Serious question

Serious question

How important do you feel diversity is in your settings? Do you go out of you way to make things diverse?

Yes. Entirely because it annoys people who are easily upset.

Diversity has no value in and of itself.

Diversity has value because it opens up new ways to tell stories, and gives you new stories to tell because of those different perspectives that are present.

My settings tend to be diverse, but as a means, not an end. And if a setting being diverse doesn't make sense, it won't be, because diluting the creative vision of a story to appeal to arbitrary standards of diversity is the worst sort of tokenism.

Diversity is such a shallow and meaningless term in a diagetic context. Diversity exists as a priority in real life because it ensures that there is a richer well of experience and perspective to draw from. Narratives are inherently drawn from a single source and it is explicitly impossible for that source to ideate things it cannot conceive of.

Do I include people of color in the worlds I build? Absolutely, it gives my player-characters an easy way to justify knowing a character's origins. Does that mean I am making the game more diverse or more jingoistic? The truth is that neither is true, because "Diversity" has no meaning in a narrative held up by a singular mind.

I don't give a fuck about diversity. It is code for "I wanna play a special snowflake race! I wanna play a special snowflake race!"

No. I am so sick of these fucking niggers who have to play some kind of special 3rd party / splatbook race. They want to play a drow or a fucking dhampir or a fucking tengu or a fucking gnoll or some fucking kitsune / catfolk magical realm furry bullshit. No. No. No. Get the fuck out. There are humans, elves, and dwarves. That is fucking it. Oh and maybe half orcs half elves and half-lings. But you need to roll to get to play anything but a human. Oh and you are complaining about it? THat is because you are a shit roleplayer. Get the fuck over it. If you cannot play a fucking human enjoy the game then you are a SHIT ROLEPLAYER. You do NOT need other races to roleplay. End. Of. Story. And if you are whining about then get the fuck out of my game. I have every right to restrict what races are available. Don't respond to my fucking email in which I CLEARLY STATE that we are using core races only, with "I know you said X but can I do Y because I'm an entitled millennial and think the world revolves around me?" No, fuck that shit, I don't even reply to these people, nor do I give them my address until I know they're not fags. This isn't the motherfucking Mos Eisley Cantina, this is an actual world with an actual flavor to it, not some kitchen sink bullshit.


D&D 5e and Critical Roll have made it even harder, too, because of shit like pic related, and the constant pro-fag and pro-tranny propaganda in Critical Roll, which is the gateway drug for 90% of new D&D players, who have also read loads of greentext nat20 stories about Sir Bearington and Los Tirbunos (thanks alot to whichever nigger anons wrote that shit, may they rot in hell) so they think they need to play a special snowflake and do some funny shit and get a nat20 and shriek autistically about they literally just threw a mountain at the BBEG because a 1 in 20 event happened.

You seem really mad

you seem fun

i absolutely make my settings as diverse as i can, partly because i think it's important for games to reflect the society that plays them and it helps make sure not only my games are all-inclusive, but the hobby is as well

partly because it allows my campaigns to draw on different cultural contexts, making them richer and therefore allowing the stories in those campaigns to be richer as well

partly because it's how i deal with all fiction- if a character's race honestly doesn't matter, why make every character the same race?

but mostly because fuck white people

>because I'm an entitled millennial and think the world revolves around me

Nope.
When you're ready to stop blaming your kids for your own shitty attitude, let me know.

I miss quest threads on this board

Then you're a stupid asshole who needs to be banned

I play MYFAROG

myfarog is so bad i'm still not convinced it isn't secretly a punishment for the type of people who play myfarog

>stop blaming your kids
He'd have to have sex first, let alone find a female that doesn't find his presence absolutely repulsive, in order to have any kids.

Fuck off, namefag.

> he doesn't like roll tables upon his roll tables upon his roll tables upon his roll tables upon his roll tables

I don't give a shit about diversity nor do I go out of the way to make anything "more diverse."

