that different peoples can have different cultures, and they’re all valuable.” - for some people they’ve never experienced or ever thought about this… and it’s “simpler” to grasp than (the much better design) of different regions having different cultures, and each region having a mix of races.
On the other hand, there’s a massive disadvantage in portraying “all people of this race are (stereotype x), all people of that race are (stereotype y)”
DMs and GMs, this is a place where you can shine with your worldbuilding. Make towns that have a mix of races, and give towns their own culture. It’s worth it and much more immersive.
I honestly don’t see why people picking humans is an issue, just let people choose what they prefer.
I tried to explain in my post, let’s go again.
Imagine you, as a designer, have put a lot of effort into making an interesting cosmopolitan setting. It’s very frustrating when the bulk of your playerbase represent a different reality than the content of your setting. It’s especially frustrating in mass social games (like MMOs or fest-LARPS)
When you have games that are heavily player-driven, the reality of your setting is what the players actually experience, not what you wrote in the setting document. If your intention is to build a complex rich cosmopolitan setting, but then everyone plays humans, they don’t get to experience all the rest of the content you made - the result is you’ve put time and work into designing content that doesn’t get used, and the world you end up with is “oops, all humans.”
If I devote ten pages of my PHB to the culture and habits of gnomes, and then nobody plays a gnome, that’s “wasted pagecount” - RPG books (Especially books like DnD) have limits on the pagecount, and you want all the content you provide to be used. Those ten pages could have been dedicated to something that impacted the table and made the game more enjoyable for everyone.
There’s no issue in the individual case, but I hoped to explain why designers feel the need to encourage people to diversify.
The reality of your setting is what the players actually experience, not what you wrote in the setting document.
I’m gonna expand on this, because I think it’s an interesting thing to consider, and an important lesson for players and DMs alike.
If you, as a player, write a big complex backstory full of important and interesting events for your character, but keep it hidden from the other players - that backstory essentially doesn’t exist to the table. Yes it can affect how you think about your character, but it’s not a part of the collective story until it impacts the table. This can have negative outcomes in roleplay.
If you, as a DM, write a bunch of secret information for your NPCs, but the players never see it, it’s essentially not real to them. If the knights of your city have a super cool wyvern emergency response team, but the players never see it, that detail never existed.
Let’s say, for a random example, that you grew up as an orphan in a dwarf mining colony, and your parents were… not the best. you experienced abuse and discrimination, both from them and the dwarves in the colony. Eventually fled and made your own life elsewhere. You’ve decided to write on your sheet that your character hates dwarven culture, and mistrusts dwarves, and always views their actions in the most negative light possible. Now let’s say this childhood trauma is so bad you don’t want to think about it, or talk about it with your party members. You keep it secret.
Now, let’s say the DM wants to bring this part of your story into the overall story, so they set you on an adventure that involves diplomacy with a local dwarven mine, or they give you a dwarven NPC to travel with the party, or some other dwarf-centric plot. If your character acts “weird” around the dwarves, constantly refusing to trust them, or speaking ill of them, or looking for malfeasance where there is none - in your head you’re just playing to character, and your actions make sense. The other players don’t know your history, so what they see is completely arbitrary prejudice.
To those players, your backstory isn’t a part of the story they’ve experienced or the world until you bring it to the table. Your actions and decisions might not make sense to them, or seem out of character. Your choices might be incredibly frustrating to the rest of the table when they obstruct or interfere what they perceive to be the party goal. Without the context of why your character is like that, their experience of your character is massively different to your own.
Here’s a second example: Your character used to live somewhere far away, they committed a murder, then fled their city, changed their name, and came to (wherever the campaign is set) to start over. They’re ashamed of what they did, and don’t want anyone finding out for fear of being tracked down and brought to justice, so they’ll never tell anyone about it.
Now let’s say your DM is running… Dungeon of the Mad Mage… a mega dungeon plot where the characters go into the dungeon, then fight their way through monsters until they’re level 20, and never see civilization. They never have an opportunity to bring your secret to the table and make it part of the story. Or let’s say they’re just busy with other plots and forget.
This backstory detail might be important to you - but the other players never see it. From their perspective it never happened at all, it wasn’t part of the narrative, it’s not an extra dimension to your character, and it’s not an event that happened in the world - they just don’t know about it… so it’s not real from their perspective.
Now, I’m not advocating against characters having secrets, or DMs having intrigue in their plot that drives outcomes without the players seeing it directly. If you want depth in your storytelling, it’s important to have flaws and phobias and secrets, and opportunities for your character to grow and all that good stuff.
What I’m saying is, if you have an important secret that you haven’t told the other characters, it can be worth thinking about what your character is doing from their perspective. What does it look like to a person who doesn’t know your secret? Where are the differences between the story you’re telling yourself, and the story you’re telling them?
When designing “hidden content” consider what circumstances might cause your character to reveal their secret. If your intention is to keep it hidden for the whole campaign, then think about what that does to the collective story.
This lesson is especially important for DMs, because it’s so easy to devote hours and hours of planning to things the players might not discover. It’s often important in your story design to have things going on that the players don’t know about, so they can unearth them. Mysteries need secrets… but when planning your campaigns, always consider the questions “when do the players learn this?” and “how do the players learn this?” because until they do, it’s not a part of their world,
Well in my case I like the idea of interacting with those wonderful and fantastical species, not being one of them. I am no traitor to my own species. Smh
In 5e so far, I’ve played:
Half-Orc, Goblin, Kobold, Gnome(3), Halfling(2), Tiefling, Tabaxi, Harengon, Kenku, Genasi, Dryad, Warforged, and Fairy.
I’ve yet to touch Dwarf, Elf, Half-Elf, or Human. I should probably play a Dragonborn and a Tortle.
What are the numbers for Gith players? That was what I chose, and loved it from the start.
The numbers are from Launch Weekend only, there were about 30k Gith players, the lowest of any race - about 10% of half-elf, elf, and human. Halfling was second lowest.
Oh, I didn’t recognize your name at first! I love your comics.
The numbers will never make sense to me, why be human or human flavored when you can be green space lizard(?) vikings that ride red dragons? I understand that many people want the self insert role, but how fun can a self insert really be beyond one campaign?
Give me spicy races any day.
This makes me want to give humans something besides the boring “generalist” abilities, like +1 to all skills or bonus feat thing in my setting, but I don’t know what lol
I haven’t played in a couple decades but I loved how 2nd edition handled it. Humans have one racial ability above everyone else, we’re generalists. No special bonuses to see through illusions, no magical night vision, just the ability to be any class, and able to reach all levels in said class.
humans made up for it in warcraft with reputation and spirit bonuses though
