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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8375089" data-attributes="member: 6801228">Do you have evil humans? How is that not forcing complex real world angst on the players but having a good hobgoblin is? And how would your players know to go looking for Good Hobgoblins if they never encounter them, never hear about them, and never see any evidence of their existence?I know that. But if you say "Well, hobgoblins can be any alignment, but you will only see or hear about evil hobgoblins in my games" then you have to recognize that means you have effectively made all hobgoblins evil for your game. And you have to be careful with that sort of thing. I was playing a game with friends where we were fighting gnolls, who were literal demon spawn, who were allied with literal neo-nazis (post apocalyptic earth) planning on killing all life on the planet... and we had to stop and figure out how we were approaching race and "evil" because the GM wanted us to get some information so he had a Gnoll surrender. And one of the other players pointed out that since we were fighting nazis, having an entire race of people who were incapable of good and only capable of evil... reinforced the nazi's idealogy and made it really weird. DM didn't intend that to happen, they didn't want a complex game of real world angst, but they had stepped face first into it, and we had to halt the game and figure out what we were going to do about it.But you can't do that. I'm sorry, you just can't. You cannot have a game about Good and Evil without getting into discussions of Good and Evil in the real world. You can minimize it as much as you want, you can try and ignore it, but in the end of the day, something is going to slip through and slam you with reality. Me? I'd rather be prepared for that. I'd rather have gone ahead and considered that, as best as I can, instead of getting caught off guard.So, Genasi get +2 Con, which character class is that? See, here is my issue. You can be upset that you can't play against type for a dwarf... but what was playing against type for a dwarf? Being a wizard? I've seen a lot of dwarven wizards. They work, they make sense, they are kind of cool. It hasn't been "against type" for a while. And if it is okay for these other races not to have a type to play against... why isn't it okay for dwarves to broaden out so they no longer have a type to play against? Why is it bad that a dwarven wizard might become a little more common and help counterpoint the elven wizard. Not by being a worse wizard, but by how we can talk about their approaches being different.I say they do matter. If Genasi and Humans and Aasimar can be popular and successful races without having a type to play against, then why can't elves and dwarves? Why do elves and dwarves need to be more constrained so that they have classes they are good at and classes they are bad at, when we don't need that for the other races?</blockquote>

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