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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 8334644" data-attributes="member: 82106">Right, and here I think we all have to politely ask people with different cultural/social backgrounds to all give each other the same 'breathing room'. I think that sometimes is the gist of frustration with 'PC' ideas about gaming and race/culture. Not to absolve anyone of responsibility for how they depict things, but to be able to give and take. However, I do appreciate that our Western cultures have done a lot of 'giving' and not so much 'taking' in a sense, historically (or maybe we should call it taking instead of giving, either way).That is an interesting point which hadn't come up so far in any of this discussion. AC is an easy one to look at, you are 'better armored' the more metal you can drape on your body in D&D. I think many games follow a similar pattern. I don't think this is unrealistic necessarily, but clearly there are trade-offs, and different societies needn't be 'backwards' simply because they don't wear armor. Yet those characters would be harshly punished mechanically in a D&D game (certainly a classic D&D game, less so in 4e or 5e).Right, Lizardmen (or nowadays folk) aren't about what an intelligent lizard race would be like. They are simply a recapitulation of old western tropes about 'primitive tribes', with the lizard part not carrying any significance at all except as an atmospheric detail.I watched all the original series episodes a few months back. Spock is a pretty sophisticated character. For example when the 'space hippies' show up, he identifies closely with their philosophical stance and they respect him. He's controlled, and cool, in his outward appearance, but Vulcans are not depicted as emotionally challenged, more the opposite. Their instinctive nature is so strong that they were FORCED to become controlled, or else perish. The message as it relates to modern humanity is pretty transparent of course! The theme is extended to humans as well, with hints of a history in which civilization reached the very brink of annihilation before adopting more mature attitudes (and presumably the Vulcans helped, as they are said to have appeared at that time).I mean, Star Trek has plenty of ludicrously stock trope aliens as well, though interestingly I think the original show was in some sense more enlightened in that regard than later series. The Klingons are bad guys, maybe even a bit evil by our standards (they threaten to torture Kirk and Spock once for example, and they systematically execute Organians who don't obey them). OTOH they keep to their agreements and seem to have their own cultural standards. The Romulans are the other race that shows up a few times. They are depicted as a militaristic society, but the individual characters are respectable and certainly don't seem to be depicted as 'inferior' or lacking in positive traits.</blockquote>

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