D&D 5E What is the appeal of the weird fantasy races?

[Charlaquin]

They do get fuzzier. Because author's choose words carefully. It is their trade. It is what they think, eat, breathe and sleep. Words. So to claim a greater interpretation than the author's is silly.

No one is claiming a greater interpretation than the author. The claim is that the author’s interpretation is no “greater” than anyone else’s.

Again, if you are discussing feelings, like this book gave me the feeling it was about industrialization. Go for it. Travel down the road. Just acknowledge and understand that you are seeking that viewpoint out. And if you claim you are correct, even when the author says no, you are wrong.

It’s art. There is no correct interpretation, because it is inherently incomplete without an audience to consume it and draw meaning from it. Whatever meaning you draw from art, that is the meaning it has to you. Whether the artist intended for it to have that meaning is irrelevant.

If someone says, "I find sexual innuendo and human lust all through the work of Bob Ross." And Bob Ross says, "These are about nature and how scenic nature can be." That someone is wrong. It does not in any way invalidate their feelings. It shows a lack of understanding of the original source material. Again, their feelings are valid. Them explaining a Bob Ross painting to others should be stated as conjecture, not authoritative fact. Which, for the second time, was the spark of this conversation.

A Bob Ross painting isn’t about anything. It’s a landscape, which has as many meanings as there are people to interpret it.

 

[Maxperson]

No one is claiming a greater interpretation than the author. The claim is that the author’s interpretation is no “greater” than anyone else’s.

And that's factually wrong. If the author does something for X reason, that's a fact. It's not subject to interpretations that differ At least not opinions that are correct. Reality doesn't change just because you misperceive the authors words to mean something other than how the author meant them.

There is no correct interpretation, because it is inherently incomplete without an audience to consume it and draw meaning from it. Whatever meaning you draw from art, that is the meaning it has to you. Whether the artist intended for it to have that meaning is irrelevant.

What the author writes is not some abstract painting that the artist hasn't told people about. Even then, the painter gets to dictate things. If you interpret Whistler's Mother to be Mary Poppins, you will be wrong. Facts aren't altered due to what you draw from it.

 

[Charlaquin]

And that's factually wrong.

Not according to all of academia for the past 50 years or so.

If the author does something for X reason, that's a fact.

It is a fact that the author did the thing for that reason, yes. But that is only one component of a comprehensive analysis of the work.

It's not subject to interpretations that differ At least not opinions that are correct.Reality doesn't change just because you misperceive the authors words to mean something other than how the author meant them.

It doesn’t matter how the author meant them. What matters is the content of what the author actually wrote. The author’s intentions can (and in many cases, probably should) inform how we interpret the work, but they are not the be-all, end-all of analysis of the work. Certainly it would be incorrect to claim that the author’s intentions are different than what the author claims their intentions were (short of some evidence they’re lying, of course), but most critical analysis just plain isn’t concerned with what the author did or didn’t intend. Critical analysis is mostly a fancy way of saying “thinking about stuff in lots of different ways.” What the author intended is but one way to think about a work among many, all of which can provide interesting and potentially valuable insight into the work.

What the author writes is not some abstract painting that the artist hasn't told people about. Even then, the painter gets to dictate things. If you interpret Whistler's Mother to be Mary Poppins, you will be wrong. Facts aren't altered due to what you draw from it.

It would be wrong to say it was meant to depict Mary Poppins. But again, critical analysis really isn’t all that interested in what it was meant to depict. Authorial (or artistic) intent is a very shallow form of analysis, there isn’t a ton to be learned from it. “The artist intended to depict this.” Ok, great. Not much to discuss there. Now let’s think about it in some other ways and see what we can learn from that.

 

[Jack Daniel]

I'll admit I'm an old school D&D player/DM. I've never discounted a player idea in osr or 5e, but I still wonder. Turtle people (tortles) flying people (aarokara), dragon people (dragonborn)... and so on.

Why do people chose these races?

I'm a fellow traditionalist DM. (I avoid the terms "old-school" and "OSR" because reasons, just a personal choice.) And in my experience, at least in the circles I play with, tabletop gamers will do whatever they can to make their characters unique and special. Wanting to buck trends, flout convention, and be a not-normal special snowflake is almost an expected aspect of character creation these days.

Which makes trying to run a humanocentric setting incredibly difficult if any playable demihumans are permitted. You can do whatever you want to the demihumans mechanically—make them clearly mechanically inferior to the humans, slap them with onerous perquisites and restrictions, limit what classes they can take (or just use the Basic D&D race-classes) and limit their maximum experience levels—and you'll still get a table full of elves, dwarves, hobbits, and orcs with nary a human PC in sight.

So, I've found, if you want a human-centric game where the players don't have "I'm an elf! And my personality is—that I'm an elf!" to lean on as a character crutch, you have to make that explicit and just permit human PCs only. You'll get maybe five minutes of grumbling, and then the players will create interesting human characters with actual personalities to differentiate themselves from every other human fighter, magic-user, thief, or cleric, and ten minutes into the actual game, they'll have forgotten that they had initially been meaning to play "loud drunken boorish violent Scottish-accented dwarf #276."

