True Yospeck, and well.. everyone else I enjoy conversations like this.. mainly cause everyone is right, for different reasons, and its such a complex topic you can argue almost any point... I didn't mean to imply people are uncreative when making games and such, I just find that story usually comes near the end when there is so much more to do.. rules, visuals, programming, and everything else.. usually stories are crafted at the end, and when most games are already crunched for time, and a story is something that cannot be tangibly defined as "finished" I find at least for computer games, it gets a basic once over, and that's that... the easiest way to do so is to copy the gist of another popular story, fiction or non-fiction, or combinations of those. as well there are plenty of exceptions, so i don't want to seem like i think everyones story in a rpg game is crap.

I also believe it does come down to storytelling, and the concept of "write what you know"... it's easy for us to picture humans, because we ARE humans, and have thousands of years of human history to draw off of... a fictional race is much harder to define, because in essence, we probably can't mentally grasp how a drastically different race would act... it's also why different races tend to be humanoid, and also tend to model themselves after some other human empire or race... its easier to base them off of something we can actually understand.... Those that do successfully define, describe, and really understand how a fictional race works is rare indeed, and very hard to do. Even things like language, like elvish or dwarvish in LOTR, is usually a lifetime effort in itself... understanding and creating truely unique language in any way but a natural cultural change is extremely astounding to me, but the same would go for a culture, especially when they don't fall into the same aspects that humans fall into...

For me, the best i can think of still ends up using what i can learn... I'd look into the society of other animals for instance, prides and colonies, alpha males, etc... it'd be interesting to attempt to create a culture based on say, a lions pride... but also expand it beyond those limits, exploring the idea of lions that are intelligent, and how their culture would naturally evolve beyond the current, fairly small prides... it's look similar, but on a larger scale, and very different... how would an army work, what kind of caste system would their be, etc... again.. something you could spend a lifetime exploring.