Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Tav_Behemoth" data-source="post: 5112921" data-attributes="member: 18017">The thing we call race in the real world is a social construct based on phenotype (what you look like, which is related to your genetic heritage) as interpreted by culture (what meaning the people around you assign to the way you look).In the real world, phenotype changes over generations (trying to stop this from happening leads to royal family-type inbreeding) but the cultural construct of race can change overnight. You can "pass" for something else, or move to another region where the cultural ideas about race are different. In the US, centuries of immigration result in a multi-ethnic society where people make assumptions about you based on what continent they think your ancestors were from. If you to go to whatever region contributed most of your heritage, people are likely to make assumptions about you based on what part of the country / clan / ethnic subdivision your parents were from - chances are you'll no longer be thought of as "white" or "black" or "Asian" or any of the categories people in the US care about. In a monoethnic society everyone around you is that too so people find more precise ways to discriminate along lines that get blurred in a multiethnic society.In D&D phenotype is more resistant to change across generations. If you're a dwarf shipwrecked on an island and the rest of the crew are elves, standard D&D thinking says your descendants won't be dwelves or elwarfs. (They might be bullywugs, but let's leave that can of worms for another day). This tends to make it also more resistant to change across culture. It's easier to pass in a society like 19th century New Orleans where ancestries have been enthusiastically mixing for generations, and harder to say "I just happen to be a particularly hairy, stocky elf" if there's no history of dwarven and elven ancestries intermingling.However, D&D phenotype is highly susceptible to supernatural change. You can be polymorphed into a member of another race. You can become a member of a race of lycanthropes by being bitten by one, after which you can both breed true (at least with other lycanthropes; canon is silent on half-werewolves) and turn other races into your own by nibbling on them. I played an elf cleric whose doctrine was based on using reincarnation to prove that all sentient beings were one. (He was a heretic from a culture of  elven-superiority racists, so for him this translated into "look, everyone is an elf"; he thought this was high praise and was upset when people didn't take it this way, or were upset that his raise dead spells brought them back as a halfling or gnoll as proof of his doctrine).Like many other emergent properties of D&D as a game, exploring the consequences of magical changes in race makes the D&D world both strikingly different from our own and from its fantasy inspirations. There aren't Conan stories in which he worries about a sorcerer transforming him from a Cimmerian into a Shemite, or scenes in the Lord of the Rings where his hobbit friends have to adjust to Frodo being three feet taller, green-skinned, and tusked because Gandalf brought him back from the dead as an orc. (Arguably this kind of racial anxiety is one of the things the lycanthrope represents in literature, but no perfect example springs to mind).</blockquote>

Verification