why are humans so boring in most games?
I feel like all i have ever seen is that humans are the baseline. They are average at everything, can be or do anything, have little to no bonuses or minuses. because of this, they are shittiest race, for everything. When you could instead just pick a race that gets bonuses to whatever class you want to play.
how do we fix humans?
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>They are average at everything, can be or do anything, have little to no bonuses or minuses. because of this, they are shittiest race, for everything. When you could instead just pick a race that gets bonuses to whatever class you want to play.
The funny thing about this is while humans often have no bonuses to particular attributes and thus from a gameplay perspective make for "average" or "lackluster" [insert class here], they are often represented in the setting as the BEST. All the best wizards? Human. All the best warriors? Human.
What this results in is an entire race of bland Rey-esque Mary Sues.
>fix
Unnecessary, humans are there so normies can get into the game with ease, or for people who just want to self insert. Nothing wrong with that
Absence of floppy hats.
Human's strength is their versatility, they lack the shortfalls of other races that hinder them outside their specific niche. They cover all the bases pretty well unlike say autistic elves who lose their shit the very moment they can't shoot their precious bows.
i have always liked to think that human's "special innate ability" is adaptation.
able to quickly pick up enemy weapons and tactics and counter it.
Change the setting. Make it something like an intergalactic alien cyberpunk theme. Chances are, humans get a bonus for hometown in the Milky way or better intelligence compared to most other races. Maybe even giving them tech bonuses for it like translators or even transportation bonuses for ships. All you need is a good DM and some imagination
No thought is put into them, that's why.
Granted that same can often be said of elves and dwarves too, but at least elves and dwarves that also have little though put into them still have pre-existing media to work off of while most humans are just "well, they're humans and shit, you know, they do human stuff in generic medieval cities."
It's not a problem with the race, it's a problem with lazy as fuck writers not wanting to sit down and make any of the races compelling.
Prob cause you're a boring person
Few settings/systems actually put enough though into it, and just decide to have humans be baseline because somebody has to do it apparently. Also that it's difficult for many people to envision a type of generally humanoid social creature that lives its life in a different way than a human would, so they just get saddled with a different cultural archetype or pre established fantasy trope.
Having humans actually have a niche or focus would demand a closer inspection of how the setting would work. Say, a scifi setting where humans tend to live in ecunemopoli and close-packed space arcologies, so all humans have a natural talent for tech-use and social skills from having to both maintain, exploit, and work with technology and other humans constantly.
Primarily because most games use them as a baseline and generic "you can be whatever you want!"adaptability type traits to make up for basically making them a non-race. Also, games tend to give humans many cultures but not give them cultural traits like they do for demihumans, so they all feel sort of bland.
>Also, games tend to give humans many cultures but not give them cultural traits like they do for demihumans, so they all feel sort of bland.
Probably because it's hard to do "humans have many cultures" without making analogs to real-world ethnicities, and no developer these days wants to risk giving different "racial traits" to those cultures because it would be seen as insensitive to those real-world analogs.
So basically, all these varying "human cultures" are reduced to basic fluff about where they come from geographically, and little else.
This, you just need to be special from creation and are too boring to make a good character yourself.
the fact that the op only mentions stats/classes as an argument supports this
It's because you're boring.
because most of the time said game "writers" are either game developers themselves assigned to fill in the role or just actually fucking horrible authors who couldnt make it as a professional writer on the literary circuit
I would assume the reason is similar to why your gender doesn't influence your stats.
We don't have any other sentient species IRL to compare them to, so they just end up defaulting to the "average" race.
I'm gonna answer this one mechanically, since other folks are addressing the fluff. This "humans are boring" shit is what happens when you do race-and-class. You give all the human's toys to the other races, and you turn race into nothing but another slot in a build, and the humans have nothing left to do except be the "baseline" guy.
If only humans are fighters, thieves, clerics, and wizards, and all the nonhumans have their own class or classes that represent their particular culture and nature, then humans stop being the mechanical nobodies.
I miss race-as-class
Why the fuck would I not want to play the best race? Fuck Im a human and I love it. We can do anything. Be anything. We can be good or evil. We are the tip of the food chain. Fuck pointy ears and midgets and furry folk. Human is the true masterrace
Shit posting aside though. I like the aesthetic of being an average guy in a fantasy world. Feels more fish out of water than being a fantasy race.
I hate this idea that humans are boring like NIGGA look at the hundreds of cultures we have across the planet not to mention that almost every fantasy race is just one of those cultures except the humans are replaced with elves or some gay shit.
I'm aware it's a videogame, but don't Elderscrolls games have varying human ethnicity-races with different traits? I can't recall hearing flak about that.
Check out Beyond the Wall and Adventurer, Conquerer, King. They're OSR systems that do interesting stuff with race-as-class. Halfling Outrider should be a class in every system.
Skyrim has bonuses to skills, not attributes, so a Nord is technically not stronger than a Breton, he just starts with a higher skill in one and two-handed weapons while Bretons start with a higher skill in the various schools of magic. Skyrim also has no penalties to skills by race; each race has 15 levels in all skills, and then one skill at 25 and four at 20. No one has like, 10 blacksmithing instead of the usual 15. Basically, no one's really "inferior" to anyone else, just different kinds of "superior", and they avoid conflating it with the actual physical attributes of the race.
They DID have actual attributes in addition to skills in Oblivion and back, in addition to the usual skill levels, but that was before the whole "getting offended at fucking nothing" culture started taking off.
>in addition to the usual skill levels
Fuck me, meant to say "in addition to penalties as well as bonuses to each". It's too late for this shit.
What bonuses you would give to humans, if you could?
