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.
Honestly, Elder Scrolls has it right: the offspring of two different races will always be the race of the mother, but with some traits of the father.
None of that funny crossbreeding stuff, just keep it simple.
So basically your mitochondria decides your species?
Personally I like keeping it a little more complicated. It's the same race as the mother, unless the mother is a ditto, in which case it's the same race as the father.
At first I read this as "these species can fuck each other". Then I realized that this is only concerning conception, all these species could fuck each other as they please.
Y or M means you can fuck that species. N means you can fuck that species without protection.
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.
You sure? I believe I remember there being a story about a halfling or a gnome drinking an enlarge potion or two to get hot and sweaty with some giantess.
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!"
It's called playing the long game, maybe look it up. You may have won the campaign(s), but I won the multi-generational war.
I think that win was a pyrrhic victory
I think your mom was a pyrrhic victory.
Ladies and gentlemen, we got 'em.
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!"
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.
In my games this would be called the HFY rule because of how pervasive the trope is in that theme.
Most races get more darkvision
Half-lings get more luck
Dragonborn get more breath weapons
Humans get more
They have the power of discrimination on their side
Orcs and humans are natural enemies.
Like elves and humans.
Or dwarves and humans.
Or gnomes and humans.
Or halfings and humans.
Or humans and other humans.
Damn humans! They ruined Toril!
You humans sure are a contentious bunch.
You just made a favored enemy for life!
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.
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 ^^
Humans get to know that they're better than everyone like how batman is better than superman
Humans get to..(checks literary notes) not be genocided by other humans, until the xeno menace is destroyed.
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