Frist I got to say that I am not a racial discrimination person, I just think mabye the PC need a race select option, which the player can select it’s own skin color on the game.
and some mutation will cause player color changing too, like lizard mutagen will make the character color become green
I think this stystem should be easy to dev, am I right? hope someone plan it.
I think the real solution (in my opinion) is to allow for any number of custom avatars. As an example, right now we don’t allow for intersex people either.
a avatars with the ACSII code? is all right, I just dosn’t like a texture somehow.
i can not understand the need for a coloured ascii symbol other then to adress more objects(and a human is a human no matter which colour so it would be redundant in terms of determining what it is). Its your imagination anyways when you play ascii.
Different tiles make sense. Ascii well not to me at least.
While I do think some sort of physical description traits (even if never used in-game) would be cool, I don’t think we really need to change the @ symbol colors. But then, I use tilesets, so I guess I’m a bit wimpy. And, while I do think physical descriptions (ala dwarf fortress) would be cool, my current character has 8 arms and 4 legs and a round mouth filled with a beak and tentacles, so I think they’d have a loooooooooooooot of work to do to beat out my imagination, anyways.
If you are talking tilesets you could easily change the tiles, but that’s on the tileset people. As dev’s we do literally nothing with the tilesets other than providing the code-side support for them. We’ve already supported tile swapping, and now it’s up to the tileset people to have multiple human tiles that you can switch between if you want. (Heck, you could probably just create a “different race” weightless item for your inventory that changed your sprite right now if you wanted, I know that we already support equipment modifying your character tile). We might also support tile changes on mutations (in which case you could mod in a mutation to change your tile to the appropriate race) but I’m not sure, and if we didn’t it shouldn’t be much of an extension from the current clothing tile support.
As for ASCII, the @ isn’t white because it has white skin, it’s white because that’s the most visible color. NPC’s are pink because that was another rather visible color that wasn’t white. It has literally no connection to race in the slightest. Similarly the only place that gender exists is in the professions name and in character random name generation. There is absolutely no difference between an PC that picked a male profession and then changed clothes and one that picked a female profession off the bat, and even most professions can’t be seen once the game has actually started. If you want to play an intersex person you are totally free to, we specifically avoided handling gender anywhere in the code precisely to allow for options like that. There is nothing saying that your Punk Rock Girl can’t be trans, and it’s like that on purpose. 
Hey, if you want, i could do some variations for you to add if you use my tileset. I always tried to make them as plain as possible for your imagination though, but hey, everyone thinks differently!