Quote:
Originally Posted by Inky
Can either of you enlarge on why not?
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Roleplaying is pretty much by definition about playing sapient beings. A non-sapient animal, by definition, doesn’t work through the kind of conscious decision-making processes that make RPGs interesting.
You
could study up on the psychology and behaviour of a given species, and set to work representing that in play — “What would a real cat do in these circumstances?” — but that’d be rather a dry, mechanical process, and frustrating when it leads to what a human can see are obviously bad decisions. Players like their characters to survive and succeed, so there’d be a perpetual temptation to apply their own, human-level capacity for planning and analytical thought to the animal’s behaviour. At which point, they aren’t playing a realistic animal any more, they’re playing a fantasy sapient creature.
(Which is fine, in a fantasy game, but they shouldn’t be getting the points back for animal-level IQ.)
You appear to be thinking of a game with sapient animals, though, which is perfectly feasible, though the GM needs to be alert to things that the characters can’t do. “There’s a closed door between you and your objective. With a doorknob. You’re stuck.”
I have run a couple of demo games where one member of the party was human, and the rest (four fantasy cats in one case, an uplifted dog and a couple of AIs in minimal computer hardware in the other) had to rely on the human for complicated tasks like opening doors...