Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.
Rocket your D&D 5E and Level Up: Advanced 5E games into space! Alpha Star Magazine Is Launching... Right Now!

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6527782" data-attributes="member: 6790260">I'm still really not sure why this has to be a thing. Admittedly, it's a weaker standard than I had originally understood you to uphold--that is, characters don't have to be actively outside all human experiences and personalities--but it still seems really extreme to me.When someone plays a character, any character, I expect the player to put in the effort to make the character rich and believable. This ranges from highly idiosyncratic/personal touches, to more general habits and traits, to linguistic and cultural behaviors, informed by any and all appropriate character elements. If a woman grew up working the forge with her father, I expect her to be muscular and calloused; probably rough and unlettered, unless there's a distinct reason otherwise; probably not following "traditional" Western standards of beauty and personal dress. If a character is a tiefling, but his heritage is easily hidden (say, horns that can be covered by a hood, hat, or turban, or a tail small enough to be hidden inside clothes), I expect that that will be part of how the character is portrayed; I expect a decent amount of dissembling and keeping secrets, and a pointed attitude (positive or negative) about controlling the way others perceive him; the character should probably have a chosen stance (for, against, or indifferent) toward the origin of his fell ancestry. There is no need to think deeply about something like, "Do dwarves lack sexuality since they have minimal sexual dimorphism? How does being hatched rather than birthed affect dragonborn psyche?" If the player wants to, they can, but that's...even calling it "giving 110%" seems insufficient. That's "wow, you really love this worldbuilding stuff don't you? Maybe you should think about DMing!" On the flipside, it's entirely reasonable that what starts as a particular character's individual quirk transitions into a general (or at least common) trait of their race: I've played in a campaign where elves had indeterminate physical sex or possibly were functionally intersexual--but Drow were not, and this was considered part of the deep divide between the two races despite their common origin. Both things (intersexual elves and monosexual Drow) came about as a result of individual played characters. We didn't spend a great deal of time thinking about, "How would Elf personalities be different as a result?" but we did factor it into our campaigns and it played some minor but important roles in certain events. (It also meant that the Avatar Council--the demigod-like heads of the various Towers of Magic--had no active male members; the Gold Avatar of Enchantment was an elf and therefore intersexual, and the Green [Conjuration], Red [Evocation], and White [Artifice] Avatars were all female--only the long-absent Black Avatar [Necromancy] was male, and he's dead now!)Whenever actual biological traits aren't overtly obvious or necessary, I don't think that "is an Elf" should be so dramatically front and center that no one could possibly be unaware of a given character's race at the end of a session. No more than (say) if you transcribed the words that were said, anyone should be able to tell that a particular player was a woman rather than a man or vice-versa. I expect the physiological characteristics of a character to be important now and then, and that the player be consistent about them, but I'm far more interested in the cultural stuff, and the vast majority of that is going to be just as "constructed" as real-world cultures are.</blockquote>

Verification