Humans in rpgs

[Zacharine]

snip

Really, you are sliding back into the 'now that's just fantasy' area.

I am not a trained warrior. I just know how to swing a weapon and hurt my opponent more than myself with it.

The trained warrior would follow Rule Zero of serious fighting: Don't!

That is the most important lesson of all fighting arts and skills: Avoid fighting to the last. Run away, take the humiliation, get called a sissy and a weakling. None of those matter. Fight only if your life or someone elses life is in honest danger. Once you start fighting, people get hurt. You among them.

So a trained warrior would run from the mother bear, or play dead. He would run from the elephant, until it reaches a human settlement.

Then he'd take a bow and an arrow and engage from range.

Anyone going into melee combat with an elephant or a bear is either stupid or desperate. Either way, the mistake has happened before the fight even begins. And that is usually the case: you know the first mistake has already been done, because you are about to fight.

And yes, Painkiller. Shurikens and lighting. Because it's fun. Lady Reality doesn't approve but allows me this little wise. As long as I don't engage in it too often.

 

[Grounogeos]

I would kill for an RPG where the only humans are NPCs, preferably enemies. Especially if it's a fantasy-themed RPG; why would you play a human when you're playing a fantasy game and there are all the elves, dwarves, and other things to choose from?

 

[Grounogeos]

The only useful swords to ever appear were the roman gladius and the japanese katana,and even these had to be paired with a shield or a wakizashi to be useful.

Anybody know how to delete posts? Didn't mean to put this one down...

 

[Axolotl]

I would kill for an RPG where the only humans are NPCs, preferably enemies.

Planescape Torment.

 

[number4096]

SakSak,i think i understand what you are saying:

-Don't be a hothead.
-Don't fight because you think it's funny.
-This a real fight and you can die,don't do it.

Spartans,Viking,Berserkers and Samurais could have learned something from that(Their usual strategy was to be hotheads,thinking it was funny especially because it was a real fight rather than despite.).

If i told you that shaolin monks could:

-Kill a tiger barehandedly.
-Break cement with their barehands.
-be held on top of four sharp spears without receiving any injuries.
-Hold off an army of about 100 000 soldiers while they were themselves only 1000.

What would you say?

 

[Zacharine]

If i told you that shaolin monks could:

-Kill a tiger barehandedly.

I would say they are stupid for even trying, it might be possible and even slightlest mistake will make sure that Shaolin monk becomes a nominee for the Darwin awards.

-Break cement with their barehands.

This is easy, enyone can do it. Because cement is fragile, it's the iron bars used in proper construction that hold it together. Personally my record 8 blocks of cement (10 cm thick each) in one strike. The trick here is to hit from a proper position, hit with proper spot of your arm and not flinch as your arm is about to hit a block of concrete.

Crushing is both a mental and a physical excersice. The mental part is about overcoming your own survival instinct that is screaming at you to stop your arm, redirect it way, try to pull it back, do anything else but strike that piece of concrete, because hitting that piece of concrete will hurt. And it will hurt if you listen to that instinct OR you don't know how to do it properly.

The physical part is about developing your ability to harness 'explosive' force from your muscles. That is, from zero performance, to max performance in as short a time as possible.

Also hardens your arm.

-be held on top of four sharp spears without receiving any injuries.

With focus, ignoring pain, absolutely ridiculous amounts of physical conditioning and proper spots for those spears, yes. But think of it this way, those monks that do it began training the moment they could walk. You need at least a decade or two of extreme training 24/7/365. They literally commit their entire lives to this kind of thing. So with a proper application of physics and a trained body it can be done.

-Hold off an army of about 100 000 soldiers while they were themselves only 1000.

In any kind of straight fight? No. Ambushes on narrow mountain paths, hitting supply lines, poisoning water supplies, rolling avalanches or rockslides on their head, engaging in guerilla warfare? For a time, yes. But it would be only a delaying action, hoping for reinforcements or making conquering you less cost-effective than not conquering you. Perhaps that army of 100 000 was needed elsewhere. Perhaps it was meant to be a show of force and suddenly when 3k to 4k soldiers have died off into these attacks the general wanted no more losses and retreated.

