D&D (2024) How did I miss this about the Half races/ancestries

[Vaalingrade]

Frozen Heart said nothing about that and this conversation was in no way headed toward that cliff.

 

[Incenjucar]

If your first inclination when it comes to dimorphism is to start thinking sex-based stats yes please just do not engage with dimorphism.

For everyone else it's fine if you just use some empathy and consideration.

 

[Bagpuss]

If your first inclination when it comes to dimorphism is to start thinking sex-based stats yes please just do not engage with dimorphism.

Actually my first thoughts of sexual dimorphism tend to be of angler fish, and just how drastic they can be in nature. So yeah why not reflect that with stats.

Starfinder has dimorphism with it's alien races (with stat adjustments) and seems to get away with it.

"All lashuntas gain +2 Charisma at character creation. Korasha lashuntas are muscular (+2 Strength at character creation) but often brash and unobservant (–2 Wisdom at character creation). Damaya lashuntas are typically clever and well-spoken (+2 Intelligence at character creation) but somewhat delicate (–2 Constitution at character creation)."

Well I say get away with it, they use to have sexual dimorphism in Pathfinder 1st Ed, but got an update in Starfinder to just dimorphism, not related to gender. So maybe they didn't.

 

[Incenjucar]

Hard pass on stat dimorphism for player species. The game is too designed around primary stats to use them.

 

[Mecheon]

Yeah, stats aren't really a thing for player races

I could see something like Formians, in that you could be Worker (Small, but with powerful build and able to carry stuff as if you were large, because ant), Soldier (Medium with stinger) and flying ones (For queens and drones), with the also implication of non-playable stuff like super majors (because the super majors are the size of giants and big enough to have multiple smaller ones just hop on 'em)

 

[Micah Sweet]

Limiting capabilities by sex in order to ensure people don't feel like equals is not the only kind of dimorphism.

I sincerely doubt the goal was ever to ensure people don't feel like equals. This is just inflammatory sophistry.

 

[Remathilis]

This is a lazy, uninspired and boring way to represent the half races. They shouldn't have the full traits of one or the other. The blending should create new traits or at a minimum a blend of the traits of the two races.

So you want 511 unique sets of racial traits then?

 

[Micah Sweet]

Nah. We can all communicate just fine without calling anyone a savage. It's easy. Literally nothing is lost.

Gygax infamously quoted John Chivington by name, specifically "Kill and scalp them all, big and little; nits make lice." when talking about how it's not evil to kill orc babies. Literally the direct language of genocide. This is why people aren't comfortable with "savage", "primitive", etc in describing whole races in DnD.

There isn't that much of a line between dehumanizing language and violently dehumanizing language, and people who have had that language directed at them understandable don't always want anything to do with a company that uses that language to sensationalize the outside enemy people of their game.

What you are demanding is less expansive and open to any possibility than the language they're changing to.

It's literally just neutral descriptions from the perspective of the people being described. You can go literally anywhere from there. The Orc entry explicitly mentions ancient conflicts between orcs and elves and dwarves. It just doesn't talk about orcs like a 18th Century colonialist describing native people in order to justify murdering them en masse.

I 'm asking for examples of how different species can be portrayed, not a neutral, anything goes blank slate. The fact that some species have fought other species tells you practically nothing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So you want 511 unique sets of racial traits then?

Nope. Level Up's version works just fine.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Nah. We can all communicate just fine without calling anyone a savage. It's easy. Literally nothing is lost.

We lose the word savage. And we aren't calling people savages, we are calling fictional races savages. I could understand if the issue was dismissing a real world group as savages. That is different. But saying you are attacked by a savage band of orcs, conveys a lot of imagery to the players. And it is colorful. In regular speech I have had friends say things to me like "What are you a savage" for leaving the living room a mess or something. It is just a colorful way to talk in most instances. And this is just one word among many that we seem to be losing.

Gygax infamously quoted John Chivington by name, specifically "Kill and scalp them all, big and little; nits make lice." when talking about how it's not evil to kill orc babies. Literally the direct language of genocide. This is why people aren't comfortable with "savage", "primitive", etc in describing whole races in DnD.

Without knowing the full context, I would say I could interpret this one of two ways. One as him agreeing with John Chivington about native americans (which I suspect wasn't the case, but if it was obviously that is bad). The other is a dark sense of humor about killing orc babies. When I was a history student, people often had a dark sense of humor about historical atrocities and villains. That I am a lot less concerned about. Still I wouldn't go around quoting John Chivington myself.

For the record, on the subject of killing orc babies, while I don't think it says anything about a persons' real world ethics, I have never found that to be a convincing idea (even if you accept all the conceits of the D&D alignment system cosmology, somehow killing babies because they were born evil, just doesn't pass the smell test. And when you dive into the actual ethics of it, it just strikes me as an evil act that uses events which have not yet and may not transpire to justify killing something that hasn't done any wrong.

There isn't that much of a line between dehumanizing language and violently dehumanizing language, and people who have had that language directed at them understandable don't always want anything to do with a company that uses that language to sensationalize the outside enemy people of their game.

I understand this line of reasoning and I agree with many aspects of the first part. I was deeply interested in the history of genocide growing up, and the history of things like the Khmer Rouge, Russian Pogroms, the Holocaust, etc. Language certainly is a factor, and if someone is referring to real world groups as vermin or in other dehumanizing ways, I think that is a reason to be concerned. But I also think if you apply this argument to everything, including dehumanizing language directed at fictional species in a fantasy world, you weaken the real world power of this argument. It becomes easier for people to dismiss concerns about dehumanizing language when people focus on things like calling orcs savages IMO. If WOTC were using the term savage in propaganda posters about a group of people, yes I would be deeply concerned. I am not worried though about applying the label to orcs or fictional groups in an RPG.