On Races

Why do we have races? Let me clarify that. In Mud's yes we can often turn a bunch of skin-tone and hair-colour sliders to select what an ethnographer would call ethnicity. What I'm talking about is what the biologist would call species: Elf, Dwarf, Orc, etc.

I saw one Mud advertise 30 different races. 30! Gawd. How could any player, even an experienced one, possibly make any sort of informed decision on that one?

Do they each have different advantages or abilities? Are those differences important or tangential? Is your list a bunch of opposites? Is your list full of re-skinned duplicates?

Should I chose the race with a really long name consisting only of vowels and no consonants? Or should I chose the race with a really long name consisting only of consonants and no vowels?

If to succeed as a Wizard then I just *have* to be an Elf, or if the only way to succeed as a barbarian is to be a liontaur, then why are race and class selected separately? Why include both class and race if one automatically decides the other? Why not just have one?

All too often we see this sort of thing, and it boggles the mind. It's almost as if the designer isn't actually designing, but checking items from a grocery list.

I'm also curious why there is a word for the offspring between a human and an elf, a half-elf, but there is no word ``half-dwarf''. And would ``half-dwarf'' be the word for the offspring between a dwarf and an orc?

What is wrong with just making everyone the same? It is understandable that some people, in a fantasy environment, would want to play a lizard man shaman from the steaming jungles. My issue is when the *only* way to succeed as a shaman or a lizard-man is to be a lizard-man shaman.

If we can't force everyone to be Human, then I say force everyone to be some made-up fantasy bullshit race. There, now everyone is happy!

But if you must include the traditional races, please recall the plural of dwarf is dwarfs, not dwarves; Tolkien could not spell despite his literary degree.