D&D (2024) How did I miss this about the Half races/ancestries

[Hussar]

Yeah, stats aren't really a thing for player races

I could see something like Formians, in that you could be Worker (Small, but with powerful build and able to carry stuff as if you were large, because ant), Soldier (Medium with stinger) and flying ones (For queens and drones), with the also implication of non-playable stuff like super majors (because the super majors are the size of giants and big enough to have multiple smaller ones just hop on 'em)

I was always sad formians never made it into 5e. I thought they were an excellent monster. Just chock a block with potential.

 

[Incenjucar]

I sincerely doubt the goal was ever to ensure people don't feel like equals. This is just inflammatory sophistry.

That sex-based stats is an issue has been known since at least the 80s, if not the 70s. It's a non-starter and little more than a lit match in a coal mine.

 

[Minigiant]

I wonder if there could be a fey version of tiefling where you have a race of any mortal heavily touched by the Feywild either by parentage, royal boon, or noble machnication.

So you could have access to fey magic and grace without the binds of fey mentality.

Feyblood.?
Faeling?
Greenie?

 

[Alzrius]

Stupid design based on bad science is always an issue.

There are legitimate criticisms to be made regarding AD&D 1st Edition's capping Strength scores differently for male and female characters, but the idea that "the strongest men are stronger than the strongest women" is in no way "bad science."

 

[Maxperson]

So you want 511 unique sets of racial traits then?

Nope. Just a few. If a player wants to play a half-centaur/half-aarakocra he can work with the DM to create it. The vast majority combinations just don't need to be worried about by WotC.

 

[Remathilis]

Nope. Just a few. If a player wants to play a half-centaur/half-aarakocra he can work with the DM to create it. The vast majority combinations just don't need to be worried about by WotC.

That number is all nine PHB races (human, elf, dwarf, halfling, gnome, orc, tiefling, dragonborn, goliath) and every permeation of those nine. That doesn't touch the MotM races. If we're only going to have elf/human and orc/human as viable combos, the only reason to include them is nostalgia. Why bother...

 

[Scribe]

There are legitimate criticisms to be made regarding AD&D 1st Edition's capping Strength scores differently for male and female characters, but the idea that "the strongest men are stronger than the strongest women" is in no way "bad science."

Be that as it may (and nobody with sense is going to argue otherwise I hope) its an elf game, and there is little to nothing to be gained by making there be a difference between the sexes.

We cant even get modifiers on the various <this is not a race> options in this age of contrived issues, having distinctions on sex is just not going to happen.

 

[Alzrius]

Be that as it may (and nobody with sense is going to argue otherwise I hope) its an elf game, and there is little to nothing to be gained by making there be a difference between the sexes.

To be absolutely clear, I granted the premise that there are legit criticisms to be made in that regard where AD&D 1E is concerned. I just couldn't abide the suggestion that it was scientifically inaccurate to acknowledge the differences in muscle power between male and female humans.

 

[Scars Unseen]

really think the only way for the community to get what were known as "half-elves" or "half-orcs" reinstated into the 2024 PHB is on social justice grounds. Either accentuate how problematic it is to erase character options of mixed heritages or point out how much just choosing the features of one parent parallels the "one-drop" issue.

Honestly, I'm just sticking to the "it's lazy game design to remove options and then tell people to just describe your character differently instead" option. I don't think social justice or discrimination really plays into it because, as we've seen in this very thread, you can make arguments along similar lines to support either way.

Take away the emotional or real world social comparisons. They can literally write flavor text to support whatever they put in the book. Hell, they wrote Gruumsh as a relatively benevolent war god in the playtest, and that's like a whole paint factory's worth of whitewashing. About the conniest ret that ever conned. I'd rather argue for what would make - in my opinion - a better game from a design and options perspective, and let them justify the fluff however they feel works best.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

We lose the word savage.

Well, no, we lose it as a descriptor for races of people.

And we aren't calling people savages, we are calling fictional races savages. I could understand if the issue was dismissing a real world group as savages. That is different. But saying you are attacked by a savage band of orcs, conveys a lot of imagery to the players. And it is colorful. In regular speech I have had friends say things to me like "What are you a savage" for leaving the living room a mess or something. It is just a colorful way to talk in most instances. And this is just one word among many that we seem to be losing.



Without knowing the full context, I would say I could interpret this one of two ways. One as him agreeing with John Chivington about native americans (which I suspect wasn't the case, but if it was obviously that is bad). The other is a dark sense of humor about killing orc babies. When I was a history student, people often had a dark sense of humor about historical atrocities and villains. That I am a lot less concerned about. Still I wouldn't go around quoting John Chivington myself.

No well-adjusted person around today would. It would be extremely weird and indicate for many that it’s best to avoid you, just to be safe.

For the record, on the subject of killing orc babies, while I don't think it says anything about a persons' real world ethics, I have never found that to be a convincing idea (even if you accept all the conceits of the D&D alignment system cosmology, somehow killing babies because they were born evil, just doesn't pass the smell test. And when you dive into the actual ethics of it, it just strikes me as an evil act that uses events which have not yet and may not transpire to justify killing something that hasn't done any wrong.

Tell that to Gary, who was literally making the explicit point that Lawful Good characters can justifiably kill Orc young, and used Chivington’s quote as a rhetorical tool to make the point.

If I thought Gary believed Native Americans should be killed on sight, I’d not let his name come up in a thread without mentioning it.

As it is, it was just a disgusting rhetorical tool that he should have known better than to use, and we certainly have no excuse today to do the same sort of things.

I understand this line of reasoning and I agree with many aspects of the first part. I was deeply interested in the history of genocide growing up, and the history of things like the Khmer Rouge, Russian Pogroms, the Holocaust, etc. Language certainly is a factor, and if someone is referring to real world groups as vermin or in other dehumanizing ways, I think that is a reason to be concerned. But I also think if you apply this argument to everything, including dehumanizing language directed at fictional species in a fantasy world, you weaken the real world power of this argument. It becomes easier for people to dismiss concerns about dehumanizing language when people focus on things like calling orcs savages IMO. If WOTC were using the term savage in propaganda posters about a group of people, yes I would be deeply concerned. I am not worried though about applying the label to orcs or fictional groups in an RPG.

If you truly refuse to acknowledge the simple fact that using the same rhetorical tools is going to justifiably make a lot of people feel unsafe, and thus is something we should avoid, then you and I shouldn’t continue interacting.