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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Eldritch_Lord" data-source="post: 5560381" data-attributes="member: 52073">The person I was quoting was talking about the "average commoner in a medieval borderlands setting"--I was clarifying medieval commoner on Earth vs. medieval commoner in D&D, not medieval human vs. modern human or the like.I didn't say they were familiar, I said they could be found anywhere; it's not so much mere familiarity as a universal acceptance.  If you look in the DMG, the vast majority of communities have members of all the common races in them in not-insignificant quantities.  A member of one of the common races can walk into any city anywhere and have some other members of his or her race there, he or she will not have to worry about being shunned, etc.  Even if an individual human, say, hates dwarves with a vengeance, the number of cities that won't allow dwarves in them is vanishingly small; a human and dwarf who hate each other "for good reason" will have said good reason to hate each other, they won't simply hate each other on sight for being evil.Changing the basic assumptions is great; I like seeing more isolated and xenophobic races as much as I do more cosmopolitan races.  My objection is to the "default" presentation of races in generic D&D and in the published settings; I assumed that would go unstated because the OP was talking about how races in the "original D&D universes" held these views.  If you change the assumptions, then of course all the problems with "good races" and "evil races" are off the table.Oh, I'm sure elves and dwarves disagree about a great many things...but one thing they probably agree on is that evil races shouldn't be associated with.  In my previous example, I pointed how hobgoblins and elves are quite similar in that both have a "holier than thou" attitude, both believe everything else to be inferior, both have lots of talents ("intensive military training from an early age" for the hobs, "dabbles in everything" for the elves), and yet because hobgoblins are generally evil and elves are generally good, as far as the default settings are concerned hobgoblins are unconditionally shunned in most cities while elves are unconditionally welcomed, with a few exceptions.  Team Good doesn't have to agree on what "good" means in order to exclude a member of Team Evil without giving him a chance.</blockquote>

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