Finally, there’s the hardcore simulationist angle, which I ignored completely above.

Many fantasy writers, whether that be books, shows, computer games, or RPG media… know what a human is and can do, and design the humans in their setting to comport with their experiences of what a human is from the real world.

It serves as a kind of grounding baseline, a foundation of familiarity that doesn’t need any work from the audience. “Ah yes, a human. I know what that does.” A useful starting point that ensures the audience has something low-concept and relatable in an otherwise high-concept offering.

With a simulationist mindset, humans are often the “default”, and least “fantastical” of the species in the world, because there’s an established preconception of what humans are like.

Other species can have supernatural dexterity and grace, or magic gifts, or strange relationships with the laws of physics, because they’re made up, and the mundanity of the human serves as a mirror that highlights and emphasizes the fantastical elements of the other species.

This approach isn’t so much an attempt to incentivise diversity as it is just our natural inclination to not interrogate the known and familiar. Of course humans don’t live for a thousand years, or have supernatural strength, or an immunity to poisons, we know what humans are like.

It’s a fairly small and easy leap to invent a new species and say “this species is immune to fire.” It’s a leap to ask “what if humans were immune to fire?”, and many people never even consider playing with that, because in our minds, humans aren’t fantastical creatures.

Here’s a surprising outlier from this trend:

It is legitimately impressive to see a game manage a spread like this, most MMOs and rpgs see an overwhelming lead for the “human” choice, whereas in BG3 it’s just equally popular with half-elf and elf.

There’s a lot that’s been said about BG3 and how it approaches the roleplaying game hobby, how their approach to presentation and roleplaying differs from the computer RPG genre in general, and how it relates to DnD, where people feel that the game made a positive contribution and where people feel that it didn’t. I won’t get into that, because that’s a series of essays all by itself.

Anyway, for games of this style, where you offer a generally cosmopolitan setting with a range of viable options, of which one is human, it’s distinctly unusual to see a spread like this

AND YET.

With the exception of dragonborn, (which often skews upwards as an outlier by the “dragons are cool” factor.) there’s a generalized trend in this graph with “most like a human” on the left, and “least like a human” on the right.

The most popular choices are “looks like a human” and “looks like a human with funny ears”, then progresses through “looks like a human, but a funny colour” and then through “wildly different bodytype”, with githyanki landing at the bottom for a host of reasons outside of what I discussed above.

I’ve seen a lot of perspectives on this, from ttrpgs, LARP and videogame developers, so here’s a potential answer and discussion on that point.

There’s a lot of competing factors and philosophies that go into a player’s decision of what species to play in a fantasy game. Here’s some examples:

• Some people go for narrative coherence - they had an idea for a story, and pick the species that best supports their idea in setting.
• Some people go for aesthetic preference - they want their character to look a certain way, wear a certain outfit, or synergize with a colour palette.
• Some people go for mechanical preference - the species they pick has an ability they want access to, or species-locked gifts or talents they want.
• Some people go for escapism, choosing to play as a creature that’s wildly different to themselves, so as to disassociate their experience from their real life as much as possible.
• Picking randomly.
• I have this cool mini/prop/costume that I want to use.
• Prebuilt characters.

Regardless of your game or setting, or the incentives you put into your world to play fantastical species, if human is an option, it will be an overwhelmingly common choice, because, regardless of your setting, there are a large number of players who want to play a character that “looks like them.” There are many possible reasons for this too:

• Their preference for any of the above criteria just happens to land on human.
• They want to play a self-insert, to make the character as close to themselves as possible.
• They find it helps with immersion if their character or avatar matches their self-identity.
• They’re uncomfortable stepping too far outside the bounds of their own experience or identity.
• They have problematic beliefs about racial or sexual identity that restrict their creative expression.

My point here is not to imply any judgement or failing. Do whatever’s most fun at your table, and don’t worry about people who try to tell you you’re “doing it wrong.” I simply want to highlight that there are a lot of incentives for someone to choose to play a human that are unique to the human option in whatever game we’re discussing.

There is a percentage of your playerbase that will only choose human, regardless of what options or incentives you offer to do otherwise, whether those incentives are game-mechanical or narrative. (e.g. “other species have a species-trait that gives them a mechanical advantage over humans”, or “in this setting, humans are treated as a lesser species to the other options, you will face increased scrutiny, opposition, and stigma if you play as a human.”, etc.)

