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It is strange how the the author glosses over the diversity of opinion among those quoted. Someone who thinks that changing the word “race” to “species” will do the trick has a very different critique from someone who thinks that neither the character’s species nor its culture should impact character creation. When Paizo¹ published Pathfinder 2 it used the term “ancestry” instead of race, but the article is wrong to say that it dropped racial ability modifiers altogether. It did change them to make playing against type less disadvantageous.
Over the years I have come to a particular view on the purpose of RPG rules: their primary function is for the gamemaster to communicate to the players how things work and what is possible within the game world; they establish a shared understanding. The GM is free to violate the rules, but he should do so selectively to preserve that shared understanding.
So if someone separates race from culture, I want to ask, “How does that fit your setting?” If it communicates the world better to the players and lets them situate their characters better within it, that’s great! Maybe your elves have several very different cultures, or your capital city has a cosmopolitan culture shared by the men, elves, and dwarves who live there. But if your elves are a reclusive people clinging tightly to their shared traditions, rules that let the player create an elf character from a dwarven culture are going to lead to confusion and frustration.
I think the article fundamentally objects to the givenness of these game mechanics for the character. That explains why the author is concerned not only with race (in either sense of the word) but also with multicultural characters or a 1976 Dragon magazine piece (!) trying to model sexual dimorphism. The player chooses the character’s race, sex, culture, background, and class, but the character only chooses the last one² or two. If you believe that real-world people are fully self-defined beings, I can see how that would rub you the wrong way.
[1] For non-gamers, Paizo is the company which publishes Pathfinder, another branch of the D&D family and a competitor to Wizards of the Coast’s current, fifth edition of D&D.
[2] I wonder how the author feels about sorcerers who inherit their powers through a bloodline, though D&D 5e leans into this less than D&D 3e did and far less than either edition of Pathfinder does.
My view is the rules developed to cover that one smartarse in every session who argues about doing something that shouldn't be permissible for the character on grounds of "Well, the rules don't say I can't do it!"
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