mathaetaes: Internal Consistency: You seem to forget that people have been playing tabletop in the D&D world for 40 years, in whatever way they please. Some are playing queer characters who try to f*ck every NPC they encounter regardless of race or gender. Some don't.
If you're only using the world of Baldur's Gate games as your internal consistency metric: Did you go around and poll each NPC as to their sexual orientation? Most of the time it's "go fetch me this magical doohickey" and you go run the errand and that's it; just like in the real world, someone's sexual orientation doesn't play in to casual conversation. For all you know, the NPCs in BG1 could be having massive, bisexual orgies as soon as you left the screen.
Time4Tea: I'm talking about the Forgotten Realms setting and the Sword Coast region of Faerun specifically, not D&D settings in general. FR has been developed as a fantasy setting to a very high level of detail over the course of ~40 years. Not just in CRPGs and/or D&D supplements, but in
dozens of full-length novels. I don't know if you've ever read any of the Forgotten Realms novels, but I read at least half a dozen when I was a teenager - many of them include mature sexual themes, but I don't recall any of them giving the impression that the gender-identity demographics of the setting varied wildly from what would be expected from either modern-day society or medieval Europe.
If you want an RPG that has a very high percentage of LGBT characters, fine: do it Cyberpunk or a different fantasy setting, somewhere else in Faerun even. But trying to retcon a highly popular and familiar setting that has been developed in great detail over several decades is not the right place to do it (imo).
You make a good point though: I played through BG1 and for all I know many of the NPCs I met could have been LGBT. I didn't ask, didn't care, because it wasn't particularly relevant. But then, the way I see it, I'm not the one who seems to be trying to retro-actively insert gender identity politics into an established fantasy setting. Why is it suddenly necessary to explicitly depict the sexuality of significant numbers of NPCs at all? If it's not relevant to the adventure, perhaps it would be better to just leave it undefined, as it has been in previous games, and let players fill in the blanks themselves?
Zaxares: Ehh, not really. I'd say we humans have reached the point where we're threatening to upset the world's natural balance with our overpopulation. In fact, it's entirely possible that the "increase" in non-hetero individuals is actually a natural correction within our species trying to balance itself out before we breed ourselves into oblivion.
Time4Tea: I actually sympathize with this POV. We are over-populating the planet with human beings and it's clear we are facing some pretty severe consequences from that. So, the human race probably does need more people/couples who are not going to have babies. Although I'm not one of them myself, I would agree that an increased percentage of LGBT people in the world would probably be a good thing and yes, it might even be linked to some sort of natural balance mechanism (for all we know).
But, that's the real world and I don't think it necessarily justifies suddenly changing an established fantasy setting into something that is not consistent with how it has been depicted previously.
"Why is it suddenly necessary to explicitly depict the sexuality of significant numbers of NPCs at all? If it's not relevant to the adventure, perhaps it would be better to just leave it undefined, as it has been in previous games, and let players fill in the blanks themselves?"
This sentence right here is what I've been thinking since this game was released.
Completely unnecessary.
