Wolf Link đșCultural differences in fantasy races instead of the plain "good vs. evil"
AK77The thing is, this is still tying culture to race. If there is no racial essentialism to the traits you describe, then thereâs no reason to say that some goblin cultures / sub-cultures do understand the concept of property - and disagree with what they understand to be stealing. Etc.
I donât see how this just doesnât create nuance, which is fantastic
Sure, it adds nuance - and if thatâs all you care about then youâre all set. But it doesnât address The Problem, which is painting âracesâ as monoliths with essential characteristics. Just because you can explain why All X Are Evil, doesnât solve for it being boring/lame/tending-toward-offensive that they all are. Seems like we dealt with this in other contexts, why not include it in lore?
Think of it more as culture tied to community. A village of goblins is going to behave one way, but a goblin raised in a human city will behave another way. Yes there are characteristics that are generally associated with a species (I shy away from âracesâ generally, too loaded of a word). But thatâs just because those species generally form their own communities. Are all goblins like this? Of course not. Are all goblins that the small town cleric has met like this? Yes.
Itâs not really that different from a native Californian thinking a native New Yorker is rude and interrupts all of the time, and the New Yorker thinking the Californian doesnât engage in conversation, simply because their conversational speeds differ enough that it creates underlying tension. In that example, did I paint all New Yorkers as rapid speakers? Yes. Is it generally true of native New Yorkers? You tell me.
There will always be generalizations, and there will always be nuance that disproves the generalization. When telling a story the secret is knowing WHY the generalization exists and how the character relates to it.
You are saying what Iâm saying. This is not the traditional view.
MillieI think in most cases when you zoom in on one of these admittedly poorly named âracesâ in D&D, you see the breaking of molds almost more often than not. What they allow is an extreme contrast in behavior being packed into a smaller terrain that isnât simply viewed as another community by the surrounding people. A bunch of kobolds living in the mountain near your village isnât seen as having bad neighbors, itâs seen as an infestation. The kobolds, likewise, donât view the human village the same way they view another kobold settlement. That, in and of itself, highlights some of the problems with an expanding civilization, but it also provides smaller contexts that can clash heavily against one another within the âestablishedâ territories of various countries.
You do have many examples in D&D of cities populated by a huge diversity of different types of creatures. Looking at Forgotten Realms, most cities arenât limited to just humans or just dwarves or elves. Those exist, but theyâre not whatâs most common. Youâve even got places like Westgate where humans, elves, halfings, and what not are living with orcs, drow, ogres, bugbears, and all sorts of other folks that would typically be attacked on sight in otherwise similar cities.
Thereâs a lot of nuance and room for nuance in D&D. Even in the case of outer-planar beings like fiends, there are cases where characters have a major turn-around. Iâd say that most of the most popular characters are actually subverting some trope rather than living up to it.
I think racial descriptions in fantasy games are more like tendencies. Tendencies that often have to do with the environment that each typically grows up in. I thought this was the traditional view, but maybe not.
While there are of course deviations from the norm, it is hard to lay this out in a digestible way. Simplification help readability. NPCs or locations that break these norms seem like a more pleasant way of de-essentializing.
AndonomeThe thing is, this is still tying culture to race.
I had a go at breaking past this barrier, and found it extremely difficult. I started with the idea that geography informs culture, and made a split between elves in the frozen South and elves tropical jungles. This left me with half the normal space to write about elven cultures.
So I figured I could do 2-3 cultures per race, and end up with (5 x 2.5) ~13 descriptions of fantasy cultures. But who wants that? I canât use that much in my own game. Writing because you have to write something makes for bad writing.
Another route is to limit cultures even more. Maybe dwarves and gnomes basically live the same way, as do gnolls and humans. But then it seems odd that gnolls having the mouth of a canine changes nothing about them. If nothing else, their language has to be deeply different, given the lack of lips.
So in the end, Iâve decided to just fill in a very small part of the world, and leave an underlying assumption that elves, humans, and gnolls might do things differently elsewhere.
Thanks for this. I think what you ended up with was the absolute right move. Trying to solidify everything from the top-down, beforehand, seems an impossible task to do well, or with enough foresight to make work across your eventual varied needs. In real world terms it seems sort of Prescriptive, in a vaguely Victorian scientist way; cataloging races instead of meeting people.
Iâd imagine working bottom-up, Descriptively, means you can put all of your nuance into a single group or region, per the story you want to tell. You find out who and why, because you meet them on the ground in their actual situation - instead of thinking you can manufacture everything ahead of time in a vacuum. And then the next time your story crosses paths with another such group, you again get to reflect on the individual circumstances that make them even slightly different, and add a new micro culture to your growing canon.
Itâs grand, exciting stuff. Thank you!
Yea, âbottom-upâ is a great way to put it.
Like, I can still add a totally different gnoll tribe later on in a module, or just add one âfrom the icy Southâ, and let the GM imply a world without yammering about it.