One of the things that easily identies pink slime fantasy is the ease with which the diffferent races happily coexist for each other. In Tolkien's Middle Earth, Dwarves were a lesser god's shoddy attempt at creating his own race, and the elves never really had much to do with them. You get to D&D novels and there isn't that much difficulty placing completely disparate races aide by side. It ruins the genre emulation for me because it feels like we have to rehash some version of the United States civil rights struggle to get a party with diverse characters who can cooperate with each other.

For me, it's a conundrum. Players want to be able to have their own unique characters and I want to design lots of different races ideas, but you're basically forced to have cities where all the races coexist in some kind of tenuous peace. You can't have a playable race that prefers to keep to itself, or anything too weird to be accepted in human society. In a sense it kills the sense of otherness I need for the second half of a hero's journey. There needs to be societies that convey a sense of otherness or differentness. If your starting location is already radically cosmoploitan, how do you do that?

I just don't know how to achieve a post apocalyptic fantasy with humanity straining with a population that acts as though they grew up on the Cosby Show.

For those that see the same incongruence, ideas for how to resolve this dilemma? How to bring a diverse party together without it seeming contrived?

Edit: It just seems that racial tolerance is too much of a luxury for a resource scarse society, where people will close ranks and take care of their own first. Bit I want people to be able to play different characters.

Ruhh Rohhh Shaggy, someone may need to go to liberal social justice re-eduction camp.

Do what I do, any setting that has orcs and goblins running legitimate businesses in the middle of a mostly human city go straight to the fire bin. And it is ok for your elves and dwarves to despise each other, they probably are looking out for themselves and their own goals.

You are correct that it does not make sense and ruins the entire idea of otherness to have all of these people holding hands and sharing a coke when three editions ago they were trying to eat each other.

I can't stand it either because it just does not make sense for the most part and the best idea is to do your own setting or ret-con a setting you like.

Get a big ole box of black markers and spare copy of your almost perfect setting book and fix it... The copyright holder will not show up at your door.

Quote from: MonsterSlayer;933252The copyright holder will not show up at your door.

Yet.  Your day against the wall will come, non-believer!

Right, but the players still want to each play a different races. What then? How does the party coalecse?

It's really simple. As DM, you decide which races are playable, and which ones are not Whatever fits your milieu.  If you want to run a purely human centered campaign, create some different, strongly drawn, but compatible-enough cultures. Players like having choices, so give them some. But it's your game, so it's OK to set limits.

They all team up to fight Sauron, duh.

What I like about good stories is when the motives of the enemy are inscrutable. You can't even tell if they are evil because their psychology is too alien. So, a Mantis warrior that ate her last 20 husbands would be an interesting character to smash people with in combat, but I can't imagine her sitting in a tavern drinking ale with my mage who likes to read books, not without the whole thing getting really silly, really fast. Silly is fine, but it becomes a crutch too easily.

So it gets to the the idea of otherness. Most elves are really just humans with pointy ears. Forest Spocks, if you will. I wouldn't know how to graft human myths onto an alien mindset. The playable races pretty much have to be humans if I want to keep that feel. That's why this is pretty solid advice.

"If you want to run a purely human centered campaign, create some different, strongly drawn, but compatible-enough cultures. Players like having choices, so give them some. But it's your game, so it's OK to set limits."

I believe I could come up with various human factions that could tolerate each other and still have differences that players could enjoy. I can see that for my campaign.

It depends on how you want it to be, or how you handle the history.  

Racial strife and issues are part of the history for what I do, and while it makes little intellectual and logical sense for sentient's to always fight, neither do they have to get along perfectly.  Creating an actual history for where you want things to be helps it all along.

For example, my main setting is in a place where the Ogrillite (see this as monster) races are just starting to become acculturated, but outside tribals are not, and the strife between the two, as well as the discrimination from other races.  http://celtricia.pbworks.com/w/page/44901947/Ogrillite%20Races

Making it not strain credulity is mainly a function of creating a strong, well established history.

