Vince_Snetterton
Explorer
The amount of people on the planet that are indeed "special" is a tiny tiny fraction. For every Stephen Hawking, or Annie Lennox, or Lebron James, there are 1 million others that are average, not special at all. That is one of the fundamental issues driving this debate, and so many other real world issues today. The majority of the West (I can't comment on other places) truly believe that "I am indeed special, and the world should cater to me". That is what so much of this ASI conversation, or the entire Pokemon universe of species available, or the power leap that came with Tasha's, is all about.The amount of time I've seen "special and unique" used as an euphanism to criticise or demean LGBTQIA+ people or neurodivergent people (or indeed, people who are ""different"" from the supposed ""norm"") is pretty high. So I am a little sensitive to it, and while I could have phrased it better (I've reported my own post), the sentiment often hurts.
The "societal trend" are people recognising that maybe, you know, things are complicated, and people are individuals, and that differents that don't hurt people don't really matter, no matter what "society" thinks?
If you're not using it in that matter - what does it mean to you? How does it manifest? And why is it bad (as the sense that you find it bad is what I'm getting from what you're saying)?
(perhaps this is also a big cultural difference - nobody is saying anything like that over here, and the context I've seen it used online makes me think it's some sort of euphanism.)
P.S. I've been told I am 'special' all my life, and in terms of ability or other things, I'm definitely not. Not in any manner.
But we are all 'special' due to our wildly different experiences and upbringings, our thoughts and combinations, and the way we've had to work through life.
I am playing in a game right now where I was the outlier taking Stout Halfing. The rest are Human. It is great, because we actually have to carry torches, and deal with Object Interaction etc.
I would love, just love, to run a game completely made up of Humans, with 27 point buy, no Human Variant, with a heavily reduced list of Feats. Then, what comes out of this is the chars that shine are run by the better players. But if I walked into my gaming cafe saying I want to build a campaign about such parameters I would not enough for a table, as players want to play Pokemon universe for species, roll for stats, use floating ASI's etc.