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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jfdlsjfd" data-source="post: 7870145" data-attributes="member: 42856">They are not truly alien, but gender and racial segregation aren't truly alien to our historical culture either. You could be a female warrior in the Middle Ages (Joan of Arc) but it was certainly more difficult to join an army than if you were male. As BrokenTwin pointed out, if there is no setting, having art depicting the wide possibilities of the toolkit is a good (and even expected) thing, but if there is a setting, it shouldn't depict real life's expectation, it should depict the setting'. If playing during WWI in the trenches, it's safe to expect the default soldier to be depicted as male and the default nurse as female. Such pictures would say nothing of the mindset of the author and drawer with regard to the current, real world.Indeed, the explanation must match the setting description and the accompanying picture. When people are playing in fantasy middle ages, my guess is that they are projecting what they know of the middle ages to the fantasy society, seldom adjusting for fantasy races and magic being real. I guess many are basically  imagining a faux-medieval world with added fireballs. There was no She-Knight of the Round Table and we don't find the Arthurian cycle unrelatable. Most D&D fantasy settings, on the other hand, takes an explicitely egalitarian approach and emphasize gender equality: based on this premise, it's logical that they depict much more mixed groups. And that's to be expected. And it would be expected that the setting doesn't depicts female warriors as Eowyn-like characters overcoming the social conventions, since they are in a world where equality is the norm.It's not only gender, it's also race: if the setting states that Elfs and Dwarves hate each other, I would find strange to see most adventuring group featuring and Elf AND a Dwarf in the illustration of the game.</blockquote>

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