(08-05-2015, 03:56 PM)Nadine Marteau Wrote: Unless you're in the business of telling people what they should and should not be playing, I'm not sure why character's tending towards the open-minded is a bad thing.
One issue I've encountered is that I try to play a character with a pre-modern worldview as a way of blending her into the setting, but more often than not it causes her to stand out and even be perceived negatively by other RP characters.Â
It only really becomes a problem when characters start acting like I'm the one who's unusual for not having a 21st century liberal worldview. Characters will get very angry when I imply non-physiological differences between races, for example, and will sometimes accuse me of "racism." But I think "racism" as a sociological concept probably doesn't exist in Eorzea, especially owing to the fact that the "races" in the game are just different humanoid species rather than being different skin colours of the same species.Â
It also doesn't seem lore appropriate to me that characters would have such a worldview simply because they are "adventurers who travel a lot." Christopher Columbus didn't stop being racist when he discovered the Americas. Historically speaking, people who contributed to the more enlightened modern attitude towards physical race were intellectuals and scholars, both inside and outside the oppressed groups, rather than being "worldly people" per se. Most of this change in attitude took place in universities and places of higher education.Â
And the other items you listed - tradespeople/merchants, criminals/outcasts, specialized mercenaries - well, I just don't see the connection between their line of work and their general worldview. If anything, I would imagine such people probably have less formal education and are therefore less likely to have distinctive or sophisticated belief systems.
If you've never played the 3.0 LTW quests, the whole premise of it is a single merchant in Ishgard trying to take a stand against the haughty attitude of the tradespeople there towards the poor. Accordingly, tradespeople and merchants, at least in Ishgard, are used as a symbol of the status quo which is being challenged by one merchant who disagrees with it. This isn't the topic of race, of course, but it's along the same lines and it gives you an idea of how merchants who have liberal views are perhaps exceptional individuals rather than being commonplace.
![[Image: hlEovB0.png]](http://i.imgur.com/hlEovB0.png)
