hoopy
Savant
Goons continue to discuss the finer aspects of Elder Scrolls and RPGs:
You know, playing Skyrim now, I think one of the only thing that annoys me about the voice acting is they made Redguards basically the whitest sounding characters in the game. I mean even the Nords have an accent.
Its just one of those ticks that's burns me. Oblivion was pretty much the only game that I could really craft a character that looked and (at least partially) sounded just like me. That's gone now and it sort of burns me.
At the same time, it's probably very reaffirming for someone who speaks with a "black" accent to their voice to hear people who sound like them in video games instead of everybody sounding like white people all the time.
If you're playing a fantasy game in a fantasy world, you don't like to feel like you're losing out on something based on picking a gender or race. It makes sense right up until the point where somebody wants to play a female Redguard Battlemage who kicks rear end with spells, only to discover that they're inherently limited in their strength and intelligence stats, you know?
Having fantasy race or gender affect usual stat ranges doesn't have to, and shouldn't, mean that playing as a female dwarf means you can never ever have the same strength stat as a male werewolf. But there's nothing wrong with a female dwarf character being required to train more or get more experience or whatever mechanic you choose in order to get the same strength as the male werewolf has.
I see your point, but I think the issue is that usually those starting stats or stat ranges use the often flimsy excuse of verisimilitude to reinforce both positive and negative stereotypes of genders and ethnicities; it's a way bigger deal in TES because "black people", "norse aryans", and "romans" are player character races. There's more theoretical harm done by that than the D&D approach of having the races with different stats be things like elves and dwarves, which at the very least are allegorical or analogous to real-world cultures and ethnicities rather than almost directly being them.