If there aren’t cultural traits that distinguish one race/species from another, then all characters will wind up being humans with slightly different facial features.
Luckily nobody is saying there shouldn’t be any cultural traits. Just that the implicit or explicit hierarchies might be a problem.
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Dragon #44 (1980) has a an article on dungeons and dragons “genetics”.
It contains much that is indefensible,
One of the articles draws from Gygax’s speculations on the Half-Ogre (1979) "(THE HALF-OGRE, SMITING HIM HIP AND THIGH), p 12-13
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I remember they even had an in magazine adventure for Paranoia that found a way to include Daleks and Mexican Cantina bars.
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I don’t think anyone still here is, it’s more the “POLITICAL CORRECTNESS GONE MAD!!!” crowd who are offended about the existence of alternative views.
But let’s not argue about this, we’ve already had the thread closed and cleaned up once.
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“Oh, hey. To clarify, the smith who forged it, and his son, were really really ugly. Not like you… handsome.”
“Dude.”
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White always goes first. You monster.
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The early “races” were designed around the concept of “game balance.” A player might choose to play an orc to gain access to psionics, and take a penalty to other stats in turn. Elaborations on orc culture, and crackpot notions of genetics were added later.
That’s a very egocentric view of the universe. Everything must, in the end, be comprehensible, have values and standards that match a very particular set of human norms, and care about you. “God in His Heaven and me in my bed. All’s right with the world.”
Damn, you beat me to it. I am surprised this hasn’t come up yet.
I was responding to @mallyboon 's comment about “dissociate good/evil from ancestry”. If humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, dragons all have a full spectrum of good-neutral-evil then you wind up with what amounts to a game set in an all human earth, but with magic added.
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I think it’s quite the opposite. It’s an admission that there can be many things that would be literally incomprehensible to a human mind, and that I shouldn’t expect them to align with my categories, but also that I still have final responsibility for my own actions and for the values I do care about.
Any god that exists has no reason to share my values, and I don’t expect them to. I am always willing to learn more, and see if my values should change; they have many times and will many more, I’m sure. But the outer gods don’t care about me or what I do at all, in any way, and it is supposed to be literally impossible for me to understand their values (if they have any), so why should I try to force them into categories like “good” and “evil”? That would be egocentric hubris.
But if you meant egocentric more in the sense of various gods that humans actually worship, well, even the most religious people generally agree that not all such gods exist, unless they mean something very nonstandard by “god” and “exist” (and yes, there are communities where that is the case, I know). And the ones that don’t exist must have been created by humans, presumably in service to some human purpose, according to human values and categorizations and ways of thinking, so “egocentric” is already a given and not a criticism.
You are right though, I am egocentric and hubristic in the sense that I am not willing to change my values to align with what any god says I should believe, just because they are powerful or even all-powerful. And frankly, I hope you are too. Imagine if this afternoon, heavenly beings descended and appeared to every human, declared a new divine revelation, and told us all that the Aztecs were right, the gods demand daily mass human sacrifice, better make with the step pyramid building or we’ll feel their wrath. What would you do, go out and find a piece of obsidian to carve into a dagger? We might have no choice but to appease them, but I think in that scenario humanity’s highest moral duty would be to at least try to overthrow the gods and put something more humane in their place, at least within our own corner of the universe.
Would a dwarven trainer be able to effectively teach combat to an elf twice his height and half his weight? Would they have suitable practice weapons (or be willing to make them)?
Does Stonecunning require some feature of dwarven eyes (bearing in mind that it can’t be gained by feats etc)?
Likely so, the basics apply regardless of body shape and size and a master of any type of martial arts is always able to instruct. It’d be different if a trainer were to try to teach something that is not humanoid, but an elf shares a lot with a dwarf despite differences in size. In a D&D setting an elf trained by dwarves would likely be adept at fighting smaller opponents or have an unusual fighting style that could give them some kind of advantage.
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The best quote along these lines is from a book by the late Joel Rosenberg. A group of three members of a species of hermaphroditic amphibians are discussing their confusion with humans. One says (and I’m doing this from memory of a book that has long since fallen apart) “I have made a study of these matters. There is a sort of internal ‘pond’ in which the eggs are fertilized and develop. And their entire economic and social system is based on the fact that some of them have this ‘pond’ and others do not.” Succinct, accurate, and not helpful for us mammals.
One of the things you have to remember about RPGs, like science fiction and fantasy, is that they are written to be easy to read and to run along familiar channels so that people will buy them. If you do something too alien, if you really get inside the sevenfold matrix-brains of the methane-breathing t’ca (kudos to C. J. Cherryh for her non-humanoids) you will lose all but a few dedicated consumers. People, as Lord Vetinari put it, do not want news. They want olds, so your non-human humanoids will only really sell if they aren’t all that different from homo sapiens.
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Some of the subgenres of SF cater to the weird. The characters might be made of cardboard, but as long as they’re exploring an alien megastructure that blows your mind, it’s all good Or maybe the aliens are described in such magnificent detail that nothing else matters. Or alternatively, it might be the most conventional space opera with believable passionate characters.
In the world of Roleplaying, there are games with richly developed cultures and religions and there are games with perfectly balanced mechanics. Buy what interests you.
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One of the all-time best and one of my favorites. He also quit SF&F in large part because people weren’t buying his work.
all but a few dedicated consumers
My point is that sci-fi/fantay has a pretty long history not just pandering to the lowest common denominator, but of producing interesting and thoughtful work (and no, high complexity and non-standard narrative formats are not the only thing that makes something thoughtful). It long ago evolved from a pulp genre into a literature that regular tackles tough questions. I’d also suggest that games have done similar things over the years (although probably not to the same extent).
You’re promoting a stereotype of genre culture that has long since been left in the dustbin of history. 
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