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

[Umbran]

I think the reality is pretty clear, it's more that you don't want to recognize it because you feel it says something about you

Mod Note:
Don't. Make. This. Personal.

This tactic of trying to win the argument by assigning a personal flaw to someone you've never met, and asserting their lack of agreement is due to that supposed flaw isn't acceptable. So stop doing it.

 

[Chaosmancer]

And again, criticism is fine it is free speech. But people also get to respond to critiques. My issue, like I said before isn't so much with individual critics as the state of the culture around criticism and how that has blended with things like cancel culture. If these things don't bother you, they don't bother you. And if you aren't trying to stop content or tropes, I don't think you and I have much disagreement. On the other hand, people who are calling for Dark Sun not to get remade with the original setting material, and similar calls, I do think are participating in a censorious movement in the hobby. Now to be fair, WOTC doesn't have to respond to that. And this is where 'the state of the culture' is more at issue for me. Unfortunately companies are responding to it, and I think it is making for a very constrained creative environment. If you feel otherwise fair enough. We may not see eye to eye on that.

That isn't my point. My point is free expression should be a higher priority than most of these other things, because all of our rights hinge on our ability to express ourselves freely. And just having lived through periods where art was more constrained and when it wasn't, I vastly prefer living through less constrained periods.

Yes the state of the culture makes things not always possible. Which is the point. I don't want to return to 1400s or 1600s thinking in this respect. It is an issue of having an orthodoxy that is hard to challenge

"Murder is wrong" is an orthodoxy that is hard to challenge. I would really struggle to find reasons to say that murder is okay. I actually read a story once that really skeeved me out, because the author seemed to delight in the detailed, grisly murder of a family by a misanthrope. There was no value in the story, it was pure murder porn.

Is the existence of that orthodoxy a problem too? We describe things like "torture porn" or "murder porn" because they seem to have no value beyond just gratuitous shows of violence and pain. And I'm against it. I don't see value in "let me describe a man being eaten alive by ants in excruciating detail for six pages"

The problem you seem to have is that you don't like that the culture is slowly changing. We are FINALLY seeing a time when it is less and less okay to be terrible and hurtful to other people. Yes, it can go too far. Everything needs to be done in moderation, but you keep sounding the alarm that we are already going too far, that we've crossed lines that shouldn't be crossed... and yet nuTSR was right on track to release a setting here the white human men were the most superior thing to exist, and if you were too beautiful as a woman there was a 50% chance of being hated because you thought you were better than everyone else.

We are FAR FAR from this future you are clamoring that we should be afraid of. Yes, there is a balance to be struck, but we ARE striking that balance. You just don't seem to like where that seems to be.

I am not going to be able to respond to the entirety of this post as there is simply too much so I will take what I can. But I just want to say here, like I said to the other poster, happy to have a conversation with you, but I am not going to punish myself here if you are going to be impolite or mischaracterize what I say. It is always possible I am wrong about what I said (either misremembering something I stated, or saying something in a way that I didn't intend to mean) and I am happy to examine that and offer clarification. I just won't be responding to anymore posts that start out like this.

Funny you say there is too much, when I had to go through six or seven posts. But also, I get sick of being accused of misrepresenting people, then having to trawl back through dozens of pages of posts to quote you to prove you wrong. Because if I don't quote you, you'll just call me a liar.

It happens far far too often

So as you can see I wasn't saying everything would be bland. But yes I strand by the statement that each thing you take out is a step towards pablum. That has been my point across these discussions. I don't know that I could put a percentage on it. I just know when there are more restrictions, especially moral ones, there seem to be a lot fewer interesting works (at least for me).

Right, not everything will be bland, but be careful because everything you take out makes it more bland. Allowing LGBTQ+ relationships instead of hatred towards them for their sexuality? Bland. Allowing cosmopolitan cities and mixed race people instead of race wars and racial hatred? Bland. Creating complex motivations for acts of evil instead of having them stand there... menacingly! ? Bland.

