Saerain

The words that I often see people claiming to have unintuitive pronunciation seem no less intuitive to me than others, so I'm not sure how to answer. I very quickly recognize languages and intuit the pronunciation even if I don't understand of a word of it. This includes conlangs when they are obviously inspired by specific real-world languages. I can't imagine pronouncing Guenhwyvar any other way, and Dair Bhriste looks to me like this.

Preach it. I'm unspeakably tired of being Jesus, and it's the one and only thing that I would single out as the plague what to be avoided like.

Though a gigantic elf-fanatic, I stopped caring about their height some years ago. There are things that bother me so much more about how elves may be depicted that the issue well and truly vanished.

No. They could certainly have a city (or tribal village), especially one populated by non-humans, in which females fulfill certain administrative roles. An advanced human matriarchal society would be ridiculous. This hasn't happened once in the history of mankind and there's pretty obvious reasons for that. ‘Female dominated’ doesn't have to mean what you seem to assume here it would mean, and in a fantasy world surely you can imagine many ways it could happen. Especially once you get into non-humans and bring magic into it, but not necessarily.

The idea that, as a male, I fantasize about being a disgusting stubbly hulk thing, is what makes me uncomfortable. I'll take Hot Batman.

I would hope to see prejudice where it makes sense for prejudice to have arisen—against females, males, elves, orlans, Vaelians, Aedyr, whatever. It adds a measure of believability to the setting wherever there's obvious fuel for this to happen and it's meaningful for those who would like to counteract it. Without a publisher, it would be nice if nothing was sacred.

I wanted to go $165, but I kind of live on a hair's edge when it comes to paying for food and medical bills. So, $20 it was, plus the recent $8 tribute to the Order.

So did I, but you know what's even rarer? Having that experience in multiplayer. Good experiences are better shared, wouldn't you agree? I understand the problem from a budget and prioritization standpoint and agree that it's good they're focusing on the single-player experience, but if it were possible to share the same experience with friends, I couldn't call that a step down. Multiplayer RPGs have been virtually extinct since MMOs took off, so I certainly understand why this question has been coming up about every RPG for the last several years. I do hope multiplayer returns to the genre some day.

Pledge upgraded. Enter Saerain, Scholar Apotheosist of the Obsidian Order.

For the discussion, not for the hope. Even if I am not in favor of Obsidian dedicating resources to multiplayer functionality in this case, there are seriously ****ty arguments (from people strangely vehement toward experiencing an RPG with friends) that need to be wiped when I smell them. But I didn't realize two weeks was a significant lull for a thread; I apologize.

It looks significantly better than I expected, and I thought my expectations were already fairly high for the budget. I'm mesmerized.

Yes, RPGs are, by definition, solo activities. Just you and your dice. Oh, wait.

Elves not having souls is pretty standard for a fantasy setting. What. I'm fairly certain that any race ‘not having souls’ is not standard. Examples?

But what? What are some things you'd like to see done differently, and how?

The ‘generic’ races stick around because they work. But they don't fail to change, either. They've changed a lot. They evolve iteratively because that's how creativity works. The dwarves and elves we have today are not Tolkien's, by far, just as Tolkien's were not those of mythology. Evolution will beat any single, isolated instance of randomly cobbled-together DNA, every time. If you don't like something about the tropes, work to change them, even if only in the form of discussion/feedback. I'm a big elf fan, but I don't like their often-expected tendency toward naturalistic fallacies (i.e. both the is-ought and the appeal to nature) and what I call ‘the elder race syndrome’ (basically appeal to tradition/antiquity with a dash of xenophobia toward ‘lesser races’). So, in my campaign settings I sometimes offer them as the new, progressive race on the block, seeking to change up the tired old world with their magical affinity, and full of transhumanist (transelvenist?) ideas, rather than the preservationist hippies nearly as old as the planet (which better describes my dwarves or orcs, though neither are so concerned with forests). You can do things like this and still have a picture that is recognizably and evocatively elven, in my opinion. Sometimes it might even be a mutation that survives the natural selection that is the players. I don't think there's a core, immutable ‘essence of elf’, not even the good looks and pointed ears. It's all subject to change, given that the change works. It seems to me that many, perhaps most, of the people who resent the ‘generic fantasy’ races do so not because of the elf/dwarf tropes in general, but because they want races that are even further from the human norm, physically and otherwise. I can sympathize with that, but I would hope that they also understand that every time such a race is introduced to a setting (and really, there have been a lot), they face the same selective pressures that elves and dwarves have faced for a long time, and they have to move their own weight.