I've seen a lot of discussions over the years about playing the opposite gender. For some it's okay, for others it's a problem, and it is often done very poorly, though not always.

However I have never seen an issue about playing a different race, by which (of course) I do not mean elves and dwarves, but other ethnicities.

I've seen many a bad stereotypical Asian over the years, usually monks, the occasional native American (who is usually played as semi-literate, embarrassingly enough) not a lot of people playing African-American's though.

Would that be considered offensive? Just curious...
This message was lightly edited by a moderator, as it was the wrong forum, at 17:45, Sun 05 June 2016.

I've been trying to branch out into playing other ethnicities.  The games died off before I could fully flesh out my characters though.

I will never understand people in a roleplaying hobby/community getting upset at the idea of people trying to find some empathy for a gender they are not irl, so I can't imagine extending that to an ethnicity, religion or species that they're not irl either.  If all my characters were the same nationality, religion, etc. as me roleplaying would be extremely boring.

As far as it being offensive, how do you judge something so subjective as that?  Offense is never given it is only taken.

I was one of the ones who posted asking for advice one. The general consensus was just play the character, I was thinking to much about it.

Often human racial background just doesn't matter, as it so often doesn't in RL until someone makes an issue of it.  So unless the player has a picture of the character, making it obvious, probably most people don't even think about it.