D&D 5E Yes to factionalism. No to racism.

[Malmuria]

Let's say you have a party that consists of: human, half-elf, kenku, tiefling, a goblin, and firblog. This immediately throws up all sorts of world building questions: what communities do these characters come from (where, physically on the FR map, are those located)? What are these communities like (culture(s), territory, political structure, trading, languages/dialects)? Is this diversity of races representative of the world at large (a 'cosmopolitan' setting), and if not, how do npcs react to this group (and as a dm, do you want to make constant npc reactions a feature of your game)?

Kitchen sink settings like FR don't answer these questions very well. It's simultaneously human-centric and yet doesn't work out the real consequences of being human centric. Many culture-forming groups exist in a kind of wilderness ether, existing to be randomly encountered without any of the components of culture (society, art, trade, etc) yet within stones' throw of major, cosmopolitan cities. Languages don't vary or become dialects, even across thousands of miles of supposedly sparsely inhabited land.

It's like dungeon ecology. I'm perfectly happy to suspend disbelief and not think about how the massive dragon got inside the tiny dungeon, or what waste disposal system the cave-dwelling goblins were using. But if you think about it for more than two minutes, all sorts of problems and inconsistencies show up. And don't even get me started on cantrips!

 

[Ruin Explorer]

You think so? Its not something I think crosses the majority of players minds at all.

Oh yeah I definitely do.

But to be clear I agree it doesn't cross people's minds consciously.

I'm talking about an unconscious feeling, like, when you play D&D, somehow thorny issues and awkward stuff doesn't happen, even though maybe it does when you play PF1 or CoC or whatever. So you gravitate to D&D because it promotes a good time, even without really thinking about why.

Honestly, my feeling is that there are very few real issues, that WotC is addressing most of them by surgical changes and that hopefully this will blow over like the satanic craze of the past, leaving us with a game that can still be played simply and cleaned enough to feel inclusive (and honestly, it might be because I'm European and have different perspectives, but I've never met a player that felt actually offended by the game itself, and this in 40+ years of hard playing over 4 continents) for a huge majority of people.

I think the big differences here are:

1) The changes here are designed to fit with younger people who already do or might actually play, rather than older people, who will absolutely never play.

2) These changes are largely anticipatory, rather than reactionary. WotC is getting "ahead of the ball". I think this is confusing some people, especially older players like ourselves, because they're not seeing this "backlash" or whatever, so they're wondering, why is WotC doing all this?

And the answer is because WotC wants to be on the front foot this time, not the back foot. Because the changes are aimed at younger people who do/might play, and are anticipatory, it's much more likely they'll offer a long-term benefit to WotC than reactionary changes like going "Oh crap, rename all the Devils and Demons!!!", which only made angry 50-something hardcore religious types happy, who hate D&D anyway.

I dunno how much of TTRPG Twitter you read, but there are some people out there on the edges for whom the changes to D&D are "not enough". Thing is, most of those people would never play D&D, it's too big, it's too mainstream, it's too basically about acquisition and "winning", and I notice WotC isn't really moving to make changes to please that group. Their sort of suggestions have been pretty much ignored.

Re: in real life, well, I've been offended by D&D before, a few times, and I'm 43 and have played for 32+ years. Some examples:

A) Maztica. The idea of a South America expansion for the FR was pretty great. The way they did it? It was ghastly and yes actually offensive. This was in the early 1990s and I wasn't even particularly "woke", but I could see this was really gross. Just a creepy whitewash-y (in the non-racial sense) take on the conquistadors, who even by that age, I knew were Very Bad News.

B) The Vistani as non-human. Let's not even go into details, but yeah, that obviously not great. It was from the same school of idiot anti-racism going full circle back into racism as World of Darkness: Gypsies, but thankfully less extreme.

C) Elements of Red Steel, specifically the stuff where a bunch of Evil Humanoids were given the cultures of real-world tribal cultures that colonial-types had messed with. And the job of the players was to mess with them. Damn.

