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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Hussar" data-source="post: 4936787" data-attributes="member: 22779">Heh, I was wondering if this would come up.Would it be fine if, at the table, in a modern game, halfway through the campaign, it suddenly came out that one of the players was black.  Everyone at the table (barring the player of course) had no idea.  The character was played in such a way that the issue of his background never came up.  Not once.  Not one single time.And that's good roleplaying?I know I'm taking flak for badwrongfun and all that.  Fine.  Y'know what?  I don't care.  If a player cannot take 5 minutes to establish a core element of their character - and yes, I do consider the fact that my character is a different SPECIES than another character to be an important fact - that's bad roleplaying.Heck, if I did it as a writer, I'd get hammered.  If my fantasy novel was two hundred pages in before I established that Legolas wasn't human, I'd be a very poor writer.  "What do your elven eyes see?" is all it takes.  Ok, it's a crappy line, but, you get the point.  If my Twilek Jedi goes three sessions before the fact that he's blue and has "brain tails" comes out, I'm going to say I failed.You can nitpick my examples all you like.  That's fine.  Get your own examples.  My point was, establishing a character's race is a very simple thing.  It takes all of 5 minutes to do.  Again, and I'll keep repeating myself so long as people keep taking it the wrong way, I'm NOT saying that you have to make your race the most important aspect of your character.  By no means does your race have to be the most important aspect of your character.  However, it IS an aspect of your character and should be brought into play at some point.  At least brought in enough that the other players at the table aren't surprised ten or fifteen hours into play that you aren't what they thought you were.I'm not picking on this particular example, really.  It's just one of a bajillion I've seen over the years, almost exclusively with elves and half-elves.  For some reason, people are capable of establishing the race of their character with almost any other race.  With elves?  It's "I'm a human that sees in the dark".</blockquote>

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