In many games, this is fine. If your group all want to play humans at your Forgotten Realms DnD session, or your multiplayer Baldur’s Gate run, then there’s no issues with this - it doesn’t imply anything about your setting that you don’t want, and it’s not impacting anyone else. Have the fun you want to have, and don’t worry about anything else.

However, when designing ecosystems and settings, this can run into a problem. If you are running a 1000 person LARP, or an MMO, and you want a cosmopolitan high-fantasy setting where all the different sophont species are commonplace and intermingled, or you want to run a setting where humans are a rarity, it can lead to a bit of narrative dissonance if the player-experience is very human-centric. You write “1% of people living in this city are human” and then players see more than 50% humans while traveling around, and your setting conceit is undermined.

Worse, your players experience of your setting is heavily dominated by what’s in front of them in any given moment. If your setting is 90% dwarves, but the party is 100% humans with a human NPC guiding them, then their mental associations, and picture of the world is going to be one where the world feels like it contains “mostly humans”

My ideal “solution” to this would be to try to foster “buy-in” to the world and setting from the players of my game… If I want a properly immersive setting that’s trying to do a specific thing, then it’s much easier to accomplish that if the players are invested and commit to the same goals. A really good example of this would be if you’ve ever tried to run a scary horror game. If the players are bought in, and roleplay jumpy/frightened characters, who run away from danger, you get a really different vibe to if they no-sell it and try to kill everything they come across and never act fearful.

However, if you’re designing a system for mass-play (e.g. an MMO, a Larp, a ttrpg sourcebook etc), you can’t really do that much, beyond an opening blurb that tries to sell the playerbase on the value that committing to your ideas will bring. (and most people skip those kinds of forewords in game books!)

It’s common for designers to have some sense of the “too many people want to play humans” issue when making their game, either subconscious, or through experience or observation of games they’ve played. Such designers commonly look for ways to redress this balance, to try and push the in-universe demographics away from human-dominant and towards what they feel the setting should look like.

Lacking any other way to incentivize diversity, a common crutch is to look at the category of players that choose their species based on mechanical criteria. You push that category out of picking “human”, by offering more interesting choices elsewhere, and thus your players experience a more cosmopolitan party.

The second picture of Konsi I ever drew :)

Part of the fun of having Konsi as the main character of this story is that I can just make up a new pretty dress every time the day changes.

Here’s a Bonus Konsi I drew during Pride Month.

I live in a set of apartments (60 in all). Once a year we have an “AGM” where everyone’s supposed to show up, and we go over stuff like the resident’s association finances, and plans for future works and changes to policies. (e.g. we had to remove a tree because it died, or the council want to put parking restrictions in our neighborhood, or the bike sheds need repainting, etc.)

It’s not really as oppressive as a HOA, because your interaction with it is once-a-year, and if you have an issue you just email the people running the committee, you don’t really have to contend with constant complaints and jockeying about whether your driveway is tidy enough or any of that nightmare stuff… but the once-a-year-meeting can sometimes drag on for hours and it’s very tiring.

There’s sometimes a discussion around an issue before we vote on it. Sometimes particularly beligerant residents get into circular arguments where they’re not listening to each other, and neither of them are going to change their mind, they’re just taking up air in the room going back and forth and making no progress, sometimes the argument is in spite of a lack of needed information and everyone is just speculating on what might happen etc etc.

From my extensive time DMming, more than anything else, it’s become very easy to spot when such discussions have no chance of resulting in a productive outcome, and I’ve started to notice that a quick interjection that summarizes the situation and suggest we move on and deal with it via email, is invaluable. “Look, we don’t know yet if the change to the renter’s rights bill is going to pass at all, or what exactly it’ll contain. We should wait for that before trying to figure out how to handle it.” or “The motion we’re discussing is for the committee to research how much this installation will cost, not whether or not we’re going to do it.” or “That information sounds useful, you should email it to the committee after the meeting so they can make sure it’s considered.”

I think, just having anyone in the room who’s focused on staying on task can save you a huge amount of time, in basically any group-discussion forum. Our AGMs are almost an hour shorter now, and there’s an increasing number of attendees who are on board with my philosophy of “are we going to be able to solve this now? no? email the committee and move on.”

This was the most “androgynous” looking goblin I had…

Konsi’s first two years of life were as a goblin in a goblin clan, so would have eaten the same as the rest of them, after that, the next four or so years of her life were as a street urchin in Waterdeep. She ate a lot of scavenged food from trash cans and rats.

She’s definitely eaten beetles.

This is all fine. I’m not arguing that this is a problem for ONLY DnD… It’s just that was the subject at hand, and it’s a problem with DnD.

