Lets see lords in a western based society picking up customs like the harem. How about eastern meditative spiritual practices adapted and adopted by priests of Bahamut (not the monk...real clerics with that flavor).
This would be really cool, and I agree. I'm sure that people are doing this, and splatbooks are doing this. The point is that the GENERIC core books should not impress anything upon their audience. The original question was about artwork in the core books, which are designed specifically to be generic.
You see the difference between a specific setting like Rokugan or a specifc sourcebook like OA... and a general game like D&D is that they try to emulate a specific real world culture... D&D disregards this by mixing and matching everything.
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Why do we have to be limited by real-world examples, when a world with magic would have evolved in a totally different way?
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And yet this diversity still wasn't reflected in the 3.x lines artwork.
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I think where the artwork comes into play is that it shapes players and GM's perceptions of how the game can and/or should be played... I mean the MM relies almost totally on artwork to spark a DM's imagination. By including diversified artwork you pave the road for these things to appear in more specifc "campaign books" and they are accepted without people's suspension of disbelief becoming broken. It's steps and in the corebooks the first steps woiuld've been having artwork that actually depicted the different races more in line with the variety their descriptions state.
Quoted because it bears repeating.
If I knowingly purchase a setting or game to play in historic China, no I don't expect there to be diversified artwork. If I buy fantasy game 1 with no specific setting that draws from numerous mythologies and cultures...yeah I do. Two totally different situations.
Again, quoted because it bears repeating and is something with which I agree.
The only reason to use earth ethnicities is to promote identification for an earth audience. Realistically, humans should have developed completely different ethnicities altogether on another world.
Agreed.
I don't worry about why my PC has brown skin and the next PC doesnt.
And I don't think most people do (I'm not arguing against you, just jumping off from your post). But what some people don't seem to get is that this isn't about individual campaigns and players and groups, but generic core artwork depicting a wide range of things. Ask yourself: Is a single dark-skinned character in plate mail and a shield more, less or equally jarring than that character paired with a light-skinned character in druid's garb (and I know that druids are gone, at least temporarily)? If the answer is "less," then there's an issue, in my eyes.
If you're playing in a game world with kingdoms whose rulers live in castles, with walls covered in tapestries, and who ride out on war horses while clad in mail and carrying lances, etc., that is thematically medieval Europe, and I see nothing wrong with populating that land entirely with white people.
What if said world had kingdoms exactly as you described, but populated (almost) entirely by dark-skinned people? Is that problematic?
It is sad that
even in an imaginary world,
this guy is just too much for people to handle.
You know, if this is really what it comes down to, then I give up. Because I think that is damn cool and wouldn't bat an eye at something like that. I think that if I were in a group and someone said to me, "No, you can't play a black knight," I'd get up and walk out unless they had a DAMN good reason (like, no one had ever been dark-skinned in the history of the universe of that game--and even then I'd question it).
I think rather it comes down to whether or not you think that D&D implies, by default, a pastiche of medieval European culture (only with pantheism and gender equity and extra cultures).
And whatever persons X, Y, and Z think, D&D SHOULDN'T imply medieval European culture. That's not only good business sense, but it also represents the product more properly.
What I would like to see is an asian-type warrior wearing western armor (because the climate allows it) but add some asian flair to it in regards to regalia and ornamentation and maybe think in somewhat different terms so the character isn't merely another traditional faux-european D&D character who happens to look faux-asian.
What exactly does "asian flair" mean, in D&D?
(your words, not mine) but then have a fit because there being mixed in a, by default, mixed setting.
