Editing E. Gary Gygax (section)

==Gygax & Humanity==
Something /tg/ doesn't talk about much is that Gygax was one of /tg/'s earliest believers in [[Humanity Fuck Yeah]]: he had a genuine concern that unless humans were the strongest race, both mechanically and flavorwise, then nobody would play them and instead everybody would go for the non-human races. There are contradictory stories as to whether or not he even liked the idea of non-humans being playable; one story says he basically had to be coaxed into allowing [[dwarves]], [[elves]] and [[halfling]]s into his game, whilst another story claims he invented the [[cleric]] class to deal with one asshole player whom he had allowed to play a [[vampire]] and who then went on to abuse his PC's racial powers.

Regardless, this concern about humanity's viability is seen in two distinct areas.

Firstly, this was the root of his idea that class option & level range should be directly tied to race; that's why, in AD&D, only humans can take every class and reach whatever level they want in any class they want. He even stated as much in some interviews in [[Dragon Magazine]] that this was his reasoning.

Secondly, this is why every "classic" D&D campaign setting has a human-dominated world. Whether you look at [[Greyhawk]], the [[Forgotten Realms]], [[Mystara]], [[Birthright]] or [[Dragonlance]], you've got a world where the known lands are divided into distinctive realms, and where those realms are largely dominated by humans. Whilst this can be arguably tied into their origins as a neo-Medieval wargame, the fact of the matter is that classic D&D settings always presume that humans run the world - this is why humans come in many different cultures, whilst non-humans tend to be more mono-cultural.

But, this trait has lessened as the years have gone by without Gygax at the helm. [[Eberron]] really shook things up, even going so far as to have [[Droaam]], whilst "Worlds & Monsters", a designer's teaser book for [[Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition]], outright features a segment on page 24 titles "The End of Human Dominion", emphasizing that the lack of "human nations" being the norm was intended to make the [[Nentir Vale]] world feel more fantastical. [[Dungeons_%26_Dragons_5th_Edition|5e]] brought the trait back into prominence by striving to push the Forgotten Realms as the default setting, but who can say how the future will turn out?

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