Duplicate Trope: Five Races

Yeah. Standard Fantasy Races and move Sci Fi samples to their respective Alien species trope.

Standard Fantasy Races.

Time to make a Sandbox, I guess?

Sure, let's go with it.

to Standard Fantasy Races.

Well, this all seems pretty well-decided.

Should we start talking about how to draft Standard Fantasy Races, then?

Is Five Races description bad? Or can we just move?

Yes, the description is bad. It's the whole thing that asserts there are exactly five races (or types of races) that exactly match Five-Man Band; and that's just exceedingly uncommon in fantasy works.

That, yeah.

If this is going to be reworked to an overview of common fantasy races/species/whatever and their usual roles, my instinct would be to start with an overview paragraph or two and then have a list section to describe specific ones more in detail — maybe split it between the most common ones (elves, dwarves, lawyer-friendly hobbits, orcs), more uncommon ones and monster races like dragons and such.

Standard Fantasy Setting should probably be worked in there somewhere as well, since it's where Stock Fantasy Races usually live.

Agreed. Shall we start a Sandbox for the description?

I'd be down for it. If nobody else does it first, I'll try to get one started over the next day or so.

Alrighty, I've got a draft from Sandbox.Standard Fantasy Races set up, if anyone would like to take a look.

This is looking more like an index to me. Unless there's something about the 5 functioning as a narrative whole, unlike Elves Versus Dwarves and other tropes about just two of them in isolation.

Like, if Orcs have relations A, B, C, D towards Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, and Humans, and Elves have consistent relationship variants towards all the others at once, like a Love Dodecahedron.

Edited by Malady on Dec 2nd 2020 at 12:04:42 PM

Looks similar to Demihuman.

I'm missing gnomes, faeries, elemental-kin, half-demons, and some monster race like minotaurs. I'm not convinced halflings are all that common any more, but maybe they are.

The description would need a lot of fleshing out, that much I wholly agree with. I put this together over maybe twenty minutes, so it doesn't surprise me that there are issues.

I think you're onto something there — some talk about how these all fit together or tend to relate to one another is definitely something that should be worked in, chiefly because otherwise it isn't really a trope, just... well, a list of independent tropes. I'll try adding something to this effect if someone doesn't beat me to the punch, but I'd like to let some more people chime in first.

Off the top of my head, they tend to show up in games a lot more than in literature.

Edited by Theriocephalus on Dec 2nd 2020 at 2:59:36 PM

Did some extra work on the draft. Feedback or contributions would be appreciated.

Gnomes and Trolls should be included among the uncommon races, they are also pretty standard in these settings. Perhaps Treants and other forms of Plant Person too.

EDIT: I added these to the Sandbox.

Edited by Snicka on Dec 10th 2020 at 10:00:49 AM

I was not aware of the trope Demihuman when starting this thread; but looking at it now, Demihuman also appears to be a list of standard fantasy races and some standard traits.

Now I think that Standard Fantasy Races is a better title and that the sandbox has a better description than Demihuman, but I also think that the pages overlap and that merging may be in order. Any thoughts on that?

Looking at demihuman, I very much agree with you both on that Sandbox.Standard Fantasy Races is better-written, but also that the two overlap so much that a merge sounds reasonable.

A few things worth noting:

Demihuman, strictly speaking, explicitly brands itself as the fantasy counterpart to Rubber-Forehead Aliens — that is, creatures that are essentially humans with one or two tweaks — elves, dwarves, orcs, giants, etcetera. If something differs from the basic human plan by more than just pointy ears or unusual height or a weird skin color or extra hair or whatever it isn't really something that Demihuman covers.

There is also Monstrous Humanoid, which seems to cover "monsters with a humanoid form". However, it also lists things like Fauns and Satyrs, which aren't really monsters, so in practice it just seems to cover more physically unusual or distinct species than are listed on Demihuman, although a number of tropes are present on both (All Trolls Are Different, Beast Man, Our Ogres Are Different and Our Orcs Are Different).

Certain other tropes, like Treants and Our Dragons Are Different, are outside of either trope's current purview.

Consequently, the picture I'm getting is that we have two preexisting tropes that are defining themselves along fairly specialized lines, and that what we've been drafting so far would cover them both and some other things besides.

While I think there is some merit to a fantasy version of Rubber-Forehead Aliens, there is also the fact to consider that that covers a relatively limited number of recurring species rather than a large quantity of work-specific ones. Also, having Demihuman, Monstrous Humanoid and Standard Fantasy Races all up at once at the same time would risk being very redundant, so I am not against a merge. That being said, it might be worth looking into whether there are enough unique examples of "fantasy human with One Weird Thing" to keep Demihuman around while rerouting elves, dwarves, hobbits and the like elsewhere.

I added demons, elementals and undead to the monster races, as most fantasy settings have some variant of these.