In my setting, the population is overwhelmingly human. There are maybe a couple thousand orcs, elves, and dwarves, living in isolated communities of a few hundred each. There really are just a handful of nonhumans in large cities and probably none in smaller human settlements, and many humans haven't ever met a nonhuman. Players can be other races, but in those cases, they are pretty much the only one of their kind. There might be others, but finding them would be an adventure of many sessions.

The benefit of that approach is that humans may be distrustful of nonhumans, but it's more like the way they'd be distrustful of strangers. There just aren't enough elves around for a typical city to pass laws making elves second-class citizens. So, no established racism.

Quote from: Ashakyre;933257Right, but the players still want to each play a different races. What then? How does the party coalecse?

If you want racial conflict in the world, but the players still want a mix of races, then I'd suggest having the party planned around some tie or particular background that overrides the usual prejudices. So rather than just being a random elf, dwarf, and goblin who happened to team up, I might instead require that all of the PCs are members of a fringe religion that accepts different races. (Not that this religion is necessarily good - it might be an evil death cult which accepts everyone on the basis that everyone dies.) For example, I played in a Harn campaign where we were all acolytes of Ilvir - who is a rarely-worshipped god largely seen as the spawner of monsters. We looked on bizarre monsters as holy creations, which is very different from how most of the population viewed them.

Then all the characters might be accepting of each other, but together suffer from religious prejudice.

Quote from: MonsterSlayer;933252Do what I do, any setting that has orcs and goblins running legitimate businesses in the middle of a mostly human city go straight to the fire bin. And it is ok for your elves and dwarves to despise each other, they probably are looking out for themselves and their own goals.

You are correct that it does not make sense and ruins the entire idea of otherness to have all of these people holding hands and sharing a coke when three editions ago they were trying to eat each other.

Personally, I like it when games break out of endlessly regurgitating Tolkien, and instead have other racial and social dynamics. Harn is cool in that any non-human is pretty darn weird and alien. In the world of the GURPS game I'm playing in, elves and halflings have been treated as untrusted aliens (which they kind of were) - while dwarves and orcs are more accepted parts of society. There are a lot more possible variations than just Cosby show and Tolkien.

In a world full of magic and gods, race might well not be an important dividing line among nations. It could be that religion is the main divide. This was historically true for many historical periods of religious conflict.

Quote from: LordVreeg;933269It depends on how you want it to be, or how you handle the history.  

Racial strife and issues are part of the history for what I do, and while it makes little intellectual and logical sense for sentient's to always fight, neither do they have to get along perfectly.  Creating an actual history for where you want things to be helps it all along.

For example, my main setting is in a place where the Ogrillite (see this as monster) races are just starting to become acculturated, but outside tribals are not, and the strife between the two, as well as the discrimination from other races.  http://celtricia.pbworks.com/w/page/44901947/Ogrillite%20Races

Making it not strain credulity is mainly a function of creating a strong, well established history.

Yeah... I'm looking at your history here and this...

"Over millenia, positive relationships between the various races had become quite normal.  However, there had been a good amount of racism and discrimination practised, even among allies until very recently.  Where the enemies of the various city-states and countries were of a different race, it was often outright ugly.

But a little less than 2 centuries ago, driven in particular by the bold, equalizing, racial independence that the now-powerful and multi-national guilds had brought to the scene, race ceased being a major discrimination point in the Celtrician Cradle area...."  

... reads like modern sensibilities imposed into a pseudo-medieval milieu. There's nothing wrong with that, but the solution you've reached doesn't actually read like real history, not from a broad enough scale. It reads like American history if you start at 1950 and stop at 1995. You take the history of Yugoslavia, the 2nd Islamic Expansion, or the invasions of the Sea Peoples and peaceful coexistence is often enough just the resting period before one group wipes the other out, pushes them off the map, or interbreeds them out of existence.

