Thread by @SecretGamerGrrl

Random stray thought since for the past month or so I've seen another uptick of weird dudes pissing their pants over efforts to not make all dwarves be fighters or whatever in RPGs:

Imagine that there were a rule in the game that you get a +2 bonus to Str if your name is Betty.

Not you as a player, just your character. And they can even do all their adventuring under a fake name where it won't necessarily come up, just so long as it's canonical that up until shortly before joining the party, they were called Betty, and that's their actual legal name.

It's a completely arbitrary rule, not based in real life or anything, but you've got 3 options now, going forward:

You start making every single martial character you play be a Betty.

You start making every character in the game have a dark mysterious past where they hide the

fact that their name is Betty from the world, which definitely wouldn't start to feel super weird the second or third time you did it.

Or you stubbornly refuse to be restricted like that and make various fighters and barbarians and such with names that aren't Betty, accepting

that your characters are all just going to be straight up functionally worse than those of all the people who just accept the designers clear intent that all martial PCs be named Betty.

Also if you complain that this is ridiculous and your name shouldn't affect what classes you

can play without a penalty for expressing yourself, you will absolutely be called a whiny min-maxer who cares more about the numbers on your sheet than just creating an original character.

Oh and for the record the names for other stat bonuses in order are Wendelford, Tummytum,

Mitch, Ji-woo, and Gladys. It'd just be weird if only Str got a Name Bonus.

Anyway, think about how such a rule would effect things for a while, and try to carry forward any thoughts on the inherent ridiculousness and pigeon-holing with you for other, similar contexts.