You know what, since it was brought up I'm going to voice what is probably a very unpopular opinion that's going to get a bunch of people shouting and potentially calling me a racist again: going setting neutral for the PHB is a mistake.
I disagree, but not for any reasons related to racism. Rather, it's that too much setting detail gets in the way. Also, to be honest, the existing D&D settings are a chaotic mess, in large part because they were formed under a theory of "I want to run this adventure, but no appropriate place exists in the world, so I'm going to invent a new country and cram it into a blank spot".
I'm not looking for some sort of hostile confrontation here. I'm looking for a middleground and I don't understand why 'certain things apply to a race at a macro level and are generally decent guidelines for creating a character but do not necessarily apply to individuals' seems to be unacceptable.
To clarify the specific issue with saying "dwarves prefer to live underground" is not about individual deviation from it - of course you can always be the exception to the rule if you want to (though hard-liners will require you to have somekind of character conflict about how your character feels about being a freak b/c you like the open sky as a dwarf). It is setting-wide deviation from it. I'm not talking about one exceptional dwarf that is a sea-farer. I'm talking about making a whole coastal town of dwarves who specialize in cultivation & foraging of shellfish. Or a whole culture of nomadic desert dwarves who seek out and identify aquifers and build pumps down to them creating whole new settlements in otherwise barren desert (that of course then go on to specialize in gambling since they exist outside the laws of the land.... yes I want be play a dwarf from dwarf-Las-Vegas in my D&D game).
You know what, since it was brought up I'm going to voice what is probably a very unpopular opinion that's going to get a bunch of people shouting and potentially calling me a racist again: going setting neutral for the PHB is a mistake.
I disagree, but not for any reasons related to racism. Rather, it's that too much setting detail gets in the way. Also, to be honest, the existing D&D settings are a chaotic mess, in large part because they were formed under a theory of "I want to run this adventure, but no appropriate place exists in the world, so I'm going to invent a new country and cram it into a blank spot".
I agree they don't need to write a full sourcebook's worth of setting lore for the PHB, but imo it should be a lot closer to the 2014 PHB than Monsters of the Multiverse. The fact that they cut out so much lore from the reprints and took the original sources of that lore down was just ridiculous for a one-stop resource on races and monsters.
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I disagree, but not for any reasons related to racism. Rather, it's that too much setting detail gets in the way. Also, to be honest, the existing D&D settings are a chaotic mess, in large part because they were formed under a theory of "I want to run this adventure, but no appropriate place exists in the world, so I'm going to invent a new country and cram it into a blank spot".
To clarify the specific issue with saying "dwarves prefer to live underground" is not about individual deviation from it - of course you can always be the exception to the rule if you want to (though hard-liners will require you to have somekind of character conflict about how your character feels about being a freak b/c you like the open sky as a dwarf). It is setting-wide deviation from it. I'm not talking about one exceptional dwarf that is a sea-farer. I'm talking about making a whole coastal town of dwarves who specialize in cultivation & foraging of shellfish. Or a whole culture of nomadic desert dwarves who seek out and identify aquifers and build pumps down to them creating whole new settlements in otherwise barren desert (that of course then go on to specialize in gambling since they exist outside the laws of the land.... yes I want be play a dwarf from dwarf-Las-Vegas in my D&D game).
I agree they don't need to write a full sourcebook's worth of setting lore for the PHB, but imo it should be a lot closer to the 2014 PHB than Monsters of the Multiverse. The fact that they cut out so much lore from the reprints and took the original sources of that lore down was just ridiculous for a one-stop resource on races and monsters.