A very diverse race and character creation

[Nihimon]

Urman wrote:

... such new sword designs would be tied to master craftwork. So the new design would be in demand, recognizable, and rendered multiple times.

That hadn't even occurred to me. I'm glad you pointed that out.

[Onishi]

Urman wrote:

Your optimism is... optimistic. :)

In Wurm, some of us attempted to create a player-made, tile-by-tile map. The idea was to use a standard set of colors to represent the different tiles and a 1 pixel = 1 tile scale; people could submit sections of the world map which we would piece together. Unfortunately, some people could not be counted upon to use a standard palette or scale, which meant that player input had to all be checked and often edited before adding it to a compiled map.

So, I guess I am cynical about people's ability to follow simple directions. I think there will need to be a staff member in the loop to ensure the player submissions won't crash the game and won't include graphics inappropriate for the game.

Honestly I don't think that would likely be a huge issue. I know of no shortage of games that permitted importing of guild emblems from icon files on a PC with little to no incident. The most obvious requirement, is that uploading an image would have to be limited to players who have paid a month or so of subscription, and have a simple agreement they have to click before uploading.

[Camlo Alban]

Back to the original topic of the post, I think that one of the better solutions to the problem of "diverse humans" is to allow for presets that define the character visually, and as long as a character falls within certain ranges of values for the visual aspects, the character is stamped by the game as "Varisian" or "Chelaxian" - or if you fall between these two, perhaps the game stamps you as both. This would accurately model how NPCs could then perceive your character based on his/her visual properties, and perhaps the old Varisian Harrower reacts better to Varisian PCs than non-Varisians. All of this would be on an RP-and-immersion-promoting level. It also makes sense, because NPCs will have generally only appearance as a first measure of a person. A PC may be an Ulfen born and raised in Absalom, but how is the NPC to know that without interaction?

As for statistical differences between human ethnicities, I think that's not necessary. I think that could be handled beautifully with a trait or "background wizard" system like the one that's already been suggested. You want your half-orc to be erudite and aloof? No problem. Pick out a couple of characteristics in the background wizard and NPCs will react accordingly. What's great is that some of these things might change over time through interaction with NPCs - maybe this half-Orc becomes a bit more personable, and the "aloofness" value lowers over time. Other traits may be less malleable, like country of birth or parentage. Some of the traits may be mutually exclusive, to prevent nonsensical characters (my half Orc is erudite, aloof, illiterate, and very personable... Not all those things go together.) There would also be perhaps a cap of five traits that define the character (just to make it easier for NPCs.) They could be... Country of Origin, Demeanor, Self-Esteem, Religiosity, and Inquisitiveness, for example (just making things up.)

Anyway... Rant over. I think if they separate the visual look of a character from his or her background, it would lead to a greater variety of characters and make for a very interesting game. No one would be cookie-cutter, and it would provide a greater deal of richness. Other accommodations could be made for other races: Elves come in regular and forlorn perhaps, half Orcs and half elves would break down along the type of society that raised them, the ethnicity of their human side, Gnomes might vary by stage of bleaching, halflings by whether they come from slave populations, etc. There's tons of lore to work with here.