Make Fantastic Races Fantastic Again
Ah, fantasy roleplaying games, where we've made the fantastical mundane. Where the Dwarves don't feel like Dwarves, the Elves don't act like Elves, and where the half-Devil offspring of Satan act just like everyone else (ok, maybe that's actually rather realistic).
This has been a long-building frustration from my own games. Any time someone ran a non-human character, I just... Forgot about them being non-human. They never felt like any of that. The only time it'd come up is when they'd go "hey, wait, I should've been able to see that because dwarves have darkvision" or something along those lines. And frankly, what's the point in having races in the game if they all act and feel the same?
Behind closed doors I've discussed this with people for a long while (Trill the DM, Clerics Wear Ringmail, Diogenes as well as a few others I have forgotten and apologize to in advance) and we've come down to effectively two opinions on this: either you cut non-human playable races entirely because they're never done right and detract more from the game than they add to it, or you enforce how they can actually be made fantastic.
The fundamental issue is that most RPGs treat non-human races as framlings when they should be ramen.
If you don't know those terms, let me introduce you to something that should be required reading for every game designer: Orson Scott Card's Hierarchy of Foreignness.
Learning from Crazy Uncle Orson
In Card's Ender universe, xenologists classify the degree of alien-ness using four categories, from least to most foreign:
Utlänning: A stranger from the same planet but different nation or city. Different culture, maybe different language, but fundamentally the same species with comprehensible motivations.
Främling: A stranger from a different planet. Still human, but shaped by entirely different worlds and circumstances. Foreign in ways that go deeper than just culture.
Ramen: An entire sentient species other than humans. This is the crucial category: beings so profoundly alien that they require entirely different modes of understanding, but who can still be recognized as truly intelligent with their own valid forms of consciousness. They think in completely different patterns, but those patterns have internal logic and dignity.
Varelse: True aliens so foreign that meaningful communication might be impossible. They may be intelligent, but in ways so incomprehensible that we can't bridge the gap.
This is where nearly all games fail: they put elves, dwarves, and other "fantastic" races somewhere between utlanning and framling. They're just humans with mechanical bonuses and cultural quirks.
Think about how most games handle elves. A bonus to DEX, maybe some nature magic and an age number that doesn't matter goes up higher. Dwarves get told they are short, are fixated on mining and have a drinking problem. None of that actually matters. They're just humans with some bad Star Trek prosthetics.
This is a waste of potential that borders on criminal negligence.
Race-as-varelse?
You might think varelse is what we want for truly alien fantasy races - beings so foreign they're incomprehensible. But that's a dead end for playable characters. You can't roleplay something truly incomprehensible; you can't make meaningful choices as something whose thought patterns are literally beyond human understanding. The moment you sit down at a table and need to decide what your character does, you've already broken the varelse barrier. Cosmic horror works precisely because you don't play as Cthulhu - you play as humans confronting the incomprehensible.
Now does that mean you cannot have these? Of course not It's a great things to have some of these. They make great enemies; great outside forces influencing the world, but they, by definition, cannot be playable. Varelse belongs in the dark corners of your setting, not in your character sheets.
Race-as-ramen!
Here's where most people trying to fix this problem go wrong: they think you can solve it with lore. Write enough background about elven philosophy, describe their alien customs in sufficient detail, pepper in some untranslatable concepts, and surely players will feel that otherworldly mystery. Bullshit. Players won't even read your three pages of Elven meta-physics, much less apply that abstract thesis to how they play the character in a game. They'll fall back on what they know how to be: human.
Some of you might be thinking that AD&D already handled this through its level grading system, where the referee evaluated a character's performance to determine training time and advancement speed. This created racial incentives by making certain behaviors mechanically rewarded for advancement. That's actually closer to what we need, and I'd argue it was a good feature that modern games abandoned too quickly. However, it's still too abstract, and too far removed from direct play. The gap between behaviour and feedback on that behaviour is too big.
If you want truly foreign races, you need to bake that otherness into the mechanics. The rules need to force players to act differently, not just tell them they should. What we need are more direct mechanical incentives that operate automatically, effectively the same principle as "you get experience for gold taken out of the dungeon" but applied at a racial level.
Consider dwarves: instead of just saying they're "obsessed with gold," design systems that make leaving treasure behind genuinely painful in game terms. Make their social systems operate on entirely different principles than human charisma-based interactions. Force players to think in terms of honor, grudges. Instead of /hoping/ they'll dig too greedily and too deeply, dangle the carrot and the stick. Punish dwarves that do not do so!
Or take elves: rather than giving them longevity as background flavor, make their relationship with time mechanically relevant. Create systems where their extended perspective changes how they approach risks, relationships, and long-term planning in ways that feel foreign to human players.
The key is that these aren't suggestions or roleplay guidelines. They're systematic requirements that make playing these races feel genuinely different from playing a human with cosmetic changes.
For those curious about what this might look like in practice, here's what dwarves look like in the current version of my heartbreaker shitbrew. I created these mechanics specifically to follow these principles about making races truly alien. People can use it for inspiration or even steal it wholesale for all I care.
This isn't just more immersive (though it is that too). It's more creative and more directly applicable. We're directing how players play the character, how they'll make decisions in game, because the mechanics push the Ramen nature of whatever race they chose to play in their faces. They cannot ignore it and fall back on playing them as normal humans.
But I can already hear the objection: "Doesn't this make all dwarves the same?" Some will argue that mechanically enforced alien psychology eliminates individual character variation. If all dwarves must think in terms of honor and ancestral obligation, where's the room for personality differences?
This complaint fundamentally misunderstands cultural normativity. The game is humanocentric: we're humans playing from a human perspective. Of course dwarves are going to seem "all the same" to us, just like how an American can easily distinguish twenty different regional accents and cultural subtypes among Americans, but to those same Americans, all people from the Balkans all sound vaguely Slavic and seem to share similar outlooks unless you're already deeply familiar with those cultures. Hell, this undersells the notion. Slavs are framlings; not ramen!
The apparent "sameness" isn't a bug, it's a feature; it's an accurate representation of how alien cultures appear to outsiders. When you're operating from fundamentally different psychological foundations, the variations that matter to them aren't necessarily the ones that register as significant to us.
A dwarf community might have rich, complex distinctions between different approaches to honor, different interpretations of ancestral obligation, different ways of balancing competing claims, but from our human perspective, they're all "honor-obsessed alcoholics." That's exactly how alien psychology should feel.
The individual characterization happens within those foreign constraints, just like how individual Americans develop distinct personalities within broadly shared cultural assumptions. The alienness creates the foundation, and personality emerges from how characters navigate those non-human constraints.
Racing to a conclusion
Instead of giving elves +1 DEX and calling it a day, give them rules that reflect fundamentally foreign relationships with time, magic, or mortality. Instead of making dwarves "humans but shorter and grumpier," build systems that make their foreign social structures feel essential to play.
Make players work to understand these beings. Make the alienness feel earned rather than explained. Create ramen, not framlings with window dressing.
The fantasy genre is full of fundamentally foreign ways of being. We just need the courage to let them be truly foreign instead of reassuringly familiar.
The fantastic races deserve to be fantastic again.