Do you see the problem I'm having here? Every time we work to make things more inclusive... we are ADDING. The drow are no longer monolithically evil. Are they bland now? Well... there are three different factions, all with different cultures and beliefs and complex relationships between them and other people.... how is that more bland than a single monolithic culture? "Oh, that's like every other race in the book, so that's bland." No, not really, because if that were true then every good race would be bland, because it is like every other good race.

You don't show evidence of this blandness, you just claim it will happen. Because reasons.

Oh sure, moral censorship isn't the only path to pablum.

But I am not so sure edgy has the currency it did say when walking dead and game of thrones were at their peak. The culture, and gaming, seem to have moved past that. I am not saying all content should be edgy (nothing wrong with edgy but only doing edgy gets dull too). I just think it is unwise to jettison so many crucial RPG tropes.

Let's look at some of the top rated TV shows of the year.

Barry a "macabre comedy" featuring a disillusioned former marine turned assassin.
Beef a comedy about pettiness
Yellowjackets, seems to be similar to squid game and involves a survival game show
Schmigadoon! Opening line is that it returns with "more libido"
Rain Dogs "Authentically brutal"

I didn't even get much past the top 10, Rain Dogs was #11. Edgy content is alive and well. Heck, Whinney the Pooh Blood and Honey featuring Whinney the Pooh as a serial killer just released this year.

And, again, I've demonstrated repeatedly that those RPG tropes are NOT crucial. In fact, you yourself just said a few posts above this one that you don't even use some of these tropes yourself. How are they vital for the survival of the game if they aren't even vital to your home games?

Fair enough. But I would argue we aren't actually removing racist content number one (just removing content because some people mistakenly believe it is racist). And number two, a lot of the content people are asking to tone down, remove, etc is stuff I think makes RPGs more interesting and less bland.

How does Racism make the game interesting? Honestly, I've asked this a few times and never gotten the answer. Have you just... not seen racism before? I can point you to a children's cartoon episode that covered it if you want. We've seen it, a lot. Some of us see it daily. But we don't see the opposite very often. And I actually find it MORE interesting and less bland to see people working together and using their differences as strengths, and building a society that emphasizes that.

Many "monster settings" do this. They have harpies that act as courtiers, Dragonkin who do metalworking, they build cities that have canal ways for aquatic species. How many cities in DnD have we seen that have an entire underwater section built for accommodating aquatic people, compared to another human city with massive walls, a slum full of poor people, and being led by a human noble? By removing the need to discriminate and hate people who are different, the setting can start focusing on what might happen if these people are treated as equal citizens and create something we don't see very often. And that is interesting.

Times change doesn't justify everything. History isn't a straight upward trend towards the good. New bad ideas emerge even after old bad ideas are eliminated or abandoned (and old bad ideas come back, new bad ideas die, etc). True you make a valid point that just because people wouldn't have entertained these criticisms a decade or two ago, that doesn't mean they aren't valid. I suppose my point there was people understood those critiques in an academic way. But when they moved into the broader culture, they became extremely simplified and you started seeing things like equating dungeon delving with colonialism (which I think is a very big simplification and reductive). So fair enough, it not being a thing twenty years ago, doesn't make it bad, but it being a thing now also doesn't make it good. Times change doesn't justify anything we happen to do in the present.

Right, just because it wasn't a concern decades ago doesn't mean it isn't a concern. And I'm not claiming that these concerns are good because they are new, I'm claiming them based on the merits of the concerns, and balancing them with the ease of changing the elements in question.

And do you think there might be some merit in the fact that as the broader culture started seeing these issues, they became more of an issue? DnD was a refuge for many people who felt outcast from society, and it is very easy to forgive faults in things that you love, so isn't it possible that those who considered the critiques "academic" were just being willfully blind because they were afraid confronting the problem would take away the community they had found? And that now that DnD is more popular than ever, people no longer have that fear that if they speak up, they will be banished from the last bastion they have?

No it is definitely entertaining if you are killing ghouls and oozes and if there are an abundance of threats. One of D&D's strengths is being built around all these monsters to challenge the party. But I also do think there is something classic about these monstrous and intelligent humanoid threats like orcs and kobolds.

