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<blockquote data-quote="Malmuria" data-source="post: 8369397" data-attributes="member: 7030755">The kind of essentialism presented in fantasy doesn't usually take into account a lot of variation within a species.&nbsp; For example, in order to create bright distinctions, you might say x creature is really fast, whereas y creature is not.&nbsp; But in the real world, the track and field athletes we saw last week in the olympics are faster than I am (and ever was or will be) by several orders of magnitude.&nbsp; So you have this incredible variation within a species before you even get to differences between them.&nbsp; How do you model this in a game?&nbsp; Things like movement rate, or a dex bonus, are obviously extremely crude if you want to do this kind of world building, but they work for the purposes of keeping the game simple.It's also the case that thinking in terms of species, genes, etc, is not really the idiom of fantasy.&nbsp; So trying to model species variation with a 3d6 bell curve strikes me as off to begin with.&nbsp; Fantasy works better with archetypes, which I still think are mostly ok, except in the cases where the language around those archetypes borrows or copies from real world racist language (&quot;savage attacks&quot; etc)</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Malmuria, post: 8369397, member: 7030755"] The kind of essentialism presented in fantasy doesn't usually take into account a lot of variation within a species. For example, in order to create bright distinctions, you might say x creature is really fast, whereas y creature is not. But in the real world, the track and field athletes we saw last week in the olympics are faster than I am (and ever was or will be) by several orders of magnitude. So you have this incredible variation within a species before you even get to differences between them. How do you model this in a game? Things like movement rate, or a dex bonus, are obviously extremely crude if you want to do this kind of world building, but they work for the purposes of keeping the game simple. It's also the case that thinking in terms of species, genes, etc, is not really the idiom of fantasy. So trying to model species variation with a 3d6 bell curve strikes me as off to begin with. Fantasy works better with archetypes, which I still think are mostly ok, except in the cases where the language around those archetypes borrows or copies from real world racist language ("savage attacks" etc) [/QUOTE]

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