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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Swanosaurus" data-source="post: 9346936" data-attributes="member: 7044220">EDIT: I changed the title to remove a possibly offending term; sorry for that!I'm not sure if I'm maybe ten years behind here, but I do remember that there has been some harsh critique of players wanting to play characters who, in their respective settings, would be considered highly unusual; where this critique was justified, I think, it was mostly about spotlight hogging - the assumption that if a player wanted to play a "snowflake" [EDIT: Here's the offending term, I wasn't aware of how it's used these days - I'll leave it in so that the other posts remain comprehensible], the underlying reason was actually that they wanted the game to be all about them.I suspect by now, most people in gaming would be aware that the actual problem in that case is not "snowflaking" but "spotlight-hogging" and that's what would need to be called out (you can hog the spotlight without playing a snowflake, after all, and you can play a snowflake without hogging the spotlight).So far, so good, but the question remains about what it means if a player wants to play a character that goes against the grain? Most current fantasy games seem to default to being permissive, which is great. Want to play a lawful-good orc paladin? There you go. A halfling barbarian? No problem. But the thing is that often, that comes accross as if none of this is anything out-of-the-ordinary, so it might actually defeat the purpose of playing an orc paladin. If no one says, "you're a halfling, I don't think you people are supposed to run round chopping people's heads of with a big axe ...", you might feel that you're not getting what you're looking for out of playing a halfling barbarian.I think there's a point for making the rules as permissive as possible in terms of ancestry/class/alignment combinations, but also to present settings that leave room to go against the grain. I understand that that can be really difficult without resorting to offensive stereotyping, but I also wouldn't want to lose the chance to play a character that is, within the bounds of the setting, obviously more than a little bit unusual.</blockquote>

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