Who cares about classic? Classic is just another word for traditional and comforting. And you can still have monstrous and intelligent humanoid threats WITHOUT the threat being simply "they existed near me.... THREATENINGLY!"

 

[Chaosmancer]

Well, yeah. Killings things and taking their stuff is literally the backbone of D&D's gameplay mechanics.

Typically elves aren't the ones raiding nearby villages and doing evil stuff. But if it were elves, sure, I'd be just as happy to kick down their doors, kill 'em, and take their stuff.

And why aren't Elves the ones doing that? Elves have often been depicted as killing humans who enter their forests, so they would clearly be killing human loggers and hunters. Why are nature-based creatures like Dryads, Fey, and Elves who kill loggers who enter their territory not kill on sight enemies too?

 

[Mecheon]

This seems like the role played by drow, duegar and deep gnomes (can't recall if there is a halfling version)

While we have those versions, I'd argue we shouldn't have seperate 'These are the evil ones you can fight'. There should just, be "Here's the cult of the five flames. They're some dragonborn Tiamat cultists out to try to murder you"

also like, frankly the astral elves are the ones we should be killing because, look, they got bionoids and aura battlers spirit warriors. There's like a 90% chance they're just going to try to take over an entire planet and kill off everyone they don't like.

 

[Bedrockgames]

"Murder is wrong" is an orthodoxy that is hard to challenge. I would really struggle to find reasons to say that murder is okay. I actually read a story once that really skeeved me out, because the author seemed to delight in the detailed, grisly murder of a family by a misanthrope. There was no value in the story, it was pure murder porn.

Murder is wrong is an orthodox opinion I agree with. However depicting murder in a movie, story or RPG, isn't going against that orthodox opinion, it is going against the orthodox opinion that it is wrong to depict violence in media and that we have to be especially careful when we do depict it. That is the orthodoxy violence in media challenges. Now you could argue this isn't always the case. Violent action movies get pretty violent. So I don't think this issue is always so black and white, as the question, at least in the states, often revolts more around the why and how than the presence of violence alone.

In the story in question, without reading it I can't comment. It is always possible you read a horror story by a sociopath and were justifiably troubled by something you sensed in the work. But I have also seen people have that reaction to violent movies and stories that were clearly using it for another purpose. And I think there is a place for cathartic violence in media. Choosing to describe it in a particular way could be for any number of reasons (from the author delighting in it as you point out, to the author trying to make the reader intentionally uncomfortable or being the details to life through the eyes of the killer).

Is the existence of that orthodoxy a problem too? We describe things like "torture porn" or "murder porn" because they seem to have no value beyond just gratuitous shows of violence and pain. And I'm against it. I don't see value in "let me describe a man being eaten alive by ants in excruciating detail for six pages"

Torture porn and murder porn isn't something I tend to gravitate towards. But I also don't mind it if it is done well and I don't think it is a problem from movies like Wolf Creek, Saw or the House of 1000 Corpses to exist. I actually rather enjoyed the saw movies. Wolf Creek was interesting, but hard to watch. I don't especially care for Rob Zombie movies but that is just personal taste. I do like movies like Lady Snowblood, A Better Tomorrow, Chan Cheh films, Blade (the Hong Kong movie), John Wick, and Commando, all of which delight and revel in violence in their own way.

Again I don't know that I would be interested in a book that describes a man being eaten alive by ants, at the same time, I think a person isn't terrible for doing that, or for reading it. I can think of plenty of reasons why someone might want to do so (simply to imagine the horror of that kind of death, to meditate on how humans are also food for the worms and insects, etc).

I do think all these movies in some way challenge established orthodox sensibilities around propriety and violence (but you an also argue aspects of them play into orthodox thinking).

The problem you seem to have is that you don't like that the culture is slowly changing.

I don't have a lot of time right now, so I will try to address the rest of this when I have some spare time. But I just want to say, no my problem isn't with change. My problem is with the slow narrowing of what is acceptable artistically and in terms of design in RPGs. And my problem is with some of the tactics advocates for these changes are using. But plenty of change is good and I embrace it. Change on its own isn't positive or negative (society can change to become more free and accepting, but it can also change to become more totalitarian and censorious).

