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mrsonvsyoutubeThis is an absolutely fascinating video.
Most times when people talk about the humanity of fantasy creatures in TTRPGs it's a discussion of prejudice. Or our real world morals. Of racism.
But this video is approaching the topic with the framing of game design and psychology, and it has a lot of fresh angles to consider.
Highlighting this comment from Bluecho4:
On another note, a species being "people" does not negate their ability to be antagonists, even on a large scale. It just requires recontextualizing their antagonism. Give them "people-reasons" for opposing the protagonists. Whether that is diagetic, like Drow living in deeply unjust hierarchies that profit from internal division, to a dragon's greed being a mirror of our own.
Person-enemies, by their nature, demand complexity. Individual monsters or monstrous societies granted personhood don't need to be rational or sympathetic, as such. If they're going to be granted "human-ness", they must simply have human qualities we recognize. Anger, desire, love, desperation, pride, spite. A PC should look at, say, Drow or Goblins menacing them, and say "but for the grace of the Gods, that would be me". Much as how a Drow or Goblin PC stands with the rest of the party because of very "person-y" reasons.
You can have traditional "antagonist species" in your D&D campaign, and also have them be entirely person-able in a party. It just demands a bit more effort in the world-building. (And it makes the truly inhuman adversaries seem all the more inhuman, because they diverge even farther from what we consider "human".)
And the reply by henry6715:
Yes, exactly! I don't think "antagonist species" are so hard to build. There have been "antagonist ethnicities" historically - non-agrarian peoples who live on the fringes of agrarian civilizations who raid for vast swaths of wealth: vikings, steppe nomads, etc.. Goblins can both be authentically vicious raiders who burn and plunder settlements regularly and be people.
This also opens up a lot of historically inspired narrative possibilities: A great hobgoblin conqueror has taken vast swaths of land, now divided amongst their descendants; which lands will stay under the control of the invading "monsters" and eventually integrate cultures? Which lands will rebel against their ruling caste?
Thoughts
Date: 2025-01-27 10:25 am (UTC)Well, that's one approach, and it works, although you have to remember that nonhumans may also have very alien perspectives behind the conflicts.
For Torn World I built a whole ecosystem of sea monsters, each species having its own reasons for tangling with humans. Boats look sexy. Boats look like threats. Shipwrecks make great nests. Fish in nets are easier to catch. Aggressively territorial. Humans are delicious. Ropes look like edible seaweed. And so on.
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2025-02-17 11:58 pm (UTC)https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/755217978668269568/a-miracle-in-the-night
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2025-02-18 09:37 am (UTC)Re: Thoughts
Date: 2025-02-18 01:37 am (UTC)https://roach-works.tumblr.com/post/775517459792953344/whats-more-likely-the-entire-animal-kingdom-is
Re: Thoughts
Date: 2025-02-18 02:00 am (UTC)Emotions aren't instincts, though. Instincts are survival routines that can be passed down, and when needed can work faster than thought. Some can manifest as emotions, like fear of snakes, but they're deeper than the feeling itself.
In fact the root of instincts is valence: the ability and desire to move toward what sustains life and away from what threatens life. It's the first thing an organism has to develop in order to persist, and while it is a simple binary, it's surprisingly hard to get up that first step. Even sessile organisms need ways to meet their survival requirements and thus can be responsive in ways that humans just don't think about.
So when crafting an organism for storytelling, think about what it needs, how it pursues those needs, what threatens it, how it defends itself -- those are all basic biology. And biology is deeply weird.
One of my favorite references is Humon Comics.
Also ...
Date: 2025-01-27 11:12 am (UTC)I find that most people just have an appalling lack of imagination. They struggle to grasp how different motivations could work, or how to tell nonhuman stories. Hell, humans have a hard time understanding a humpback's fishnet as technology because they cannot hold it in their hands.
On the other hoof, I have observed that, while many people lack imagination, the ones with the most of it often become gamers and will be quite capable of -- and interested in -- playing truly alien creatures. You can see games that have tried it, although most have a sad tendency to water it down.
One great example was the Warforged from Eberron, who originally were a kind of golem that gained sapience. They didn't heal naturally but required repair, and they couldn't bleed out. They didn't sleep, but did have a sort of rest period. Those aspects were removed in later editions because players and gamemasters found them too challenging.
