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Message: <blockquote data-quote="squibbles" data-source="post: 8183903" data-attributes="member: 6937590">In gaming, the sky is the baseline.That's a pretty straightforward point, which is reasonable on its face, and I'm completely on board with burning false idols.But don't be down on verisimilitude. If you want there to be emotional investment in a fantastical secondary world, suspension of disbelief is the buy in--and it requires verisimilitude. That said, I realize what is being argued about here is whether 3ft 40lb people and 8ft 340lb people should have a 5% differential in their likelihood of stabbing one another.I think these endless arguments about race in D&D boil down to contentiousness between verisimilitude and the rule of cool. Person A says "I should be able to have cool thing XYZ! It would be so cool!" and person B says "cool thing XYZ doesn't make sense, your fun is ruining my engagement with the game." This is a tension with no perfect answer and is best handled on a case by case basis.If D&D goes the way of lineage and culture, I would prefer they re/overwrite race AND backgrounds, for reasons of both parsimony and concept.Having a background that is the high elf cantrip+weapon training+language+2 background skills (i.e. the cultural part) seems like it would be a great way to represent a society of militarized arcane-facing elves as well as other people raised in that tradition. It also makes it very easy to patch out D&D's 'race essentialism' by just having other types of elf culture listed in that section--and allow elves from a human town or less warlike elf society to be garden variety acolytes, artisans, and so on. (and obviously, those other backgrounds would need more cowbell)</blockquote>

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