Sithraider:
I apologize, really, I wasn't trying to imply romance are the only kinds of love. Only that to me those are the best stories. And who could argue that Sam isn't one of the best and most loving character of the genre? My favorite scene in my RpoL experiences was one of sisterly love and self sacrifice.
And I hadn't even thought about my NPC list being to gender/ethnically narrow. Crud, thanks for that bit of wisdom.
Fair enough, I was only pointing out the common "desire to be romantic/breed=human" thing has...drawbacks. I actually saw a smart take on t'internet that pointed out (correctly, I can verify as an archaeologist) that in terms of specifically human traits that have shaped evolution, our brains and civilisations, it's the ability to
cook. Even our fellow hyper intelligent, tool/language-using scavenger buddies (that's corvids, not chimps, by the way) can't do that. So Sam and his Magic Potatoes have more humanity than all of us. XD
As for Cast Lists...at least two people read them! The first time I saw a balanced one was a real eye-opener for me, because my own reaction was "that's a lot of women...[counting]...no, wait, that's a
normal amount of women..." which just goes to show how insidious the HGR and what it says about who gets to be a named supporting character/speak/be more than the token ____ is, and I've made an effort to try and balance that ever since (and have got good stories out of it). Obviously you're going to have less people from further away depending on the rurality of a setting and a world's technology, but before land routes were a safe prospect you'd be surprised at the strength of contact between, say, Persia and Viking Ireland, or Roman North Africa and Brittany, because good ports are good ports.
As for a limit on Steves or what have you, there's a point where the realism of letting multiple people in a story have the same forename gets silly enough that you just have to put them on a team together.Having a default common name can also save time if your players ask about NPCs, and then they can make real use of in-game cultural stuff like trait names, patronymics etc. Flavour!