Maybe my game should have slavery. If one character could simply own another character it be reflective of broader human historical diversity, get me outside of the comfortable but perhaps short-lived period we happen to find ourselves in, and then I'd have a historical grounded way for diverse coalitions of people to work together.

Quote from: Ashakyre;933273Yeah... I'm looking at your history here and this...

"Over millenia, positive relationships between the various races had become quite normal.  However, there had been a good amount of racism and discrimination practised, even among allies until very recently.  Where the enemies of the various city-states and countries were of a different race, it was often outright ugly.

But a little less than 2 centuries ago, driven in particular by the bold, equalizing, racial independence that the now-powerful and multi-national guilds had brought to the scene, race ceased being a major discrimination point in the Celtrician Cradle area...."  

... reads like modern sensibilities imposed into a pseudo-medieval milieu. There's nothing wrong with that, but the solution you've reached doesn't actually read like real history, not from a broad enough scale. It reads like American history if you start at 1950 and stop at 1995. You take the history of Yugoslavia, the 2nd Islamic Expansion, or the invasions of the Sea Peoples and peaceful coexistence is often enough just the resting period before one group wipes the other out, pushes them off the map, or interbreeds them out of existence.

Maybe my game should have slavery. If one character could simply own another character it be reflective of broader human historical diversity, get me outside of the comfortable but perhaps short-lived period we happen to find ourselves in, and then I'd have a historical grounded way for diverse coalitions of people to work together.

Oh, slavery works.  We have it in some areas.
A good history allows you to do what you need to and allows it to make more sense to the PCS.  
That page is a PC version, one that they can see and helps make sense of where they are.  so it does read like a snapshot of what they are aware of...of a limited time frame... for a reason.

The players in our particular game deal with the current partial acculturation of the ogrillite races, and each race has their own challenges, as they original purposes are long in the past.

But the larger truth holds, for your game.  Create the proper historical background, then bring them down to where the play is going on, and the conflicts based on that current time period.

Yeah, I'm not trying to trash your game. Sorry if it cMe off like that.

Quote from: Ashakyre;933250For those that see the same incongruence, ideas for how to resolve this dilemma? How to bring a diverse party together without it seeming contrived?
.

You'd have to determine what world you are gaming in before I could understand the dilemma and offer any suggestions to change it. D&D isn't a setting, its a toolkit. There are settings for D&D, but each basically has their own explanations (or lack thereof). I can explain to you why things worked the way they did in Tolkien, but unless your breaking out The MERP or The One Ring come game night, it doesn't really matter.

As for my own games? It entirely depends. Warhammer Fantasy has a rich history of intense antagonism between races and the struggle for dominance underpins everything in that game, but generally when I run it I have all PCs as humans living in the Empire.

In the fantasy setting I'm currently running, it is quite literally The Otherworld of European myth; a place outside of Time, somewhere in between the world of dreams and the world of the dead. It was populated by a series of invasions, basically, one dominant race pushing out the older creatures, with the last invaders being the Sith, who drove the Fomhoire into the sea. Likewise the Fomhoire enslaved the giant Fir Bholgs, who now are all but extinct, a few solitary remnants leading solitary lives deep in the Mountains. Before them were the...well, that's a secret actually. Complicating matters, The Otherworld is bordered by Hell and a Tithe is paid each year in "rent" to the Legions of The Howling, the terms of a treatise after the Godwar. Meanwhile a sudden influx of humans has led the Sidhe to believe they are the next invading peoples, and some are preparing for war.

But all of that is so setting specific its really not generally applicable. You need to come up with the setting first, then work out racial relations. An realize that "racism", as we understand it these days, is a modern concept, and completely alien to most thinking throughout the majority of human history.

Not too hard to justify, just make the PCs are bunch of fringe mercenary scum, those groups have always been pretty diverse in our history.

In my own pet setting, elves are such arrogant assholes that most everyone else can envision at least alliances of convenience with everyone who isn't an elf.