D&D 5E D&D Races: Evolution, Fantasy Stereotypes & Escapism

[Faolyn]

And if I use a perfectly good word now and then, and I get harassed on social media until I remove it, what is it?

What's the word, and who is harassing you, and why?

 

[Crimson Longinus]

More accurately, is it better to get paid to play a role that likely someone else has created, or better to play that role for fun, because you enjoy playing a murderer-y character, after you have put in effort to make it as murderer-y as you can?

Well, roleplaying is a creative art form, and one can create messed up characters without actually endorsing their behaviour. But that's a big part of why I dislike "legitimate kill target species" as their purpose seems to be able to elide the messed up nature of being a wandering kill-hobo, which to me comes very close to glorifying such behaviour. I don't really need deep reflection on this in the game, but to me a brutal world of grey morals seems fundamentally more honest backdrop for a game that involves a lot of violence.

 

[Vaalingrade]

What's the word, and who is harassing you, and why?

It's never a good sign when one has to use a euphemism for the 'perfectly' innocent thing you did and got called out on.

That's the stuff Youtube apologies shortly before doing the same thing again are made of.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

They are not true though, objectively.

We'll have to agree to disagree on that one. 'Cause that's kind of the whole point of that passage, that those are the only things that objectively matter once the time scale grows large enough. I just quoted the punchy bit.

 

[Scribe]

We'll have to agree to disagree on that one. 'Cause that's kind of the whole point of that passage, that those are the only things that objectively matter once the time scale grows large enough. I just quoted the punchy bit.

I'm not saying those things dont matter. I'm saying they are not objectively true.

Thats the difference here.

1 + 1 = 2, is truth. Having Faith (literally not provable as true by its definition) Hope (not true, but a kind of Faith) and Love (...many loves have ended, become false, or been broken...) these are things, important things, but they are not true.

 

[Dire Bare]

This could potentially be interesting. What do elven trances do for elves, and what it means to live a 1000 years? Instead of We-like-trees-elves and We-like-stones-dwarves, I'd be curious to see what a "fantasy alien" species/culture could be like.

The thing I'm unclear on is, if does/could work, then why it hasn't been done by now? I'm not up-to-date on the latest fantasy novels, but I think of Asgardians from the MCU, or elves from The Witcher, and they're still just humans with cosmetic changes.

Then in RPGs specifically, are players able to roleplay an alien dragonborn, or is it still a human with a dragon head?

In my current Wild Beyond The Witchlight campaign, I like to play up the Feywild culture, pulling whatever there is in the adventure and in Domains of Delight. Honestly, it is hard and time consuming to learn and present, but the end result is that it feels like a separate plane with its own rules and its own culture that isn't found anywhere else. It doesn't feel like the Prime plane. That's the closest I've gotten to pushing the envelope on non-human experiences.

IMO . . . .

It's not a binary thing, but a slow evolution with steps forward and steps backwards. In official D&D, there has been additions to the lore to make elves (and other creatures) more differentiated from each other and from humans . . . but again, while fantasy takes influence from sci-fi, it isn't sci-fi. And WotC is hesitant to go too far in changing anything, as D&D has a long history and fans who like the way things have been. Changes, to be successful, have to be subtle, slow . . . and of course, cool. WotC seems to be stepping this up in response to recent discussions over the problems fantasy has with race. Long overdue IMO, but then again, perhaps the community is finally ready. Well, some of us.

One of the coolest and most dramatic changes to elven lore was, IMO, in 4E when elves, eladrin, and drow became a trio of cousin races with lots of new story. It was too much, too fast, on top of many other changes to the game and many gamers were not happy.

WotC also has to be careful about fleshing out various races too much, as that is traditionally the domain of the DM. Give too much detail, even if interesting . . . and then folks break into "love it" or "hate it" camps (more so than currently). Keep racial/cultural details light, and individual tables can take that framework and build on it their own way.

Comics are a wild blend of fantasy, sci-fi, and other tropes . . . and different "races" in comics often have the same problems. Science fantasy like Star Trek usually has this problem as well, Klingons and Romulans are about as different from humans as elves and dwarves are, as in not much.

And I'm not really advocating for making different fantasy and sci-fantasy races more alien . . . go to far with that, and they become unrelatable. Perhaps a bit more alien than is traditional, perhaps. For me, it's about being more mindful about understanding the difference between "people", "monsters", and "spirits". Is it okay to slaughter all the orcs? Well, are they "people" or "monsters"? In D&D, they traditionally are coded as "monstrous people" but evil, savage, violent . . . . the same language humans use in the real world to demonize other groups of humans.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I'm not saying those things dont matter. I'm saying they are not objectively true.