I found them easy and well-built, and I had no trouble setting up challenges for a Warforged character because, obviously, the world was built for humans. He didn't fit through most doors except barn or warehouse doors. He couldn't stand on a floor without risking it breaking underfoot. He had to know where to find repairs and then avoid pissing off those humans who could make repairs. He had to deal with people who hated him just for what he was. But in combat, he could keep going after others characters were beaten down. That all made playing a Warforged character very different and interesting. There's no such thing as an overpowered character, only underpowered challenges.
I think people often get enchanted by surface features -- the aesthetic, as the video put it -- and don't care about the substance underneath. Fine, if you want that, just dress up. Come up with an explanation like "Drow are evil and raped enough other women to leave half-drow littered everywhere, of whom the survivors formed this village of folks who look like drow but have the major strengths and weaknesses buffered by other genetics. So you can play one of these, because they're not all evil." It's just when do a lot of that, you lose the actual diversity -- and in most games, the "alien" races are less weird than foreign human cultures.
I'm usually more interested in the infrastructure myself, and I'm attracted to games with really different characters. World Tree, for instance, has multiple whole emotions that humans just don't have. The cani are greatly driven by salaffan and deffa, emotions that govern relationships based on chouf challenges for situational authority -- to the point that you can take a disadvantage of not feeling them, which makes other cani consider you a freak.
I liked the observation that certain creature types come with preset assumptions. In one case, I really didn't want to deal with that, so while A Conflagration of Dragons has dragons, it does not have humans, elves, dwarves, etc. The Six Races are all hand-built from elemental traits. They'd all work fine as character races. So would a dragon young enough that it didn't have too much power yet. Or hell, you could play as old dragons motivated by lust, greed, and territoriality -- all emotions that humans understand just fine. They were, after all, modeled on billionaires.
Another thing people overlooked is that game rules are loose parts. This was actually my second experience gaming, because I got one session as a player in someone else's game before my friends assigned me as gamemaster because they wanted to play in my storyworld. AD&D was badly suited to my style, but I bashed it against the wall a few times and picked out usable parts. You want to play a drow? Sure, we can do that, these are the challenges and some ways of coping. We all had the range to deal with that level of complexity, and it was ... glorious.
It's good that people can make all different kinds of games and characters, because we need that diversity.
Re: Also ...
Date: 2025-02-17 11:55 pm (UTC)And while yes, there are concerns there. And culture can override instinct in many cases, biology is still a foundation on which thinking and culture is built, and shapes the directions it will naturally grow.
A lot of people... are not great at self-reflecting on what aspects of human behavior are shaped by our instincts. From protectiveness over children, to discomfort with death, to feeling lonely.
I made an alien species once with an amphibian reproductive cycle, and they have absolutely zero childcare instinct. A tadpole of their own species might as well be a random fish, instinctually. They can choose to look out for them, if they want to, but it's not a reflexive built in urge.I wrote a whole short fic about it. I'll have to dig that up and post it later.
And you do have to balance that against stereotyping and other racist assumptions, when worldbuilding. But people definitely overcorrect and end up making a lot of species feel just... human with different aesthetics. And it gets bland.
>> I find that most people just have an appalling lack of imagination. They struggle to grasp how different motivations could work, or how to tell nonhuman stories.
Oh for sure, that too.
I think think it's any inherent lack? I think it gets trained out of them as they grow up.
A combination of being fed a very samey diet of entertainment through their life, and giving into the "cringe" as it's being called now.
They learn to kill their imagination every time it really starts to branch out. Clip the leaves in tight and close to a "normal" shape.
I see it over and over in, for example, watching co-op let's plays? People start to have a wild hypothetical conversation and one of them is mid-idea and stops themselves. Goes "I'm being weird", and they kill their idea. Strangle it and toss it aside. It's too "weird", too "silly". They feel embarrassed and have to stop themselves.
It takes a special skill to get over that impulse to stop yourself, to keep going. People like Drawfee have trained themselves out of the kill. Improv actors train the kill away thoroughly. And some lucky souls avoid learning the kill in the first place.
I started to learn it somewhere in my teens, and have been training to get rid of it every since.