But.

The old truism always applies: "IT DEPENDS ON THE SETTING." Some settings are human fantasy. Some settings are Tolkienesque fantasy, with elves and dwarves in addition to the humans. Some settings are Shining Force style kitchen-sink science fantasy, with centaurs and birdmen and robots running around, and humans aren't any more common or dominant than any other sentient species.

The rules—including any table-rules the DM makes regarding which races are playable in a given campaign—are there to serve the setting first, and it is traditionally the business of the DM to do the worldbuilding and delineate the setting milieu.

 

[Scott Christian]

Even the Granddaddy of them all, Tolkien, didn't write his books to examine the minds or lives of these beings he created. He wrote those books as allegory about the industrial revolution.

No, he didn’t.

That's what English lit majors tell me. Did Tolkien tell you different?

Explicitly. Repeatedly. Both bluntly and with nuance. Over decades.

Seriously no serious argument can be made that he wrote his works as allegory without explicitly and directly calling the man himself a bald faced liar.

For reference, as someone who got their Masters in English, the author saying that their work isn't something is rather meaningless. If something can be read a certain way, and if that certain way can be backed up with both research and quotes from the actual body of work, then the argument is valid that something is in fact that certain way. Death of the author is very real.

What Tolkien was saying is that he didn't mean to write an allegory. And that is believable. But just because he didn't intend the story to be one doesn't mean it isn't one, it just means that wasn't his focus, his intent, or his impetus to making the work. However, Lord of the Rings has many allegorical facets to it, and an allegorical reading of Lord of the Rings is not only possible, but valid.

While I agree that literature and poetry are very much an personal interpretive experience I find it odd for someone to say that what the author intended isn't relevant. That seems to be a very narcissisitic, way of simply dismissing the most important person involved in the work so that some "well educated" person can make their view the most important.

Tolkien was a literature professor before deconstruction defined an entire generation worth of philosophy and theory. In Tolkien's era, what the author intended was paramount; see movements like modernism where authorial intent is the important aspect of the work in question, and where the reader is supposed to pick their way through the work in order to decipher all that is being said.

We live in a post-post-modern world though, so things are different now. For what its worth too, people are right to call me out for saying that what Tolkien said was meaningless. That was shallow by me, and fueled by being too tired to give my post the amount of detail and nuance it deserved. That being said, again, while Tolkien did not intend to write an allegory, and while the Lord of the Rings is NOT an allegory, it can be read through an allegorical lens, that reading would be valid, and that reading would be worth discussing, because it would reflect certain inherit biases of Tolkien, as well as the culture that he grew up and lived in.

So yes, LotR is not an allegory, but an allegorical reading of it is not only valid, but a pretty easy reading to make.

Meant no offense. I was just stating that it seems dumb, or silly, or strange, that one would disregard what the author themselves has said about their own work. As I said I am not a literature major so I don't understand how it all works. Just seems strange to say that what the author themselves said about their own work is invalid.

It's not that the author's own interpretation of their work is invalid; it's that the author's interpretation is but one of many, and can be analyzed and debated against like any other interpretation of any given work.

This is true. The author's interpretation is one of many. But it is the authoritative interpretation. People can change it, especially as present drags into history. But if you are going to speak as an authority on a subject, one should be very aware and knowledgeable of the original source. And one should try to use it for their interpretation.
Some moments in history are made by misinterpretation. For good and bad. Popular songs are ripe with this. As are symbols. But that shouldn't stop the person explaining the material, song, or symbol from also explaining its original source and how it changed.

What makes the author’s interpretation of a work more legitimate than anyone else’s?

This is the conversation. You imply the interpretation of a work should hold the same validity as the author's own interpretation. They should be equal. My response is no.
Do they interpretations change with time? Yes. I said they do.
Are other readings of a work valid? Yes. I said they are.
But if you read this thread, it starts with someone saying Tolkien wrote his books as an allegory! He did not. Can it be read as an allegory for industrialization? Absolutely. Is it valid? Absolutely! Did he write it as an allegory? NO!

Do you see what happens when someone insists their interpretation is equal to the author's? They go and teach something that is not correct, instead of exploring a topic with open interpretations based on the past/present/future day context. If you read all my responses, I have stated there are multiple and valid ways to view something. It doesn't make them correct.
But the point is, when one completely disregards the author's interpretation, then they are just spreading their own viewpoints using the artist as a shield. A shield they may or may not have wanted. And that, to me, is inherently amoral.

So again, if you choose to teach something (which is what sparked the debate), do it with an exploratory mindset. Let others learn it through the exploratory mindset. But teach the basics: what the author said they meant. Not what person A insists it really means. Show that it can change, but explain the why. This way new interpretations will develop, and maybe even add more layers to an already great piece of writing.

 

[Charlaquin]

I'm a fellow traditionalist DM. (I avoid the terms "old-school" and "OSR" because reasons, just a personal choice.) And in my experience, at least in the circles I play with, tabletop gamers will do whatever they can to make their characters unique and special. Wanting to buck trends, flout convention, and be a not-normal special snowflake is almost an expected aspect of character creation these days.

