Some thoughts on race in role-playing

“The DM can, if he chooses, make any class available to any race.  This will certainly make your players happy.  But before throwing the doors open, consider the consequences.  If the only special advantage humans have is given to all the races, who will want to play a human?  Humans would be the weakest race in your world?  Why play a 20^th level human paladin when you could play a 20^th level elf paladin and have all the abilities of paladins and elves?

“If none of the player characters are human, it is probably safe to assume that no non-player characters of any importance are human either.  Your world would have no human kingdoms, or human kings, emperors, or powerful wizards.  If would be run by dwarves, elves, and gnomes . . . Also, if humans are weak, will the other races treat them with contempt?  With pity?  Will humans be enslaved?  All things considered, humans could have a very bad time of it.”

On the other hand, it is probably a little excessive to say that "non-humans are restricted in order to ensure a continuing human supremacy."  Something apologetic like, "We didn't want you guys to always want to play the fancy creatures with innate superpowers, so we threw you this bone in order to give some kind of real concrete advantage that might encourage you to try playing just plain folks" would probably not have gone over well with the D&D crowd. 

Orcs are always a bit problematic.  The author of this essay reaches for the "unstoppable tide of darkies" ring, and it's not a difficult one to grab.  But really, let's face it: orcs exist so that you can kill people without killing "people."  By being an "evil race" they let us imprint whatever definition of evil onto them that will make us feel like our characters could still be "good" while committing mass murder.  They're more or less running zombies.  Personally, I'm a big fan of the Warhammer (40k) orks.  They're a sort of raceless, marauding lower-class.  Something between stupid Americans and dirty cockneys.  And possibly negroes.  But who's counting?

Drow, also known as Dark Elves, are a sort of travesty that's hard to avoid.  My theory is that the Drow were invented when a fantasy artist got tired of drawing lily-white elves, and, on a lark, decided to draw this elf in a chain-mail bikini with jet black skin.  Then, in the way nerds do, someone invented a plausible justfication for this new super-sexy black-skinned fantasy girl.  As you can imagine, no matter how much effort you put into making a "Drow culture" that bears little or no resemblance to anything racially motivated, you're still grappling with "they're elves!  with dark skin!  and they're evil!"  No good can come of it.

I've ended up backed up against this wall, myself.  I started out with a game set in faerieland.  Mostly, because I like the more rough-hewn concept of fairies that predates all this butterfly winged, Tinkerbell shit.  Stuff like Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norell.  Also, I thought of them as little, unselfconscious nuggets of character tropes that could have their roots as far back as pre-literate Europe. 

My first problem was "do I use non-European mythos"?  I decided against it at first.  Mostly, I think, I didn't want to have to deal with the uneven gestalt that would come from mixing and matching cultures.  I also didn't want to needlessly fetishize djinns, onis, or hopping ghosts.  I'm not native to the cutures that gave us them and I didn't think I could manage the nuances needed to give them a thoughtful place in my world.  Eventually, I wanted to start dealing with them-- first as ham-handed stereotypes, but gradually becoming more real.  After all, that's sort of what the game was about. 

The more I thought about it, the more I wanted something uneven.  (I called it "post-modern".  I think I used the term correctly, but I fear I've long since handed in my credibility in that department.)  Still, I haven't figured out how I wanted to do that.

My second problem was that I really did want to use the rich and bizarre world of faerie lore as the backdrop for the game.  I still love flipping through reference guides to things like faeries and angels, picking out weird details that have been preserved across centuries.  The weirdness of what people actually took as "real" is far more interesting than anything I could come up with on my own.  The trouble here, of course, is that there are lots of kinds of faeries.  Some have animal heads.  Some have animal bodies.  Some have wings.  It really seemed like there were races of faeries.

I've gone back and forth between a large slate of racial abilities, and leaving the whole thing completely open.

I tried to write some kind of interesting cultural description for each race, only to find that half of them are just stereotypes with a few anomolies thrown in.  On the other hand, I'm making a game where the characters are actually supposed to be manifestations of characters and stereotypes.  Imaginary people with the chance to make a choice about whether or not they want to become "real."

Meh, so, anyway, I still have this city in my head where all of the interpretations and almagamations of fictional characters live, and I'm not sure who they really are.