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I read most of Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman before I realised that - unlike the normal default for English novels - the only characters whose ethnicity was described were white, and it was otherwise assumed that all the characters were black. It's interesting that I've wanted to read something...

Yeah, but - oh no! - then its culture won't look like medieval England much anymore! Now it's a setting which never existed in history, imagined as a result of disparate cultures meshing as they never did in real life! I'm told that's a bad thing in D&D? For some people anyway. *shrugs*

The reason you are completely wrong is that we're talking about D&D, a game which has always included monsters and ideas taken from mythology around the world (often bearing no relationship to the "inspiration" except to steal a name), as well as much more modern science fiction and fantasy...

CountPopeula, you put it absolutely beautifully.

Why? Why is it hard to believe that there could be a fantasy kingdom where the people who made up the population don't all look the same? As a point of fact, medieval England was made up of different ethnic groups. The fact that they all looked pretty similar to each other (i.e. were all...

The goliath looks like it's making a return in Player's Handbook 2, so if you can handle a big race with mottled skin and a few stone-like patches of hardened flesh, you only have to wait until March. Well, maybe, but a) trying to use science to draw conclusions about D&D is pretty silly, and...

I'm confused by the disconnect between "I like things that are different, but not these two particular races" and "they should use only basic traditional races". I don't understand why you think you're unusual among D&D players (current and potential) in personally liking more variety than the...

Why does "quasi-medieval" equal "white-skinned humans", though? Is it because you don't immediately imagine dark-skinned humans building European-style castles, or because you can't imagine that happening? There is absolutely nothing that says a quasi-medieval European-like society could not...

Please explain why it is important and necessary to restrict the core races to the Tolkienesque slate.

Or, you know, just maybe some of us were designing settings with wholly non-traditional races. In point of fact I have kicked around multiple settings where tieflings were prominent minorities in the major human settlements (in the most recent case, born to human parents because of the...

I can't answer the first, but you're wrong about the second, pretty clearly. This is some weird, stupid pejorative stuff going on here. What on Earth is wrong with Wizards of the Coast publishing an edition of Dungeons & Dragons informed by modern fantasy ideas instead of just the traditional...

I absolutely disagree that Dungeons & Dragons depends on pseudo-medieval Eurocentric tropes. Absolutely.

I think that Dungeons & Dragons would be much improved if the books didn't assume any particular real-world cultural stereotypes as the basis.

So let's start by eradicating those ridiculous defaults, too. You've just ensured that the most popular drink in my next campaign is rice wine. Awesome!

I just love how all of the bitching about the "reset button" is obviated by the last two strips. Yay, talking out of your arse before you know what's happening next! Woo!

Eberron does. It's a nonsense argument anyway. If you're not playing in medieval Europe, there's no reason to have an all-white world. It's not like only white-skinned people could think up longswords, plate armour, castles, and such. All D&D settings have medieval trappings, but that doesn't...

Ironically, Mialee is darker-skinned than most Fourth Edition elves.

This is true in a great many places, but it's not true in all of them. In Sydney, I would easily nominate university gaming societies as the largest driving force. None of the stores in the city are "community centres", as far as I can tell, and of the two in the suburbs that I can think of...

I've been posting my Pathfinder Rise of the Runelords games on RPG.Net's Actual Play forum. I'll probably start documenting them here, too - good timing, switching to EN World 2 as we switch the game to D&D Fourth Edition. :p

I'm always happy when I see some non-white characters in RPG illustrations. As far as I know, all my immediate ancestors were Anglo-Saxon (or, as we sometimes say here in Australia, Anglo-Celtic), but I grew up surrounded by non-Anglo people. Hell, even when I lived in a small country town in...