D) The Barbarian's Handbook in 2E. Oh my god. Again, even a young-ish teenager I could see this was Messed Up. Like "Yikes". Again, I don't think it was intentional, I think it was just like the work of someone who lived in a very, um, circumscribed environment.

E) I've always been creeped out by "pro-genocide of humanoid races" attitudes evident in some D&D materials. This was nigh-universal with people I played with. Note that maybe 50% of players I played with as a teen were Jewish, and I think that maybe made them pick up "Wooo genocide is cool" vibes in some D&D stuff and be really turned off by it a little more easily than some other people might be.

I could go on, there were plenty of others. Of course some stuff didn't register as offensive at all. Oriental Adventures, I thought had a "dumb grandad name", because reading it, it should clearly be called "Japanese Adventures", but I didn't find it's stereotyping offensive as a kid, because it was so damn cool.

 

[jasper]

I am a round ear, air force brat, army cook, programmer, football hater, southern American.
Do I get along with ?
a Pionted ear, air force brat, army cook, programmer, football hater, southern American.
a round ear, Marine brat, army cook, programmer, football hater, southern American.
A short a round ear, air force brat, army cook, programmer, football hater, southern American.
A short big boned a round ear, air force brat, army cook, programmer, football hater, southern American.
So many factions and cultures.
Leave the races and all their defaults in the core game. On page 0 include in a large font explaining the races are the default. And the DM or setting may change the default. The changes over the past two or three make the pcs appear to humans in green screen suits. Technology has passed the Human with funny rubber mask face.

 

[Minigiant]

Kitchen sink settings like FR don't answer these questions very well. It's simultaneously human-centric and yet doesn't work out the real consequences of being human centric. Many culture-forming groups exist in a kind of wilderness ether, existing to be randomly encountered without any of the components of culture (society, art, trade, etc) yet within stones' throw of major, cosmopolitan cities. Languages don't vary or become dialects, even across thousands of miles of supposedly sparsely inhabited land.

I don't think the problem is Kitchen sink settings. It's like you said, it's settings that are simultaneously human-centric and also nonhuman centric.

Basically the issue is twofold

1) The game rules and basic lore is written human-centric. However most of the settings' D&D promotes are not human-centric in skeleton nor look.

2) WOTC tells you that you can do whatever you want but provide little inspiration, guidance, nor examples on creation of racial culture nor world factions.

So you get

WOTC: You can do whatever you want.
DM1: Really? So if I want my orcs to be overly ambitious and reckless tech-punks aligned with the gnomes on the dangerous cutting edge of science, I can do that?
WOTC: Sure.
DM1: Where in the books can help me set that up and make that happen?
WOTC: What?
DM1: Where can I find rules and advise to do that?
WOTC: That's not in the books.
DM2: You mean he has to do that from scratch with little help.
DM3: Sounds like a lot of work to make it interesting and understandable to get player-buy in..
DM4: Sounds like I'm opting out of your game, DM 1.
DM1: I'll pay ya.
WOTC: I don't wanna make that book.
DM1:Bye bye Blue orcs. Guess I'm going back to barbaric orcs worshiping a raging war god.
DM2: Same.
DM3: Same.
DM4: Imma try to copy some non-war-god orcs from a popular video game. That way Idon't have to explain much.
DM2: Nature orcs? Spicy.

 

[Oofta]

But then you get into the whole "all <race> are evil/good, except for these few exceptions" problem, unless the writers take the care to deliberately subvert that. Which currently the D&D writers haven't.

Which is why we should go back to the qualifiers like 3E had. Even orcs were only "frequently" evil. Or say that orcs that follow Gruumsh are evil.

The alignments listed in the MM are explicitly supposed to be just the default, it should have been made much clearer.

