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

[Oofta]

This is a simplification and misrepresentation of the argument.

It's not that orcs=black people. That's never been the issue. That's the misunderstanding of the issue that has gotten repeated very often as a counter argument, but, it's not what the issue is.

The issue is that the description of orcs directly (and very often word for word) mirrors the SAME LANGUAGE used to describe minorities in the very recent past. THAT LANGUAGE is the problem. The same way that we don't start quoting from Mein Kampf to describe things in the game. It's a really, really bad idea and carries with it far, far too many connotations and historical baggage.

Orcs=black people is a gross simplification of a much more complex and nuanced issue.

Any negative language we use to describe a creature will have, unfortunately, been used to describe a certain group of people, to make them non-human. Fear and dehumanization of the other has unfortunately always been with us and probably always will be.

I agree that some of the language should be fixed, but there will always be people who see correlations.

 

[Oofta]

There’s more to the D&D classification “humanoid” than that.

Not really. Two arms, two legs, no innate magical abilities pretty much sums it up.

 

[PsyzhranV2]

One of the issues I have with Star Wars/Star Trek is that all the aliens are really just humans with rubber masks with a possible exception here and there such as the Borg. I don't see why anything that relates to human morality (which is pretty baked in/instinctual) would apply to a different species. In fantasy, yes, I want monsters. Even sentient ones. I just don't see a difference based on fluff meaning much. The only role some creatures play in my campaigns are as opponents because there's already too many sentient species running around. If you want to run things differently go for it. There is no one true way.

On the other hand, I've said before and I'll say again: there should be a section in the DMG talk about this more. We should probably go back to 3.5 with it's gradations - and let people decide what makes sense for their campaign.

P.S. I don't think the Thermian argument applies and it always feels like a bit of a cop-out. An "I disagree with you so therefore I play the Thermian argument trump card." D&D by and large is about heroes defeating the bad guys for me. Occasionally I want monster fodder, easily identifiable bad guys. I don't have chainmail bikinis I do have creatures that happen to have a moral structure that we would consider evil as the default.

This is what I meant with my earlier post about D&D's conservatism. "Morality is absolute, with characters--and often whole races--lining up to fall into pigeonholes with 'good' and 'evil' written on them" (Mieville, 2000).

Granted, your specific argument in this post isn't a Thermian argument because it's not using in-universe reasons to defend the writing choices you made for your setting and for your game. But "I just like it" isn't much stronger as a defense.

I don't particularly believe in universal alignment. That doesn't mean that alignment as I use it, from a human morality perspective, isn't useful as one general descriptor of many.

But I'm not going to discuss alignment any further again.

If alignment is to act as but a human morality perspective, there are a thousand better frameworks from both fictional and real life religion and philosophy that could be brought in to replace it.

 

[Faolyn]

Not really. Two arms, two legs, no innate magical abilities pretty much sums it up.

Nope. You can't use charm person on a redcap, because that spell affects only humanoids.

I agree that some of the language should be fixed, but there will always be people who see correlations.

Well, nothing can be done about those people.

 

[Hussar]

And we get back to why we have other sapient humans if the differences are purely cosmetic.

If the only way you can differentiate between two different sapient humanoids is to rely on racist language and concepts, then, well, I would MUCH rather have purely cosmetic differences.

OTOH, the fact that you look at elves, and simply pooh pooh them as only having darkvision and trance shows a rather shallow view of things. Elves, in 5e, are gender fluid virtual immortals who can relive their past lives every time they rest. They are innately magical people who can do outright magic from birth (in the case of high elves) or have a virtually supernatural ability to hide (wood elves) that nearly nothing can match. Being able to hide in lightly obscured terrain means that they can hunt anything with darkvision and absolutely devastate it. Anyone fighting wood elves MUST use light at night, meaning that our wood elves are going to go to town on invaders. Supernatural arboreal hunters that can vanish in plain sight, even in the daytime. All you need is lightly obscured after all.

And you think these are just "cosmetic differences"? Good grief, what more do you need?

 

[Lanefan]

For starters, it's pretty Lamarckian in nature.

Who?

How many monsters are said to have been created by curses or magical interference and yet breed true.

"Survival of the fittest" actually means "who can survive long enough to pass down their genes." Elves, dragons, and other creatures that breed once in a blue moon should be at Giant Panda levels of population now.

I see Elves as breeding more often than that, enough to sustain-plus their population but not enough to put the world thirty feet deep in Elves.

And who's to say in a typical fantasy setting that there isn't some place where Dragons proliferate; and the ones we see elsewhere are either outcasts or have left voluntarily, to find a new life elsewhere.

And, well, if you have a conflict where one side is dumb, brutish, and relatively low-tech and the other side has not only good tech (if only in the sense of superior materials) but also a decent amount of magic (it's generally assumed that humans, elves, et al are more magical than orcs and goblinoids), well, the dumb ones are probably going to be wiped out.

Maybe. Strength in numbers still counts for a lot, magic notwithstanding.

(There's a world for you: once upon a time, you had your group (either a race or just a culture) of Always Evil Marauders. They got killed off--but came back as undead. Now the Always Evil Marauders are actually hordes of specters and zombies and death knights and the like who add to their numbers by raising their slain enemies as their minions.)

Very white-walkers-ish. Interesting idea for a backstory.

 

[Hussar]

Any negative language we use to describe a creature will have, unfortunately, been used to describe a certain group of people, to make them non-human. Fear and dehumanization of the other has unfortunately always been with us and probably always will be.

I agree that some of the language should be fixed, but there will always be people who see correlations.

No, it really, really won't. The Redcap is a perfect example. Note how absolutely no one is objecting to the language being used. The objection is "should beings with a culture be always evil?" There have been exactly zero objections based on the use of racist language.

So, no, there are no correlations here. And no one is even suggesting that there is one. The biggest "correlation" if you can even call it that, is to this notion of biological morality, which, okay, fair enough, I can certainly see where that might be problematic. But, even the most ardent among us about this language have freely admitted that it doesn't apply to Redcaps.

"Oh, well, someone will always take offense" is not a counter argument that holds any water. This thread right here disproves your point.

 

[Charlaquin]

Not really. Two arms, two legs, no innate magical abilities pretty much sums it up.

It really doesn’t. There are lots of creatures that meet some or all of those criteria and aren’t classified as humanoid, and lots of creatures that are humanoid that don’t meet all of those criteria (especially “no innate magical abilities”).

 

[PsyzhranV2]

Who?

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Lamarckism is an inaccurate and outdated theory of evolution; Lamarckists thought that organisms could pass down physical characteristics acquired during their lifetime to their offspring, and this happening over and over again was how evolution happened. Contrast with our current Darwinian theory of natural selection, where traits are selected for or against by environmental conditions.

 

[Lanefan]

Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. Lamarckism is an inaccurate and outdated theory of evolution; Lamarckists thought that organisms could pass down physical characteristics acquired during their lifetime to their offspring, and this happening over and over again, as opposed to random traits being selected for or against by environmental conditons, was how evolution happened.

Thanks for the info!