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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6763638" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Okay. Your evidence about this is interesting (though I know for a fact that there have been challenges to the "only a tiny fraction of variation is between groups" argument, which apparently could be, in part, due to the type of statistical analysis performed on the data).Bigger question: what races in (typical) D&D are the product of evolution? It's generally accepted that the worlds of D&D are created by a deity (or deities), and that the organic beings present on them are either the product of divine creation or later experimentation by magic-using mortals.Also: sure, half elves in Tolkien have a choice. Where else does anything even remotely like it appear in fiction? Dwarves don't get to decide one day that hey, I feel like being human. And D&D goes MUCH further afield than that. The obvious case is of course Dragonborn, who lay eggs. Or is using that as a basis for distinction PURELY socially constructed? Are you next going to say that talking of "male" and "female" is purely, 100% social, with neither reason nor motive in biology, because a small sliver of the population is difficult to analyze physiologically? Again, I have no question whatsoever that social factors apply. My problem simply lies in your insistence that, because social factors are *present*, nothing else matters and it is unrecoverable inconsistency to view RPG class in a different way than RPG race.I think it's perfectly cromulent to treat either one as "concrete" and the other as purely mechanical. "Concrete" classes is how Guild Wars 2 views it: you've trained for years in a particular field, and would not have the time or possibly even ability to cross to another. Whether you learned your (say) ice magic from the Blood Legion, the Mages' Guild, the memories that came before you in the Dream, Raven Shamans, or whatever else, you are still manipulating ice, and that's what Elementalists do; observing a person manipulating ice, or the dead, or minds, is sufficient to show that that person is an elementalist, necromancer, or mesmer respectively. (Magical categories, I'll note, were defined by the human gods, not mortals, so they emphatically cannot be socially constructed.) Concrete race basically cashes out the same way: if you're possessed of a particular physiology, you also have specific, identifiable secondary characteristics, which you (the character) cannot change and, within the fiction, cannot choose either.Or, the group may decide that one or both of those facts is not true. Just because you see a char manipulating ice, doesn't mean they're a Wizard. Alternatively, just because a person is 3 feet tall and can't see in the dark may not mean they aren't an elf. Deciding that vocations are siloed or not siloed is completely orthogonal to deciding whether physiology is uniformly associated with particular labels or not.</blockquote>

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