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.
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.
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.
Variable based on the game. In modern d&d humans are the least specialized, while in old d&d (like 2e) humans were mechanically Inferior until higher levels, where they had the highest level cap. Also demi-humans (elves, dwarves, etc) were fewer in number, Tolkien-style, and sometimes discriminated against. In fact it kinda seemed like the less liked a race was, the more inherent abilities they had.
Why is it that in fantasy, humans always suck the most?
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:
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:
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.
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.
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.
Variable based on the game. In modern d&d humans are the least specialized, while in old d&d (like 2e) humans were mechanically Inferior until higher levels, where they had the highest level cap. Also demi-humans (elves, dwarves, etc) were fewer in number, Tolkien-style, and sometimes discriminated against. In fact it kinda seemed like the less liked a race was, the more inherent abilities they had.