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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 7860229" data-attributes="member: 18">I think races are more important to fit in than classes. Classes are not necessarily a thing normal people have - that's a choice for a setting to make. Eberron 3E for example is a firm, loud yes to that, but most settings have classes as more vague, with only a handful as defined parts of the setting. I used to take a similar attitude to the OP, long ago, but i found it ultimately leads to settings which don't feel as real to the players, or to me, so stakes and engagement aren't quite as high. As such I started considering stuff like how the basic economies of nations worked and connected with those around them, how cultures and religions spread, how D&D races integrated (or didn't) into various cultures, and so on. It's interesting that the two different philosophies here have been part of RPGs since the 1980s. On the one hand you have stuff like Mystara, where basically every culture stands alone and barely interacts with others. It's almost like a randomly set up board game. Honorable lion people here, nuclear reactor elves there, etc. There's no consideration about interrelations or history or anything and A Wizard pretty much did everything. But in 1989 you see Taladas for D&D, which is completely about interrelationships and culture and even language, with a cool flow-chart showing lingual relationships and how well a character who speaks on language might understand someone speaking another. Religion and culture similarly flow and mix like RL instead of being bound and great attention is paid to how the societies actually function. Even the complexity of gender roles across societies is considered (one culture, for example, views all wizards as female, so male wizards exist but live with and dress like the women, are referred to in that culture with female pronouns and so on). The wonderfully different positions of Half-Elves in different societies are a thing too, and the way some societies are cosmopolitan re D&D races and others xenophobic is very well-handled. When I started out I thought Taladas was cool but a bit much. Five years later I thought it was much closer to what I aspire to than stuff like Mystara (which I loved a lot of). Most D&D settings exist on a spectrum between these two more extreme outliers. FR is towards the middle. Eberron more up the Taladas end. Greyhawk between Mystara and the FR. Not every DM is going to be interested in that kind of stuff though.</blockquote>

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