On an army scale, defeating someone does not equal killing someone.

 

[number4096]

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xabp3c_final-fantasy-vii-advent-children-c_videogames

This is not a video game(Though it is based on one.).

I wonder how many mistakes they did here concerning real fights?

 

[number4096]

I think you under estimate humans(I doubt i over estimate humans,we defeated animals thousands of times our size with fragile pointy sticks.).

You oftenly"Assume"that something didn't happen or that past fighters"Probably used some dirty tricks"or the lack of filmed evidences makes you"Assume."that"Maybe it was not awesome but dirty and underhanded.".

I lack proofs that past history was made of awesome but you also have to assume that what happened was dirty and underhanded,in both cases because of the lack of filmed evidences.Today's sword practitioners learn these things for fun,back then it was a question of life or death.The site Grand_Arcana linked to mentioned that today's age had many misconceptions about past ages.You know more about history then me,but if i followed what you said thus far cavemens would have died before learning how to make clothes,cook their food before eating it or how to make a knife or spear,meaning we would have died before the bronze age started(Note that cavemens had to face smilodons,mammoths and many things bigger than tigers or bears,most of which primitive cavemens drove to extinction with extremely limited means.).

You mention humans as embarassingly frail,while if it was true,we would have died before the bronze age(The stone age lasted for much,much longer than all subsequent ages combined.If humans were frail and easy to kill,you and i would have never borned.).

 

[number4096]

Also,one thing that bugs me about polearms:

What's the point of using a weapon to beat up people with if twigs on the ground are sturdier than it is?

You would guess that if you had a weapon,you would make sure it was sturdy enough to defend you.

 

[Mr.Squishy]

Wow,i have done more mistakes than i tought.

-It is true that pretty much any species one earth is pure evil rather than just humans.

-I must have been phenomenally misinformed about knights,forget what i said about them.

-As for humans and magic,they are never shown as specialised in magic but the very fact that they can use it breaks suspension of disbelieve.

-About human evil,even if there are evil humans in most RPGs,the one who saves the day is almost inevitably human.

-Honda tadakatsu and Zhao yun could defeat entire armies with their spears,alone,without other soldiers to help them.Polearms were always game breakers.

-For examples,i will just say standard fantasy setting.You know what i mean(Anything with dwarves,orcs and elves.).

Now, I don't want to sound hostile or anything (I have a tendency to,I think >_>), but I still think you're a bit...not necessarily wrong, but not in agreement with my opinions. Yes, the chinese guys you mentioned were awesome with polearms and spears, but look at people like for example William Wallace (just a well-known dude as an example,I hope to make most people see my point), who wielded a claymore (AKA the sword that can cut clean through 7-8 people's necks in one swing). Swords are not efficient? Bull. I won't say the sword is the greatest or the best/most efficient weapon ever, but unlike spears and polearms, which were invented as tools for hunting and agricultural means at first, swords were DESIGNED to kill HUMANS. The word 'Sword' derives from the German schwert, which means "wounding tool" or "cutter", depending on your reading. It has been around for at the very least 2 millennium and most likely more. People have experimented to find what curve, size and weight is optimal for killing people with through those years. Many, many, MANY offshoots have emerged, like the rapier (alright, I find it a bit useless, but in the right hands it is extremely deadly), the scimitar, the katana, the gladius, the typical European longsword, the aforementioned claymore, hook swords, the two variations of the chinese Dao, and that's just the ones I remember from the top of my head. I know people who can list more, but I suppose I've made my point. I'm not saying polearms ain't good weapons, I'm just saying swords are fucking designed to kill human beings, and have the longest history of doing it and a very very high efficiency rate. Until guns came, of course, but still. Try going up against a scotsman with a claymore and see how "impractical" that is. Better yet, try doing that while wielding a gladius.

