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Decline Worst playable fantasy race?

Which race do you like the least? (not gameplay related)

  • Human

  • Black Human

  • Elf

  • Half Elf

  • Gnome

  • Halfling

  • Dwarf

  • Half Orc


Results are only viewable after voting.

anvi

Prophet
Village Idiot
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Kelethin
Frogloks are the best race.
 

Darkzone

Arcane
Joined
Sep 4, 2013
Messages
2,323
Where is the option to vote "I hate all the races equal listed here besides the Humans" ?
Just pick any 40k's imperial unit as your Avatar. Everyone will know.
There are no "Death Korps of Krieg" avatars and the other avatars for 40k are shit. I would also take an Jin-Roh Kerberos Panzer Cop avatar, but i cannot choose my own avatar. So i'm only left with this.
And no i do not hate per se other races, i just hate this listed overused tolkienesque races.
I like Half-Giants, Mul / Goliath, Lizardfolk, Githyanki, Constructs (like Warforged) and Yuan-Ti (including Snake Man). And to some extent: Tiefling, Aasimar, Kenku and Shadar-Kai (if you divorce them of their Elf descent), but that depends on the setting. There are other good races like Half-Demons from the Role Aids (currently under Paizo) series. I will add here that Mul, Tiefling, Aasimar and Half-Demons are not "true" races since they do not have their own societies that pass down their genetics and culture to their descendents. They are just a very distinct variant of Humans, that lives among Humans in Human societies, but this applies also to Half-Elves and Half-Orcs.
 
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Alrik

Educated
Joined
May 14, 2020
Messages
72
The main issue for me is that most settings decide to be a liberal delusion where every place is completely cosmopolitan entirely without ethnic strife (or at best very superficial ethnic strife).

I get the dislike for elves, especially considering the often lazy implementations of them, but they are still my favourite considering that their IMO proper implementation is uncannily close to my own temperament and physiology. Arrogant, elitist, insular, technosceptic, venerates nature and beauty, detached, total and utter lack of urgency, tall, lanky, fair skin and hair, prominent cheekbones. The natural conflics between elves and dwarves/humans are not nearly explored enough in modern settings just to cater to special snowflake players who want no limitations in superficial options. Their longevity not being taken into account in worldbuilding is another reason most implementations are terrible, an adult elf should be a demigod compared to a human.

But that doesn't necessarily mean that elves should be vastly superior to humans on a civilizational level, the human determination, ambition, risk tolerance and sense of urgency gives them several significant power advantages over elves.

Half elves also generally suck as implemented, but I think they actually have a lot of potential in a setting where human-elven relations have broken down and human society has to deal with the few half elves exisiting in their society who could be a dangerous fifth column (half elves would realistically only exist in human society from young reckless elven males seeking adventure and novelty in human society during a time period where they were not despised there, human male/elven female couples are a laughable proposition).

Dwarves are somewhat interesting though I would never play as a dwarven character myself. The anti-elves in a sense, sharing the connection to nature but rather than wanting to maintain the balance of the ecosystem they seek to exploit it for power and comfort. Their strong sense of honor is commendable though.

Gnomes and halflings are thoroughly uninteresting. The idea that they would have any power or influence on a macro scale is laughable considering their physiology and temperament (halflings especially). Though I guess in most implementations they don't, but that raises the question of why they are even included in the first place.

Any setting that allows half-orcs in human/elven/dwarven society is a bad one, can't imagne a realistic setting where half-orc rapebabies aren't systematically euthanized at birth. The only half-orcs that should exist are ones where human women have been kidnapped by orc tribes, which should exclude them as a PC race in most settings unless you have a game based around the MC being a half-orc, in which case all other races (aside from pure orc I guess) are non-playable.

"Black humans", "arab humans", "east asian humans" etc. are only bad in the sense that they have become ubiquitous in settings where they do not make sense. If you want to implement them in your game they should have their own geographically separated civilization with a reasonable explanations for the divergent evolution (e.g. a tropical climate) and not just have them appear in some nordic town without explanation as to why this happened. In a fantasy setting transportation should be very slow and resource intensive so the mixing of geographically separate ethnicities should be extremely limited, unless it's some clusterfuck super high magic setting where everyone can teleport at will but those are pretty much intrinsically terrible anyway.
 

DalekFlay

Arcane
Patron
Joined
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Messages
14,118
Location
New Vegas
The main issue for me is that most settings decide to be a liberal delusion where every place is completely cosmopolitan entirely without ethnic strife (or at best very superficial ethnic strife).

