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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Brother MacLaren" data-source="post: 1670822" data-attributes="member: 15999">I find this argument interesting.  I suppose I see a difference between adding or subtracting elements to the world as we know it and changing them.  It's the difference between saying "My game world features a new metal called mithral that weighs no more than wood" and "In my world, iron weighs the same as wood."  But more than that, you're talking about changing human nature, the touchstone for our understanding of this (or any) fantasy world.Get rid of the Black Death?  It's like our earth without that bacterium.  Get rid of the One Church?  It's like our earth at a different point in history, or with a few historical events changed.  Adding magic and active gods?  You have the world that most of our ancestors believed they lived in, with plenty of myths illustrating how humans might react.  But to say that there are no sexist societies, when sexism seems to have evolved independently in so many cultures in our history, you are postulating a radically changed human nature.  It's like saying "And over here we have a large kingdom where everybody is so altruistic and law-abiding that there is no poverty and no crime."  Now, some fantasy stories do have that - LOTR and Roddenberry Star Trek spring to mind - so it's not impossible.  You can remove prejudice from the human heart, or greed, or sloth, or rage, or self-interest and cost-benefit analysis.  But it will require you to consider the extent of the changes to human nature in your game.  My preference in games and most genre fiction is to have basic human nature exist as close as possible to what we know it, adjusted by the logical reactions to the cultures and realities of the fantasy world.  I don't like worlds where humanity as a whole are simply and for no real reason just better people than we are here in our world (my problem with early ST:TNG). I also disagree with the argument that the lack of sexual dimorphism means that prejudice wouldn't exist.  It seems to imply that there was a rational basis for sexism in the real world, which clearly isn't true.  For example, sexism and racism have often been due to assumed differences in mental abilities, even though there really are no significant differences.</blockquote>

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