You make a point out of humans being Evil. Sure. Humans do a lot of cruel shit. That's why you see mother Theresa eating babies, Ghandi kicking dogs and Martin Luther King keeping slaves. /SARCASM. Sorry about that. But really, does it not strike you that not everything is black and white? I won't go too deep into it here, I might end up rambling more than I already have. The point is, most people aren't 'good' or 'bad', but rather shades of gray I suppose you could say. Many say that is one of the strong points in Dragon Age: Origins, although I have not played the game, but knowing Bioware, it sounds very likely.

To be fair, most games have a good justification for how humans and other races are able to use magic. Wizards often manipulate some manner of energy source or something (case in point, the spell-weave in D&D, although I haven't read up on that a lot), while sorcerers have their spells as inborn powers that manifest in the ways they do due to magical dragon ancestry.I usually don't think that sounds far-fetched, though you may disagree. But generally, races with enough intelligence and/or wisdom can all use magic, so what the crap are you complaining about? I mean, humans generally have intelligence as their only point strong enough to boast (kind of like in real life, no?).

Due to this intelligence, as well as a very adaptable body and psyche, humans are very versatile, again, very much like in real life, do you not think? Also, the whole thing about humans too often being portrayed as English and white is mostly audience appeal, I suppose. Same goes for the human protagonists, do you not think?

 

[Del-Toro]

Well, you can't really compare it to the real world, as almost all RPGs have a completely made up class, i.e. ogres, elves, dwarfs, etc.

So they're the humans in the world that elves, dwarfs and other beings like that exist.
Not the ones we are

This. Of all the other creatures, we're the most balanced because as a species we aren't full stealth, full magic or full strength.

 

[number4096]

Human specialisation comes mostly in relation to other animals:

-intelligence(Very,very much so.)

-opposable thumbs(Can grab objects,people,pressure points and dislocate bones,amongst other things.)

-Endurance(Not as much as some migratory species,but still have terminator like levels of endurance.)

-Bipedal(Our legs are the strongest part of our bodies because of that,ask weight-lifters.)

-Sight(Not as good as eagles,but still better than many species.)

-All around awesomeness(we are one of the only species who can break cement barehandedly if we train hard enough.)

-We are called superpredators,enough said.

I think people forgot to read that when i wrote it.

Claymores,from what i've heard,were made mostly for intimidation.They just seem as efficient in battle as swinging a detached door around:miss the first strike and you're dead.

Also,polearms defeated bears,rhinos,elephants,mammoths,smilodons and whales far before the first swords were first invented.

 

[Zacharine]

Also,polearms defeated bears,rhinos,elephants,mammoths,smilodons and whales far before the first swords were first invented.

This isn't an argument for the efficiency of the pole-arm, it is an argument for the availability and simplicity of the pole-arm.

 

[Axolotl]

Claymores,from what i've heard,were made mostly for intimidation.They just seem as efficient in battle as swinging a detached door around:miss the first strike and you're dead.

Then why were they used for over 200 years in an area with a heavy preladiction towards violence?

Also,polearms defeated bears,rhinos,elephants,mammoths,smilodons and whales far before the first swords were first invented.

Then why was the sword invented then widely used?

This is the key flaw with most of you're posts in this thread they aren't though through, if the polearm was better than the sword then swords would not exist.

 

[Grand_Arcana]

I think you under estimate humans(I doubt i over estimate humans,we defeated animals thousands of times our size with fragile pointy sticks.).

You oftenly"Assume"that something didn't happen or that past fighters"Probably used some dirty tricks"or the lack of filmed evidences makes you"Assume."that"Maybe it was not awesome but dirty and underhanded.".

I lack proofs that past history was made of awesome but you also have to assume that what happened was dirty and underhanded,in both cases because of the lack of filmed evidences.Today's sword practitioners learn these things for fun,back then it was a question of life or death.The site Grand_Arcana linked to mentioned that today's age had many misconceptions about past ages.You know more about history then me,but if i followed what you said thus far cavemens would have died before learning how to make clothes,cook their food before eating it or how to make a knife or spear,meaning we would have died before the bronze age started(Note that cavemens had to face smilodons,mammoths and many things bigger than tigers or bears,most of which primitive cavemens drove to extinction with extremely limited means.).

