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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Thomas Shey" data-source="post: 8472358" data-attributes="member: 7026617">I think I did.  But it still didn't make the area a good place.That's part of the issue.  As long as you have cultures that are going to have traits that mean some of them are going to seem better than others to players, its going to seem like someone is being slammed.  Would this only have been acceptable if I'd aimed it at the two cultures who resembled Nordic and Central European ones, since it doesn't look like punching down?  Is this the equivalent of the only real bad guys you can be using being white het boys?(Yes, I know that can sound like poor-little-me from a dominant group, but the point is that consistently avoiding the unattractive element in a setting being represented by groups that are subaltern in our world seems, at best, overcompensation.  But do anything else and it always comes across that your motives and judgment are in question).Yeah, know that one too; the other half of my ancestry is Croatian.I get the distinction but, well, not so sure that in my example the Welsh would agree with you.That's part of the gig, of course; while some groups are pretty clearly subaltern (if there's a place in the world where blacks aren't effectively to one degree or another an underclass, except in countries where the whole country is treated as a lesser place, I'm not sure where it is), different groups we wouldn't class that way still see themselves that way, and there's no obvious way to make the distinction sometimes (Asian being a muddy case; there are absolutely parts of the world where Asians are treated as subalterns, but its hard to see China, Japan and Korea and see that as a global trait.)  So if I'm using a group of pseudo-Celts as villains somewhere, do a Welsh player have the right to feel targeted?The more central to a campaign something is, the more research I do (I'm an ex-librarian, so one thing I know how to do is research).  But that's the problem; the less you're using just bland, super-familiar approximations, the more the negative elements can seem aimed at somebody, and given games normal need for conflict, those are going to often be the more visible.  Even when what you're doing is aimed at their ancestors rather than the modern versions (and let's face it, in many ways the cultures of a lot of our ancestors were kind of terrible), it can end up feeling really personal.  (I remember a situation I encountered some years ago where I hit some Russians that thought Americans were racially prejudiced against them.  I tried to explain that while there's still some baggage about the politics between the U.S. and Russia (and this was in a less fraught period than we have these days) to the vast majority of us, Russians were just another bunch of white guys, but I don't think they believed me).</blockquote>

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