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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DammitVictor" data-source="post: 9799613" data-attributes="member: 6750908">I'll grant you that much, I suppose. I'm not trying to argue in favor of racial monocultures, just against the idea that dividing race and culture-- like race and class-- and then assigning almost every possible variable to "culture" is good world or game design. Translating the reality of a world in which every person you meet is a member of the same species into the fantasy of a world where species is the least significant aspect of a person's identity is... a choice, and people keep presenting it as the only solution to the problems it caused.Why does everyone keep holding these up as good things? It's possible to do them without explicit mechanical support... but with explicit mechanical support, all it means is that there are no defined baselines for these corner cases to contrast with. There are no coherent cultures for your interstitial identity to be caught between... and because these 'creative souls' can't even imagine a world in which other people's (and peoples') minds think differently than their own, all of the 'diverse' cultures and peoples they're throwing in the blender are just empty, disconnected mechanical perks.Seriously, honestly, do you think that the current system of divorcing heritage from culture offers any complexity and texture, displays any care or subtlety, whatsoever?That resolving the conflict between nature and nurture by denying nature even exists is nuanced and says something meaningful about either?In real life, other cultures and governments are composed of other human beings and are somehow still more different than you're willing to acknowledge. What you've said is true enough, but it has no bearing on this argument.I'm not talking about social conformity being applied by cultural authorities. I was never talking about that.I am talking about the fact, obvious to the point of tautological, that social behaviors that stem from the human brain will be different in people that do not have human brains, and behaviors that stem from the human soul-- in settings for which the existence of such is a given-- will be different in beings that do not have human souls.Being raised amongst a different people might alter the expression of social behavior-- but it still won't make the dwarf or the dragonborn think or feel or act like their human foster siblings because they're not just shaped differently on the outside.I'm not saying these questions shouldn't be asked and the game rules shouldn't support exploring them. I'm saying that the solution that people keep trying to impose on those questions is vapid and causes far more problems than it purportedly solves.</blockquote>

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