Skimmed your post as it's a little tl;dr, but not sure I'd agree with this at all. If anything developers lean to easily on the crutch of using the different fantasy races as modern day racism/sexism tropes. Elves are almost always a fallen race treated like shit by humans, orcs are almost always seen as barbarians out of place in society, etc. etc.
 

Citizen

Guest
Understandable. The boner would then surely give you away.

It's much simpler - I don't associate myself with characters I play, and staring at the thicc female booty for 40 hours straight is much more pleasant that looking at the dude's ass. Especially in 3rd person perspective games that place the camera exactly behind the character's back, covering half the screen with BUTT
 

DraQ

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Chrząszczyżewoszyce, powiat Łękołody
Any setting that allows half-orcs in human/elven/dwarven society is a bad one, can't imagne a realistic setting where half-orc rapebabies aren't systematically euthanized at birth. The only half-orcs that should exist are ones where human women have been kidnapped by orc tribes, which should exclude them as a PC race in most settings unless you have a game based around the MC being a half-orc, in which case all other races (aside from pure orc I guess) are non-playable.
Most of interesting settings require some degree of looseness to permit interesting things happening - interesting things like adventurering parties and also half-orcs.

You have large crumbling (because you need shit hitting the fan enough for PCs to have work and cracks big enough to let adventuring parties exist) multicultural empires, frontiers and places like that.
A setting that kills of half-orc rapebabies is presumably not a setting where adventuring parties running around stirring shit up can thrive.
 
Joined
Feb 8, 2020
Messages
387
Understandable. The boner would then surely give you away.

It's much simpler - I don't associate myself with characters I play, and staring at the thicc female booty for 40 hours straight is much more pleasant that looking at the dude's ass. Especially in 3rd person perspective games that place the camera exactly behind the character's back, covering half the screen with BUTT
So you can't not look at man's ass when it's on your screen? Hmm
 

Alrik

Educated
Joined
May 14, 2020
Messages
72
Any setting that allows half-orcs in human/elven/dwarven society is a bad one, can't imagne a realistic setting where half-orc rapebabies aren't systematically euthanized at birth. The only half-orcs that should exist are ones where human women have been kidnapped by orc tribes, which should exclude them as a PC race in most settings unless you have a game based around the MC being a half-orc, in which case all other races (aside from pure orc I guess) are non-playable.
Most of interesting settings require some degree of looseness to permit interesting things happening - interesting things like adventurering parties and also half-orcs.

You have large crumbling (because you need shit hitting the fan enough for PCs to have work and cracks big enough to let adventuring parties exist) multicultural empires, frontiers and places like that.
A setting that kills of half-orc rapebabies is presumably not a setting where adventuring parties running around stirring shit up can thrive.
I fail to see the equivalency between a setting where adventuring parties are feasible and societies that accept half orc abominations. Instead of exploring natural fracture points and conflicts these are papered over to allow for maximum player "choice", but these choices become superficial and ultimately meaningless by this very nature. I hate dwarves, but if I had to play as one I would 1000% rather play as a homogenous dwarven party working for the betterment of their clan than as a dwarf PC with his ragtag group of zany companions (including natural enemies such as half orcs and drow) bumbling about the countryside with no meaningful purpose (which is what ulitmately most cRPGs descend into).

Re: multiethnic empires. These aren't bad by nature, but that doesn't mean they always make sense. In a central region and an empire of large enough size it can absolutely make sense, but you often see forced diversity that is merely superficial, usually in the form of a reskin where the race of the character has zero significant impact on their person, and where it is not explained at all how it came to be. And as I said earlier, whatever ethnic strife there might be is superficial at best in these cases. Instead of conflicts arising from genuine conflicts of interest between groups, it's always somone who happen to be EVIL and everyone else bands together to defeat it. Utterly facile, uninteresting and unrealistic.

This concept taken to its extreme is something like the NWN2 OC where the awful caricatures of NPCs have maximum racial and class diversity, but the group makes no sense at all and there is no way any of them would associate with anyone else in the party. The result is an incoherent mess that, at least to me, instantly kills any suspension of disbelief (especially since my PC wouldn't want anything to do with basically any of them). Bevil and Amiee are unironically the best party members in the NWN2 OC, which is more of an indictment of the rest of them than an endorsement of the two. The only character that had some potential to be interesting was Qara, but she is retarded beyond belief and there is no constructive way to interact with her to achieve positive character development as the only options are to lecture her (which obviously will never work) or to simp for her and encourage maniacal indiscriminate destruction. Speaking of dwarves and clans, one of the few good interactions in NWN2 was shoving Khelgar's hypocrisy in his face having abandoned his clan for his dumb quest to become a monk. Of course it didn't lead to anything interesting and it was actually purely counterproductive from a mechanical perspective as the only consequence was a loss of influence that stalled quest progression.

