I'm actually annoyed with games that give every other intelligent species the same gifts that humans have, plus more.
Compared to most other species on this planet, humans have incredible daylight color vision, really excellent endurance for long-term low-output efforts (up to incredible endurance for moderate-output efforts if trained human athletes are involved), are amazingly powerful swimmers for a species whose primary abode is on land, and have the ability to eat almost anything that's not on fire. And we've even been known to make exceptions to that last rule.
In Crawl, like most roguelike games, other fictional intelligent species inherit all these advantages along with what we humans consider to be our primary advantages, which are intelligence, language, and opposable thumbs. But it doesn't have to be so, and I think in general it shouldn't be.
About human athletes and endurance, one example. "Primitive" human hunters traditionally catch prey such as deer, by literally running after it until it falls over dead, or unable to run any more. Even without much training, if a human and a horse both start walking 30 miles a day, a week later the human will be 200 miles down the road and still complaining that his feet hurt, and the horse will be dead.
About eating things: Aside from wood there is almost nothing on this planet that is edible to more than one or two other species, that isn't edible to humans. From the pole to the equator, on every continent, humans can find enough to eat. Sometimes we have to cook it first, but this is still amazing! Not only can we drink milk (as adults!) without getting sick, we actively culture bacteria so we can reproduce our favorite ways to let it rot before we eat it! Think about this: Chiles evolved a neurotoxin called capsaicin, which directly stimulates mammalian pain receptors, specifically in order to prevent mammals from eating their seed pods. Humans enjoy it, and actively breed chiles to have more. You can almost hear mother nature weeping with frustration. And we routinely eat things like chocolate, garlic, and onions, that would kill our household pets. There is almost no animal whatsoever (including we humans ourselves) that has never been traditionally cooked and eaten by some humans somewhere (usually in China, but that's a whole different story).
One downside of our human heritage is that we get thirsty a lot. We need a lot more water, and need it more often, than most species, even accounting for our size. This may or may not be related to the fact that we're better swimmers than any other land animal. And, we can't run as fast as most quadrupeds nor fly the way most other bipeds can. Oh well. Can't have everything.
Bear
