D&D 5E I thought WotC was removing biological morals?

[Mirtek]

Redcaps do not have culture, do not have civilians, do not have babies. They're born of blood, born of murder, and exist merely to create more murder. They'll just spontaniously pop up one day of the conditions for "Redcap" are arbitarily met

They may not have babies, but they certainly have culture.

The loner on the material plane not so much, but only due to being on his own.

But they ones in the feywild attenting the courts of dark archfey do play a role in fey culture

 

[Mirtek]

Why?

Are satyrs, giants and whatever else hurting anyone? Have they been used to hurt anyone? No? Then they're not worth taking a look at. Full stop.

Neither have orcs or drow. Certain descriptions attached to them have been used to hurt RL people, but this had nothing to do with those also being attached to orcs and drow.

It's merely an unfortunate link that people wanted to see removed because they did not want to see the reminder in D&D, but them being in D&D have never been the reason for the RL hurt going on.

And there are a lot races in D&D which carry exactly the same sterotypes.

 

[Scott Christian]

When I grew up, orcs were evil, plain and simple. As a teen in the early 80's, I did not know enough of the world to think an orc could have any real-world equivalent or that someone could construe such a creature to be an analog for any real entity. Same with drow, elves, dwarves, etc.

Now, that's not our social awareness. Real and damaging analogies have been tied to these fantasy races.

This is well said. Real world awareness grows with age. But it also makes connections that were never there: song associations that never existed*, nudity in paintings that were never sexual, AI coding being evil as opposed to doing a function, etc.

Neurologically, we build connections, whether they exist or not. That is how our brain works. Most of the time, false associations are completely benign. Even in science, they often just lead to a new path. ie. biological classification; some dinosaurs are reptiles - no they are birds, elephants and rhinos must be related since they are both big and grey - no they are not related). Point is, writing is imperfect. The person that sees an association from one author to something else might be the only one to see it. Hell, even a large number of people can see it, and it never existed. And this leads to...

In today's world, information spreads at a strange and ungainly pace. By authors who know nothing or by experts (Reddit), at a pace that varies in speed from minutes to years to centuries. This creates A LOT of false connections. Tie this to sensitive topics such as race, religion, ethnicity, culture, or family pride, and you get a knot that is in one's mind and in one's gut.

I do not mean this to sound as though we should be insensitive. We should be sensitive. We should seek acceptance. We should listen. And part of that stems from language and art. But we should be aware enough to ask: Did I tie this connection by looking at the rope and figuring it out or was it tied to me and I never looked at the rope?

* For the longest time, directly after reading Masque of the Red Death, I thought that was what Pete Townshend from The Who was singing about in Eminence Front. Ahh... young me. I found connections in a host of Rush songs too... fortunately, many of those were correct.

 

[Scott Christian]

Again, speaking for myself, I haven't had a NEED for orcs to always be evil for a long time. I respect that some people, in the games they want to run or stories they want to tell, do need that. But if I were to have a player come to me about a certain race meaning something to them, I would absolutely change or find a work around for it.

Seems to me like you have the signs of a good DM.
I do have to ask how this works for your world (if you have one)? I only ask because I have met many DMs that do the same, but they all seem to have a line if they have their own world. For example, if a player wants to play an orc - it's all good. But when they choose a goblin, the DM has already set up the goblin race to be hated by 99.9% of "civilization." Therefore, they might say no because of the difficulty involved in roleplay.
Just curious. Thanks.

 

[BookTenTiger]

Seems to me like you have the signs of a good DM.
I do have to ask how this works for your world (if you have one)? I only ask because I have met many DMs that do the same, but they all seem to have a line if they have their own world. For example, if a player wants to play an orc - it's all good. But when they choose a goblin, the DM has already set up the goblin race to be hated by 99.9% of "civilization." Therefore, they might say no because of the difficulty involved in roleplay.
Just curious. Thanks.

I'll give an example from a game I play in.

One player is a half-drow. In real life, this is also a player of color.

