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

[Hexmage-EN]

Yep. And at least to me a fantasy world with many intelligent species is kinda like that. Though there also are some even more different ones like lizardfolk. But that's more like 'what if dinosaurs had evolved intelligence' or something like that. And sure in a fantasy world they may be actually created rather than evolved, but the ned result is the same.

So to me 'they're all actually exactly the same' is boring. If that's the case, then I don't want to have the fantasy species to begin with.

I appreciated Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes' attempt to make dwarves and elves more alien, though getting players onboard with roleplaying a creature as significantly different from a human can be hard.

 

[Malmuria]

Does anyone here actually have an issue with the way redcaps are portrayed?

 

[OakenHart]

Does anyone here actually have an issue with the way redcaps are portrayed?

Not as far as I can tell. Feels more like a backdoor way to get back to complaining about WotC and their removing problematic elements from humanoid races (orcs, drow, etc) as the base assumption for all members of the race than to actually be about redcaps/other planar beings.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

According to 5E rules "it's magic". After all, where do you think centaurs originally came from?

Well, there was this really weird farmer…

Second thought….strike that from the record.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

It should be obvious that different species behave differently based on the forces of evolution. For example, vampire bats (yes, blood sucking bats from South America) tend to show empathy and kindness to other vampire bats. That's not unusual, but what is unusual is that they even do it with unrelated bats. This seemed to be pretty heretical when first discovered because most animals are effectively only concerned about their genetic legacy - children and close relatives.

Initially people thought maybe they had just missed it in other species. However, it turns out that vampire bats are just one of the exceptions to the general rule, most animals are not particularly willing to share or help unrelated animals (obviously there are exceptions). It turns out that vampire bats had gone through some evolutionary bottle necks that made the sharing and compassionate behavior beneficial.

Most species? Like the male lion that will kill the cubs when they defeat the old alpha to become the new alpha of the pack will kill the cubs so the lionesses will instead have his cubs. So in a society where the alpha anthropomorphic lions still have harems with other males challenging them to a fight for control of the harem on a regular basis they may well do the same. They may not look at killing children they did not sire as evil or as anything unusual, it's just the way it works. For that matter they may look at other species, sentient or not, as either competition to be eliminated or prey.

Or not. It's all just made up.

Stop being logical. It confuses my desire to argue

 

[Deadstop]

They look humanoid to me. They use tools. How fine a line do we need to draw?

There is not a redcap society. The redcap doesn’t go home to its spouse and kids after a long day of murdering and ask what the kids are learning in murder school. There’s no culture to redcaps at all. They are murder spirits.

Elves and orcs differ because they’ve always been given the Tolkien treatment, where they’re basically other intelligent species living alongside humans, not just personifications of good and bad personality traits.

 

[Faolyn]

It seems to me that people take the PHB and MM as set in stone when races have always been “the majority of”.

Good Drow existed in large #s before 5E. Why WotC doesn’t expand on those instead of making whole new High Drow and Wood Drow….? Good Goblinkin too. Heck even good demons.

Probably because, no matter what people claim, D&D has always been focused on races as being of nearly all one alignment. Any exceptions are just that, exceptions. Whenever a writer wants to create a differently-aligned sub-culture of a monster race, it gets turned into a sub-race instead, with different attributes and a different statblock or a different set of PC traits. It's why there were (in 2e) fey-touched LG Odanti orcs, instead of just regular orcs who decided to beat their swords into plowshares and had an alignment change when they took up farming. This is also why PC races have sub-races. There's no good reason why high and wood elves need different stats; after all, forest-dwelling humans and city-dwelling humans don't have them. There's no good reason why mountain and hill dwarfs have different stats, either. But in D&D, culture = (sub)race = different traits and abilities.

Whether that continues to be the case for these arctic Aevandrow and jungle Lorendrow remains up in the air, since I don't believe they've been turned into playable races yet. But note that neither of them live underground, which already marks them as different from the Lolth-worshiping, subterranean Udadrow.

 

[Alzrius]

I'm a bit fuzzy on this myself, but from what I understand humans are supposed to have intermingled with certain other non-human relatives at some point in the distant past. How this works IDK.

My guess is that humans are something like a ring species.

 

[Mirtek]

According to 5E rules "it's magic". After all, where do you think centaurs originally came from?

Indeed. Dwarf+Elf and Orc+Dwarf and Orc+Elf once just did not work because their gods were at odds or outright hostile toward each other

There is not a redcap society. The redcap doesn’t go home to its spouse and kids after a long day of murdering and ask what the kids are learning in murder school. There’s no culture to redcaps at all. They are murder spirits.

Except for those living in the Feywild with other fey. There they have something that would be called "society" in mortal terms.

 

[Faolyn]

Except for those living in the Feywild with other fey. There they have something that would be called "society" in mortal terms.

Assuming they're a social species. Sadly, since monsters no longer have a Habitat/Society section or a Number Appearing section, it's difficult to tell if a creature is solitary, communal, or something else. It could be that they hunt in groups but don't actually care about one another at all. It could be that they're "born" in groups but immediately split ways.