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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 5561882" data-attributes="member: 4937">In a nutshell, I guess what I was trying to say is that I'm very skeptical of words like 'default'.  My assumption and my experience is that what is normal and unquestioned for one group is abnormal for another.  My assumption is that most DMs don't purchase all the suplimental material, haven't adopted every Dragon article (or have priviledged Dragon over other sorts of suplimental material), and are pretty opinionated sorts prone to dismissing ideas that they don't like and creating there own material.  I'm not at all sure that we can speak of a 'default' setting.Yes, but I think that's the 3e DMG you are talking about, and by the time it came out groups and DMs had 25 odd years to evolve there own default demographic assumptions or to adopt any number of prior published demographic standards.  And even those that first encountered the 3e DMG, many probably took such demographics as suggestions and did what they wanted anyway.  I don't think we can take it for granted that even a majority of groups used those demographics as stated, so while they may be 'cannonical' I'm not sure there is any more a 'default demographics or 'default settings' than there is a 'default pantheon'.  To use your own example, of the wide variaty of information about hobgoblins that has been published in scattered places, what if any of it became cannonical for a give table?  What is the root of your assumptions of default culture of hobgoblins?Two tables will likely very wildly in what they think of as normal.To give you an example, among my many sources of information about what must be 'normal' in D&D demographics was the D&D cartoon.  The D&D cartoon encouraged on one hand something close to a Star Wars cantina approach where in average cities it might not be unusual to see a squad of orcs stumbling out of a bar, or to find an ettin playing cards with a dwarf, while on the other hand it protrayed these Tolkien like racial havens were the races did not normally mix.  This caused me to adopt as early as the mid-80's the assumption that there was commerce between intermediaries of the races that normally didn't get along, from which was born the idea of the goblin merchant.  Pirates and smugglers did business with goblin merchants, and trading towns existed where goblin merchants could meet openly with human smugglers and slave traders.  Demographics of a town were based on its social role, the prevailing culture, and the proximaty to racial homelands not on some standardized chart.  Is that how people did things by default or not?  I don't know, but there is some evidence in published settings (are they default or not, and if so, which one) that those sort of factors were considered.</blockquote>

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