139 réponses à ce sujet

[Herr Uhl]

Maria Caliban wrote...

AtreiyaN7 wrote...

Chimps are our closest relatives, and if we can't crossbreed with them...

That was actually my point. We have no idea if humans can crossbreed with chimps. It's unlikely, but it's not like this is something we've tried, and human/chimp sexual relations are neither numerous or well-documented.

I wonder if it is only a myth that Stalin wanted to make half-ape shock troopers by having chimpanzees making love to women. But only after men tried impregnating chimpanzees.

[Avatiach]

shepard_lives wrote...

Avatiach wrote...

I fail to see how living in a forest could cause someone to be shorter.

No no, it's science. Shorter=more agile, less branches in your face, and better suited to looking downwards (which you should do often when in a forest). It happens in real life.

looking down in the forest is pointless, sooner or later you will step on something.

[Wulfram]

The all round superior elf thing seems to be more subverted than actually exists as far as I can see.



Excluding fanfiction and Eragon anyway.

[Saibh]

Wulfram wrote...

The all round superior elf thing seems to be more subverted than actually exists as far as I can see.

Excluding fanfiction and Eragon anyway.

TVTropes has a few examples. Our Elves Are Better and Can't Argue With Elves. They also have Screw You Elves, which is the subversion.

[AtreiyaN7]

Maria Caliban wrote...

Tigers and lions might be subspecies, but donkeys and horses are not. Like donkeys and horses, humans and chimps 'split' ~ 5 million years ago.

AtreiyaN7 wrote...

Chimps are our closest relatives, and if we can't crossbreed with them...

That was actually my point. We have no idea if humans can crossbreed with chimps. It's unlikely, but it's not like this is something we've tried, and human/chimp sexual relations are neither numerous or well-documented.

True enough, I should have looked up the donkeys and horses as well. The failure of the ivanov experiment mentioned in a related wiki (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humanzee) seems to indicate that it's unlikely to occur with any frequency (if it is even possible), but the initial Ivanov experiments only involved three female chimps which is a pretty small number.

At any rate, I suppose that these days it might be possible to do some sort of experiment to test the viability of cross-breeding in a lab. However, I doubt anyone will be doing that anytime soon. *chuckle* I might actually get a copy of Lucy (by Laurence Gonzales) now after talking about this now. It's centered around a child who's half-bonobo & half-human (heh). Anyhow, back to discussing dwarves, elves, qunari and humans, everyone!

[thegreateski]

Saibh wrote...
 Screw You Elves

My favorite.

But TV Tropes will ruin your life.

[AtreiyaN7]

Herr Uhl wrote...

I wonder if it is only a myth that Stalin wanted to make half-ape shock troopers by having chimpanzees making love to women. But only after men tried impregnating chimpanzees.

Well, you can check the other link I had in my post just above - there was a brief segment about the Ivanov experiments. Hmm, I have this really weird feeling of deja vu that this has been discussed before, how odd...

[Meltemph]

I typically prefer playing something not human in most cases. Was a little disappointed that we could not be a Dwarf, but I got over it.

[HighMoon]

I agree to some extent. No matter how hard I try, I can never bring myself to play anything other than a female human for my first run through.

Modifié par Golden-Rose, 11 novembre 2010 - 10:47 .

[Herr Uhl]

AtreiyaN7 wrote...

Herr Uhl wrote...

I wonder if it is only a myth that Stalin wanted to make half-ape shock troopers by having chimpanzees making love to women. But only after men tried impregnating chimpanzees.

Well, you can check the other link I had in my post just above - there was a brief segment about the Ivanov experiments. Hmm, I have this really weird feeling of deja vu that this has been discussed before, how odd...

yeah, I quickly googled it before. Now I know why I remembered it being an orangutan in my memory.

