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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Merkuri" data-source="post: 4950643" data-attributes="member: 41321">This thread is making me think about when I read I Am Legend.  As often happens with me, when the movie came out and they were advertising it everywhere it made me want to read the book, so I went out and snagged a copy before seeing the movie.  Though I hadn't actually seen the movie yet I couldn't help but imagine the protagonist as looking like Will Smith.  Boy, was it really jarring when, towards the end of the book, they described the protagonist as having grown a thick BLOND beard.  That was the first time it had occurred to me that the protagonist was white.  They may have described him as blond in the very beginning, but my internal image of Will Smith was stronger than the short description the book had given pages and pages ago.To some people, race is just a cosmetic thing about their character.  They don't feel like exploring the edges of humanity by playing something non-human, they just liked the pointy ears.  I've been guilty of this.  One time I had the urge to play a kobold bard just because I liked the idea of a little lizardish creature, dressed up in a wide-brimmed hat with a feather, jumping around and playing the fiddle.  There was no deeper motivation there.  I was actually prepared to be the brunt of mistrust because of my race and was eager to climb that roleplaying mountain, but it just never came up probably due to the fact that we were playing the World's Largest Dungeon and by the time my character appeared the group's theory was "strength in numbers - if they don't attack us they can join us."  Hussar was actually the DM for this game and he asked me on at least one occasion why I didn't just play a halfling if I wanted a short charismatic fiddle-player.  The answer was, I just wanted a kobold this time.That might not have been exactly what Hussar was talking about, since I'm pretty sure everybody in the group new I was a kobold, but my choice of being a kobold in that game was about on the same level as the choice of her wearing a floppy wide-brimmed hat with a feather.  And probably on the same level as her being a HER, actually.  I wouldn't have been surprised with that character if some player had turned to me and said, "Wait, the kobold's a she?"  Her gender just wasn't very important to her character.I think it's less important to make sure people know your race than it is to make sure people know your character and can tell the difference between your character and everyone else's character.  If your race is part of that identity, fine.  If it's not, that's fine as well.This is all assuming you're playing with people who value roleplaying and getting into character, of course.  If you're playing a game with a bunch of tacticians who don't even remember their own characters' names because that isn't why they play, then that's a whole different story. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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