 

[Scribe]

I'm talking about an unconscious feeling, like, when you play D&D, somehow thorny issues and awkward stuff doesn't happen, even though maybe it does when you play PF1 or CoC or whatever. So you gravitate to D&D because it promotes a good time, even without really thinking about why.

Hmm, fair enough.

 

[Oofta]

Let's say you have a party that consists of: human, half-elf, kenku, tiefling, a goblin, and firblog. This immediately throws up all sorts of world building questions: what communities do these characters come from (where, physically on the FR map, are those located)? What are these communities like (culture(s), territory, political structure, trading, languages/dialects)? Is this diversity of races representative of the world at large (a 'cosmopolitan' setting), and if not, how do npcs react to this group (and as a dm, do you want to make constant npc reactions a feature of your game)?

Kitchen sink settings like FR don't answer these questions very well. It's simultaneously human-centric and yet doesn't work out the real consequences of being human centric. Many culture-forming groups exist in a kind of wilderness ether, existing to be randomly encountered without any of the components of culture (society, art, trade, etc) yet within stones' throw of major, cosmopolitan cities. Languages don't vary or become dialects, even across thousands of miles of supposedly sparsely inhabited land.

It's like dungeon ecology. I'm perfectly happy to suspend disbelief and not think about how the massive dragon got inside the tiny dungeon, or what waste disposal system the cave-dwelling goblins were using. But if you think about it for more than two minutes, all sorts of problems and inconsistencies show up. And don't even get me started on cantrips!

If I were going to set up a kitchen sink campaign, the world would be some kind of crossroads world or a magical Bermuda triangle destination. There was a time when there were no civilized lands or only ancient ruins of a long lost people. Then groups from entirely different worlds just started appearing, and continue to appear today. Sometimes it's one individual, sometimes it's a thousand. After a period of initial war and bloodshed, the races started banding together after realizing they were all in a strange land. Nowadays? Nobody looks twice at a race they've never encountered before except maybe to ask if their people have registered with the bureau of resettling yet.

As far as dungeon ecology, I agree. I haven't run a standard dungeon since high school.

 

[Oofta]

I don't think the problem is Kitchen sink settings. It's like you said, it's settings that are simultaneously human-centric and also nonhuman centric.

Basically the issue is twofold

1) The game rules and basic lore is written human-centric. However most of the settings' D&D promotes are not human-centric in skeleton nor look.

2) WOTC tells you that you can do whatever you want but provide little inspiration, guidance, nor examples on creation of racial culture nor world factions.

So you get

WOTC: You can do whatever you want.
DM1: Really? So if I want my orcs to be overly ambitious and reckless tech-punks aligned with the gnomes on the dangerous cutting edge of science, I can do that?
WOTC: Sure.
DM1: Where in the books can help me set that up and make that happen?
WOTC: What?
DM1: Where can I find rules and advise to do that?
WOTC: That's not in the books.
DM2: You mean he has to do that from scratch with little help.
DM3: Sounds like a lot of work to make it interesting and understandable to get player-buy in..
DM4: Sounds like I'm opting out of your game, DM 1.
DM1: I'll pay ya.
WOTC: I don't wanna make that book.
DM1:Bye bye Blue orcs. Guess I'm going back to barbaric orcs worshiping a raging war god.
DM2: Same.
DM3: Same.
DM4: Imma try to copy some non-war-god orcs from a popular video game. That way Idon't have to explain much.
DM2: Nature orcs? Spicy.

Trying to understand what you want. WOTC can't provide details on every possible option, where would they even start?

 

[BookTenTiger]

That's exactly my point, and this is the part which annoys me with the rabid races-haters around the internet. D&D and in particular 5e aims at being a fairly simple game, and only a game, that is not meant to address deep moral or ethical issues. And it has always done this very well, but now the game is burdened with what seems a very large problem coming not at all from its simple perspective, but from the fact that only a very few races (again, mostly the orc and drows, most of the problems come from this although some cultural issues in some settings are inappropriate as well) create problems with real life stereotypes.