You mention humans as embarassingly frail,while if it was true,we would have died before the bronze age(The stone age lasted for much,much longer than all subsequent ages combined.If humans were frail and easy to kill,you and i would have never borned.).

Cavemen hunt in packs. They were social creatures who worked together and used their brain power to outwit and outmaneuver their prey. Before the invention of spears, human-like creatures had to scavenge if they wanted larger game. It was our brains, not our strength, that allowed us to create hunting strategies and make spears in the first place. We didn't fight a herd of mammoths head on, we isolated the weakest member, and then set up an ambush. Sometimes we resorted to dropping boulders onto their backs. Even then, our hunting success was very poor. African hunting dogs may have been better, and they too can't hunt anything large on their own. That's why we hunt in packs!

Early humans were not super-predators. We were very much vulnerable to attacks by predators. Being a prey species does not condemn you to extinction. Wildebeest are killed by lions, but they're still going strong. If small mammals could survive, not fight, dinosaurs, we could tolerate a few deaths at the mercy of smilodons.

Finally, we did not drive smilodons and mammoths to extinction. People say that out of human arrogance (the same arrogance that thinks that some god made us special). It was the changes in climate and environment that robbed them of their food. Smilodon was too slow to catch smaller, swifter game. The sort of food that mammoths ate went extinct at the end of the Ice Age.

So in summation, yes we have faced smilodon. And then we were eaten. Sometimes we could drive it off, but most of the time we'd be screwed without the help of fellow tribesmen. So please, for the love of someone else's god, get the idea of superhuman Tarzans out of your head.

 

[Zacharine]

Snip

You have misunderstood my point regarding these past exploits. What you need to understand is that while we know some things about their lives, there are also countless myths and legends also attributed to them.

Let us take Miyamoto for example. We know the primare points of his life. We know what wars he fought in. We know he was an accomplished swordsman.

From similar sources, we also know that people calimed he could throw men several feet back with just a swing of his sword. We know he fought against giant lizards. We know he could walk on air and water. We know he rode dragons.

The question then becomes, how do we know this? We have records of service, historical documents depicting his appearance, possibly court scripts talking of his deeds.

None of the verifiable sources mentioning him talk of him fighting multiple opponents at once in a fight to the death and winning. There are so many myths and legends counted to him however, that go unsupported by eyewitness details, letters written to someone cousins and so forth. Among these are his supposedly undefeatable skill with a sword. Among these are him riding the winds. We have no way of reliably telling which of these myths are true and which are not.

We cannot simply assume, that because he was a good swordsman, that he could therefore take on a veritable army of opponents and come out the victor. It is more likely than him riding a dragon (he was a good swordsman after all, not a dragon summoner), but that is not evidence.

Accepting him doing this is like accepting the stories of Achilleus: of how he was invulnerable besides his heel.

Now do you understand? We have no evidence supporting the claims and we know several myths or various proportions are attributed to him. We have no reason for accepting this particular myth, while discounting the others.

And when it comes to human frailty, that is something of a double-edged sword. We are easy to take out of a fight.

But at the same time we can survive almost anything. Army medics generally follow the one-hour rule: as long as the patient is breathing, his heart is beating, he has enough blood/liquids in his veins to keep the blood pressure up and blood can circulate between the heart lungs and brains, then for that one hour from the wounding the victim will likely survive. If you get him to a surgeons table within that hour, he will likely recover.

Because human body has extensive reserves that are taken into use at the moment of emergency. And as long as those basic functions required for short-term living are not compromised, human body can live through almost anything with those reserves.

Generally, one hour is held to be an acceptable guideline.

But notice how I said survive. Pain, fatigue and bloodloss will extremely quickly lead to losing consciousness. Your body is alive, but will not be doing anything by itself. That is our biological resilience.

In ancient times, have you forgotten that humans hunted in groups? They didn't take on elephants one on one, but rather 50 to 1. Death by papercuts. Death by pinpricks.

On smaller animals; death from ambush. Death form surprise attack. Death by trap-pits.

One of the earliest weapon inventions also was the spear-thrower. This significantly increased the range from which a spear could be thrown.

