Human Races & Peoples

[Sorrowdusk]

Here's a thought a random thought that occured to me looking at another thread. Now, typically DnD is set in some form or variety of 'european fantasy'. Occassionally, you might do something like an oriental adventures kind of thing. Now, there are various player races, dwarves, elves, humans and all the like-but of course humans arent divided into ethnicities, they count them all as one group.

Now if you were playing in a Rokugan type setting, you would probably expect all the characters to be 'asian' (or what we would consider to be asian, as within the setting there is no 'asia'), and it would probably be asian-centric (ala Airbender's setting) no different than Tolkien's story was more or less european-centric (although there were the Southrons in there IIRC). In contrast, some settings might attempt to replicate the real world variety within human culture, and so you may get equivalents or hodge podges of many peoples.

But here's a few questions:
-IF you were doing an OA style setting...would you allow one of your players to play a PC that by their own description was caucasian (ala Last Samurai) or vice versa with a primarily european styled setting?
-How often do your homesettings include all ethnicities of humans that exist in real life; do you make room to include specific lands that these people hail from?
-Do your elves and dwarves, etc include as much variety within one another as humans? Or are all your dwarves scotts?
-In your experience, do you (or your players) when playing Humans at least, tend to play characters who are of their own ethnicity, or does it depend on the setting?

I myself (african american) have only played a black character thrice once in Vampire, CoC and PbP but also in LARP;I only made a caucasian character once; over the course of my human characters I've played several middle-eastern, and East Indian characters, with a few east asians.
"You almost never see black people in D&D or FRPG art-its like one in a million. If you or me were to just magically show up in a fantasy setting, 9/10 times people would be like 'Where did you come?' "-friend of mine to me once
It makes me feel good to see the PF paladin.
http://paizo.com/image/content/RiseOfTheRunelords/Pathfinder7_Paladin.jpg

Other than the 3.5 Iconic Monk, I think I can recall a divine martial PrC's art actually, which I can quite recall the name of.

I'll also bring up the oldschool Queen of The Spiders; on the cover of which the drow are black. I thought it was kind of hot ;D.
http://tsr.bothgunsblazing.com/dd1/gdq1-7.jpg

On a random side note, how have the drow changed? I know at one point they were night black, then black (ethnically; but not for long), then blue, and now in more recent incarnations this kind of purple color.

 

[the Jester]

My campaign's main human ethnicities are:

Forinthian (roughly Caucasian/English in appearance)
Thulian (black skin, wavy black hair)
Peshan (slightly green tinge to skin, red, brown, tan or chestnut hair, slanted eyes)
Khelmite (swarthy red-brown to golden skin, generally dark hair, almond-shaped eyes)
Strogassian (pale skin, dark hair, aquiline nose, large dark eyes)

So, to answer your questions:

-IF you were doing an OA style setting...would you allow one of your players to play a PC that by their own description was caucasian (ala Last Samurai) or vice versa with a primarily european styled setting?
-How often do your homesettings include all ethnicities of humans that exist in real life; do you make room to include specific lands that these people hail from?
-Do your elves and dwarves, etc include as much variety within one another as humans? Or are all your dwarves scotts?
-In your experience, do you (or your players) when playing Humans at least, tend to play characters who are of their own ethnicity, or does it depend on the setting?

IMC an OA style campaign would be a matter of setting it in Pesh, or certain areas of Strogass, Khelm or Bordis. I would have no problem with a pc human of a different ethnicity. Likewise with a more Eurocentric part of my world.

My campaigns never include real-life ethnicities, rather using my own homebrewed ones.

Yes, there is a substantial amount of racial/cultural/ethnic difference within my elves, dwarves, halflings, etc.

I would say that players tend to play their own ethnicity kind of by default, but it's far from a hard and fast rule. I'm pretty damn white, and I played an awesome epic-level alienist in a 3.5 game set in the Warhammer world, and I was a black woman from deepest Africa (whatever that means in the WH world). Likewise, one of my players' longest-running character is a half-elf whose human half was Thulian, so he's dark-skinned. Again, the player is white.

EDIT: BTW Redgar was originally designed to be kind of generically multi-ethnic non-caucasian.

 

[Diamond Cross]

Yes, I like playing guys that are out of their time or culture and trying to have to deal with the differences.

And yes I would allow such things.

 

[Wik]

I really don't like "stranger in a strange land" characters, mostly because they usually wind up sounding hackneyed and cliched. I much prefer players exploring the rules of a culture that might have different values than the players themselves.

