…dropping into the conversation here because 
Kpop. Dancing plus singing = life. B.A.P stole my heart first.
Hmm, well I was planning on skin tone/color being a choice in my game. Mostly because you’ll get the choice for some…unnatural skin choices later (ice blue, pale violet, moss green?). But hadn’t put too much thought into what I would name them.
Oh, and I’m half Chinese half white (mostly British) btw. So I get to see both sides I guess?
Honestly, if all members of the party are okay with it, I don’t mind. I tend to have a different sense of decorum depending on which group I’m in and I can tolerate racist remarks as long as they’re not being genuine.
I think you did a good job on skin tone customization! It has a very diverse selection, I like that.
Also, my favorite Kpop group of all time is F(x)!! Amber is my bias, all day every day. Some other groups I like are VIXX, Block B, and Exo (as you can tell by my profile pic lol). Sadly, I do not speak Korean (had to run that through Google Translate!
) but I am definitely intent on learning so I can communicate with relatives and plus I’d really love to go back to SK. I was too young to remember last time I went.
YES, ANOTHER KPOP FAN.
Also, I would love to have blue skin omg
Wooooow, I feel so old compared to you guys. My first foray into kpop was Seo Taiji & Boys (서태지와 아이들) and DBSK/TVXQ! in the early 2000s. My ulti-bias is Key from SHINee. And my current fave groups are 방탄소년단/BTS and BAP. Also iKON and Zico and Block B and Bastarz and CL. i like hiphop/rap~
And yay~ I’m glad I have a good selection for skin tone ;u;
And green skin sounds ba af
Hm, I came in here to see if anyone was talking about GitS and it looks like I missed it. I suppose that’s fine though. I probably would have pissed a lot of people off with my opinions on it.
Lol. Yeah, I would be way too young to understand in the early 2000s. But Shinee is love. Eee, BTS/BAP . Love hip hop even though I dance lyrical. 
Sweet, then I’m sticking with the skin color choices
I was looking through my bookmarks and found I’d a tumblr blog bookmarked for writing descriptions of skin colour, etc, hair, eyes etc. I’ve not actually read the articles recently mind you so can’t comment on the quality but I thought people might find this interesting
I’ve been skimming through the various guides that are there http://writingwithcolor.tumblr.com/tagged/guides but there’s a bunch of other stuff as well. I’m not a huge fan of navigating tumblr mind you.
Me too… It was weird when kdrama got popular because I always thought that was just stuff my grandma watched and therefore uncool. Then suddenly all my friends knew more Korean than I did. So now I feel a bit behind the curve, I have to catch up.
It is just stuff your grandma watches and therefore uncool. But it’s completely foreign to people whose grandma’s didn’t watch it, so it’s unique and interesting to them. Just like how everyone outside of Hawaii seems fascinated by the idea that people in Hawaii like spam.
I personally prefer not mentioning how the MC looks because all those choices without meaningful text between them disrupt the flow of the story, don’t include all possibilities (MC usually can’t have white/grey hair or ombre or rainbow etc.) and usually don’t add to the story.
Isn’t skin tone a little fluid for some people? Some people have one skin color and then they can tan and have another skin color or they can have a spray tan and have an orange skin color.
People, even if they are family, usually don’t have the exact same skin tone unless you are really general with the choices. What about mixed race MCs who don’t have the same skin color as any of their parents? Parents usually aren’t related so how are you going to deal with them looking different if you only base it off of MCs description?
You could ask the readers to describe each parent’s hair, skin,eyes, height, weight etc…but that seems long and clunky and probably won’t add much to the story.
Skin tone is one of the more complicated genetic characteristics. What with recessive genes and mixed inheritance, it’s not as easy as a red and white rose making a pink one; it can be counter-intuitive. It’s very common for a paternity or DNA test to be done on a child simply because a parent believes they’re “the wrong color.”
One way to handle this would be to more directly tell your reader what you’re doing. When you’re describing their parents, you could give them a list of heritable traits, and ask them which characteristic runs in the family. Some quick ideas for traits. Build - tall and willowy, wide and stocky, long torsos, wide shoulders. Eyes - a distinctive recessive color (purple, silver, blue - not only white people can have these) or inherited shape. Hair - an unusual shade (red or blond are recessives, also things like premature white streaks), inherited texture. Small morphological traits - two fingers the same length. A sixth finger or toe. Attached earlobes, so none of you can wear earrings properly (I’ve got those.)
Heritability goes way beyond race, and skin color is one of the trickier things to predict. If you’re drawing from a distinct genetic pool, like a tribe or nation whose traits have stabilized over time, it gets easier. Still, a foreign marriage a few generations back and a different amount of time in the sun, and you have someone who looks totally different again.
My mom likes to tell this story about when we were visiting a mall in Virginia once when I was a kid. My mom and sister were standing together and then my dad walked up, and this little black girl (that’s the extent of my mom’s memory of her appearance) came up to them and said in a very Virginia accent, “Is that a kin 'a yorn?” Apparently totally blown away by the sight of a multiracial family… Which is kinda a funny coincidence since it was a court case in Virginia that was the catalyst for laws against interracial marriage being ruled unconstitutional.
Okay so this topic has kind of run all over the place, but I have a specific question/problem, and this seems to be the perfect place to ask about it.
I’m writing a storygame (aren’t we all). It’s set in a fantasy world, but one that feels like colonial era New England. Now this was a very homogenous society, but that doesn’t matter it’s a made up world I can put anyone I want there. I would at the very least like the player to have the ability to choose their race. Since several of the other characters are blood relatives of the MC that choice will affect their race too. That’s all fine. I know how to do that.