But because it's the internet and people like to sound scandalised and make scenes, they blow this completely out of proportion and generalise the problem, in an environment which is simply not created to deal with this.



I'm not sure that's possible, the two aims seem to be really at odds.



Add to this the fact that, today, it's really hard to create something that does not offend at least someone somewhere and I think you see how the equation starts to become really unsolvable.

Honestly, my feeling is that there are very few real issues, that WotC is addressing most of them by surgical changes and that hopefully this will blow over like the satanic craze of the past, leaving us with a game that can still be played simply and cleaned enough to feel inclusive (and honestly, it might be because I'm European and have different perspectives, but I've never met a player that felt actually offended by the game itself, and this in 40+ years of hard playing over 4 continents) for a huge majority of people.

Rabid race-haters??????

 

[Malmuria]

I don't think the problem is Kitchen sink settings. It's like you said, it's settings that are simultaneously human-centric and also nonhuman centric.

Basically the issue is twofold

1) The game rules and basic lore is written human-centric. However most of the settings' D&D promotes are not human-centric in skeleton nor look.

2) WOTC tells you that you can do whatever you want but provide little inspiration, guidance, nor examples on creation of racial culture nor world factions.

So you get

WOTC: You can do whatever you want.
DM1: Really? So if I want my orcs to be overly ambitious and reckless tech-punks aligned with the gnomes on the dangerous cutting edge of science, I can do that?
WOTC: Sure.
DM1: Where in the books can help me set that up and make that happen?
WOTC: What?
DM1: Where can I find rules and advise to do that?
WOTC: That's not in the books.
DM2: You mean he has to do that from scratch with little help.
DM3: Sounds like a lot of work to make it interesting and understandable to get player-buy in..
DM4: Sounds like I'm opting out of your game, DM 1.
DM1: I'll pay ya.
WOTC: I don't wanna make that book.
DM1:Bye bye Blue orcs. Guess I'm going back to barbaric orcs worshiping a raging war god.
DM2: Same.
DM3: Same.
DM4: Imma try to copy some non-war-god orcs from a popular video game. That way Idon't have to explain much.
DM2: Nature orcs? Spicy.

Take Hobgoblins (and for the sake of discussion, we can put to one side the way they are clearly coded using east Asian stereotypes, at least in 5e). We have here an entire species that is described as lawful and militaristic. Organized militaries take a lot of resources! Volo's tells us the following

When hobgoblins aren't on the move, they have a stable lifestyle and society wherein they can raise new generations, train them, and prepare for future battles. If few enemies exist nearby and the hobgoblins in a legion have room to spread out, the members of each banner might live in a separate location, effectively its own settlement, with worg riders and messenger ravens passing communications between the sites.

That's a lot of infrastructure! Even if you were going with race-as-monoculture, it seems like Hobgoblins should have some stable kingdom, trading patterns, relationships with neighbors, etc. Volo's expands on this:

If a hobgoblin legion is looking for a place to set down roots, its first choice is an out- of-the-way area that has adequate resources or can be improved to suit the hobgoblins' needs. Land for farming or grazing is desirable, as is access to lumber, stone, or metal ore. If the hobgoblins find a place that fits the bill, they build non-portable facilities such as forges and sawmills, marking their intention to stay either until all the resources have been harvested or until Maglubiyet calls them off to war. If the hobgoblins are interested in doing business with the outside world, they might erect a trading post on the fringe of their territory where other people can come to exchange goods and coin.

Ah yes, an "out-of-the-way area" that is rich in arable land, lumber, and mineral resources. In which they develop a medieval-esque, stable society. It seems like, if your world has hobgoblins, they should have a defined territory on the map and detailed interactions with other defined territories. But because they are "monsters," and not humans, they exist in a vague, "out of the way" space so they can enter the narrative purely as antagonists.