D&D 5E Are humanoid mono-cultures being replaced with the Rule of Three?

[DammitVictor]

If it was game in a modern campaign setting and the PCs stormed the offices of Evil Corp TM, were stopped by security and murdered every single one of them that shot at them, I don't think me or most people will have a problem with that. Presumably every security guard that tried to stop the PCs were Humans and had families too. But security guards like that get killed all the time in action movies, and it's expected that PCs kill them too.

The difference is that nobody, absolutely nobody, who writes that scene in that action movie then writes their heroes confronting the grieving families of the people they killed-- which is something that a certain kind of juvenile DM absolutely gets off on-- and the audience of the action movie doesn't expect an angelic pat on the head for being objectively morally correct when cheering on the right heroes.

You can write a story about Good triumphing over Evil, and you can write a story about real-life actions having real-life consequences, but you can't write them both at the same time-- and you can't "keep things simple" and keep introducing moral complications at the same time. As soon as you introduce the question of killing orc babies, you cannot stop the inexorable slide toward questioning the wholesale killing of their fathers. And the problem is... a lot of people keep saying that they want one of these games or the other, but then they keep trying to shoehorn the other style of gameplay into it.

You do know orcs have had playable stats since Basic, right?

Like, do we really want to have the argument about this again when their legacy in the game has been "You can play as these" and they have a legacy longer than gnomes? Because, Orcs of Thar was 1988, Top Ballista (I'm 90% sure that's the first playable gnome stats came from) was 1989

and like, I'm a gnome fan and I'm bringing this up.

Gnomes were a playable race in the AD&D Player's Handbook, 1978; I think you're probably right about Top Ballista being their debut in Basic D&D. Orcs of Thar offered the first playable orcs (and trolls) for Basic in 1989, Complete Book of Humanoids added a bunch of common humanoids to AD&D (2e) in 1993.

Ten years before World of Warcraft. But since when have facts ever made a difference in this argument?

 

[Cadence]

You can write a story about Good triumphing over Evil, and you can write a story about real-life actions having real-life consequences, but you can't write them both at the same time--

There aren't any real life stories where good triumphs over evil?

 

[DammitVictor]

There aren't any real life stories where good triumphs over evil?

“If you want a happy ending, that depends, of course, on where you stop your story.” - Orson Welles​

 

[Vaalingrade]

There aren't any real life stories where good triumphs over evil?

Less evil over cartoonishly super evil? Yeah.
Neutral and minding their business over evil? Of course.
Self-serving over evil? Obviously.
Good over evil? Temporarily, I guess. As long as it takes evil to put on some glasses and a false moustache and try again, usually with money this time.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

I'd argue enough to show a variety of thing across a race. So however many or however few it takes to do that

Ironically I'd say dwarves fail at this given you've got Grumpy (Hill), More Grumpy (Mountain), and Super Grumpy (Duerger) as the big dwarf groups in most settings

That's basically Oirish dwarves, Welsh dwarves and Scottish dwarves.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Seems to me that nobody really just wants to admit the truth of the matter... that ALL races / creatures / monsters we D&D players are playing are just "humans in masks" (as the meme goes.)

Because other intelligent races besides humans don't actually exist... none of us have any idea what kind of intelligence a fictional version would have. All we know is what we know of ourselves. So we have no choice but to choose specific HUMAN emotions / traits / knowledges and GIVE them to all of these fantasy creatures. Which is why we end up stereotyping all these creatures... in order to give us SOMETHING to play that seems "alien" enough to be its own thing by having ALL of them act in this way (I.E. some humans are logical, so we'll make ALL Vulcans logical so that they are "different" than the humans).

But when we do that... all we are really doing is still playing a human trait. We are just playing other humans with the "mask" of a dwarf, or an elf, or an orc, or a Vulcan, or a treant.

"Treants in my world talk really slow and spend exceedingly long periods of time making decisions."

Yeah? Well, there are plenty of human beings who do that too.

"But my treants take much, MUCH longer to do those things than any normal human being."

Doesn't matter. Even if you are going comically over-the-top... you are still just playing human emotions and traits. Your treants are just exaggerated humans, because YOU are a human, and thus anything you try to do is colored by only knowing what you know as a human.

So what does that mean? It means that every single thing in this game (and indeed in any RPG) is influenced by human emotion and human morality because they are invented and played by humans. And thus it is impossible to REMOVE the humanity from anything in the game. And so... any claims of "But X isn't human!" (and thus trying to remove any sort of human morality from them and use them as something else... cannon-fodder or whatever) is patently false.