Endurance, probably. There's the whole persistence hunter aspect to early human culture, and humans can take a surprising amount of damage before succumbing to it thanks to adrenaline. Make them start with a bonus to Constitution and a bonus to saving throws, and maybe even a very weak method of fighting with negative HP for a round or two.
Longer, more fun answer - adaptability. Humans can survive and thrive all over the world, and have settlements everywhere. Now this requires a bit more work on the part of the DM, but they should take a look at each human nation and come up with small bonuses for each ethnicity based on region. The not!Vikings from the North gain a bonus to strength for example, while the humans from the steppes to the East gain a perception and bow bonus. You could go as in-depth with that as you want as long as your setting can support it.
Someone hasn't actually read very many D&D books. Pathfinder humans are ridiculous.
>Ability Score Racial Traits: Human characters gain a +2 racial bonus to one ability score of their choice at creation to represent their varied nature.
>Bonus Feat: Humans select one extra feat at 1st level.
>Skilled: Humans gain an additional skill rank at first level and one additional rank whenever they gain a level.
So they gain a bonus feat, +2 an ability score, and an extra skill point every level. What this means is that they highly varied individually in abilities, each one has picked up a unique skill or trick, and they all learn a wider set of skills than other races.
And they also gain alternate racial traits just like all the other races in PF.
>Alternate Racial Traits
Adoptive Parentage
Awareness
Comprehensive Education
Dimdweller
Draconic Heritage
Dragon Scholar
Dual Talent
Eye for Talent
Fey Magic
Focused Study
Giant Ancestry
Heart of the Fields
Heart of the Mountains
Heart of the Sea
Heart of the Slums
Heart of the Snows
Heart of the Streets
Heart of the Sun
Heart of the Wilderness
Heroic
Industrious
Innovative
Institutional Memory
Military Tradition
Mixed Heritage
Piety
Poison Minion
Practiced Hunter
Psychic Defense
Rationalize
Reptilian Ancestry
Self-Made Fate
Shadowhunter
Silver Tongued
Social Ties
Tribalistic
Unstoppable Magic
Wayfarer
Oh man, did I mention the human only sorcerer bloodline, Imperious. Or the human only feats that all basically make you fucking awesome.
I find this swap around funny honestly. Only one of my players is human and his backstory is average of interest. Two non humans made interesting backstories that use thier race. But the rest of them could litterally be any race and it wouldn't make any difference. Like your description it seems most of my players see it as merely a stat block. And my players never remember that their party is mainly non human until I bring up their race. Out of the two I'd rather humans with good backstory to non humans with a race that is merely a stat block.
Though in 5e variant human is amazing with it's specialist feat.
>why are humans so boring in most games?
You play with boring people.
Human warrior is one of the worst possible examples of this, because they have arguably the best racials for warrior in (vanilla) WoW. Hands down for Arms warriors.
Humans in general in WoW have some of the most interesting and varied lore. You couldn't have chosen a worse start for your thread OP.
They made great paladins and priests too with the bonus to spirit and maces. WoW humans are fucking rad as hell.
The problem is that humans have to be the baseline, because it's how things are compared. If some race is stronger than a normal human, they have +2 Strength or whatever; conversely any race weaker than a normal human has a -2 Strength or whatever. Humans thus are +0 to everything.
If you do make humans +2 Charisma (which seems to be what they usually get, Charisma bonuses), it means everything else in that world is less charismatic than a regular human. If you want something more Charismatic than normal humans, you now have to give it a +3 Charisma or a +4 Charisma or whatever, and the whole thing becomes and arms race.
They can serve as a blank slate.
>Human warrior is one of the worst possible examples of this, because they have arguably the best racials for warrior in (vanilla) WoW. Hands down for Arms warriors.
Eh. Depends on what you want to do. For PvE, if you want to do deeps, Humans are good. Orcs sort of have an edge on them until you realize there's not a ton of good end game axes compared to swords and maces. Thing is, gearing eventually makes the spec racials trivial, at which point, the other races outshine Humans because they have racials that gear don't really replace. For tanking, Humans aren't that great and pretty much every race is better or equal in that aspect.
In PVP, Forsaken and Gnome are the kings of Warriors. I'd say just about every race beat Humans there.
By not doing pseudo-medieval yurop lukewarm boring human monoculture, and actually assigning some cultural traits to the nation at hand (or humanity as a whole if you really bend on doing monocultures)
>Humans in general in WoW have some of the most interesting and varied lore.
Humans are easily the most boring race in WoW.
Maybe they are boring in Warcraft (or whatever your pic is from), but they are not boring in other settings (LotR is an example).
Because you are the boring one.
Humans in most fantasy media are just like humans IRL.
The same humans that are protagonists and antagonists of 99% of fiction ever written, filmed or otherwise made. Including many works much, much more valuable than fantasy flicks.
If you can't draw from this richness, instead needing to be "speshul" through some superficial traits like beards, pointy ears, "my grandpa was a devil xD", or shallow racial "cultures" made up by fat basement dwellers, well, sorry for you, but that's your problem, not ours.
You now realize that if DnD were designed by DnD elves, elves would be the baseline.
What race you pick shouldn't be the defining part of your charter. It can play a role in their identity, but it shouldn't define it. Humans are only boring if you choose to make them boring.
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Humans are much, much better at throwing stuff than any other primates (or really any other animals). Instead of the stereotypical Elven archer, humans should be the race with the focus on ranged combat.
How is this a fucking question? Of course humans are the baseline. Rulebooks are written by humans, so they are written from the perspective of humans. To us, orcs are strong and stupid, but if an orc wrote an RPG, we'd have penalties to strength and bonuses to intelligence. And of course humans might seem "boring" to you. You live in a world of them. Elves would be boring too if they bagged your groceries and drove your bus.