Extended Race Selection....not.

Lemuel · Post by **Lemuel** » Wed Sep 19, 2012 7:19 pm

WHO is in charge of maintaining the CLOK entry at MudConnector ?

Our entry page at MudConnector states that CLOK offers Extended Race Selection. Happily, it does not.

In CLOK, your character is a human from one of a number of nationalities. This roughly parallels the world of Conan, of Fafhrd & The Gray Mouser, of Solomon Kane and not of The Lord of the Rings and of a thousand D&D MUDs.

Frankly, I am grateful; I dearly wanted the former because I have had more than my fill of games with elves, dwarves, and orcs. The fact that CLOK does not have extended races is a major part of it's charm for those of us who are elf-and-orc fatigued.

Now someone be a good sport and change the entry form in the MUDconnector web page to indicate the truth, that we proudly do *not* have Extended Race Selection.

Rithiel · Post by **Rithiel** » Wed Sep 19, 2012 7:36 pm

That's entirely dependent on how you define race. If you go with Wikipedia:

"Race is a classification system used to categorize humans into large and distinct populations or groups by heritable phenotypic characteristics, geographic ancestry, physical appearance, ethnicity, and social status."

In which case we do have extended race selection. It's not our fault that the rest of fantasy uses the word incorrectly.

Lemuel · Post by **Lemuel** » Wed Sep 19, 2012 9:32 pm

[quote=Rithiel]That's entirely dependent on how you define race. If you go with Wikipedia:

"Race is a classification system used to categorize humans into large and distinct populations or groups by heritable phenotypic characteristics, geographic ancestry, physical appearance, ethnicity, and social status."

In which case we do have extended race selection. It's not our fault that the rest of fantasy uses the word incorrectly.[/quote]

The rest of fantasy uses the term as appropriate to the context of fantasy, not real life. This is the expectation of browsers of MudConnector.

Rithiel · Post by **Rithiel** » Wed Sep 19, 2012 10:11 pm

Not necessarily. I can think of a number of books and other things that use 'race' the way we do.

Post by **Rias** » Thu Sep 20, 2012 7:46 am

My understanding is that this means when you make a character, you can choose a race, rather than everyone being the same thing. It doesn't mean that every race is wildly different (orcs, elves). I'm looking around for a more precise definition of "extended race selection" but so far I haven't had any luck.

KianTheArcher · Post by **KianTheArcher** » Thu Sep 20, 2012 12:24 pm

[quote=Rithiel]In which case we do have extended race selection. It's not our fault that the rest of fantasy uses the word incorrectly.[/quote]

This. Most fantasy genres DO use the race incorrectly. If an Elf is anything other than a human, it would be a different species, in the same way that a chimpanzee and human are two different species.

Shadowrun does a great job with this by, I believe and could be mistaken, calling the different categories subhuman, and giving them all the Homo genus followed by a different species name.

I think it's safe to say we have an extended race selection.