I do care about variety, and what's fun and interesting. If those things do or do not make my settings more or less diverse isn't of any concern to me and a more or less diverse end result is purely coincidental.

Do you see the difference between the picture you posted and this one: ? They have the first sentence in common but nothing else. See the first sentence is fine. That's all that needs to be said about the matter. But "think about how you can bring your character's sexuality and gender identity into the game"? No. Fuck that shit, it does not belong in D&D, and I do not need the rules making people feel like they are entitled to do this shit. inb4 rule zero, because the rulebook creates expectations, don't even fucking try to pretend it doesn't. If you offer a D&D game and it doesn't have any fantasy in it then your players have a right to be pissed. This is similar: players can now expect sexuality and gender politics to play a large role in D&D campaigns.

i play the game for the stories they create, and putting those ideas into a game makes for better stories

otherwise you're just rolling dice, and i can do that by myself

>Sex and gender never played a role in mythology or fantasy fiction

...

That has nothing to do with what I posted. Did you quote the wrong post?

They did, but not this tumblr-tier "think about how your character might be a plutokin demifluidsexual" bullshit.

>inb4 you find some isolated example which will totally prove that D&D should have sex and gender shoved into the forefront because even though it's a game about fantasy adventure, it's 2017 and gender is a spectrum and RPGs are a vehicle to explore that. How dare you disagree you shitlord? #MoreThanARefugee

You're leaping to conclusions and reading between the lines in order to get angry about nothing. It makes you look very silly.

i think you might be mad, you should maybe consult a doctor

Neither of these are arguments as to why sexuality and gender identity should occupy a larger part of D&D.

If I made a setting where everyone was Inuit women or some shit, that'd feel awkwardly specific, right? Also super awkward if you sat down and tried to play with a bunch of Inuit women. But objectively that's no more specific than standard medieval European fantasy. So, understanding that SMEF is someone else's awkwardly specific setting, I do try to make at least a token effort to make things more approachable to different people.

That said, if we're doing fantasy worlds there are a lot of really low-effort ways to do this. I mean, we could just say genetics don't exist in magicland and people's appearances are on full random. Or pick a historical ethnicity and say everyone looks Scythian. Or that this world's ethnicities have no relationship to ours and there are people with pointy ears and others who tan a little green and literally everyone would look foreign to us because this is a different fucking planet.

i think you might be exceedingly mad. you should definitely consult a doctor

(also i explained myself completely in - putting those ideas in a campaign can make better stories, limiting them limits the space for the stories you can create)

Diversity is the diversification of life. Every life is a journey. Every journey is a circle turning in squares.But you can't square the circle.You can only run.Run back to you, back to me, back to us.Outside of everything. Inside of Nothing.Infiniternity by Diversificatifying diversely diverseness. Diversely.

Why?

>putting those ideas in a campaign can make better stories, limiting them limits the space for the stories you can create)

Oh really? Does the same apply to rape and graphic torture? If not, then you are a hypocrite.

the last point was a joke- i'm white myself

Oh okay

they absolutely can deepen a storyline when used tastefully! i've thrown torture in my campaigns as a moment of choice- either you torture someone to get information or you run the risk of something bad happening you aren't prepared for. it's a good way to test out your characters' moral fiber

The "not an argument" argument is past its pull date. Didn't you get the memo?

Yes. If the race of a character doesn't matter (which is what triggered retards say on Veeky Forums all the time) then there's no reason to not make most characters diverse.

Why is that statement retarded?

What does that even mean?

I didn't explain well enough. When a group of people clamor for diverse casting, retards will say "m-mu diverse casting who cares if the characters are all white it doesn't matter. This is just m-muh sjw propaganda". If it doesn't matter than who cares if it's cast as diverse?

This.

Doing otherwise is just pandering and quota chasing or being a contrarian dickhead just for the sake of being a dickhead.

>If it doesn't matter than who cares if it's cast as diverse?
If it doesn't matter then who care if it's not?