As a result... like it or not, there are going to be people who rightly see the humanity underneath every single creature in this game and are going to notice just what parts of humanity get attributed to them and how the supposed "good guys" in the game are meant to react to them. And when people are able to make one-on-one comparisons between actual humans and the "human in masks" that are various types of D&D creatures... you can guarantee they're going to comment on it.

 

[Sithlord]

Seems to me that nobody really just wants to admit the truth of the matter... that ALL races / creatures / monsters we D&D players are playing are just "humans in masks" (as the meme goes.)

Because other intelligent races besides humans don't actually exist... none of us have any idea what kind of intelligence a fictional version would have. All we know is what we know of ourselves. So we have no choice but to choose specific HUMAN emotions / traits / knowledges and GIVE them to all of these fantasy creatures. Which is why we end up stereotyping all these creatures... in order to give us SOMETHING to play that seems "alien" enough to be its own thing.

But when we do that... all we are really doing is playing a human trait. We are just playing other humans with the "mask" of a dwarf, or an elf, or an orc, or a treant.

"Treants in my world talk really slow and spend exceedingly long periods of time making decision."

Yeah? Well, there are plenty of human beings who do that too.

"But my treants take much, MUCH longer to do those things than any normal human being."

Doesn't matter. Even if you are going comically over-the-top... you are still just playing human emotions and traits. Your treants are just exaggerated humans, because YOU are a human, and thus anything you try to do is colored by only knowing what you know as a human.

So what does that mean? It means that every single thing in this game (and indeed in any RPG) is influenced by human emotion and human morality because they are invented and played by humans. And thus it is impossible to REMOVE the humanity from anything in the game. And so... any claims of "But X isn't human!" (and thus trying to remove any sort of human morality from them and use them as something else... cannon-fodder or whatever) is patently false. As a result... like it or not, there are going to be people who rightly see the humanity underneath every single creature in this game and are going to notice just what parts of humanity get attributed to them and how the supposed "good guys" in the game are meant to react to them. And when people are able to make one-on-one comparisons between actual humans and the "human in masks" that are various types of D&D creatures... you can guarantee they're going to comment on it.

That’s because because people can’t grasp that in myths and folklore that each of these races is supposed to depict certain kinds of people with specific personalities for allegoric storytelling. They are supposed to be stereotypes of the human psyche or certain types of social behaviors so they can tell story about it as an early form of psychoanalysis.

 

[Grendel_Khan]

Less evil over cartoonishly super evil? Yeah.
Neutral and minding their business over evil? Of course.
Self-serving over evil? Obviously.
Good over evil? Temporarily, I guess. As long as it takes evil to put on some glasses and a false moustache and try again, usually with money this time.

Don't forget "Guilt-ridden/remorseful over evil," the old reluctant hero trope, which is sort of covered by "Less evil over cartoonishly super evil" but accounts for characters who've done bad for a long time and finally decide to help someone. Not the best narrative mode for a long-running campaign, but can work for a contained story or two.

 

[jgsugden]

The difference is that nobody, absolutely nobody, who writes that scene in that action movie then writes their heroes confronting the grieving families of the people they killed-- which is something that a certain kind of juvenile DM absolutely gets off on-- and the audience of the action movie doesn't expect an angelic pat on the head for being objectively morally correct when cheering on the right heroes.
....

In a 2 hour action flick? Rarely do you see them address the full impacts of the heroes action. In an 8 hour miniseries or TV series? You often do. Ramifications take time to explore, so in storytelling that has time, you see them explore the impacts of their actions far more often. Comics are full of villains that hate heroes because of the damage the heroes did while protecting the world. Even the MCU movies are finding time to explore fallout - Zemo in the MCU is a byproduct of the devastation in the Ultron fight, for example.

D&D is a long story game. You have time to explore. Dealing with the fallout of your decisions isn't a 'juvenile DM' approach. If handled well, it can be very moving storytelling. I tend to think of young and inexperienced DMs tending towards hack and slash with no story in mind, which would be the opposite of what you attribute to them.

 

[Vaalingrade]

In a 2 hour action flick? Rarely do you see them address the full impacts of the heroes action. In an 8 hour miniseries or TV series? You often do. Ramifications take time to explore, so in storytelling that has time, you see them explore the impacts of their actions far more often. Comics are full of villains that hate heroes because of the damage the heroes did while protecting the world. Even the MCU movies are finding time to explore fallout - Zemo in the MCU is a byproduct of the devastation in the Ultron fight, for example.

The 90's to 10's 'heores are bad, being a hero is worse' trend is one of the reasons a lot of people got real sick of comics and the related events though.

This is how we got Civil War. No one wants that.