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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mallus" data-source="post: 5080127" data-attributes="member: 3887">The simple answer is "because you can only ask your audience to remember so much". Elves and aliens tend to have monocultures (or an unreasonable small number of cultures) because there's only so much fictional ethnography a reader/player can take before it all blurs together and you lose any meaningful distinction. There's a tendency among SF/F readers to want to "learn the world" (cultures, histories, technologies, magics, etc.). This helps explains all the infodumps found in SF/F. Somewhat paradoxically, this necessitates the fictional worlds they read about to be small enough to be known. Authors/setting-creators often need to simplify things. Sometimes painfully so. Put crudely, Vulcans can have either have one distinct racial culture or no distinct culture at all. This is a great suggestion. You can have a small number of cultures made up of a many races, which aren't themselves culturally distinct.Though, while I'm not usually one to bring up... ahem... realism, not all cultures are big, multi-, heterogenous affairs. FYI, "humans with pointy ears" isn't a problem, it's an admirable and hard to achieve goal. Most authors/DM's should be so lucky that their elves and aliens approach the depth, complexity, and, most importantly, relevance of everyday people.</blockquote>