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Nothing remotely intelligent or consistent works like that, not even in fantasy movies (only fantasy rpgs). Human(oid) attention spans are crap - the monstrous player could save the whole nation on in front of everyone and 10 years later there will be those who question his real motives or his nature as it relates to his race.Hmmm, I guess I must have missed that version of both the book and movie where the men of Rohan kill Legolas as soon as they see him because of their fear of the elves and the "evil lady of the woods".
No, since racism against elves wasn't a big issue in TLotR, I could see them killing goblins, orcs or even Gollum on sight though.
Nice attempt at moving the goal posts, I'll give you that.
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And to clarify, I do understand the OPs position on the matter.
They don't mind the dark of the tunnel if there is some kind of light at the far end - a reward for all their hard work to break perceptions and stereotype. I just disagree that this should be a default assumption for all games as there are too many factors in play (campaign world, level of assumed "reality" run in-game i.e. emotional responses, history, behavior or the majority vs. a minority). Was this all agreed upon between the player and DM, are they running a high fantasy game, etc?
I do think that it comes down to communication between the player and the ref. If the DM agrees to the racial choice and lays out the conditions the player may need to endure upfront, then he shouldn't turn around and latter play some kind of passive/aggressive nonsense to torment the player’s character.
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I tend to agree with the OP.
Games where you are against everything and everyone can be fun, but that is only if everyone agrees on it. Way too often, these things are not explained and accepted. And it sucks when you are on the bad side of the stick.
If things are done right, this is a question of style and taste : would you rather read something family-friendly or an horror book ?
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(what's the word? not realism, close to plausibility)Verisimillimiresitude?
And good point. Come to think of it, most of the postings online mentioned above did smack of being reactionary against "special snowflakes", however they chose to qualify the term. Drow-hate was the most common flavor, followed by paladin-hate.
Verisimilitude, that's the one. Bigotry against non-standard races is a given, and not implausible. People failing to recognize someone proving themselves time and again to be 'one of the better ones' is...also not impossible, but plausibility becomes strained save in the most backwards of settings/scenarios. That said, the scale and scope of such can be small and bleak, q.v. going from people running the would-be heroic ogre out of town with torches, pitchforks, and lethal intent to merely chasing him out with non-sharpened sticks and rotten produce, eventually culminating with being grumbled at and about when in town, but not actively driven off...and having the townspeople maintain the facade of hating the ugly SOB, but keeping straight faces while telling him to go away forever when he leaves to adventure, even though there's not a dry eye in the surprisingly not-unruly mob, because the ogre is a loathsome abomination but, damnit, he's THEIR loathsome abomination and he's leaving town to face people who will treat him worse than they ever did, and only now do they finally realize what they're losing.
TL;DR they can be tsundere for their local 'snowflake'.
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If I make a monster character, I expect that working to overcome prejudice against the character (in the case of good or neutral characters, anyway) will be part of playing them. In some ways the conflict is both internal and external to the character, because they're caught between self-knowledge that they are, due to nature or circumstances or whatever, different, but their culture may well merit its reputation. I'm actually disappointed when their race is brushed over, because it's jarring and breaks immersion in the game world, as well as eliminates one of the reasons I made that character.
But on the other hand I also expect the GM to step in during character creation and tell me if this is not an element they want in this game, not be passive-aggressive towards my character over their race for the entirety of the campaign. When I'm using a character concept that I know might not fly, whether it's a monster race or a strange background or an odd class combo, I always seek GM input before proceeding, and I fully expect them to be honest with me. If they're not, they have only themselves to blame for the resultant situation, imo.
As far as "special snowflakes" are concerned, all characters are unique in their own ways, even the nth "raised a farmer and left home after tragedy" character. When everyone is unique, uniqueness is no longer "special". A snowflake comes from a player (or GM) assuming their atypical race/background/ability/whatever will confer recognized, fully positive specialness in-game or in-game advantages. Unique is not the same as special or important, and it's only when those wires get crossed that stuff like this really becomes a problem. (Barring of course particular campaigns where certain concepts just won't work, but you could say that of any character feature, not merely race.)