Thats the difference here.

1 + 1 = 2, is truth. Having Faith (literally not provable as true by its definition) Hope (not true, but a kind of Faith) and Love (...many loves have ended, become false, or been broken...) these are things, important things, but they are not true.

I believe we're talking past each other, so I won't press it any further than this post (not least because it's off topic). But I think you are discounting an entire world of truths solely because they don't correlate to brute physical facts, as I said.

Stories communicate to us these timeless truths. That's the whole point here. As Sir Terry Pratchett put it in Let There Be Dragons:
“The morality of fantasy and horror is, by and large, the strict morality of the fairy tale. The vampire is slain, the alien is blown out of the airlock, the Dark Lord is vanquished, and, perhaps at some loss, the good triumph – not because they are better armed but because Providence is on their side.
Why does the third of the three brothers, who shares his food with the old woman in the wood, go on to become king of the country? Why does Bond manage to disarm the nuclear bomb a few seconds before it goes off rather than, as it were, a few seconds afterwards? Because a universe where that did not happen would be a dark and hostile place. Let there be goblin hordes, let there be terrible environmental threats, let there be giant mutated slugs if you really must, but let there also be hope. It may be a grim, thin hope, an Arthurian sword at sunset, but let us know that we do not live in vain.”

Or as G.K. Chesterton--in Pratchett and Gaiman's words, "A Man Who Knew What Was Going On"--put it:
“Fairy tales, then, are not responsible for producing in children fear, or any of the shapes of fear; fairy tales do not give the child the idea of the evil or the ugly; that is in the child already, because it is in the world already. Fairy tales do not give the child his first idea of bogey. What fairy tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogey. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.
Exactly what the fairy tale does is this: it accustoms him for a series of clear pictures to the idea that these limitless terrors had a limit, that these shapeless enemies have enemies in the knights of God, that there is something in the universe more mystical than darkness, and stronger than strong fear.”

These things are truths, but which are revealed by the "falsehood" of fiction. There are many other excellent truths beyond and beside. Love--how we relate to other people, and specifically, choosing to relate to them by the guidelines given preceding that verse I quoted--is one of those truths. Thse things are not true in the precise way that "there is no present King of France" or "when the symbolism is properly understood, '1+1=2' is a necessary truth" is true. But they are true nonetheless, and I find them to be much more relevant truths for my daily life, in the sense of how I should conduct my behavior and affairs, than empirical factoids and mathematical necessities.

 

[Scribe]

I believe we're talking past each other, so I won't press it any further than this post (not least because it's off topic). But I think you are discounting an entire world of truths solely because they don't correlate to brute physical facts, as I said.

A little bit, but to push it further will just cause issues.

I agree with much of the rest of your post.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

Well, except here is French prime minister Nicolas Sarkozy in 2007:

Mod Note:

Here, we drifted into RW politics. A simple observation that such rhetoric is present to modern speeches sans the actual quotation would have sufficed.

Let’s step back a bit, please.

 

[Lyxen]

So, to bring this back around to Tomb of Annihilation and fantasy Africa in rpgs: it means that the use of terms like "primitive" and "savage" are not innocent.

Yes, they are. I do believe that in a lot of countries, the motto "innocent until proven guilty", so you will have to prove that the words used in Tomb of Annihilation were used maliciously, and I'm pretty sure that you will have a very hard time doing that. Just because, at one time, Africa was described by some as a savage land, does it mean that all uses of the word "savage" has to be suppressed ? Many other lands have been described as "savage". Many people have been considered as "primitive", and all our ancestors were, at one point or another, and they all lived in tribes. So sue me, I'm not affected by prejudices born only by one country, and I don't have to be bound by prejudices born out of there and forcefully exported to the rest of the world.

Tribes are a perfectly normal way of social organisation, both historically and extremely useful in terms of TTPG. Are we supposed to stop using that word because it's polluted by one country specific use of it ?

And if you really want to fight against people using good words in a bad fashion, then, as @Umbran said, address the root cause, which is certainly not the words themselves, but their sometimes use in bad context.

If I want to describe a land, any land by the way, whether a jungle or mountains of another plane as "exotic" (which, by the way, often has a very positive connotation (e.g. Merriam-Webster "introduced from another country : not native to the place where found" / "strikingly, excitingly, or mysteriously different or unusual"), I will do so, since it's an excellent word to describe fantasy locations compared from the point of view of adventurers.

All these words are extremely good words to describe situations in Fantasy RPGs, and they don't have equivalents. For example, in ToA, the errata either erased some words or replaced them with words that just don't mean the same thing, in particular replacing "tribes" by "homes".