Humans of the time avoided melee fights to the last. It doesn't take even a minute to bleed to death, if your jugular is cut.

 

[Therumancer]

It's an old issue. It basically comes down to the romance of the superhuman. When creating other species we tend to automatically envision them as being somewhat better than ourselves, and define them according to what they can do that we cannot. However, we also don't want to write ourselves out of the picture, but have ourselves dealing with them, and our culture being a factor, so we come up with justifications for why humans can dominate, or at least hold their own.

I've only read a few stories, like one science fiction series called "The Damned" (the author eludes me, it might have been Alan Dean Foster) where things were differant, and other intelligence life was presented as being greatly inferior ro humanity in any noticible way. In "The Damned" for example humans were super fast, and super strong compared to other species, not to mention the fact that while we envision races more violent and warlike than we were, we (in those stories) took the cake there.


-

When it comes to race in RPGs and such, typically the stories are being grounded in The Middle Ages or around them as a base, and set around European conventions. As such most other ethnicities were not a factor, having been geographically limited. People frequently bring up complaints about the lack of blacks, and such in sword and sorcery but it's simply accurate to what is being done. It's no differant from the lack of while people in cases like "Jade Empire" or "Prince Of Qin" where there are no white people (such games being the same basic thing except using an eastern as opposed to european basis).

I have long held to the opinion that if people don't like this, rather than whining about it, they should head out and develop games that are differant. The issue gets complicated but what racial disparity I see, seems to be largely caused by the lack of creators (in anything from comics to video games) of the race in question. Whites make video games, Asians make video games, Easter Europeans and Eastern whites complained about the totally western focus and started making their own games with the stuff they felt was missing (1C company, CDProjeckt Red).

Honestly Redguards in Bethesda were a mistake, one of the most ridiculous attempts at politically correct pandering ever. I try hard to ignore their existance for a lot of reasons. Simply put what happened is when people started screaming "race" Bethesda removed the Dwarves from the game (who were "The Redguards" in the first two games), and changed the mountains to a Carribean type setting. Despite the failure of the "Redguard" game, they chose to continue this trend by removing the Dwarves entirely from the game as of Morrowwind.

If it seems like they don't fit, and there are contridictions involving them, it's true. They were very much edited in. A lot of people don't realize it however because the series didn't break into the mainstream in any big way until Morrowwind at which point they were present.

It's also noteworthy that I do not think they consider them a seperate race. I think Redguard, Nords, and Imperials are all considered humans. Just as the "mer" (Dunmer, Bosmer, Altmer) races are considered differant offshoots of elves the same way. The division being based around culture more than anything. I am not sure if Bretons are supposed to be strictly speaking human, a few things I've read lead me to believe that they are akin to what would be called "High Men" in say Lord Of The Rings, those with an older and more powerful bloodline making them human, but a breed apart from "common men", hence their inherant use of magic. It's been a while but I think some stuff I read in Daggerfall (which was set in their lands) lead me to that impression.

 

[number4096]

Some african tribes could take out lions barehandedly,even today.If our strenght was merely pack hunting we would hardly do any better than any other pack animals.Remember that guns are a recent invention and that experts said that north america was filled up with mammoths,cave lions and short-faced bears before humans came in and destroyed their population.According to them,mammoths would still be their if we didn't over hunted them.If you destroy an entire species,you have to attack more than just the weakened or the isolated,you have to attack the whole thing.

But it is mostly personal experience that prevents me from thinking that humans are glorified punching bags for all other animals,i myself(and my brother)were often attacked by other people at school,10 to 1,and we had no problem taking them all out on our own(We were in different schools,so it was literally 10 to 1 for each of us.).

If you say that,for the people that harassed us,taking on more numerous than themselves would be suicide,however,i would believe you.But my brother met real people who were similarly capable of taking on multiple people at once in real life.I'm not saying that it is usual or that you should count on it when making a strategy.But there is a reason that some warriors had their prowesses recorded while the others were barely even mentioned,not everyone is of the same strenght and therefore you cannot put all humans on the same boat when it comes to martial prowesses.Some people are just that badass.