Conversely BG1 is probably one of the best in this regard (though still not entirely without problems, but what is?), where you both have a wide enough cast of characters to construct a somewhat coherent party as well as innate character conflicts that make members mutually exclusive.
 

Cryomancer

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
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Frostfell
Gnomes
  • On Arcanum they are metacapitalists exploiting everything from his own benefit
  • On Baldur's Gate, they can only be ilusionists, tricking people and illusionists can't master the life and death itself(necromancy) and they aren't good martial fighters. So they only resort is cheap trickery.
  • They are manlets
 
Joined
May 31, 2018
Messages
2,509
Location
The Present
Gnomes
  • On Arcanum they are metacapitalists exploiting everything from his own benefit
  • On Baldur's Gate, they can only be ilusionists, tricking people and illusionists can't master the life and death itself(necromancy) and they aren't good martial fighters. So they only resort is cheap trickery.
  • They are manlets

Normally I'm in agreement with your prestigious spell casting tastes, but this one I must dissent. As long as they're not made overly zany or annoying, they usually carry the most respectable trait of each of the other races. As for Baldur's Gate, having them only be Illusionists, if one chooses to abide that restriction, is not a problem since Illusion is easily the best school in the game, let alone PnP.
 

Lawntoilet

Prophet
Patron
Joined
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Messages
1,840
Gnomes
  • On Arcanum they are metacapitalists exploiting everything from his own benefit
  • On Baldur's Gate, they can only be ilusionists, tricking people and illusionists can't master the life and death itself(necromancy) and they aren't good martial fighters. So they only resort is cheap trickery.
  • They are manlets

Normally I'm in agreement with your prestigious spell casting tastes, but this one I must dissent. As long as they're not made overly zany or annoying, they usually carry the most respectable trait of each of the other races. As for Baldur's Gate, having them only be Illusionists, if one chooses to abide that restriction, is not a problem since Illusion is easily the best school in the game, let alone PnP.
Gnomes are not zany or annoying in Arcanum, nor are they respectable.
:keepmyjewgold:
 

overly excitable young man

Guest
Gnomes are the best thing since sliced bread!
Y'all fags.
 

Tyranicon

A Memory of Eternity
Developer
Joined
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Messages
5,875
Dwarves/fs are objectively the best race you can play.

Except in DnD 5e 'cause that game's unbalanced as shit and promotes elven superiority agendas.
 

DalekFlay

Arcane
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Messages
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New Vegas
Surprised elves are in second. I guess the elf story is almost always the same Native American parallel shit, so maybe people are sick of it. I also don't remember elves being that great in D&D, which is the standard for most people.

Maybe I just play elves a lot because I play rogues and elves usually have good stat bonuses for that.
 

V_K

Arcane
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Messages
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at a Nowhere near you
Reading through this discussion, I'm now starting to wonder - for the first time in over 20 years - why there are half-elves, half-orcs, and even sometimes half-ogres, but not half-dwarves? Is dwarven dick so much smaller that it can't go deep enough into human vagina? Or does it just get stuck in the beard?
 

Tyranicon

A Memory of Eternity
Developer
Joined
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Messages
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Reading through this discussion, I'm now starting to wonder - for the first time in over 20 years - why there are half-elves, half-orcs, and even sometimes half-ogres, but not half-dwarves? Is dwarven dick so much smaller that it can't go deep enough into human vagina? Or does it just get stuck in the beard?

Half dwarves are just short hairy people who like to drink and are buff maybe.

Surprised elves are in second. I guess the elf story is almost always the same Native American parallel shit, so maybe people are sick of it. I also don't remember elves being that great in D&D, which is the standard for most people.

Maybe I just play elves a lot because I play rogues and elves usually have good stat bonuses for that.

Elves are a popular choice for DnD players because of their various bonuses. First, IIRC, elves have the most amount of subraces by far. Second, their basic immunity to charm/sleep and lack of need to actually be unconscious for long rests make them very attractive.

Since elves are popular, people get tired of them constantly being in their campaigns. I don't think I've had a single campaign without at least a half-elf.
 

anvi

Prophet
Village Idiot
Joined
Oct 12, 2016
Messages
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Location
Kelethin
Gnomes are alright. Elves I like, not so much the snooty high elves, although high elf women are hot. Half elves seem cool. Dark Elves I don't really know but I like their home in EQ and they could hide and had ultravision. In RPGs I usually pick an elf because I like casters. I'd rather be an Erudite or Iksar :shredder:
 

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