What a meaningless question. If the setting is something super small and contained, like a single haunted house, then it wouldn't be very diverse but it wouldn't need to be. Or rather it is diverse among its on strict parameters. Of the setting is a galaxy wide space adventure or adventurers in a fantasy world then it's more diverse only if you explore more and more.

I mean what's the point?

It doesn't matter. That's why I do it. Because who cares?

Clearly it matters if you make an effort to do it.

If I'm making characters it takes literally no effort to say "this guy is black".

So why not say "this guy is white?"

Or just not say anything at all?

Because I flipped a coin and it came up tails? Because I just felt like it randomly?

Is that REAAAAALLY what you did? Or are you just hiding behind a veil of false apathy?

Why are you treating white as the default?

Diversity is important in human only settings.

I don't understand the question.

Are you really suggesting even the most basic of details (the race of a character) can't be randomly decided? It has to be white or else it's pandering or something?

Why are you?

I have sometimes put non-white NPCs into places where they would make sense. I started including them because at one point I was like "Wait a minute, it makes 0 sense for this port town to be populated entirely by white people," and so, I looked at similar population centers, looked at the racial distribution, and now roll a percentile dice.

One of the most memorable villains that the group has faced was a Seer of the Throne Mastigos who happened to be black. It didn't alter his character regarding his interaction with the player characters, but if I have to flesh him out, he will have a quiet sense of pride for literally being at the very heights of power.

Diversity isn't good or bad in of itself, I feel. If it can make for a richer story, go for it. It's also slightly more realistic in a modern-day game, and less realistic in a medieval fantasy game. So as long as it's not shoved down people's throats, use it as necessary.

Nope, I'm just trying to get you to stop lying to yourself.

You make it a point to make "diverse" characters for the sake of diversity, that much is obvious from just your first post in this reply chain. You're hiding being the idea of "it doesn't matter" to try to make it appear as if you're not trying to push an agenda or come across as some kind of SJW, which you don't need to honestly.

Be honest with yourself.

>Diversity has no value in and of itself.

That's logically untrue

Change "diversity" to "variety" (+in regards to whatever we're talking about) and it should all become much clearer, as the weird connotations assigned by modern internet culture falls away.

Variety has innate value

It's the only answer.

If trolling is and art, this is the guy who can only draw stick figures.

If trolling is an art, I'm the guy who draws tits in between the margins of my math textbook in high school.

...you know, that little bit about playing a male drow cleric thrown out of his society for being who he is sounds pretty cool

So we're just gonna take that as an admission of defeat.

Not at all and no.

'diversity' as the concept lives in the head of your average Joe, i.e. that people have different colours, has no innate value. Diversity of thought and (civilised) attitude has, but people don't seem to care about that much.

>partly because it's how i deal with all fiction- if a character's race honestly doesn't matter, why make every character the same race?
Because, chances are, their race actually does matter. Not in the sense that there's a lot of material difference between them, but because they are fundamentally different and the historical context that puts them together innocuously is extremely unlikely and strange.

I once had a player seriously ask me, "Why is everyone in your [13th century Dark Ages Vampire] game [which is also set in Prussia] white? Why won't you let me play a Nubian warrior woman?"

Well, the answer is that race matters. Race is not totally ephemeral, it has weight even if you want to pretend everyone is equal. There were no black women in Prussia in the 13th century, period. There were no black Africans fighting for Germany in Europe in WWI. Nor would you expect, for instance, some settled people of a fantasy world to be arbitrarily multiethnic. There's a lot of social tension that comes from living alongside people who are not like you, and historically, what usually happened when two different groups of ancient people wanted to occupy the same space was a war of extermination or expulsion.

If you are to have any semblance of genuine appreciation for social context, history, or the way that cultures interact, you'd understand that your happy cosmopolitan societies are extremely offensive, and certainly not inclusive or representative of the society we live in. Portraying this false, stupid, ugly caricature of human racial dynamics is the height of cosmopolitan chauvinism, and soulless imperialism. So fuck off with your bullshit, seriously.

