Perhaps ask them what their heritage is. That leaves it pretty open, including allowing cultural shifts in concepts of ethnicity.
Examples of Safety, Diversity, Empathy in games
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Speaking of experience: my experience has been that white people tend to play white characters more often when there are actual PoC at the table, for whatever reason. I have to assume itās a comfort issue for them.
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Yeah, maybe ācultural heritageā and a fill-in-the-blank?
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Safety: Thereās a good spread of safety tools in the games in Pelgraneās Seven Wonders anthology. The Fate Horror Toolkit has lots about safety.
Diversity: I appreciate the fact that Urban Shadows pushes ethnically varied cities, like the big cities Iām familiar with, and not just playing as white people. Iām not 100% sure of every part of the implementation, but itās generally good, and the fact it pushes it is pretty great.
Developed settings presenting a range of cultures and ethnicities are another good route. Thereās not in my opinion quite enough of this in āreal worldā settings, whether present, or historical, or historical fantasy. I try to do this with things I write, and donāt always succeed.
Fantasy settings which step outside fake Medieval Europe, and science fiction settings involving people who are explicitly not just future Americans also add to the diversity of gaming in general. There are lots of these, and the best donāt fetishise the cultures involvedā¦Iām thinking here of Capharnaum and Bastion for fantasy, and Coriolis for science fiction, but there are many more and we should all talk about them more. We should also talk about games from outside the English speaking world when we can.
Empathy: Bite Me! is great for this. A big part of it is about exposing your emotions, and bonding with your pack.
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What do you all think of this? āFill in the blank with your characterās cultural heritage. This could mean any combination of race, ethnicity, nationality, tribal affiliation, and/or regional ancestry.ā
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I feel like it depends on the goal of the game. For example, why is a given game asking about ethnicity? Can a game instead ask āhow does society view your characterā or something like that? Sometimes a goal might be āmake a nonwhite player feel welcomedā and nonwhite listings achieve that, but Iād still keep the larger goal in mind.
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The term āsafetyā. I spent a silly amount of time in the past explaining that RPGās are not physically dangerous. I think āwell beingā better describes it and is a synonym of safety. I imagine a casual or curious person seeing this #1 item and thinking, āoh my itās dangerousā. I am going to apologize to anyone who thinks I am splitting hairs, I can see that point of view, but words and wording are important.
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This is interesting to me. I, personally, have not had to explain that RPGs were not physically dangerous, but I can see how that might be frustrating.
Absolutely. I think that āSafetyā is a perfectly appropriate word. But that might be because I think emotional and mental well being are important and deserve similar level or attention as physical well being.
This brings me to another thought, I know there is some discussion about safety tools being clumsy because they bring you āout of the fictionā and how it might be nice to have more integrated in fiction tools. BUT I also sort of think of this as a feature not a bug. If someone is about to do something physically dangerous, I want to be able to warn them and I want them to know in a way that they will NOT interpret as an in game thing. For me, this follows through to emotional and mental safety. I want to deliberately stop the fiction and make sure we get everyone safe before continuing. The fact that it is jarring is kind of the point.
That being said, I do like gentler ways to handle things too, and those can be in fiction methods, but if some stuff is going really poorly I WANT an out of fiction method that can stop us and get us back to a safe place. This could just be, āHey guys, I need to stop us, I cannot continue with whatās going on, can we talk about whatās making me uncomfortable?ā, but that sentence is not always the easiest to get out, and it can be much harder depending on the person and their past experiences.
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That could work. I like blanks. 
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How about just:
- Your people: ________
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Iām definitely listening to all the criticism here about how the racial lists are presented in Urban Shadows! Both Drew and I felt it was kinda wild at the time to include anything like what we included, but clearly itās just the start of a conversation about what it looks like to include racial content in a game. I always look forward to seeing folks come up with new and different solutions to this stuff.
Like Yoshi noted, the main thing that we were trying to do was to get people out of the default of playing only white characters. We saw how much both Apocalypse World and Monsterhearts had shaped expectations around playing across gender, and we hoped that weād be able to do the same thing with race. Contrary to @oh_theogonyās experience, Iāve seen lots of white folks play across race, but that may be because my identity authorizes them to do so. (I think if you look at Masks as a community, weāve had even more success establishing non-white as the baseline.)
But we also didnāt want to confuse āLookā with āACTUAL RACIAL IDENTITYā and the compromise we struck seems like sometimes people think weāre actually asking people to choose their race instead of how they look. So itās an imperfect solution. (For example, I would pick White and Latinx for my look, but Iām not sure thatās clearly communicated on a playbook!) I think some heritage stuff is a good move, but I also think that youāre basically going to get white people saying āHereās my white heritageā and moving on with their day.
But I also hear what @Pedro is saying about how NA-centric the list ended up. I feel the same way about all the guns we included in the game! Urban Shadows is definitely written with a US/NA focus, and anyone who is playing in London or Bangalore or Sydney is going to have to do some work to get the playbooks to fit their locale, both in terms of talking about race and guns and politics and other stuff. Thereās a tension here between making the game evocative and making the game open. But the āotherā line is definitely not an afterthought; we spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make a list that tried to include everyone, and Iāll definitely make a note to the effect of āThese categories are NA-centric, like all the guns!ā if we ever do a second edition/reprint.
This is something I continue to work on. In Cartel, I donāt have racial pick lists. It makes no sense to impose those ideas on a Mexican setting. Miguel Ćngel Espinoza has some really, really interesting options going on in Nahual, but it involves lists that Iām still absorbing, definitely stuff outside of my cultural wheelhouse. I thought about including them in Cartel, but they donāt seem like a great fit. In the end, I think Iām just going with āYouāre all Mexicanā and focusing on other details that make those characters human.
