D&D General Do Your Human Characters Match Your Ethnicity (etc)?

[the Jester]

Most but not all are straight, and level of promiscuity varies between characters from "frigid-or-repressed" to "try-anything-anytime" to "only-within-marriage" to "can't-be-bothered-I'm-too-busy-adventuring" to various other degrees - they're all different.

On that score, my favorite of my characters was a very hot female elf who would be happy to sleep with anyone once she got to know them a little, but the catch was that, for an elf, getting to know you a little usually took longer than a human lifespan.

 

[ccs]

When it comes to humans in my D&D campaigns, there is only ONE human race.

There is no sub-races.
There is no black, white, yellow, etc.
There is no Asian, European, African, etc.

The ONLY time I would consider such, is if I am in a RPG like Conan/Hyborian Age, where such things are part of the actual game/world.

Otherwise, a human is a human, PERIOD!

A player has the option to customize them with hair and eye color ONLY if they wish.

And even then, regardless of if they do or do not, it does not effect any game mechanics.

Yeah, but if there's no black/white/yellow/assorted pinkish & brownish tones/etc, what color are the humans?
I get that it makes no social difference, & certainly doesn't have any mechanical bearing, that's all fine & dandy. And not having any color, though a very odd human trait, is certainly..... inclusive.

But when I ask you what my character sees, what do you describe to me? Saying "He's Human colored." is bad storytelling as it doesn't reference anything.
Worse, it's going to inspire me to ask you ALOT of stupid descriptive questions about what color non-human things are.
We'll start with Drow....

If I paint a human mini for my character, what color do I make it? I ask because looking at my paints there's many of shades of everything on my rack, but "Human" isn't one of them.
And no matter what color I paint it, how is that not customizing my character?

 

[Kinematics]

Physically? Basically none. I do my best to make each new character unlike any other character I've played, so even if there was at some point in the past a character like me, there hasn't been one since.

 

[BookBarbarian]

I'm very guilty of making my D&D characters idealized versions of myself. Even my Half-Orc Paladin while having green skill still has the same hair and eye color as I actually do. Now the characters' ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation have never come up in any of my games, but if they did they would be the same as my own.

Boring I know but this kind of 'power fantasy' is just about the most excellent escapism from my even more boring life.

 

[Hussar]

I DM and have done so far more than I've played. I've also, on various platforms, been playing online via VTT for about 20 years. Judging from the images that players choose for their character portraits, the vast majority will choose ethnicities very close to their own.

To be fair though, this is a bit of a chicken or the egg issue. If you want to find an image for your fantasy character that is outside the stereotype, it can be very difficult. You want to have an image of a human knight? Well, that human knight image is almost always going to show a white dude. Your knight is a black woman? Yeah, good luck with that.

Heck, I remember back in the late 2000s playing a Dark Sun game where I was playing a human warlock who was a Sidar from one of the city states (Raam AIR, although it's been a while) and I wanted to find a portrait of a wizard/warlock that wasn't white but also wasn't a tribal shaman. Never did find a good image for that. Pretty much the only thing I could find at the time was Jafar from Disney's Aladdin. :/

But, yeah, in any case, IME, players will choose images that dovetail with their ethnicity unless they are specifically playing a character that doesn't.

 

[DammitVictor]

At the risk of sounding glib, it's rarely an option in games I play-- I am not white, I am primarily Germanic and Celtic, American ranging from fourth-generation immigrant to the people who watched the Mayflower landing.

A lot of D&D settings are made up of thinly-veiled or deliberate nod-and-wink analogues to real-world cultures, but I've never felt as if my cultural heritage has been represented by any of them-- there are always "Barbarians from the Frozen North", but they don't much look like my Nordic ancestors. Except for the Dwarves and (sometimes) the Elves, the Scots-Irish analogues are just vestiges of forgotten cultures within the English analogues-- don't get me started-- and there's nary a trace of the cultural forces that shaped my Irish-American roots. There are very rarely analogues to American Indian nations in D&D settings and when there are... they're not like my cultural experiences at all.

And that's probably a good thing, because nobody wants to play those games.

In more general terms... in D&D, my human PCs are always male. If my character is not a mammal, and their species is not strongly gendered, I often go female because I find it amusing to misgender mammal PCs and then correct them when they refer to my character as he. (Unless it's not funny, then it fades into the background until "go lay eggs" becomes an excuse for why I need to go do something.) I play more nongendered characters or completely genderfluid characters, such as changelings, than female characters.

To the extent my characters have a sexual orientation at all, they're only vaguely heteroseuxual and it's mostly in the background. Theoretically, I might play other sexual orientations-- most likely pan-- in a game where the other players are interested in exploring romances... otherwise, my characters are only heterosexual for political reasons.

 

[DammitVictor]

I'm very guilty of making my D&D characters idealized versions of myself. Even my Half-Orc Paladin while having green skill still has the same hair and eye color as I actually do. Now the characters' ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation have never come up in any of my games, but if they did they would be the same as my own.

There is this, but since I always thought of myself as being multiracial... my characters tend to have darker skin and straighter hair than I have.

 

[Kobold Avenger]

One time I asked how people here were with Humans that had skin and hair colours that no human in this world have naturally (such as dark grey or blue skin or natural green or blue hair), along with mixtures of features that are plausible in our world but not likely common at all (like East Asians with naturally blonde hair).

Most admitted they don't think of such things, but were more willing to have "unnatural" hair colours or mixed features that are quite rare naturally in our world. Most felt unnatural skin colours might cross the line on what they feel is Human and could go too far into things such as Planetouched and other hybrid near-Human races.

 

[J-H]

I don't care for all the political/token inclusivity/virtue signaling stuff, so I just look for what's fun to play. So far that's included a shady halfling of indeterminate ethnicity, and a Russian-accented Native American from the far north.

I'm basically limited by what sort of accent I can pull off. I can do Russian consistently, German if I want to, Indian unreliably, and some sort of Gaelic-ish thing at an even lower level of success.

Most of my time has been DMing, so for that I looked up a few tips on having a Romanian accent, and then ended up with something that sounds closer to Russian anyway. The 3,000 year old Mummy Lord was Egyptian, but who the heck knows what that sounded like anyway, right?

Overall, more of my concepts tend to be Native American-to-Inuit than anything else, because that's something that I'm familiar enough with to pull off.

 

[BookBarbarian]

There is this, but since I always thought of myself as being multiracial... my characters tend to have darker skin and straighter hair than I have.

I think it's nice to be able to, how shall I put it? Explore or maybe even flex a part of yourself like that.

In perhaps a similar but much more superficial way my characters also tend to be (ok not tend to but actually every time) a few inches taller than I actually am, or more in the case of a Goliath. It's not that I'm short. I'm above average height. It's that I'm 1-2" shorter than my dad and brothers and wouldn't it be fun if in this game 'I' (that idealized version of myself) wasn't.