Nope, if any diversity comes about it's purely either by chance or it's a detail I find interesting or fun. Running an all-anthropomorphic campaign makes it easier, people can't bitch about skin color when everyone's covered in fuzz.

I run my fantasy campaigns extremely non-diverse because historically people were racist as fuck and would lose their shit and declare a crusade over you having slightly different shaped ears or whatever.

Doesn't mean everyone has to be white though, I generally provide some odd racial descriptors to keep people guessing. You know, "The sunset has gotten to the point that it resembles the colour of your skin at the edges". You know, sometimes an enormous white dude with huge eyes washes up on the shore and you laugh at him for having the misfortune of having massive eyes compared to what the gods look like.

And then the gods physically manifest to shrug collectively and point fingers at each other trying to figure out who made these weirdos, and why.

Actually it was the Hobbit who killed him. Hobbits aren't Men.

Yes, I love having different races!

...

God, the look on that Half-Orc's face...

>halfling ice-skater only a foot shorter than the skier

Don't look at the feet here.

See? Fat people really can athlete!

>the feet

what the FUCK

Should we really include prosthetics when talking about someone's height?

Damnit, user!

Olympic lifters bulk heavily to maintain their muscle mass. It's not like they need to look really cut like models and bodybuilders do, they just need to be permanently at peak stronkth.

So any race except the males of the Race of Man could kill him?

Will they ever learn?

Whoever did that magic wan't legally minded.

...

Why is there a photo series of athletes in their underwear?

No, but I do use random dice tables to determine gender, sexuality, and other fluid nonsense for npcs randomly because It also helps write drama when your king turns out to be a homosexual reverse trap (before you bitch, remember there was a female Pope)

>6ft tall

Why wouldn't there be?

Filthy beast-races!

Yes, and there are malus and bonus to playing different qualities.

Playing a female human/male gnoll? Prepare for a strength cap.

Having the race matter makes more sense for having diverse characters IMO.

Otherwise you're just playing a White Dude reskinned as a whatever.

Like Black People get a bonus to spear weapons because it's something they practiced with growing up.

Or they grew up as an adopted child in (local area) and because of that they're less socialized and take a penalty hit to charisma.

I would watch this hentai

Sure, more fantasy racism is always welcome.

...

Don't do this unless your group is okay with it, it makes the game unfun when you limit someone's build just because they preferred to play a gnoll or a female.

Why wouldn't they be okay with it?

I don't play with a bunch of whingey snow-flakes, but people who take restrictions as challenges and opportunities, not obstructions on being "le uber player"

I guess we just like to role-play instead of roll-play.

Yes, but that is only a small part of the worldbuilding process that takes up very little time unless you're specifically trying to run a campaign that feels particularly metropolitan.

Also, bad /pol/ bait is bad.

I got you bro.

what kind of Diversity?

you mean like does every political power have the same system, and does every miltiary organize itself the same way?

Architectural?

what the seasons are like?

racially diverse? not important at all, i don't want to spam my medieval !noteurope setting with !notafricans. that said, the game setting should accomodate individual PoC heroes that travel medieval !noteurope.

i don't want my setting to look like the beowulf tv show. god, that was crap.

why are humans a race that is above average in height in this chart?

were second tallest.

If stat restrictions "limit your build" in a fantasy game where anything can happen, then you should go back to CRPGs.

Especially if your argument is "but anything can happen!".

Try instead to work around your stat limitations. Quest to find a strength-augmenting or int-boosting magical item.

Or start with one that has a curse or something.

Some sort of in-universe justification. Like, you can literally come up with anything. But just saying "Everyone is the same" is the most boring thing ever.

Obligatory "Have you tried not playing D&D".

Because D&D elves are shorter than humans. It's amazing how many people don't actually know that.

>Like Black People get a bonus to spear weapons because it's something they practiced with growing up.
I'm glad to know I share a hobby with royalty

But Lolth would NEVER even give a weak ass male her power