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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8018370" data-attributes="member: 18">Some measure of xenophobia and ethnic bigotry of some kind (often over tiny differences, like a split a few generations back) has been common. Racism in the modern sense is actually not that common. The Romans, for example, loved a good racial stereotype, but none of them were "better/worse", they were pretty much all largely negative and covered everyone (including Romans from actual Rome, who were stereotyped by Roman culture in general as devious and untrustworthy). The idea of "superior" and "inferior" races is a late one (albeit like a lot of ideas, it crops up earlier but doesn't take root).You say of your campaign:This is how human history was for most of history. Enslavement, for example, was horrific, but rarely racially-specific until the 1500s (Sparta being a notable counter-example), when it became incredibly convenient to enslave non-white peoples so thinking had to come into existence to justify that (as it flew in the face of existing societal and religious principles).The other key phrase here being human history.In a typical D&D setting, you have dozens of intelligent species who, somehow, have managed to not exterminate each other, many of whom don't constantly war with each other, and where typical D&D cities feature large numbers of different species living in relative harmony. And slavery is typically a strictly "bad guy" thing (and even then usually generalized).So if you take that and work out from there, having "racism" or "speciesism" being a huge thing isn't really compatible with that. Nor is generalized xenophobia going to be really be viable in a lot of situations. Specific hostility towards cultures/species which interact in a negative way is much more likely.Part of the problem I've seen with some people's games is that some DMs just try and play everyone in the setting as basically extremely xenophobic and generally hostile, like it's the Deep South in the 1800s, but that's just not how even human cultures normally are (xenophobia tends to be very mild, not extreme, without a specific reason), and thus anyone who isn't a plain vanilla human (or sometimes elf/dwarf) has to endure tons of tedious and pointless "NPC being a jerk towards them" RP from the DM. And a lot of the same DMs don't think treating the NPCs with equal, earned hostility is okay (which I've always found curious). It's like, if you want Murderhobos, step 1 is to make most NPCs into the game into complete jerks. Especially racist jerks.So I tend to follow a similar pattern to you - there's xenophobia, there's open hostility if you're obviously a member or potential member of a group that, say, raids the people in question, but there isn't "organised racism", and the average person actually lives in the world he lives in, so is reasonably cosmopolitan, and has no doubt seen numerous "novel" races in his lifetime (i.e. new to him), so isn't going to freak out unless they closely resemble specific monsters or culture enemies.Generally playing out deep xenophobia and hostility tends to be both dull/repetitive and doesn't make the game more enjoyable or engaging, or even increase verisimilitude. Better to make it exceptional and rare, which generally it logically should be.</blockquote>

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