Never kill any idea before I've really seen its wings unfurl and can tell how it'll fly.
Only discard something early if I'm super busy nurturing a different idea and don't have the time and energy to feed both.
>> Hell, humans have a hard time understanding a humpback's fishnet as technology because they cannot hold it in their hands.
Oh yeah.
I absolutely do not remember where I read it, it was yeeeeears ago somewhere online.
But the idea that technology isn't "A Thing" but is Applied Knowledge, really flipped my perspective on the matter.
A bubble net is technology. An octopus hiding in a shell is technology. Language is technology. Some technology is simpler or more "primitive" (for lack of a better word) than others, but that doesn't make it non-technology.
>> Come up with an explanation like "Drow are evil and raped enough other women to leave half-drow littered everywhere, of whom the survivors formed this village of folks who look like drow but have the major strengths and weaknesses buffered by other genetics. So you can play one of these, because they're not all evil."
That's similar to a situation we had in one of the games I tried to DM. One player made a half-drow whose mother had been raped and he didn't have all the drow weaknesses. He focused more on stigma and not quite feeling like he belonged in his own family, and wanting to prove himself.
All very fair places to build roleplay from!
But much different than really wanting to dive into the psychology of a nonhuman.
>> World Tree, for instance, has multiple whole emotions that humans just don't have.
That sort of thing has always been really hard for me. It's much easier for me to handle the idea of lacking a certain emotion, even if I have it (see my amphibians ("Amphiros" is the human name for their species)), or a rebalancing of existing human emotions to a different scale that feels inhuman in total but if you pick at each individual thread, you can see how it connects to us.
One thing I struggle with but in a way that's enjoyable and I keep throwing myself at, is inhuman perceptions. It's mostly a struggle to write? And sometimes to remember "oh yes, [character] should be noticing smells more". But the perspective change just from different senses alone can really make a sophont see the world differently.
As the webcomic Freefall points out, being heavily scent-oriented changes your perspectives on time. Sight and sound are effectively instant, but smell lingers.
>> I liked the observation that certain creature types come with preset assumptions.
Oh yes. It's so hard to properly change certain types of creatures. And some are even less flexible than others. If you write elves, there's a few different ways you can go before you confuse people. Dwarves? Good fricking luck. And I do like writing common pop culture dwarves! But. Even though I'm mostly happy here in the preset fenced in area of "dwarf", I still don't like that the fences are there.
>> Another thing people overlooked is that game rules are loose parts.
Hell all my DnD books have a little section near the start where they basically go "but if you don't want to sue these rules, change them up as you like". A reminder that ultimately the game is about having fun with friends, not Following The Proper Guidelines.
>> It's good that people can make all different kinds of games and characters, because we need that diversity.
For sure!
And thanks for your patience with how long it took me to reply to this. I have to beat my ADHD/anxiety around with a bat sometimes. And then all my internet troubles didn't help. But I was determined to reply eventually, and here I am!
Re: Also ...
Date: 2025-02-18 09:22 am (UTC)*laugh* Sure, and they'll say that while doing racist things, with or without realizing it. Most people are far more caught up in talk and appearances than in actually solving problems.
Race is just a delusion. Biology is what it is. There are plenty of differences between clusters of people -- haplogroups, ear wax texture, tooth shoveling, etc. -- but you never hear racists talking about those. The patterns don't match what people think of as "race."
>> A lot of people... are not great at self-reflecting on what aspects of human behavior are shaped by our instincts. From protectiveness over children, to discomfort with death, to feeling lonely.<<
That is true. Also, those things differ between individuals or cultures.
>> I made an alien species once with an amphibian reproductive cycle, and they have absolutely zero childcare instinct. A tadpole of their own species might as well be a random fish, instinctually. They can choose to look out for them, if they want to, but it's not a reflexive built in urge.I wrote a whole short fic about it. I'll have to dig that up and post it later.<<
Check out The Color of Distance. Alien tadpoles for the win!
Anyhow, it's K-strategy vs. r-strategy in reproduction. A species that has to invest lots of energy in reproducing few offspring will be very protective of them, whereas a species that produces many offspring each with little investment will not.
