Don't humans have the ability to fuck everything? It's why half elves and half orcs exist, but no non-human hybrids.
Ah, good old Book of Erotic Fantasy. It's so gloriously stupid that everyone should own a copy. That table is by far not the silliest part of the book.
It's only bested by the official sex rulebook for The Dark Eye, which is an April Fools joke that spiraled out of control and has actual rules for intercourse – deliberately bureaucratic and unsexy ones included purely as a "you asked for it" joke at the reader's expense.
Dryads: I'll breed with anything
Dryads (earlier that day): I don't care for Lizardfolk
Found the bard. ^
One day I'm going to play an asexual bard, just to subvert expectations.
This is the truth they don't want us to know.
Technically it implies that all these other races are diverged near humans, humans being relatively unchanged remain close enough to produce viable offspring, but with different non human races being diverged from each other to the point of non viability.
So basically the racial map for a D&D setting would have humans at the center, with half children in each of the spokes of a wheel, and every non human race being nodes located in the environment where they developed in extremity, and then from there you can build the environment under the premise of the conditions that developed elves or dwarves or orcs from the human starting point.
This would also have to include a backstory spanning tens of thousands of years.
You're thinking of dragons. Humans only have the ability to fuck elves, orcs, and dragons.
Depends on the setting, some have other half species
Humans get to slowly raise the temperature of the world over 100 years until it causes a mass extinction event. It's very effective.
"Parry this, you filthy casual!"
Vumans get a feat, which is arguably one of the strongest abilities. Base humans are notoriously weak though.
Base humans are generalists, which by their nature won't have something specific that stands out. +1 to each stat and I think an extra skill is nice if you like not being terrible at anything. Not great at anything is a tradeoff that other races don't have though...
Don't humans get two extra proficiencies to represent their adaptability and quick learning?
Boooooring
Boring AND conceited. I always roll my eyes at this trope of "unlike all these different fantasy beings that are good are specific things, we can be good at everything". Seems like imagination falling short, that other beings would not have their own breadth of possibilities, and humans wouldn't have their own unique advantages that are particular just to them.
If I had to pick one thing, it would probably be something teamwork related. Humans are very social beings compared to other animals.
Humans get privilege.
Careful, you'll trigger their human fragility.
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.
and your playerbase (majority human)
The 3 dogs and 2 cats out there playing BG3: "Finally! Some recognition!"
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
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.
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.
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.
Humans should get "All healing received is maximized (ie: treat it as if the dice each rolled their maximum value)" to reflect how humans weirdly bounce back from things that should have been fatal.
I have a homebrew that I need to revisit and fix the formatting of for mixed heritage PCs, and the system I came up with meant that I had to give every race four traits. Some of these would be minor, like darkvision, but there had to be four. I went with a once-per-day refuse-to-die ability and a proficiency-per-day advantage on a roll of your choice, so that the one thing humans do best is push through the tough situations
But that's Orcs?
They have the power of discrimination on their side
Most races get more darkvision
Half-lings get more luck
Dragonborn get more breath weapons
Humans get more
Honestly I hate playing humans and want to explore other fantasy cultures but that free feat is too fuckdamn good.
Humans in OneDnD have an insp point they can toss on shit now which is pretty cool, feels like an embracing of the trope that humans will act as a glue that can bridge cultural differences between other races.
Humans get to know that they're better than everyone like how batman is better than superman
they're
Let him be, it was a simple human mistake.
Sorry mb
Better at being the real criminal.
I play mostly d&d 3.5 and pathfinder 1e And I think human is the most powerful race with his free feat level one ^^
That would be the Variant option for human in 5E, , I believe, which means its up to DM discretion.
So, it inherently isn't a super safe option if you're relying on that feat for some reason if you're a nerd who just workshops builds at various levels for fun.
I've banned regular human from my games.
Humans get to..(checks literary notes) not be genocided by other humans, until the xeno menace is destroyed.
Humans max out their primary at level 4, most op racial ever
Their primary what?
Ability score, although a couple of species can also do that
No they don't, you're thinking of custom lineage
https://www.dndbeyond.com/races/1-human
Humans get +1 to all stats, which means they start with 18 on their primary. At level 4 they get 2 points like everybody else, thus maxing it out and getting a +5 mod.
I play Dragonborn and Humans are pretty much the meta build for all classes because of the feat bonuses.
I'm not going to say exactly which build, but let's just say Human X Hybrid can one-shot everything in the game that's not immune at Level 5.
Say the build! Say the build!
Humans are space orcs
Humans write the story. Best power of them all.
And microplastics
+1 to every stat is great when you play point buy
Idk man. Human T. Bard (the T is for The, yes i like mst3k) was one of my favorite characters to play because he was just a normal bard dude who riffed villians, and sometimes friends.
Human's superpower is being the stand-in privileged class.
humans made up for it in warcraft with reputation and spirit bonuses though
Fizban Dragonborn get a much better dragonbreath and a pretty respectable ability at level 5. Regardless of Chromatic, Metallic or Gem.
And the redone Earth Genasi get to turn any class into limited Barbarian with a bonus Group stealth bonus
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
in 5e, variant human gets an extra feat.
Does that mean they can run really fast? Or is it not on a leg?
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.