For example, I have run campaigns where slavery was a normal and accepted part of society - there was never any "Free the slave" adventure, and in fact, those who opposed slavery in the campaign were generally depicted as villains or fools. It was sort of neat to see the players embracing a cultural tradition that was 100% opposite their personal beliefs.

For what it's worth, I'm a history/anthropology guy, and I tend to focus a lot on cultures in my campaign world, so maybe that's where some of this comes from.

In my current campaign world, there are only a few human "ethnicities", but mostly because the campaign takes place in a rather small geographic area. I generally depict the people as having one shared linguistic root and a shared background, but ethnically the people are diversed, as all humans in my campaign are usually the descendants of lower-class or slave-class workers from an ancient, fallen empire.

In my next campaign (Dark Sun), I expect there to be a much larger variety of ethnic diversity, ranging from sub-saharan peoples (Gulg) to Middle Eastern (Tyr, Uruk) to asian (Nibenay) to Meditteranean (Balic) to East Indian (Raam). Not to mention all the desert tribes.

 

[(Psi)SeveredHead]

Now if you were playing in a Rokugan type setting, you would probably expect all the characters to be 'asian' (or what we would consider to be asian, as within the setting there is no 'asia'), and it would probably be asian-centric (ala Airbender's setting) no different than Tolkien's story was more or less european-centric (although there were the Southrons in there IIRC). In contrast, some settings might attempt to replicate the real world variety within human culture, and so you may get equivalents or hodge podges of many peoples.

But here's a few questions:
-IF you were doing an OA style setting...would you allow one of your players to play a PC that by their own description was caucasian (ala Last Samurai) or vice versa with a primarily european styled setting?

Yes.

FR actually dealt with this pretty well in 3.0 with culture-specific feats. Of course, you still had to pay the feat slot! So if you have a European campaign, but one character wanted to be a samurai and use iado-style feats (probably not spelled right, but it's the Japanese technique of drawing a blade really fast and doing lots of damage, but you can only do it once per combat) that would be fine. Only they can do it (or only they can train others to do so) but they're not actually more powerful than the other characters... or less. (Assuming the feat is balanced.)

-Do your elves and dwarves, etc include as much variety within one another as humans? Or are all your dwarves scotts?

No and (almost) yes. Sometimes a non-human race will have a few cultural groups, but they never have as many as the humans.

-In your experience, do you (or your players) when playing Humans at least, tend to play characters who are of their own ethnicity, or does it depend on the setting?

No, they usually play a race based on the setting. In a short-lived Pathfinder campaign, I was playing an Arab-flavored character, but usually it's a European-flavored character. (I'm not white, by the way.)

I'm starting a Dark Sun campaign, and while races are never mentioned, an evil NPC party I stole from a Dark Sun adventure (converting from 2e to 3e) has a character who is obviously African in appearance, and actually writes spells on himself in pale-colored ink.

Other than the 3.5 Iconic Monk, I think I can recall a divine martial PrC's art actually, which I can quite recall the name of.

They did that to show that non-Asians can be monk. (An NPC monk in Enemies and Allies explicitly has short blond hair.)

I'll also bring up the oldschool Queen of The Spiders; on the cover of which the drow are black. I thought it was kind of hot ;D.
http://tsr.bothgunsblazing.com/dd1/gdq1-7.jpg

While they're hot-looking, they were actually supposed to be literally black. (And that only makes sense due to magic.)

On a random side note, how have the drow changed? I know at one point they were night black, then black (ethnically; but not for long), then blue, and now in more recent incarnations this kind of purple color.

I think it just varies with the artist. While they're "supposed" to be (literally) black, realistically you'd think there'd be some ethnic differences.

 

[kitsune9]

But here's a few questions:
-IF you were doing an OA style setting...would you allow one of your players to play a PC that by their own description was caucasian (ala Last Samurai) or vice versa with a primarily european styled setting?

It depends upon the campaign and game. If I running something from Golarion which has a strong mix of Asian cultures (the Tian) with European (everyone else), I'd allow it if I was to an OA Golarion game. But if I was running something like Rokugan in L5R, I would probably strongly discourage it.

-How often do your homesettings include all ethnicities of humans that exist in real life; do you make room to include specific lands that these people hail from?

I'd pretty much would have as many of the real-world cultures represented if I was to create my own homeworld unless I was going for something truly strange.

-Do your elves and dwarves, etc include as much variety within one another as humans? Or are all your dwarves scotts?

If I'm using a published setting like Forgotten Realms, I'll use all their subraces, but in more generic settings, then yes, the dwarves are Scots.

