Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Crimson Binome" data-source="post: 6524942" data-attributes="member: 6775031">That seems like a pretty fine line to walk, especially since it's open to interpretation and personal sensitivities. How do you portray a character of a certain culture, and make it obvious to everyone that the character belongs to that culture, without devolving into a walking stereotype? A person from Canada is likely to act like a person from the USA in 95% of situations. Those other things might come up, but not frequently.Is it, really? I mean, the character sheet also has room for height and eye color, but those tend to not come up very often. Alignment has steadily degraded in importance, between each edition. Why does race need to matter at all? A half-orc, raised in a fantastic human society that didn't suffer from fantastic racism, would act exactly like a human with darkvision and a bonus to Strength.The most important differences between the traditional fantasy races are all cultural rather than biological. Sometimes those cultural differences might be informed by biological differences, but a dwarf raised by elves is going to behave a lot more like an elf than like a dwarf. Whether or not they can inter-breed is somewhat irrelevant to the topic at hand, although tradition suggests that they are indeed much more like ethnicities than separate species (or perhaps, like different breeds of dog, which can exhibit wildly different physical characteristics in spite of all being the same sub-species of wolf).My whole point was, when you tell someone to act like a (D&D) race, you're telling them to promote the stereotype of that race. On the one hand, that's not supposed to offend anyone, because there are no real elves or dwarves who could take it personally. On the other hand, it's still suggesting that there are correct ways for a member of a cultural group to act, and if you don't conform to those stereotypes then you're doing it wrong. You don't necessarily want to promote that sort of thing in your fun fantasy game.</blockquote>

Verification