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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Charlaquin" data-source="post: 9846188" data-attributes="member: 6779196">Let me give you all a personal first-hand example. I’m 1/4 Pueto-Rican, but my grandmother assimilated so hard, I basically had no idea of my connection to that side of my heritage. I call her “Abby” despite her name being Mildred, because it’a short for Abuela, and as a kid I just accepted that unquestioningly, the thought never occurred to me that there was anything unusual about referring to a grandparent by an anglicized shortening of a Spanish word, or thought about why she was the only grandparent I referred to that way. But every time my family went to visit her in Florida, we’d have one day we’d all go to see my ti-ti Frieda, and Abby was wildly different around her. The two of them would constantly slip back and forth between English and Spanish within the same sentence, and I had no idea why, because Abby otherwise never spoke it. I did like those days though, they felt very special in a  different way than visiting Abby did the rest of the time, and I wished I could have understood what they were saying when they were speaking Spanish to each other.It took me many, many years just to understand what all was going on with that aspect of my heritage, but once I got it, a lot of experiences started to make sense in retrospect. There are aspects of the way that I cook, for example, that are informed by that heritage, the cuisine and practices I grew up with from my mom’s cooking, which were an anglicized imitation of her mom’s cooking. My rice and beans seem “ethnic” to my white friends and family, but would probably be unrecognizable to a Puerto Rican person as the dish they’re bastardized from. And when I eat Abby’s version, it just doesn’t taste right to me, because it’s too authentic (and she criticizes her own version because she has to substitute ingredients that she doesn’t have access to).This is pretty dark, but I will probably never need to fear being abducted ICE, unless America goes into full holocaust mode. That might not be as true for my mom and almost certainly isn’t true for Abby or Frieda.These are things that could inform a half-elf or half-orc character. What is the character’s relationship with their peoples’ languages? Their cuisine? Their cultural practices? How do they feel about calling themselves “half” elf/orc, or about being called that by others, especially when they’re “technically only 1/4”, or “have some distant elf/orc heritage”? These are interesting character development questions, and by exploring them we create opportunities to expand our capacity to empathize with others who have had analogous experiences in real life. That’s how half-elves are different to elves, and why they’re worth including in the game as a distinct player option.</blockquote>

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