I’d say the bigger issue tends to be around certain players feeling creative or desperate and trying to lean into the plot/setting with less respect for the rules.

This is an interesting point, but I would not say that the problem is with “certain players.”

DnD is heavily marketed and promoted as THE ttrpg. The default. The one for everyone. WotC talk about the game as being designed for an extremely broad pool of players, of many different styles. Players who want a more narrative experience, with less of a focus on rules are also a the target market for the system. If WotC say the game is for them, and the game doesn’t handle what they want from it, then the problem is either with the game design, or with the game’s promotion, marketing and reputation.

It’s interesting that my post was largely about how DnD 5e fails to cater towards people who want a strict set of rules for simulations, and your argument is about how DnD fails to cater towards people who want a loose set of rules that can be bent. I’m a firm believer that when you try to please everyone, you please nobody, and this is DnD’s biggest weakness as a system: If you have a strongly cohesive group of players who want a specific style, DnD will do an okay job at it, but there will always be a better system out there. It’s the ready meal you put in the microwave because it’s easy, not the specific gourmet restaurant that does that one dish you love perfectly.

DnD’s not really trying to cater towards any specific niche though - the design wants to appeal to the widest audience possible. By trying to cater to every style, it means you can pull together a group of players with a range of preferences, and put them in the same game. That’s a big part of why it’s got so much ubiquity after all. The logistics of setting up a group to play are rough for a lot of people, and just being able to put a game together is easier when your system promises fun to a wider range of players.

I’m not seeing any mention of it, but I think a lot of people might be interested in Break! - it’s specifically aiming to make a game that has the vibes of an “adventure of the week” system, where you learn of an ancient ruin, gear up, venture through the wilderness, explore a crumbling tomb for loot, then get back in time for dinner and an ale. - Basically I’m saying that the game is specifically designed to try and tell the kind of stories that DnD is designed for.

Where break differs from DnD is in it’s approach to mechanics. Downtime, journeying, exploring an adventure site, and fighting are all their own small, light subsystems of rules, so there’s clear guidelines for how to run each of them, and they’re largely aimed at highlighting the cruical and interesting moments for each of those activities, while quickly glossing past the faff and monotony of what lies between.

I’ve lost track of the number of DnD campaigns I’ve played where the DM didn’t really have a clear framework for what to do on a long journey, and resorted to just tossing a couple of random encounter fights in because it “felt necessary”, but they never felt like they advanced the story or contributed anything interesting to the game.

It’s also a game you can recruit random NPCs and the like to join you and follow you around, and when they run out of HP you check to see if you remembered to give them a name. The world knows that characters who have their own names are important to the story, and characters who are just “that random bandit mook who surrendered and we brought them along” are not. If the character doesn’t have a name when they hit 0hp, they die on the spot.

Oh, and fights take 10 minutes, rather than 2 hours - so you can have one in the middle of a session without it becoming the whole session. Yum.

I would say that the main thing that “sucks” about DnD is that DnD has often been portrayed as appealing to the kind of nerdy rules-lawyers that like to argue “hey, the rules say (x) so I can do (ridiculous thing)” and end up in a big argument with their DM about what the rules do and do not say. A lot of my groups have been like this, and it’s okay for a game to cater towards that specific playstyle.

I’m not trying to make a value judgement whether this is a good or a bad way to play a game. It’s also just one of many ways to play the game. You can (and given the stuff I talk about below, perhaps you should!) play it differently, but regardless it is quite a common table-style that the various holders of the DnD IP have encouraged throughout its history.

What is a problem is that this kind of playstyle can often be quite acrimonious, especially when combined with adversarial DM styles, and arguments can get rather heated and angry. I’ve heard many a tale of a group that split up over a rules argument that left everyone at the table too angry and frustrated to stick together as a group.

DnD 4e made huge strides to mitigating these problems by having a whole lot of very tightly defined keywords and language which could almost always be resolved into a solid, consistent, official ruling. You had to do a lot of work to learn exactly how the language was being used, but it was possible to get a table of six rules lawyers to sit down and develop a shared understanding of what the rules meant - and know there was a right answer to any specific question.

DnD 5e has taken huge strides to re-introducing the uncertainty in the system, by very loosely defining how things work, or not providing official answers at all, preferring to go with a “the DM will make a ruling” approach. This can be a nightmare for groups that like to have a defined, correct, answer to things.