-In your experience, do you (or your players) when playing Humans at least, tend to play characters who are of their own ethnicity, or does it depend on the setting?

I don't mind playing different ethnicities. In the last long-term campaign I played in I played two Asian characters, one a female sorcerer and another a samarai.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Fellow black gamer, here, and I've played all the typical races and most of the subraces...and when I DM, I'm equally open minded.

However, when I want to do something like mimic the experiences of a black man in the southern USA of the 1960s, I'll pick a "monster" race- Orc, Drow and Hobgoblins for tamer campaigns, and in more wide-open games, I've played Minotaurs and Winged Folk.

 

[balam_br]

-..would you allow one of your players...

Yeah, im all about "Stranger in a strange land characters" for my Homebrew worlds, no problem with that... i had a time i loved this kind of characters as a player, but after some years it just got old...

-How often do your homesettings...
My hombrew has a lot of them... in the main land, i have russian, nordic, iberian, british and Eastern europe fakes... the main empire in the world is Middle eastern, and i still have meso american, sub saara africa and east asian Fakes... all with their own races and kingdoms available.

-Do your elves and dwarves...
Yeah... i have different flavored dwarves in Russian, Arabic and nordic alike...
Elves can be asian (grey), meso american(Wood elves), british (high elves) and african (drow)...

Goblins are a nomad trader race, highly united and full of secrets. More os less jewish like... the list goes on... i dont have humans in all the lands, but they are by far, the most commom race.

do you (or your players) when playing Humans...
Dont think they will go for their own... we are used to go wild with ethnicities, i played all of them in my 17 years in the hobbie, most of my players have done the same...

In my country, Brazil, the concept of ethnicity is not so strong i suppose.

 

[Wik]

Fellow black gamer, here, and I've played all the typical races and most of the subraces...and when I DM, I'm equally open minded.

However, when I want to do something like mimic the experiences of a black man in the southern USA of the 1960s, I'll pick a "monster" race- Orc, Drow and Hobgoblins for tamer campaigns, and in more wide-open games, I've played Minotaurs and Winged Folk.

As an aside on this...

I'm a white guy who has grown up fascinated with the black civil rights movement (ever since I read about the underground railroad, really). And from there, I've been fascinated with most any civil rights movement. Naturally, this tends to come up in my games, too.

Most every campaign has had some sort of civil rights movement or labour movement. The current situation in the campaign (a disenfranchised race fighting for racial equality and recognition) is one that I've based rather loosely on the early black movement in the 1960s (say, after Emmett Tillman and Rosa Parks, but not by much).

And I fully agree that to reflect these movements in a game, you are better off using non-human races rather than various human ethnicities. Because, while it's an entirely academic argument, I fully believe that in most any fantasy environment where there are multiple species of intelligent beings, the various ethnic divisions between our species would not exist in the same degree as they do in our world.

 

[Aus_Snow]

IF you were doing an OA style setting...would you allow one of your players to play a PC that by their own description was caucasian (ala Last Samurai) or vice versa with a primarily european styled setting?

I suppose I might allow it, but - depending on campaign themes/style, perhaps - I'd not be keen on the idea. Most of what I've seen and read along those lines has been truly atrocious . Not that, in a RPG, it would have to be that bad, of course, but I do have plenty of negative associations, and then some. Even if it's "just" the jarring and/or goofy type. Ugh.

How often do your homesettings include all ethnicities of humans that exist in real life; do you make room to include specific lands that these people hail from?

Never. Unless I were to use Earth as the setting - and I'm not opposed to that, in the slightest - it will never happen, I suspect. Even when using Earth as the setting, most campaigns probably don't feature ALL ethnicities, let alone all those from all times, as well as places.

Do your elves and dwarves, etc include as much variety within one another as humans? Or are all your dwarves scotts?

Cultures aplenty, and differences in typical facial feature variation, skin tone, eye colours, voice, etc., all over the place.

In your experience, do you (or your players) when playing Humans at least, tend to play characters who are of their own ethnicity, or does it depend on the setting?

It depends on the setting, and the campaign themes and style, to a large extent, but also preference, whim, and whatever else. Just for one example (though it ain't fantasy) - in CP2020, you can either roll or choose, for many items on the "lifepath" pages. Race is one such item. Quite a few player have chosen, IMC, and not always what one might (or might not...?) expect.

It makes me feel good to see the PF paladin.
http://paizo.com/image/content/RiseOfTheRunelords/Pathfinder7_Paladin.jpg

Pretty cool, yeah. I am not always a fan of PF artwork (or 3e stuff, for that matter), but there are some that really work, for the "feel" it seems they're going for.