I think all of this is basically me saying āIām trying to figure this problem out, but I think the issues raised are good ones.ā I know that sitting at a table with white people means they are mostly going to play white people, but I also know that if I donāt push the issue (with a pick list or with a setting that demands everyone be Mexican, etc) then Iām not doing my job.
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I also tend to play white characters. I think itās less a matter of worrying that Iāll fall back on offensive stereotypes as it is me not being confident that Iād do anything but play the character as essentially white, if that makes sense. Games like Nauhaul, where I have no choice but to play someone from a particular community, break me of this habit pretty well.
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Contrary to @oh_theogonyās experience, Iāve seen lots of white folks play across race, but that may be because my identity authorizes them to do so. (I think if you look at Masks as a community, weāve had even more success establishing non-white as the baseline.)
This is super interesting, @MagpieMark! Now Iām wondering if my presence at tables makes straight, cis players more (or less?) likely to play queer or trans characters!
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Maybe! I meanā¦ I also sometimes just straight call it out. Like if I get a table of white players and they all play white characters, I may say āThatās interesting that you all chose white charactersā and see how they react. Sometimes I can get one of them to say āOh, I was going to maybe say Latinx, butā¦ letās do it!ā
And sometimes we just tell a story about four white people and their engagement with communities they donāt understand. 
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I wonder if there would be a benefit to starting out discussing the ethnic (and other) groups in your setting? Like, it is literally impossible for a game designer to produce a list of all possible groupings you might want to cover, because you donāt know the context the gaming group is operating in, or the context they want the fiction to be operating in (which are two different things, right?)
So, start off with āwhat are the groupsā. Then āand which of these will you be playing?ā
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Wandering a bit off the main thread of the discussion so far, I wanted to talk about some advice I got recently about a PBTA move of mine. The move is about blowing off steam to reduce (game mechanical) pressure, and a potential 7-9 consequence of it is that you fall into someoneās arms. I had been thinking about the issues around consent in relation to who would decide whether this consequence arose, and who would decide the specifics (i.e. whose arms? what does āfall into the arms ofā mean exactly?)
What I hadnāt thought of is the 6 result. I was all āthis is fine, the MC will just make a Move, job doneā. Until someone pointed out that this set up could easily prompt the MC to bypass your consent and my carefully crafted 7-9 results and have you wake up in someoneās bunk. The 6 or less set up lets you do that, and only your principles stop you doing it. But in this case, a well-defined 6 or less result could be an important way to protect consent, and therefore safety.
I wanted to share that example because I think it shows how building safety into mechanics requires some serious thought about each individual game component and the issues it might generate. Blanket tools are all well and good (and Iām a fan of such tools, of course), but thereās no way to shortcut that kind of detailed thinking.
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This is great discussion with several related threads. I appreciate everyoneās thoughtfulness. There is an issue that we havenāt touched upon, but that has been foreshadowed:
This is really the crux of playing across racial/ethnic (or any other) boundaries, isnāt it? What does it mean to play a character of another race/ethnicity/gender/sexual orientation/religion, etc from yourself when you donāt have the experience of being a person with that identity in the world?
I am genuinely interested in hearing peopleās experiences with playing characters having identities other than themselves (especially racial/ethnic) and how they embodied that race/ethnicity in the fictional world. What experiences did you call upon? Were there other players of that race/ethnicity at the table? If so, did you unintentionally give offense by playing into stereotypes or otherwise? If so, how was it handled at at the table?
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From a game of Noir World I played, Iād say who introduces their character first may set the tone/diversity of the game. I asked out loud, āThe Fatale playbook can be a male-presenting?ā and when the answer was yes, Sven Fatale was born, and his actively stated pansexuality combined with the Fatale playbook took the chains off ā I donāt think there ended up being a straight character (and there were 8 players) in the game by the end. And I honestly think it was because I introduced Sven first, making it clear that anything goes. I donāt actually remember what Sven looked like (skin color, etc.) except he was of course smoking hot.
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Iām a white cis gendered man and I found this article interesting. Could someone with a more diverse background than myself weigh in with an assessment? It seems very thoughtful to me.
There are prejudiced people out there, but from my experience in higher education and creative advertising, there are a lot of well-meaning players who want to avoid harming others. In focus groups for commercial and product testing, subjects often change their behavior based on who is in the room, and I donāt mean they hide their prejudices, I mean they grow more cautious for fear of being wrong with the nuances of what they donāt know.
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I think this article is great! Mendez is always really thoughtful about this stuff, and I think this is a great place to start thinking about playing people across racial/ethnic boundaries. But I also think that Averyās advice on queer characters is good here too: sometimes their queerness is really important and sometimes itās a side note to all the other stuff thatās going on with the character.
Think about a character like Hobbes from the Fast and the Furious series. Yeah, The Rock is a big, brown dude with lots of thoughts about being a minority. But thatās not what that character is about in the story (mostly). He is just an awesome brown dude who kicks butt and takes names and loves his daughter.
Contrast that with the main character of Get Out (Chris Washington). The story and the situation mean that his āblacknessā is central to the story. Itās what the whole story is about and so that actor needs to be able to play that character (and letās not forget that Daniel Kaluuya is actually British, so thereās another level of āplaying someone not like yourselfā going on there too.)
When I play a character of a different race, I calibrate what Iām bringing to the table based on what I really know about that culture and the markers that I feel comfortable using. When I play white people (which is me not playing my race!), I feel pretty comfortable saying a lot about the white experience. Thatās much less true about playing someone who is from a First Nations group that Iāve never really interacted with in person.
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