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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DammitVictor" data-source="post: 8349695" data-attributes="member: 6750908">Honestly, the constant discourse about separating one's biological heritage from their cultural heritage strikes me as misguided-- and it bothers me deeply. It only serves to further dilute the archetypal nature of nonhuman races by introducing more and more convoluted individual lineages and further divorcing "racial" mechanics from any kind of narrative purpose. Frankly... I think separating race from class, and introducing the half-elf and half-orc races, were amongst the worst design decisions between OD&D and AD&D, and this is pushing the game even further in that direction.You look at the lineages described in the PHB, and how often are any of those different-- really different-- peoples actually adopting infants from other lineages and raising them as members of their own? (And don't talk to me about Bruenor Battlehammer; neither of his human "children" knows their way around either the mines or the forge.)People like to complain that the urge to play monstrous PCs is either "powergaming" (laughable) or trying to be a "special snowflake", but then rush to engage in and/or defend this nonsense-- and what else would you call a character that is half-human, one quarter elf and orc, who was raised underground by dwarves?What we're doing in this thread, here, taking the European cultural assumptions of standard PHB races and replacing them with non-European cultural assumptions? Even mixing them and matching them, because even our human cultures aren't supposed to be 1:1 with real-life cultures, and using those to define either whole nonhuman monocultures, or differentiate multiple nonhuman cultures of nonhuman lineages? That's really cool stuff, and I want to see it goes. I want my D&D to be less Eurocentric, in practically any way possible.It's right up there with meaningless symmetry for compulsive behaviors that people pour countless hours into, that usually harms the game it's applied to and almost never improves it. D&D would not be a better game if it had a Martial Controller (for the sake of having a Martial Controller) or a Shadow Defender (likewise), and it simply wouldn't be a better game for answering what would happen if a bunch of gnomish orphans were adopted and raised by an orcish warband.</blockquote>

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