Now of course, many alternate systems take this stance as a given “The rules are a set of loose guidelines, the GM will run the game and just make up a lot of the rules on the spot.” - and this has a lot of advantages. It makes it easier to write systems because you don’t have to be completely rigorous, and it leaves the GM with the freedom to run the game they want, and it encourages players to not get hung up on the details - all healthy…

But DnD is in the unique position of already having proven with 4e that it can nail down a rigorous set of principles and a style guide that leaves ambiguity behind, courting a whole section of RPG players who desire that, and then retreating from that position with a new, fuzzier, system document.

Why is this a “problem” for DnD specifically? Well… I find it’s extremely common on internet forums like this one for a person to say “I was in a game and (x) happened” and then immediately three different arguments spawn, running in separate directions, all founded on the premise that the poster is playing the game wrong or doesn’t understand the rules. It’s exhausting.

I just finished playing through a short Runequest campaign, and it’s certainly an interesting system and setting. It’s extremely “oldschool” in feel (probably stemming from the fact that it’s been around for forever.)

The big struggle with Runequest and Glorantha is that there’s just so MUCH of it, and a lot of the setting is rather dry. It’s a little like reading a history book, except you have to learn what everything means, because it’s a self-contained setting. I feel it appeals quite strongly to people who want a lot of “lore” and history in their game, and who want to really get into the weeds of what a political marrage between these two clan leaders means for future trade agreements and military alliances. People who like their fantasy stories to have an index in the back of character names with a pronunciation guide, and their family trees and stuff.

Like… the first hour of character creation was rolling through d20 tables that randomized the eventual fates of each PC’s grandparents through various wars and major historical events, so we could determine stuff like “is your family famous?” and “how much do you hate wolf pirates?”

Anyway, here’s my girl Tikaret, she’s a priestess of Issaries, and she discovered one of his lost aspects on a heroquest once.

You’re right that it’s not clear in the spell text exactly how to handle this, (a common theme with 5e stuff.) - However I’m remembering having a discussion a whole while back about “how old is the new body?” and finding a Sage Advice post saying it’s however old that species is when it reaches adulthood, so I was basing my claim off that.

On average, it’s cheaper to use reincarnate, you just provide a bodypart, and, so long as you didn’t die of old age, reincarnate will make you a new “newly-adult” body. It’s more expensive than Clone in materials, but much lower level, and if you roll a long lived race like an elf, gnome, or dwarf, you get a lot more mileage out of it before having to go around again.

I’ve been meaning to ask for a while, do you have any official character art reference sheets for Angela (and/or the others?)

Your Laeral is very similar to the way I run Laeral in my games, which is lovely. I think she’s a good character, the tragic “I live forever” schtick works well on a genuinely good, intellegent, competent leader type.

I do always feel that she makes friends with the PCs too easily in most of my games. (I have a similar problem running Vajra… which at least evens itself out a bit whenever the PCs suggest having the two of them meet up…) - but also, if you do (good-aligned) adventures out of Waterdeep for long enough, you should probably end up friends with both of them.

It’s actually a significant issue in Waterdeep’s setting that she can’t just planeshift and visit Khelben, because of where his soul is.

(It’s not somewhere you can planeshift to…)

The villains in question were running a business at a street faire in Waterdeep. We had pegged their group as suspicious in general, and figured this was some kind of cover to pass on covert messages or meet with other villains that we were tracking. Wanting to get an opportunity to get a good look at them, and stake them out to see who they were meeting, we showed up and spent some time hanging around keeping an eye on their activities. (They had not met us and we had no reason to think they would suspect us of foul play.)

After a couple of hours of not much happening, we started passing shifts around keeping an eye on them, and Konsi went on a walk around the stalls at the faire, where some gnomes from the temple of Gond were making candyfloss with some kind of contraption. Faelys has a massive sweet tooth, and Konsi (who was magically disguised as a gnome so as not to cause concern in the streets of Waterdeep) figured it’d be really cool to learn to make candyfloss, so she asked the gnomes how the machine worked. They refused to tell her, but she was determined to figure it out, so she watched them operate the machine for a while to try and learn what she could about it.

As a part of this investigation, she cast detect magic, to see if the machine was in any way magical (it wasn’t, it was purely mechanical) - so, a little despondant, she returned to the group staking out the villains, only to discover that all of them had magical illusion auras - as they were all wearing magical disguise amulets.

Thanks so much, it means a lot to artists to hear this kind of thing :)

It’s going to be hectic in the next few months, so I may be a bit sporadic, but everything will be back to normal by the end of October, and I should be able to knuckle down and focus on drawing a lot more!