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Aug 25, 2010 -- 5:34AM, Alankin wrote:

I'm not going to get into a discussion about lotr cause it would take too long and be offtopic. =)

D&D as a whole is meant to be a game that is easily adapted to whatever the players want. WotC only give a bare minimum of what is needed to inspire and get across what they think the races should be based on. The text description talking about varied and diverse human races is basically saying, humans are whatever you want them to be.

However, this is a game that has a huge number of different fantasy cultures and races, and trying to give humans everything while also developing cultures for the other races would be very difficult. Alternative races are given fantasy counterpart cultures based on real world human cultres because it is very difficult to create a whole new culture from scratch.

So humans are white, and elves and dwarves and orc etc are the other non-white cultures?  Is this what you are implying?

Once again, we come back to a common viewpoint of Whites being the norm to which others are compared and contrasted.  It is not a racist viewpoint, as it is not taken out of hate or fear, but rather is the result of social programming.

We, as enlightened beings who do not want to be prejudiced, can attempt to throw off this social programming, but we need to actually try, and that means confronting our unconcious prejudices and judgements.

Getting more people of color in media wihtout being the token minority would be a start.  For their part, WotC could encourage artists to depict more minorities in their subject matter.  That's all I've been trying to say.

Aug 25, 2010 -- 6:05AM, Foxface wrote:

Yet D&D has been described as European inspired fantasy, and thus its okay for the humans to look mostly white.

This is the oversight and racial bias I've been talking about.  To be clear, I think I agree with you.  Humans are a blank slate and can be any culture.  So if that is true, why is this so-called blank slate depicted as white?

Would it really be better if this blank slate was defaulted as black?

Aug 25, 2010 -- 6:07AM, Alankin wrote:

Aug 25, 2010 -- 6:05AM, Foxface wrote:

Yet D&D has been described as European inspired fantasy, and thus its okay for the humans to look mostly white.

This is the oversight and racial bias I've been talking about.  To be clear, I think I agree with you.  Humans are a blank slate and can be any culture.  So if that is true, why is this so-called blank slate depicted as white?

Would it really be better if this blank slate was defaulted as black?

Just to clarify, I don't think "humans are black unless otherwise stated" is better than "Humans are white unless otherwise stated."

I think this really just comes down to a preference for colour. For instance, the shardmind description says that shardminds can be a veriety of colours, but only red ones have been shown. Does this stop anyone creation a yellow shardmind? Nope.

Aug 25, 2010 -- 6:15AM, Foxface wrote:

Who says any one race or culture or ethnicity should be "the blank slate".  Kinda defeats the purpose of a blank slate, dontcha think?

Rather, I would hope to see an even distribution of ethnicities in the artwork, OR a more fleshed out setting with a variety of ethnicities represented (but avoiding racist pitfalls, like screaming saracens, or primitive and backwards jungle people).  Since a fully fleshed out setting runs contrary to the goals of PoL, I'll settle for the first option.

Basically, the human write-up described humans possessing a variety of skin and hair colors to match the real world human race.  It'd be nice if we could see that variety.

But we don't particularly see much variation in a lot of the other races either. It's not a human issue, it's an issue with consistency.

For instance, most of the dragonborn pictures are reddish brown, much eladrin are blond, most half-orcs have greyish skin, most deva are purple or grey.

The PHB work on making the races fairly uniform. It's up to the player to expand on it.