[Pzykozis]

It depends for me, in terms of the origins I just picked what I found most interesting which was the city elf, back in the day, I always picked anything but human, saying that humans were boring in a setting where you could be something else, but as I've grown older I generally stick to human and dwarf. That's also coincided with me choosing to play as male characters rather than female so perhaps it's just something to do with picking the manly races...



Maybe it's the beard. No Beard, No Good. Afterall.

[OneMore1968]

Can you be racist against something that doesn't exist lol.



The fun in rpg fantasy/sci-fi is being able to choose to play as a different race/species because it unlocks different achievements/storylines, giving the game more longevity and multiple endings. But as most of us on here are human, I guess we'll naturally pick that character 99% of the time. I started as an elf, mainly coz I completed DAO as a human noble and fancied a change but I didn't like it and went back to a human noble, albeit a male this time.



For me, the best character has to be a female warrior, far superior to blokes in a fight - they can multi-task, are devious as hell and besides the armor looks better on them.

[Big Blue Car]

If you play an elf then you have to be painfully aware, every second, that you look like the Robin to Alistair's Batman. And that sucks.



If you play a dwarf then you are just a walking piece of physical comedy.



Human supremacy. Be human all day every day 420.

[Aermas]

I hate it when elves are better than humanity. It makes them think that we can't do anything right ourselves.

[Gilsa]

Avatiach wrote...

Helena Tylena wrote...

I, for instance, see no appeal in playing a dwarf.

Maybe it's because dwarves are fat and ugly?

Hey now! Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder!

[Ryllen Laerth Kriel]

I like apple pie, so you must all like apple pie too! I'm sure, somewhere in bizzaro land this is a valid arguement. Good job OP!

[Rattleface]

Pfft, just because it's hard to make a hot dwarf in the chargen doesn't mean they don't exist.

My dwarf was a sexy man beast.

[Ortaya Alevli]

Gilsa wrote...

Avatiach wrote...

Helena Tylena wrote...

I, for instance, see no appeal in playing a dwarf.

Maybe it's because dwarves are fat and ugly?

Hey now! Beauty is in the eye of the beer holder!

Now that made my day!

[Wulfram]

Saibh wrote...

TVTropes has a few examples. Our Elves Are Better and Can't Argue With Elves. They also have Screw You Elves, which is the subversion.

I've read those pages.  When even Dungeons and Dragons settings don't really play the trope staight, it's not much of a fantasy cliche

[Lurklen]

Maria Caliban wrote...

Tigers and lions might be subspecies, but donkeys and horses are not. Like donkeys and horses, humans and chimps 'split' ~ 5 million years ago.

AtreiyaN7 wrote...

Chimps are our closest relatives, and if we can't crossbreed with them...

That was actually my point. We have no idea if humans can crossbreed with chimps. It's unlikely, but it's not like this is something we've tried, and human/chimp sexual relations are neither numerous or well-documented.

 The national enquirer would disagree with you, they have enough documentation to fill a wharehouse. Just because Chimps are our closest living relative (so to speak) doesn't mean there couldn't have been others. It just didn't happen here or if it did none of those species survived. There has been evidence of the possibility of ****** sapian and Neandrathal interbreeding, now there aren't any Neandrathal surviving today but there could have been. And they would have looked as different from us as dwarves or elves, but that doesn't mean it would have been impossible for offspring to occur.

 Also there has been a successful birth from a mule, meaning a mule gave birth to another mule instead of to a horse or a donky(or being infertile) something that was long thought to be impossible. So if that can happen, who knows what else is possible?

[Big Blue Car]

I always find it funny when people act like sharing 99% of our genes with chimps makes them functionally similar to us in the least.



I mean come on guys, we also share 50% of our genes with bananas.

[Addai]

Saibh wrote...

Maverick827 wrote...

I'll generally enjoy playing as an Elf, but they are too short in the DA universe for me to be able to take them serious. Side-by-side cinematics when speaking to a human are just absurd; your head is almost at a ninety degree angle. It seems Elves were made short just to marginally differentiate them from the typical Elf image, but that seems to me to be a rather cheap reason to humiliate an entire race.

