prokopetz:

prokopetz:

“It’s bad to have robots and dragonfolk and half-angels as standard playable races in your RPG, because they impose a bunch of specific assumptions on people’s homebrew settings. Unlike Tolkien-style elves, dwaves and hobbits, which are perfectly generic and encode no setting assumptions whatsoever.”

And it’s not just the Tolkien stuff, either. There are people who will argue with a straight face that allowing players even the option of being, like, psychic werewolves or whatever represents an attempt to dictate to GMs how to run their games, but they’re perfectly okay the very same rulebook assuming that every single setting it could possibly be played in must include a subterranean empire of spider-worshiping David Bowie expies with goofy darkness powers because that in particular is a standard player character background. Like, do you not get that the latter is just as weirdly specific as the former?