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Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 8746847" data-attributes="member: 3400">For debates about things like this, racial essentialism is, at least in part, poorly applied. Criticism of essentialism makes sense when dealing with real world ethnic and racial groups since we are all, literally, human and it's at the root of a lot of racist and chauvinist theories. But applying it to physical differences between goliaths and halflings is where the little weird aspect really comes up since they are not, and never have been, conceived as being the same species or even size. There's no real world stigma to halflings and goliaths fitting different strength score distributions and players have a reasonable ability to make meaningful choices in the character races, classes, weapons, and stat distributions they pick - something people born into the real world do not have a chance to make.If someone wants to make the argument that the game system doesn't need to be so granular that it measures that difference, that's one thing. That's a stylistic choice in what the game should model. But arguing that it shouldn't because of some ethical/sociological/social science critical framework developed to analyze real-world problems might be another story.</blockquote>