 

[Horwath]

And why aren't Elves the ones doing that? Elves have often been depicted as killing humans who enter their forests, so they would clearly be killing human loggers and hunters. Why are nature-based creatures like Dryads, Fey, and Elves who kill loggers who enter their territory not kill on sight enemies too?

because humans are trespassers there, and Dryads, Fey and Elves are in their right to deal with trespassers as they see fit.

 

[AnotherGuy]

How does Racism make the game interesting?

I think racism could be used as a backdrop, to create further complications for the PCs which can make the game interesting IMO.

I have spoken about this before, but in Mystara, specifically the Duchy of Karemeikos this can easily be explored with the Traladaran underground movement and the ruling Thyatian class. This concept also brings in the theme of colonisation.

You could also have a third party escalating the friction between Alfheim (elven nation) and Rockhome (dwarvern nation) and have the Republic of Darokin via the Darokinian Diplomatic Corps (an actual thing within the Gazetteer) attempt at a reconciliation in an effort to save existing avenues for trade.

Stave off an innocent Glantrian mage from execution who was captured by a band of gnomish adventurers. In Glantri's history the Glantrian mages experimented on halflings, gnomes and dwarves due to the latter's resistance for magic and the blame for the spread of lycanthropy in the Principalities.

The party is sent to steal Baron Ludwig von Henrick's secret journal from his room in his fort in the Black Eagle Barony, in which he details his plans for those halfling vermin in the Five Shires. PCs have the option of ransoming the journal back to the evil Baron, taking it to Five Shire ambassador in Specularm (who could try force the Duke's hand) or directly to the Duke (who may hide it away in his desk for better days, not willing to risk unsettling his current tenuous hold over the Duchy).

There is so much more...

EDIT: We accept strong religious ideologies and their zealots for storylines (cultists), racism is just another form of fanatical ideology. I'm not sure why people here seem to struggle to incorporate that specific ideology within a storyline creatively.

 

[Maxperson]

Drow. I suppose the fey'ri too.

Fey'ri would fall into the half-demon/Tiefling category, not elves. They were half-demons/half-elves that bred true instead of being a one off offspring.

Vasharans, from the same.

Evil humans have been in pretty much every campaign I've ever played in starting in 1983.

Those are, you know, just orcs. This is an area where you'd flip the script and mention how there are good orcs.

In addition to those, there was a country in the east of the Forgotten Realms that absorbed an orc army that invaded as part of Zhentil Keep forces. They lived with everyone else, even taking positions of leadership. Orcs in the Realms are not simply evil.

 

[Chaosmancer]

If I miss anything feel free to point it out. It is very easy to misread posts when the thread is moving this fast. And I am not the spring chicken I once was.

Fair enough, if they'v been there for generations, maybe they are natives. But my point is in wilderness exploration you are encountering monsters who are there for all kinds of reasons (from having lived there for a long time to being invaders themselves or roaming raiders).

Sure, you encounter monsters like Elves and Dwarves too. Yet they aren't killed on sight and looted for their property. You encounter human monsters too, bandits are quite common in most games, but you wouldn't track human bandits back to a village in the woods and decide to slaughter them all and steal their stuff because they are all "clearly evil"

Sure you could be. I just think you are kind of forcing that term on all these creatures when it is only going to be the case some of the time (which I think is important because we are debating how much of a colonialist trope this stuff really is). Sometimes the inhabitants of a dungeon aren't what I would call natives, but residents, because the dungeon is more like a big home than a society. If you are talking about something on the scale of the under dark, sure that is different. It depends on the specifics

So, if I go to Boston and kick in the door to an apartment complex, those people aren't native to Boston, because the apartment complex is just "a big home"? They are merely "residents" of the city.

And I'm not really forcing the term. I'm using the term to describe people who live in a particular place. You are the one wanting me to not describe them that way, because they may not live in that place. But that would make them nomads, and nomadic people don't wander aimlessly. Nomadic people often move in seasonal places, resettling the same land over and over again. Which makes them native to the area, just like I'm native to the USA even though I've never set foot in California.

