Topic: Race vs Culture

[markc]

pemerton,
  I have some of the old Glorantha stuff and I used it when I ran a RQ game. With one exception I had trouble with Ducks and anyone who could actually think that it is a viable race.

MDC

[pemerton]

Ducks are an oddity, that's true.

But I nevertheless find it more compelling than FR.

[shnar]

I've never really had a problem separating Race from Culture since way back to my first MERP days. If an elf was raised by Rohirrim, the character had the elf stats and the rohan adolescant skill development. Pretty simple. The rest is just an application of common knowledge.

The only real sticky point that made us struggle with was the Background Options. It seemed like BG pts were partly due to culture, but also partly due to game balance. Most races that had a lot of stat bonuses had fewer BG pts to spend, so in the case of an elf raised as a man (2bg vs 5bg) we usually split it based on what was gained/lost in the culture switch. For example, this elf would have lost a lot of starting languages. We figure that's worth a BG pt. But we figured the +20OB on Horseback was more inherit to the Rohan race then their culture, but we offered it as a BG option (i.e. 1BG pt to get the bonus) if you were raised in the Rohirrim culture.

Not sure what else is really needed from an "official" standpoint...

-shnar

[Moriarty]

The only thing I didn't like about Races & Cultures was that you couldn't remove the "&".  Race is not the same as culture, and when describing a race, you must never use sentences like, "They hate Orcs," or "They have a patriarchal system and eat their siblings," or "They worship fire deities," or "They love looking at the stars." These are Cultural traits, not Racial traits, and should not be mixed up.

I think this is pushing a modern viewpoint too far, just because you can. There is no good reason why, in a traditional fantasy setting, race and culture shouldn't be, more or less, the same thing. Racial stereotypes are sources of great fun. They are also rooted in fantasy tradition. Sure there's the occasional elf raised in dwarf society, but that would be a rare exception.

The function of race (&culture) is simply to provide a character with a background, a home, and with a sense af identity in an unfamiliar world. You don't need to seperate psychology from physiology to accomplish that, in fact you risk overcomplicating the matter for the sake of bringing it in line with a modern realism that is all but irrelevant to most fantasy worlds.