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

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="InVinoVeritas" data-source="post: 4159031" data-attributes="member: 41485">Absolutely. In most cases, time spent explaining how things work is time spent boring the audience. Many times, you can get away with just letting them experience it, and then explain it after the fact, once they're curious. So, many times, you're left with sticking to cultural tropes that are well known, and introducing less well-known traditions as flavor.I mean heck, not even full Eurocentrism survives. You can't really explain manorialism or oddities with fuzzy borders very well. We expect well-delineated borders and freedom of travel in our games. So it's not as much Eurocentrism as much as knights and castles. My wife is from Europe, and I have a hard time understanding her feelings on prestige and classes from my American point of view, from time to time.But even then, because of the lack of full-on Eurocentric tropes, it becomes much easier to introduce other cultural snippets. Grab a picture of Angkor Wat, and say that the high priest's temple looks like that. Make a bunch of gods with Egyptian-style animal heads. Give the kings giant Ottoman-style turbans. Have the elves use a magical system of ley lines based on increasingly complex earthworks like the Cahokia mounds. Explain that even though a member of the lowest caste might do well, become the best fighter, and become rich, that he is still unworthy of respect--and, perhaps, is forbidden from owning property--because he's a member of the lowest caste, and if he was supposed to be a great king, the gods would have had him born to the appropriate caste. So, now he's a nomadic warlord terrorizing the countryside, but that's the way the gods wanted it (or not, and he's expected to have stuck to dirt farming or whatever). Heck, just the fact that the default D&D world expects polytheism is a major difference between it and a Eurocentric society.So, I say mix it up. Dive deep into multiculturalism. Keep the stuff you like (architecture is easy to stick in a game, is something that needs little explanation, and gets the creative juices flowing) and dump what you don't (a lot of details on the histories of cultural taboos are too complex to be adequately appreciated in an evening of monster-slaying, so should be kept on the sidelines for whenever). Find a cool picture, keep it. Read a cool legend, keep it. Mine the world for ideas, pick a few, and slap them together. The details will work themselves out when everyone gets to a stopping point.</blockquote>

Verification