Quote Originally Posted by Satinavian View Post
DMs tend to flesh out what is more likely to show up and what the players ask about. The rest gets very broad strokes.
And in the standard human dominated setting where most countries are human majority, the PCs start out in a human majority settlement and other races mostly show up as small minorities. enemies or at best places for a short visit, that means human cultures and habits get fleshed out and little else.

If the group starts out in a non-human community and only interacts with/stays in nonhuman countries and various nonhumans are always in the spotlight, that leads to a whole other level of detail.
I mean, maybe, but that seems tautological. If humans are the only characters the players encounter, only humans will be fleshed out, fine. The level of detail isn't changing, just who it's being applied to. If the DM only uses humans, only humans will get detail. If the DM only uses nonhumans, only nonhumans will get detail. Ideally, the DM uses whatever beings fit the scenario, and detail is applied to give the players whatever feeling of verisimilitude they need. Corellia and Chandrilla should feel different, even though both are human-majority planets. Bothans from Bothuwai and Bothans from colonies should have differences in their attitudes. If they don't, that's indicative of limits to the GM's ability or performance.

Ultimately, a DM who can't generate interesting non-human NPCs has a problem with generating interesting NPCs of whatever species, in my opinion. Exoticism is not a substitute for interest. A guy who creates boring humans is going to create boring elves too, even if actually those elves hate trees and only eat yogurt on Wizentaday (which is their version of Wednesday because they have nine days in their week!) and their primary form of art is smell-based. That's all just... stuff. I don't think you can make individual NPCs, which are what players care about, interesting by piling on quirks and traits at the species level. A good GM can get players invested in an elf who likes trees, has a bow, is tall and slender and has a little bit of magic (but not too much!) and sings sad songs by starlight just as easily as they can an elf who lives in a city, throws his garbage in the canal, and wears moleskin trousers to his job in the coal mine every day. Players aren't at the table to read setting documents and sourcebooks; they're there to interact with the world. Detail is not a substitute for engagement.

And, again, none of this makes the case that removing humans makes the game more interesting. If anything, it makes the opposite case -- that the most interesting games are like Out of the Abyss, where a group of surfacers are thrown into the Underdark, or Descent into Avernus, where a group of Primes travel to the First Hell. In both cases, the party are strangers in a land they're not equipped to survive, they need to learn strange customs, they need to find ways to communicate and cooperate with beings of more-or-less alien morality and values. Arguably the best party for a game like that would be four humans, because it maximizes the strangeness the characters are encountering and minimizes the tools they can use to cope.