My problem is…How do I make that choice more than just skin deep? I mean the color of a person’s skin, or shape if their eyes or…whatever has got to be the least important part if their racial identity. The cultural parts must be more important. Right?
So how do I introduce a bit of that? It’s a made up world. There is no Africa, or Asia, or Europe. The only culture we really experience is the “colonial America-ish” one, and a vague reference to cities in the “old country” being much bigger.
Inventing a few generic “African” cultural details to associate with a character with dark brown skin seems insulting in the extreme, but then having your choice of race change nothing apart from physical descriptions seems hollow.
Maybe I’m crazy. I’m definitely rambling. It’s a fantasy world.
Maybe the a variety of physical racial traits can exist without any cultural component. Maybe it’s even better.
I’m sorry I kind of lost my question here, and at least a little answered it myself. It’s a very confusing subject in the real world. I don’t think I had a prayer of saying anything intelligent (or coherent) about race in my world full of magic, and witches, and…so forth.
Thanks for reading.
I don’t think that there is actually anything different between people of different skin colors or races when people are first born. The differences come from lived experiences, but looking at culture as one large black race or one large white race is ineffective. It’s like when RPGs ask you to choose a race and there is only one human race when humans can be much more complicated than that.
You could make up your own random cultures or ask the player to choose from several different cultural characteristics and then assign a race to that culture.
Choice of the Vampire made race matter, but that was mostly because of the racist society. It would be reasonable for a slave who wasn’t taught how to read or write (because it’s illegal) to have a lower intelligence stat than a white person who has formal-ish schooling. That wouldn’t be racist(as long as you let the player know why their stats changed); that would be because of circumstances, not because anyone was born inferior.
I personally don’t like to play games that force me to have a too different culture (usually one where women are dumb and worthless or I have to worship some fake gods or morally wrong stuff) and I can’t at least go against the cultural norms, because I like to play as myself, so letting the player define their own cultures would be best. Or, you could base stats and culture off of a racial hierarchy, but I don’t like too much racism and sexism in my games.
If I were you, I wouldn’t make that a choice at all. Since this society is a homogeneous one, it would be easier and probably better if you simply leave the race of the MC and their family ambiguous so the player can project whatever they want onto their character. Some things, it’s just best to leave to the player’s imagination. Especially since racial identity isn’t as cut-and-dry as most people think. Pleasing everyone in this way would be a task.
I would second this. If race is just for player characterization of their character, it’s easier to leave it as “you can imagine whatever makes the most sense here for you” like how Jeantown’s Guenevere game doesn’t give detailed descriptions that would interfere with that on purpose - so that the player can imagine whatever works.
If you want to add racial diversity to your character creation, your world needs racial diversity to exist first. The only reason that racial diversity is important in the real world is because the world is already racially diverse, it’s just that because of tribalism (among other things) we often ignore that.
If the skin colors of different people correspond to their ancestry in the “old country”, then they need a place to have come from. Unless you’re specifically placing these people in an AU-Earth analogue, vaguely “African-ish” details are almost certainly going to backfire. And it’s an excellent question, thank you for not making another lost continent of generic nomad Arabs and… yeah, all of that Gary Gygax nonsense.
My suggestion would be to entirely throw out your ideas of history, treat skin tone and genetics as a color palette, and come up with some new cultures. If you don’t want to get into the details of them, all the better - tease here and there at a detail which shows they’re very different from The World We Know.
Two references for games that were great at their use of both diversity, and “we have a history but you wouldn’t understand it”:
I’m late here but:
Colonial America was much more diverse than you seem to think it was. Not only were there many different “European Cultures” to draw from (Maryland Catholics were much different than Pennsylvanian Quakers which were different than the Puritans) but there were Native American cultures that were way different from eachother and the European cultures…
and
there were were “free African” members of the colonial world and even some communities that came about due to escaped slaves set up in swamps and other “back-water” locations in the south.
then there was the Spanish cultures in areas like Florida and the French and Cajun cultures in New Orleans and so forth…
So in your game, you can make a hunter/trapper/trader originally from the New Orleans area who is “dark skinned” believes in Voodoo and who traveled the Appalachian trail to get to the New England area… or the fantastical equivalent of such in your fantasy world.
I don’t get why creating your fantasy world equivalents would be “insulting” … If in your world, there was a religious migration of black-skinned whatevers from some “old-world Timbuktu” to the shores of your fantasy America… it can create a very unique and very interesting scenario to explore.
Imagine if they settled in Virginia and started farming the rich lands and mining the coal etc there… they’d be a powerful culture in your “colonial America”.
lots of other similar possibilities.
Thank you all for your answers. I think I know what I’m going to do. I’m really glad for the different input.
Hey guys. OP here. So I’ve abandoned most of my story ideas (for good) and have instead focused on writing short stories and poetry to practice my skills in writing.
So, I went through one of my favorite plot generators and thought of writing a high fantasy short story featuring two female protagonists. Now, I’m not sure why, but I pictured one of the characters being East Asian (in this world’s standards), but having red hair, a pinkish hue to her skin, and freckles. She is monoracial.
I’m no expert in science, and I’m terrible when it comes to punnet squares and whatever else people use in genetics (pedigrees?). In this world, people of all races and ethnicities can have different hair and eye colors, sometimes even skin colors. I remember there being a conversation earlier about people being kind of disturbed/annoyed when a PoC player’s family members are described as having white features.
But in this world, there are tribes of Asians having blond hair and icy blue eyes, Middle Eastern people with dark blue (sometimes purple) eyes, and black people having green eyes while still maintaining dark skin and being monoracial. As I said before, I am no expert in science. I am really, really dumb when it comes to that. Even though it’s been my best subject for years, I still can’t quite grasp genetics.
How can I write this in a way that fits my story?