Which makes trying to run a humanocentric setting incredibly difficult if any playable demihumans are permitted. You can do whatever you want to the demihumans mechanically—make them clearly mechanically inferior to the humans, slap them with onerous perquisites and restrictions, limit what classes they can take (or just use the Basic D&D race-classes) and limit their maximum experience levels—and you'll still get a table full of elves, dwarves, hobbits, and orcs with nary a human PC in sight.

So, I've found, if you want a human-centric game where the players don't have "I'm an elf! And my personality is—that I'm an elf!" to lean on as a character crutch, you have to make that explicit and just permit human PCs only. You'll get maybe five minutes of grumbling, and then the players will create interesting human characters with actual personalities to differentiate themselves from every other human fighter, magic-user, thief, or cleric, and ten minutes into the actual game, they'll have forgotten that they had initially been meaning to play "loud drunken boorish violent Scottish-accented dwarf #276."

But.

The old truism always applies: "IT DEPENDS ON THE SETTING." Some settings are human fantasy. Some settings are Tolkienesque fantasy, with elves and dwarves in addition to the humans. Some settings are Shining Force style kitchen-sink science fantasy, with centaurs are birdmen and robots running around, and humans aren't any more common or dominant than any other sentient species.

The rules—including any table-rules the DM makes regarding which races are playable in a given campaign—are there to serve the setting first, and it is traditionally the business of the DM to do the worldbuilding and delineate the setting milieu.

It’s interesting to me that you consider the possibility of human characters being portrayed with nuanced personalities, but not nonhuman races. In my experience players will play nonhuman races with nuanced personalities if given the opportunity to do so, but then the “traditionalist” crowd dismisses such characters as “human with a funny hat.” I can certainly see how it would look that way if you consider any nuance in personality to be a fundamentally human characteristic, but... I don’t see why anyone would want to view it that way. If you allow room for nonhuman characters to have nuanced personalities and still be considered valid nonhuman characters, there is no issue.

 

[prabe]

It’s interesting to me that you consider the possibility of human characters being portrayed with nuanced personalities, but not nonhuman races. In my experience players will play nonhuman races with nuanced personalities if given the opportunity to do so, but then the “traditionalist” crowd dismisses such characters as “human with a funny hat.” I can certainly see how it would look that way if you consider any nuance in personality to be a fundamentally human characteristic, but... I don’t see why anyone would want to view it that way. If you allow room for nonhuman characters to have nuanced personalities and still be considered valid nonhuman characters, there is no issue.

I'd be inclined to say that what @Jack Daniel is saying reflects their own experience at gaming tables--whether as GM or player isn't super-relevant. I've seen players who behaved as though their character's race was the least important thing about them (at least in the character's mind) and I've seen players choose race strictly for mechanical advantage (to be fair, in a circumstance where ability scores were rolled in order before choosing race) and I've seen players embrace their characters' race and try to figure what it meant to be a ... whatever. I can imagine that people might have had narrower experiences than mine, or wider.

 

[Scott Christian]

I think the simplest way to express what I mean:

• Allowing others to interpret a work as though they are equal to the creator opens the possibility for over analysis or misinterpretation.
• Being humble about not knowing something as well as the creator leads to other interpretations that might change the creator's material. But, it also keeps the creator present and in the interpretation, not wiping them away.
• Once someone says I am equal to the creator, people can ditch the creator's interpretation. And then the possibility exists of losing it forever.

 

[Jack Daniel]

It’s interesting to me that you consider the possibility of human characters being portrayed with nuanced personalities, but not nonhuman races. In my experience players will play nonhuman races with nuanced personalities if given the opportunity to do so, but then the “traditionalist” crowd dismisses such characters as “human with a funny hat.” I can certainly see how it would look that way if you consider any nuance in personality to be a fundamentally human characteristic, but... I don’t see why anyone would want to view it that way. If you allow room for nonhuman characters to have nuanced personalities and still be considered valid nonhuman characters, there is no issue.

I'd be inclined to say that what @Jack Daniel is saying reflects their own experience at gaming tables--whether as GM or player isn't super-relevant. I've seen players who behaved as though their character's race was the least important thing about them (at least in the character's mind) and I've seen players choose race strictly for mechanical advantage (to be fair, in a circumstance where ability scores were rolled in order before choosing race) and I've seen players embrace their characters' race and try to figure what it meant to be a ... whatever. I can imagine that people might have had narrower experiences than mine, or wider.

My experience is that players will 90% of the time portray standard fantasy nonhumans as cartoonish stereotypes of the standard fantasy nonhumans. And the other 10% of the time, it's a shallow, one-note subversion. ("My elf doesn't hug trees/hate dwarves/look down on humans because…")

 

[prabe]

My experience is that players will 90% of the time portray standard fantasy nonhumans as cartoonish stereotypes of the standard fantasy nonhumans. And the other 10% of the time, it's a shallow subversion. ("My elf doesn't hug trees, hate dwarves, or look down on humans because…")

And my experience is not the same as yours. I've seen both of those, and I've also seen where there was some thought about how that nonhuman would see things, and I've seen where there was no thought given to the question/s at all--not even to the point of stereotyping, let alone subversion of same.