Here's the real reason for wanting a human-centric setting. Personal taste. This article is not about convincing you to agree because I don't expect to be able to. Persuasion doesn't work like that. This article is about giving you the perspective of people who don't want monsters as player races, among other features of generic fantasy. It's not about the right or wrong way to have fun; it's about why I can't have fun the same way you can.
Let's start with the strongest point before I peter out at the end. Monsters are not people; they're monsters. When you humanize the monsters by making them a player-race or by making them equal or similar to humans in mind or spirit, they cease to feel like monsters. I want monsters to be the things that go bump in the night. They are the things that hunt us. They lurk off the edges of the map. If you can play a monster (i.e. kobolt or goblin or half-orc player character), then monsters aren't monstrous; They're just exotic people. It trivializes what it means to be a monster. I want my fantasy monsters to resemble the monsters of the horror genre. You can't have a setting where monsters can be both monsters like in a horror genre but also exotic people like in modern kitchen-sink high fantasy. The exception is if you want to reestablish what is considered a "normal" race, but for me, this exception still spoils monsters because there is this imaginary line that distinguishes humans from monsters, and every exception blurs that line and diminishes the certainty of the distinction.
Second, it's about tone. Modern D&D feels like playing A Very Muppet Fantasy. I've heard and read criticisms that refer to 5e D&D as kitchen-sink fantasy because, like the kitchen sink, there's a little bit of everything. It lacks cohesion and consistency, like macaroni and glue on the Mona Lisa. There isn't a regard of how things fit or consideration for whether it belongs there or not, and the audience has to adjust their suspension of disbelief to accommodate it. In the last 5e gaming group I was in, I felt like Eddie Valiant in the movie Who Framed Roger Rabbit, but I would have rather felt like a character in Lord of the Rings or Berserk. In case you don't know, Eddie was the straight man in the sense of a straight-man silly-man dynamic, among a cast of silly-men. My experience with 5e is that the monsters as player races make the game feel cartoony. The cartoony-ness spoils the tone I would like. I didn't like it. It wasn't to my taste.
Speaking of tone, what is it? It's the mood or atmosphere. Think about the difference at a kid's birthday party vs a party for adults with depression. They have different moods. Some things don't mix. You shouldn't mix Lord of the Rings with Rick and Morty, for instance. The tone of Rick and Morty spoils the tone of Lord of the Rings. Tonally, they don't mix. Generic fantasy permits you to mix Peanut Butter and Pepperoni (I call it peanut-pepper butter-oni) and dip it in olive oil. One thing spoils the other thing.
Don't be insulted but kitchen-sink fantasy is plebeian fantasy because it is fantasy for everyone without discerning taste and people who don't know about the craft of acting or drama or of history. It tries to satisfy as many people as it can all at the same time. It's generic as opposed to specific. By generic, I mean it is "of the genre" in the broadest sense of the word genre, permitting everything under the fantasy category; but by specific fantasy I mean something curated and intended to create a more specific aesthetic, sensation, mood, theme, and style. Specific fantasy appeals to a narrower audience, not necessarily an audience with superior tastes but with specific tastes.
The definition of fantasy as a genre is "fiction plus magic or supernatural elements". That's it. Nothing about what kind of magic stuff or how much of it. So, imagine fantasy as a dial or slider. At the lowest setting of 1, you might get something like Liar, Liar with Jim Carry where a boy makes a wish on a birthday cake so that his dad can't lie. Crank it up to 2 and you might get Legend of King Arthur, where the quantity of magical elements is few and uncommon. There's one magic sword, one wizard, one lady of the lake, and one holy relic to find. There are no dragons and no potions of gaseous form. At the highest setting of 10, you might get Baldur's Gate 3 where you start off on an illithid spaceship and end up visiting hell, and one of your companions is a half-elf vampire. It's a mess and I don't like it.
Expectations are the hardest thing to establish for an TTRPG, and I think kitchen-sink fantasy makes this more challenging because not there's too many options. If I invite you to play in a game with me, I have no idea what your experience with fantasy is, and I have no idea what kind of fantasy you like. This is why D&D classically had an Appendix N which referred you to the works of fiction that inspired D&D. If I tell you I'm running a low fantasy game, are you thinking that it's fantasy with the slider on a low setting, or are you thinking it's low fantasy as in the sub-genre low fantasy which has a more specific definition than fantasy. If I tell you I'm running a game using 5e D&D, then I think your expectations might immediately go to Baldur's Gate 3 even if I tell you "LOW, LOW fantasy". Are you thinking about a fantasy equivalent of the Marvel Avengers? Are you thinking about Adventure Time? Are you hoping for a western or a gangster movie? Appendix N may help you narrow people's expectations down.
Now let's break the fantasy elements down into their own sliders. Fantasy is a slider, magic is a slider, monsters is a slider. Lord of the Rings is high fantasy because it is set in its own fantastic, non-Earth setting with its own history and mythos, but on the magic slider it's low because only wizards can do magic and there's like five of them. Furthermore, on the monster slider, there might be a massive army of orcs, but the variety of monsters is limited; you can't put a 300-page monster manual together based on the monsters of Lord of the Rings, so, let's say it's in the middle. Lord of the Rings has epic stakes: the fate of Middle Earth. That's usually a feature of high fantasy. With low fantasy, the stakes tend to be more grounded. In Conan the Barbarian for example, the stakes are very local.
The last thing I want to give you is the concept of a hypothetical master checklist of all fantasy concepts. I'll call it the master fantasy checklist. It's got everything on there from magic wands that shoot jets of colored light to dragon shouts to magic gemstones made of condensed ether that let you cast spells to sticking bits of metal in your tummy and getting powers based on the type of metal. When you define your specific setting, you check off items include it in the setting. Let's say if you check off 75% or more of the boxes, that's kitchen sink territory. This is because the list is so massive. If you check off 10% or less, that's focused, specific, or niche. It likely qualifies as a dedicated subgenre. If you check off 30% - 49% (meaning you're excluding more than half of the list), that's a curated Variety Fantasy. I think you should aim for Variety Fantasy on any regular day. Less is more and keep it simple stupid are axiomatic; you might believe that getting rid of excess (bloat) leads to greater satisfaction, or you may believe that restrictions breed creativity. Maybe you agree?
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