Warning: long post is long.
Yes, this is exactly what I'm saying. Not every individual from a given race/heritage/culture will be exactly the same as each other, nor will they be a precise stereotype of that aspect of their origin. I think we're in furious agreement there
As a DM, I would like my players to think about how they relate to those norms though - they could embody the stereotype if that's what they want, be the exact polar opposite of it if they prefer, or be somewhere on a spectrum in between, and they might be at peace with that, or extremely uncomfortable with that, and all of that is great character building. They're unlikely to be completely indifferent to it though if they grew up immersed in it, I would normally think they would have some stance to it, regardless of what that stance is.
Then I guess I don't understand what your question or complaint is here. Are you expecting the game to provide that stance, or examples of it?
Again, I think we're trying to say the same thing. I'm in 100% agreement that individuals can be very divergent from norms be they racial, cultural, gender or otherwise.
That's completely different from saying that albatrosses have the longest wingspans, peregrin falcons have the highest dive speeds and owls are the most silent flyers.
If you're making up an albatross character, do you have to have long wings ? No, of course not. But even short wings for an albatross are likely to still be pretty long compared to falcons (unless you decide otherwise in your particular case for whatever your story reasons are).
Birds' wings are pretty different from the skin color of fictional humanoids. There's a reason why wings are shaped the way they are: albatross wings let it soar; falcon wings let it dive; owl wings let it fly silently. Likewise, there are evolutionary reasons why human skin colors wound up the way they are. But a fantasy humanoid, potentially created by gods or magic, only looks the way it does because some writer or artist decided it.
(I'd like to point out that orcs have gods of fertility and medicine, loyalty and strength, and strategy--yet for some reason, D&D decided those gods are evil; if they were elf gods, they'd be CG.)
Now, you
could make a point that artists should learn something about wing anatomy before illustrating dragons.
I agree that is an unfortunate confluence. Correlation does not equal causation though. Plenty of races designated as Evil in past editions are not black.
A large number are, or are else designed to embody a particular negative cultural trait. Whether it was
intended to be racist isn't the point, though; it's the result that count.
Well, this is probably where I think differently. If every other race has fundamentally the same brains, thought processes, emotions, motivations, etc as humans, then, sure, but who's to say they do ? And why do they have to be ?
As an example, why can't other races with different biologies have different ways that their brains and hence minds work ?
As another TV Tropes page is entitled "Most Writers Are Human."
I love xenofiction. Two of my favorite novels count as xenofiction (Watership Down and The Gods Themselves), and another novel I enjoy (Raptor Red) is not only xenofiction, but involves only animals with animal intelligence, not full sapience like in Watership Down. But here's the thing: it's difficult, maybe even impossible, for a human writer to (a) both write from a completely alien point of view, and (b) make it interesting and relatable to readers. Just like it would difficult or impossible for you to write a sunset described by a creature able to see four or five colors instead of just three. Heck, lots of seeing people find it hard to describe things properly to blind people, and we're the same species--and even some of
one group's culture doesn't translate into another.
Or to players. Anecodote time: ages ago, my BFF and I worked to create a setting--still incomplete, because we gave up after a while--that was designed to be as non-Tolkienesque as possible and still be fantasy. There were nine sentient races, all of which were PC-allowed, and only three sentient monster species, and only three of those intelligent beings were even
mammals (humans, ogres, elves). The other PC races include three reptilian races (couch-sized dragons, naga, lizard-folk) and three insectoid races (one based on butterflies, one based on beetles, and one based on termites), and the monster species were based on birds. I wrote up all the racial and monster info and worked very hard to make everyone as alien as possible. I used a lot of actual biology in there, and stole lots of interesting tidbits from non-European cultures in what was certainly cringe-inducing cultural appropriation, but in my defense, this was at least 16 years ago. Even the humans were very nontraditional. Their society was more based on that of Plains Indians, people had mile-long names that grew with every accomplishment, were polyamorous,
and they had three genders (each with their own pronouns) and very strict gender roles--but their genders were chosen at adolescence and had nothing to do with biological sex or sexuality.
So my BFF decided to run a one-shot at a convention, DragonCon I think. And it was a flop. Nobody wanted to play any of the races except for humans because they were simply
too alien. If I had made the nonhuman races more like humans, instead of trying to draw heavily from natural biology, it might have worked better.
One of my biggest bugbears in sci-fi is when authors write about aliens who think and experience emotions the same as human beings and are basically humans in goo-bag suits. If a different race has a different biology, who's to say they might not completely lack the same form of emotional connection that we know of as empathy and hence, we view them as evil ?
Assuming a humanoid? Humans, along with our fellow primates and numerous other mammals, birds, and even some reptiles, engage in some degree of pair-bonding and have a small number of altricial young. We literally have be with others of our kind to reproduce, and we have to take care of our young if we want to be able to survive as a species; it's built into our genetics. This means that, as a species, we have empathy built into our DNA. Thus, a D&D humanoid, whether it's an orc, elf, dwarf, goblin, whatever, is likely to be built the same way.
