Oh, the Humanity

One of the basic design issues with D&D is that demihumans get to do stuff, most notably see in the dark, that humans can’t. Given this, why would you ever play a human? This is a problem as a party that is mostly non-humans feels very high fantasy or even D&D eating its own tail, and not the grounded low fantasy of Appendix N sword and sorcery. It is one of many cases where too much magic makes the world feel less magical. A human trades the memory of her first love to an elf for a ray of moonlight is magical. A tiefling, a dragonborn, and a gnome walk into a dungeon is the aftermath of a sale at Spirit of Halloween.

So, how can games keep this in check and ensure they have human PCs. Or more to the point, what rules can you have around race (or as they now call it, kinship, ancestry, or species) with this aim?

Just say no to demihumans

The most direct approach is to just say all PCs are human, period. There may be non-humans in the world, but they are NPCs. This is the approach you see in some Sword and Sorcery games. Hyperborea does this, as does the 3e/PF/5e setting World of Xoth. However even in this genre there are exceptions as Crypts & Things has two race-as-class non-humans (beast hybrid and serpent people).

Likewise in some other games strongly grounded in non-Tolkien, pre-D&D genres, you also see human-only PCs, as with Beyond the Wall, which emulates genres in which Fairy is just on the other side of reality from the village.

Just say no to darkvision

If the strongest buff of demihumans is infravision/darkvision, then a simple solution is to eliminate infravision/darkvision from the game, at least for the PCs. This is the approach of Shadowdark and Five Torches Deep.

Level limits and class restrictions

Gygax tried to reconcile his own preference for “humanocentric” sword and sorcery genre conventions with the high fantasy Lord of the Rings craze by allowing demihumans, but giving them class restrictions and level limits. Want to play a paladin or a druid? Better be a human. Want to get above level 8-11 in just about any character class? Better be a human.

On the class restrictions, excellent, no notes, great mechanic.

The level limits though are really bad design. Good design should have nerfs that are moderate at all times, not nothing and then severe. Level limits are a nerf that’s nothing, nothing, nothing, fuck you. This makes it so you should play a demihuman for one shots or short campaigns but a human for long campaigns.

People (appropriately) make fun of 3e and Pathfinder for essentially requiring players to plan a feat tree from day one for benefits that will only pay off after several months of play but this is essentially the same thing. A skilled AD&D player will either not play a demihuman or be sure to play a multiclass demihuman.

Nerf the demihumans

Another approach is to give the demihumans a notable nerf. Probably the best version of this is that Dungeon Crawl Classics makes elves allergic to iron. This is a strong mechanical nerf and plays well into the fiction of fairies/elves hating iron.

Another version of this would be to have a role-playing nerf where demihumans can see in the dark but everyone hates them and so they aren’t welcome in taverns or whatever. This would of course clog the emergency rooms with WotC sensitivity readers and RPG.net mods having strokes. Moreover, gaming culture has shown an inability to sustain role-playing nerfs. Hence the paladin was the original mechanics buff / role-play nerf class, but in 5e now has subclasses for Oath of the Don’t Wait for Me to Go to the Bathroom, I Will Torture the Orc Personally.

Buff the humans

The 5e approach is to buff the humans with the variant human class, which gives an extra feat. If you read 5e forums like r/dndnext, you will see people complaining that the variant human is too good not to take even though they’d rather be a half-tortle / half-roper.

XP penalty for demihumans

In games with variable XP, which is most OSR games, one simple solution is to use XP as a balancing mechanic, which is already how these games balance weaker vs stronger character classes. This is implicit in B/X and BECMI race-as-class. In B/X, a dwarf is a fighter with infravision (buff), a few mining-related senses (buff), and the inability to use longbows and two-handed swords (nerf). Their XP table is similar to fighters + 200 XP*level. If we assume that the mining buff and the longbow nerf cancel out then effectively the dwarf is paying an extra 10% XP for infravision.

This is in fact the strategy taken by Basic Fantasy RPG. In BFRPG, humans earn 10% more XP. Whether 10% is the right amount is debatable but in principle an XP buff is a great balancing buff as it’s moderate and applies consistently across levels. This is also one of the human buffs Gavin Norman has floated for Dolmenwood. The main downside is it won’t work at all with modern D&D milestone leveling and/or unified XP charts.