Then think about how the dwarves feel!

Honestly, it was a change I really liked. I can't even describe how much I hate elves in normal fantasy settings. The beautiful, immortal, harmonious, peaceful, stronger, wiser, swifter, most intelligent race of do-gooding light bringers. Of course they're not all like that, and I'm hyperbolizing, but I just dislike any race built around "we so perfect". If you introduce a race by listing their qualities as "better than everyone else", there's something wrong.

And the asari are like the elves of space, by the way.

Have to come down on the side of the tall, beautiful, tragically flawed lightbringers.  It is their contrast with humanity that makes this interesting, as well as the yearning for a lost past.  This is rooted in mythology, not just literature, so if it's "wrong," then a lot of people have been doing elves wrong.

I like the DA conception, too, found it interesting, but being the underdogs, they are not going to fit well into heroic conceptions and it's hard to take them seriously.  They're losers, basically.  So the majority are probably always going to want to play humans in that setting, except for us elf fetishists.

[ErichHartmann]

Elves and Dwarves are essentially human. Their cultures and societies are not entirely unique from our own history or humans in a fantasy setting.

[AlexXIV]

The funny thing is, usually I prefer playing Elf. But since Bioware decided to make elves smaller than humans and all female companions humans, I prefer human for DA:O. I can't stand to be smaller than a woman.

And no, they won't make a game in which you cannot play a human. Default is human since we are humans. Most of us anyway.

[maxernst]

Lurklen wrote...

Maria Caliban wrote...

Tigers and lions might be subspecies, but donkeys and horses are not. Like donkeys and horses, humans and chimps 'split' ~ 5 million years ago.

AtreiyaN7 wrote...

Chimps are our closest relatives, and if we can't crossbreed with them...

That was actually my point. We have no idea if humans can crossbreed with chimps. It's unlikely, but it's not like this is something we've tried, and human/chimp sexual relations are neither numerous or well-documented.

 The national enquirer would disagree with you, they have enough documentation to fill a wharehouse. Just because Chimps are our closest living relative (so to speak) doesn't mean there couldn't have been others. It just didn't happen here or if it did none of those species survived. There has been evidence of the possibility of ****** sapian and Neandrathal interbreeding, now there aren't any Neandrathal surviving today but there could have been. And they would have looked as different from us as dwarves or elves, but that doesn't mean it would have been impossible for offspring to occur.

 Also there has been a successful birth from a mule, meaning a mule gave birth to another mule instead of to a horse or a donky(or being infertile) something that was long thought to be impossible. So if that can happen, who knows what else is possible?

Neanderthal are an interesting question.  There are some anthropologists who argue that they should be called ****** sapiens neanderthalensis, implying that they are a subspecies of ****** sapiens and even that they assimilated with us, rather than becoming extinct.  On the other hand, a study a few years ago found that European humans were no more similar genetically to neanderthals than the rest of humanity, and since neanderthals were mostly seen in southern Europe, they argued that implied little interbreeding occurred, if it was indeed possible.

Also of interest is that the neanderthals actually had slightly larger brains than us on average, not that brain size is that significant a predictor of intelligence.  They never developed as complicated tools or the cave paintings that charcterize the Cro Magnon man.  On the other hand, ****** sapiens didn't do that either until about 30,000 years ago, despite appearing physically modern as far back as 100,000 years ago, at least as far as can be determined from bones.  Some people of argued that modern humans made a great leap forward based on complex language skills and that Neanderthals vocal apparatus was not as ideally designed for complicated speech.  I don't think much of that theory, however, as human beings are quite capable of developing elaborate communication with limited numbers of phonemes or even without speech at all.

Edited to add:  I'm not saying that language might not have played an important role, only that I doubt that the reason neanderthals didn't communicate as effectively was due to more limited vocalizations.

Modifié par maxernst, 11 novembre 2010 - 11:47 .