>> And you do have to balance that against stereotyping and other racist assumptions, when worldbuilding. But people definitely overcorrect and end up making a lot of species feel just... human with different aesthetics. And it gets bland.<<
Easy to fix by hand, though, if you take traits to mix and match. Or you can develop an alien species inspired by a plant or animal, which lots of writers have done. Hell, I've got a dolphin divination deck with nonhuman concepts like "swimming between hope and fear."
>>They learn to kill their imagination every time it really starts to branch out. Clip the leaves in tight and close to a "normal" shape.<<
A common problem, although nowadays it's more popular drug children into compliance. Easier, I suppose.
Me, I'm just not containable that way. I give off ideas like other people give off body heat.
I've seen some other folks with really far-out ideas. Look up Bard Bloom's work some time. The Wrath of Trees has a sessile protagonist.
>>But the idea that technology isn't "A Thing" but is Applied Knowledge, really flipped my perspective on the matter.<<
I would describe technology as a system of tools and principles that work together.
>> That sort of thing has always been really hard for me. It's much easier for me to handle the idea of lacking a certain emotion, even if I have it (see my amphibians ("Amphiros" is the human name for their species)), or a rebalancing of existing human emotions to a different scale that feels inhuman in total but if you pick at each individual thread, you can see how it connects to us.<<
I agree that it's easier to subtract than add emotions.
However, if you break down emotions, most of them turn into valence. Lust is a moving-toward-sex feeling. Fear is a moving-away-from-threat feeling. And so on. So you can take something that humans don't care much about, like rocks, and consider that some other species would be passionate about it. They'd have a word for "feeling like it's time to search for rocks" and "the feeling of finding the perfect rock." Which is exactly what rock-nesting species of birds and fish do. Blue bowerbirds are obsessed with blue things. They have really strong feelings about not only the color but the aesthetics of creating a bower, painting its walls blue, and adding blue home decor. Yes, really.
>>One thing I struggle with but in a way that's enjoyable and I keep throwing myself at, is inhuman perceptions. It's mostly a struggle to write? And sometimes to remember "oh yes, [character] should be noticing smells more". But the perspective change just from different senses alone can really make a sophont see the world differently.<<
That's hard for most people. However, it gets easier if you study animal or plant senses a lot. Some people have made translations that are very helpful. You can even buy tech now that will let you detect things other animals can sense naturally, from sonar to heat vision.
I have senses outside the human standard, so it's different for me. But I totally get the feeling of trying to grope through writing unfamiliar terrain. I cannot count how many times I had to rip out a chunk of story for Torn World because some polar thing was different than the temperate version, even after spending hours meticulously researching it. So frustrating.
>>As the webcomic Freefall points out, being heavily scent-oriented changes your perspectives on time. Sight and sound are effectively instant, but smell lingers.<<
Yep. But even in the moment, it changes things. People who tell me I'm a freak for sniffing things will turn around and ask me if the milk is spoiled. Fuck off, I only do favors for people who are nice to me. Yes, I can detect the difference, but that doesn't mean I'll share it.
The best way to learn about how sense influences experiencing the world is to take a dog for a walk and let them lead. The dog will follow its nose, and you can see from where they stop to sniff where things have happened. So a dog rarely travels in a straight line. The dog is always sniffing to find where messages have been left and read them.
When I track by scent, it's usually closer to a straight line because I'll smell something as the air moves rather than on the ground. I can track a food truck by scent, or strong enough flowers. One time I encountered an unfamiliar stench, thought about the context, then started hunting around for stinkhorns -- and I found them!
>>Hell all my DnD books have a little section near the start where they basically go "but if you don't want to sue these rules, change them up as you like". A reminder that ultimately the game is about having fun with friends, not Following The Proper Guidelines.<<
I love games like that.
When I write about games, or recipes, I try to tell people which things they can substitute freely ("any hard sugar candy can be bashed into flavored sugar for this recipe") and which are vital ("this recipe depends on the blood orange cordial").
>>And thanks for your patience with how long it took me to reply to this. I have to beat my ADHD/anxiety around with a bat sometimes. And then all my internet troubles didn't help. But I was determined to reply eventually, and here I am!<<
I'm glad you did. :D Don't worry about timing, I've had people comment on posts that are years old. I'm used to it.