But more importantly, the term I'm using casts a stark light on the colonial trope, while you insisting that I can't call them that obfuscates the same trope. After all, it is funny you now want to call a dungeon a "big home" when previously you wanted to call it a "lair"

Sure and this would be a great thought experiment for a lot of campaigns. I am not saying you can't think these things through. But a lot of tables aren't doing that. They are just there for a night of taking back the dungeon that was stripped from their dwarven ancestors by orcs. It isn't some nefarious thing that needs to be called out or changed. Which isn't to say we shouldn't also be doing other things in the game.

And I agree, there is double standard. Because orcs are monsters. Some campaigns humanize them more. And that is fine (I do that in my own worlds). But in a game where the point is to adventure and slay the monsters, monsters are going to be more fair game than your dwarven allies or your human allies

So why are they monsters but Drow aren't? After all, much like Hill Dwarves Drow are a playable subrace in the PHB. Dryads aren't? Dryads aren't playable (unlike orcs and goblins) but they aren't slaughtered on sight. Couatls are also not killed on sight, even if they are found in a dungeon.

So why does this double standard exist? Just because some people don't think too hard about the game?

Part of my point is the game inevitably goes back to kick down the dungeon door, because that works. And I am not so sure this style of gaming is on the way out.

Also kill things and take their stuff is a bit facetious. Like I said, there is obviously more to it than that, and a lot of the fun of the game is taking things beyond those very simple approaches. But I do think at its core, D&D is about exploring dungeons and fighting monsters. The game can do different things though for sure. I was a big Ravenloft GM and gravitated towards settings and systems that were different. At the same time I remember how much things click whenever you go back to those basics of dungeons and wilderness filled with monstrous threats.

And nothing about making sure we don't murder humanoids simply because of their appearance prevents us from exploring dungeons or fighting monsters. After all, plenty of monsters in the books AREN'T murdered on sight. And some non-monsters ARE killed on sight.

You might not, but there have definitely been people making that argument in previous threads on this subject.

But not this thread. So why are we dragging arguments from other places to here? I could say your side is arguing for only playing humanocentric games, because someone somewhere argued that. But that wouldn't exactly be a fair point to bring into the discussion.

And I would say it is just a dice game where players are killing fictional monsters, no matter how intelligent they are. I don't think it is the problem you and others are making it out to be

And yet some monsters can be killed, and others can't. Why? And is that indicative that there is a problem?

 

[Maxperson]

Ah, so you and those "many others" are the true arbiters of "reasons good enough" to allow artists to make the art they wish to make? So you and this invisible group get to decide "no, sorry, your reasons aren't good enough, you have to make it anyways"?

Artists? I don't know about you, but I don't stick my books on a shelf or frame them up on the wall and just look at them. D&D is a product, not art.

And this very VISIBLE group has been pushing back against WotC's lame announcement since it happened. Where have you been that you have only seen me do this?

I am being ridiculous to make a point. For all the discussion about not protesting and "chilling" things that artists can make the work they want to make... people sure seem to have no problem DEMANDING art and declaring the artist's reasons for not making it aren't good enough and therefore they should do what they don't want to do.

Nobody is demanding anything. At least not in this thread. There's a rather huge gulf between calling out a dumb decision as dumb and demanding that they make the setting.

I've mentioned a few times that I am an author, I write. In the genre I write in there is a specific rather common trope, that I have personal issues with and do not write. I've acknowledged it is a personal issue, but no matter how many times people try to demand I write it... I'm not going to. I get to make the decision on what I create, and I get to decide what reasons are good enough not to make something.

That's cool. I have no problem with people doing this. Corporations don't have personal issues, though. As much as the law treats them as people, they aren't people and don't have feelings or problems with anything.

Sure, you are free to call them out on their reasons, but at the same time you berate and deride people for calling them out on reasons to make stuff. It is the same action, the same thing, and yet one is acceptable because it gets you what you want, and the other is unacceptable because it is something you don't want.

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by that. It was written pretty vaguely.