On Culture

Something that has always bothered me about D&D (especially the D&D 3.x that I grew up with) is that the game is hugely racist.  All elves are proficient in the longsword, rapier, shortbow, and longbow.  All dwarves and gnomes have combat training against giants and goblinoids.  No matter where your character comes from, no matter their life experience, all elves can use 'elven' weapons and all dwarves/gnomes have extensive combat training against a couple specific enemy groups.

This is ridiculous. Elves from the Wakaka forest where metal is scarce ought not to be proficient in the longsword and rapier but in the cudgel and katar. Dwarves from the Hillside clan who fend off human bandit raids every spring ought to be very good at killing humans, not the goblinoids who never stray near their hills.

Unfortunately, with my lack of experience with OD&D and AD&D, I don't know if either edition addressed this. I know that 3.x addressed it by adding 'racial variants': Sun elves and Hill dwarves and deep gnomes and a whole lot of nonsense. Somehow, differences in culture were turned into speciation. The root of the problem is that all of these new variants, these subspecies, are predicated on the idea that there is a monolithic model of what a DWARF is (I'm picking on dwarves here because I like them and think they can be better).

What is the model of a human? What is the representative symbol of humanity - which one person can represent all the diversity and variation of the human race? It's an impossible task. You can't pick just one person. You can't pick just two. Given any number of people, I can probably find you someone not represented there. So we can't use a person as a model for humanity, and therefore we can't use a single dwarf as a model for all dwarf-dom. What can we do instead? We talk about culture.  Culture can be broad enough to group a large number of people together but be granular enough that by quantifying cultural properties we don't do a disservice to swathes of group members.

Now, some might say that it is the diversity of culture that makes humans distinctive from dwarves, elves, gnomes, and the like.  I think that is laziness talking.  Why do you want dwarves everywhere to share the same cultural norms regardless of their specific circumstances?  Because it is really easy to say "that is a dwarf".  Tolkien had several different elf cultures - the Mirkwood elves differ rather significantly from the elves of Rivendell and Lothlorien, and that difference causes them to play, as a group of elves, a nonexistent role in the Lord of the Rings (yes, I know Legolas is of Mirkwood, but I'm talking about culture and groups).  Why isn't that standard for each race?

To talk about culture, we have to know what it is. There are several definitions of culture floating around. I'll use this one because it suits my gaming purposes: Culture is a stereotype about a group of people based upon shared customs and beliefs. And it is a stereotype, with all of the positive and negative baggage affiliated with that term. Some examples, filtered from my own personal experience.  Seattleites wear North Face jackets, scorn umbrella use, knowingly drink coffee that is too expensive, are unfailingly polite, often disinterested, think that environmental sustainability is important, and patronize the arts (all of them). New Yorkers usually dress in layers, are proud of knowing the New York the tourists don't know, are often gruff but kind, and prefer functional art (art that is communicative of a narrative rather than purely decorative stuff).   That is not to say that all Seattleites do this, nor all New Yorkers. But someone raised in Seattle culture would say, "yes, these are some things that people do here" and someone who identifies as a New Yorker would say "yes, many of us make those choices".

I'm getting off-topic. From a game perspective, from a world-generation perspective, culture is the practices and beliefs of a geographic region of people.  At the level I apply it, it is quite broad and generic (thinking of American vs. European vs. Asian cultures), but once we have these broad trends we can then zoom in (Seattle vs. New York).  People acting according to these cultural norms will differentiate, say, Arein from the Southern Kingdoms.  That difference in feel is the GM's responsibility.

Here's how it shakes down to the players.  After they choose their race (and roll aptitudes) players choose the culture in which their characters were raised.  This choice gives them skills and determines what fighting styles they can learn.  It can provide naming guidelines, hometowns, and connections to organizations already existing in the world of Prodigy.

We'll get to some examples next post.