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Fantasy games usually explore diversity and multiculturalism through the filter of non-human races. I’ve contemplated lately though drawing more culturally from real human cultures different than the usual; branching out into other continents such as South America and Africa for inspiration.
I have a lot of thoughts on the best ways to do this, and I’ve been chatting about this at length on Twitter. So imagine my utter delight when Logan Bonner, a designer at Wizards of the Coast, wanted to talk over the issue with me! We discussed ways to approach increasing the diversity at your table, as well as the wrong and right approaches to doing it.
Logan of course, maintains his own thoughts on D&D at his website and is on Twitter. He is also the author of the 1st level adventure “The Slaying Stone”.
Enjoy the discussion!
Discussion of Diversity with Logan Bonner
A Jack of All Trades ,or if you prefer, an extreme example of multi-classing, Gamefiend, a.k.a Quinn Murphy has been discussing, playing and designing games straight out of the womb. He is the owner and Editor-in-Chief of this site in addition to being an aspiring game designer. As you would assume, he is a huge fan of 4e.
By day he is a technologist.
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I disagree. Usually diversity is found in Human cultures in fantasy games. Demi-human/non-human races ALWAYS have only one culture per race, while humans will have multiple cultures.
Take a look at any established setting. Humans from different countries or regions have their culture, but all elves behave this way, all dwarves believe that, and so on. Eberron is the only setting I know where the Elves have TWO (gasp) different cultures.
The only time non-human races have multiple cultures is when a Subrace is introduced, and that subrace has a culture separate from the parent race’s culture.
In Eberron there are the city elves, the nomadic elves and the Aerenal elves – and I would count all three(?) drow cultures of Xen’drik as elves too. I also always imagine the dragonmarked entertainer elves as a bit gypsy-ish.
The gnomes may be the only species with only one culture in Eberron.
I listened to the podcast. I’ve actually played a lot of different cultures and races. The best examples may be from Mongoose’s Conan rpg. I had a half Pict, half Nemedian character who had spent his childhood beyond the Thunder river with the “Indians” and didn’t ever really grasp the notion of property. After that I had a mystic from Khitai (China) and currently I play Stygian (Egyptian) sorcerer. All of them have had totally different worldviews and values. It’s been really refreshing. I play very rarely since I’m usually the dm but I have rarely managed to create such diverse set of characters in d&d.
It’s hard to say why Conan’s setting enables you to do it so well but it’ll be an interesting topic to study. Maybe it’s the pseudo historical world plus good sourcebooks.
Honestly I think Conan makes it easy because the world gives you plenty of examples and signposts to include all of those cultures. It’s easy to include non-traditional fantasy cultures when they actually exist in the world and the authors/creators give you plenty of models and archetypes to use it. I have some other thoughts on how to encourage this in 4e. Hopefully it’ll make the blog in the next few months.
Hey, my favorite topic… I totally agree with Rechan’s view of humans = multiple cultures, other races = one culture each. Races seem to be needed to create “fantastic” enough options for the player characters, the differences between cultures alone are not great enough to explain the desired diversity. I’m not familiar with Conan RPG so I don’t know how the “race” issue is handled there, but my own experience has led to a similar conclusion: the closer the campaign world is to historical fact, the better background material can usually be found for a culture.
Our gaming group has played in a homebrew human-only world since 3.0 ed. The rules element covered by standard D&D “race” is still there, but is scaled to represent different individuals within one species rather than a set of separate species that are unrealistically uniform. The entire culture issue can then be separated from character mechanics to background information – this allows a much bigger cultural diversity (when applicable to the setting)
The problem with races in 4e D&D is that they are fairly difficult to fit into a campaign world that has different basic assumptions from the standard setting – especially a localized campaign in which it would be really hard to justify why all the races from the rulebook could conceivably be available for players. This limits the _mechanical_ diversity of the characters, while the intention was to limit only the _background_ diversity of the characters.
Similar discussion in Dungeon’s Master blog a few months back: http://dungeonsmaster.com/2010/02/one-race/
@MAK I don’t think that attempting to get every culture or race into any one region of a setting, but I think allowing for a lot of travel, or broadening just a bit the cultures in a region can bring much benefits with it.
Overall it’s a balancing game between inclusion and exclusion.
I don’t think cultures are really the problem, travel can take care of introducing the right amount of diversity in that respect. What drove us to houserule the races away was the difficulty of otherwise duplicating such settings as Conan’s Hyborian world where people are mostly – well – people… There are fantastical monsters, of course, but those are not a normal part of the society of the world, as is expected in core D&D setting. With only dwarves and elves and such, reskinning could have been enough, but that is still taking away the standard cultural connotations of those races and only using them for game mechanical diversity.
I don’t think cultures are really the problem, travel can take care of introducing the right amount of diversity in that respect. What drove us to houserule the races away was the difficulty of otherwise duplicating such settings as Conan’s Hyborian world where people are mostly – well – people… There are fantastical monsters, of course, but those are not a normal part of the society of the world, as is expected in core D&D setting. With only dwarves and elves and such, reskinning could have been enough, but that is still taking away the standard cultural connotations of those races and only using them for game mechanical diversity.