You can definitely have a society where empathy is frowned upon--goodness knows there's plenty of humans that seem to view empathy and kindness as a horrible thing, like when
Fox & Friends called Mr. Rogers an evil man for teaching children they are special--but those societies are going to implode after a while. You simply can't sustain a society where nobody cares about anyone else, certainly not for the thousands of years of a typical D&D setting's history. They'd all die out after a while, either from things that could be prevented if they worked together, or from murdering each other.
5e has been using a lot of "their gods make them evil" as an excuse, which is also not a particularly good excuse. Even if you ignore what I said before (Luthic is an
eeeevil god of healing), it also doesn't make sense that, if you have a zillion gods in a world, why people would stick with a destructive god. "Hey, so, Gruumsh is a god of strength, storms, and violence, and because we worship him, we're expected to go and die in droves in unending, pointless battles where we barely get any loot, plus everyone wants to kill us. But there's the Kord guy who's pretty much the same but he's considered an OK kind of god who doesn't want us to die so the chief can get some extra gold. Maybe we should think about converting?"
So what about non-humanoids. I doubt there's many people saying you can't have an Always Evil species of monster. I like neogi for that: they're born an elder goes senile, bloats to many times its original size, is injected with venom, and then spontaneously generates offspring until they chew their way out or the elder explodes. There's no reason for one neogi to have to woo another, and since the young are precocial, they don't have to take care of their young.
And they have a natural ability to mentally dominate others
to which they are not immune. They can, logically, build a society based entirely on a pecking order of who owns who. This makes them a perfectly acceptable monster to be Always Evil.
You can come up with equally logical reasons for lots of other monsters: dragons are apex predators who are literally more powerful than nearly anything else. Mind flayers are utterly alien; so are intelligent plant monsters and many fey. Beholders, going by 5e, are as illogical as dreams. Lycanthropes are the predatory instincts of an animal mixed with the darkest parts of a human mind.
As another example, why can't a race be inclined either through biology, sociology or just plain universal education to be far more likely to be what we would call good ? Why is that not allowed ?
Because while people aren't all evil, they also aren't all good. And more importantly, while we may have decided that greed, jealousy, wrath, etc., are evil sins, it's not the emotions that are bad, it's how you express those emotions.
Sure, you can create a people who are all-good, but it's as illogical as creating one that's all-bad, and just as boring. As Asimov wrote about utopias and dystopias, "you can't build a symphony on just one note."
I guess what I'm saying here is, if we limit all forms of life to only be able to be like humans "some good, some bad, some neutral, some a little of everything depending on circumstances" we are forcing them all to be the same, in which case, why not just all play humans ?
In the real world, there have been, and still are, thousands upon thousands of cultures and sub-cultures, and there are literally an infinite number of stories that can be told
just using humans. You lose nothing, and gain a lot, by
also including nonhumans.
To me, the idea of moving a bunch of what seem to me like biological traits (stat proclivities, skin/hair/eye colourings, etc) to Culture & Backgrounds is akin to saying that a Green Tree Frog might grow up to be as big as a Caine Toad if that's who it grew up with, or might develop poison skin if it was trained to do so by archers from the Amazon. It won't. It just doesn't work that way. Green Tree Frogs are smaller than Caine Toads and not poisonous.
There are a few aspects of the ancestry/culture divide I disagree with, and yes, a person changing size because they were raised by people who were a lot smaller or larger is a silly one, and hopefully one that didn't make the final cut. Especially since it would prevent fun like Carrot "Headbanger" Ironfoundersson.
On the other hand... if the red halflings of the great Marching Jungle are red-skinned and poisonous to touch, why is that? Is it part of their innate biology? Or is it because, like hawkbill turtles and many other animals, they are capable of extracting the toxins from the food they eat and it permeates their flesh and, like flamingos, their coloration comes from the fact that many of their favorite foods contain high levels of beta carotene? Thus, it's possible that non-red halflings can also develop the ability to extract the toxins and turn bright red.
Now, do you want to play a wierd mutant Green Tree Frog who is both huge and also poisonous ? Ok, cool, great character concept, have at it ! You might want to think about WHY you are so different from normal Green Tree Frogs, but there's no reason you can't play what you want. But that doesn't change the fact that you are very different to the normal one.
Yup. So there's no problem here?
Well, I can't say I know definitively what their intentions were there, but as you say, "Thing that make you go hmmm..." I agree that doesn't look so good. But definitely not what I'm talking about. Btw, I used orcs for my example, not drow, and orcs are definitely not black (and I'll leave it to each person to say whether they think orcs are sexy or not ....).
Yeah, take a look at this hideous thing from AC9 - Creature Catalogue, published for D&D in 1986 by TSR.