One of the other players was really interested in the reaction townsfolk would have to a half-drow walking into their town. Would they be fearful? Would they attack on sight?

But in a group discussion, the player of the half-drow said they really weren't interested in playing a game in which their character was dealing with racism.

So the DM just decided that drow were a rare sight on the surface, but not something to be feared or hated.

Simple as that.

Nothing should be written so deeply into a campaign that it can't be changed with a brief group discussion.

 

[Scott Christian]

I'll give an example from a game I play in.

One player is a half-drow. In real life, this is also a player of color.

One of the other players was really interested in the reaction townsfolk would have to a half-drow walking into their town. Would they be fearful? Would they attack on sight?

But in a group discussion, the player of the half-drow said they really weren't interested in playing a game in which their character was dealing with racism.

So the DM just decided that drow were a rare sight on the surface, but not something to be feared or hated.

Simple as that.

Nothing should be written so deeply into a campaign that it can't be changed with a brief group discussion.

Thanks for the reply.

 

[Myrdin Potter]

My daughter plays a goblin bard in my long running campaign. The campaign is set in the Forgotten Realms and goblins are basically as the monster manual describes them. There is a small goblin community in Waterdeep and they are not well regarded because they do act like goblins at times.

We role play the prejudice a little in the game, but the party has risen above it and has decent status in the city. The party a while ago shattered the goblin enclave in Dungeons of the Mad Mage and the survivors spilled over as refugees into the city. One starving goblin mother and child ended up at Trollskull Manor and we had fun role playing the consequences of dungeon crawling, including visiting the slums in the Field Ward when the goblins live in appalling squalor.

This is from me, a DM who uses the default alignments and descriptions from the Monster Manual as the role playing baseline for the humanoid race (my other group has 2 black players and I discussed Orcs and other potential issues (based on forum and Twitter posts) and they laughed and said that Orcs are monsters to be killed and they don’t agree with all the concerns.

DoMM is from before the decision to change to no alignments but has whole groups of evil humanoids with actual story points where talking is better than fighting. TSR and WoTC products have a long history of modules providing evil humanoids but paths to talk to them instead of fighting. Earlier editions where gold = XP caused that to happen more.

I have been playing D&D for 40 years, most of it as a DM and any playing group that wanted to talk to evil humanoids quickly found nuance even if the group as a whole was bad news.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Neither are dragons, but they’re doing it for dragons.

Yes, they are. They literally mate and have children that they then (sometimes? I know some books have said they do) teach to hunt and stuff.

 

[Umbran]

We’re talking about how changing social mores intersect with D&D. The rules sleight of hand which somewhat arbitrarily divides elves from redcaps may not be good enough for future players.

Perhaps. We can readjust when that becomes true.

D&D has moved to a point where sentient creatures with culture probably ought to be framed as having no strict morality through the entire group. We are still a ways off from saying, "there will be NO creatures who are not uniformly baneful".

 

[Oofta]

which covers such a wide range that anyone can do ut for almost anything.

The horde of mindless flesh eating zombies? Poor proxie for the "dark hordeds of savage others, who are of limited intellect and a threat to your ressources. Making them mindless is just an attempt to hide the racism they're truly representing"

Offense can taken ftom everything

Zombies are broadly linked to immigrants, those that come in legally and not.

Practically every society throughout history has had some sort of "evil other beings that are evil". Saying that it's okay if some creatures are evil because of fluff but others are not doesn't make much sense to me. Bad things are said about evil creatures, bad things have been said about various groups. With redcaps it's "homicidal with in-born blood lust". I remember that same description being used in the old westerns my dad used to watch being used to describe Apaches because they were the "bad" native American.

It's practically impossible to depict other creatures as evil without repeating language that has been used to denigrate humans at some point. While I think the MM and DMG should be much, much clearer on the role of alignment and that it's always up to the campaign setting and DM to decide what percentage of those creatures (if any) fit the MM description, I don't have a problem with evil monsters no matter what form they take or what fluff is given.