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

[Frozen_Heart]

I'm still latched on to rancher orcs following dinosaur herds in the desert....

And doctor who gnomes.

 

[Aldarc]

I'm still latched on to rancher orcs following dinosaur herds in the desert....

Taking a page out of the Eberron halfling playbook?

 

[Frozen_Heart]

Taking a page out of the Eberron halfling playbook?

Nah saw it suggested further up the thread.

 

[Hussar]

I'm still latched on to rancher orcs following dinosaur herds in the desert....

And doctor who gnomes.

I do love the image. Or just go with aurochs- those huge European cows that they used to have.

But the notion of orcish ranchers is a very good one imo. Good legs on that idea.

 

[Horwath]

The game can be simple and the enemies make sense in universe.

Strong idiot orcs who are all raiders and never farm but never starve.
Underground elves who are dark instead or pale who run a backstabbing based society with a slavery base despite being rail thin.
Ultamilitaristic hobgoblins who are tactical powerhouses who didn't have forges and Intelligence bonus for a long time.

D&D wants to have humaniod warrior enemies but forces them to be stupid and have no culture or nonsensical ones. So once your PCs rest in the inn or tavern, the world around them makes no sense.

not to mention that a 7th level wizard breaks local economy with Fabricate spell.

 

[Frozen_Heart]

I do love the image. Or just go with aurochs- those huge European cows that they used to have.

But the notion of orcish ranchers is a very good one imo. Good legs on that idea.

Aurochs could work very well in a classic 'eurocentric' themed setting.

I always pictured orcs as being based off the Germanic tribes such as the Vandals and Goths, as fitting for a eurocentric fantasy setting. Was kind of a shock to realise that DnD had based them on Mongolians and Native Americans (and in an insanely racist way while they were at it).

 

[Chaosmancer]

Language is communication but not all communication is language. The rattle of a diamondback is a clear communication that danger is near but it is not an example of a use of language. If we go by your definition of language, sure, I guess it is. But your definition isn't shared by many experts that I'm aware of.

That's entirely possible, I don't have a degree in studying languages. But I think of it a bit like color. Color is more complex than just the three primary colors +white and black, but if you want something to be "colored" you only really need those five colors. And some of them are debatable, since many colored scrolls/manuscripts don't have white.

 

[Guest 85555]

I would agree that the Dresden Files books are pretty light reading. Not quite sure what that has to do with D&D.

I think we should stop and enjoy this moment where we all seem to agree that the Dresden Files is light reading (used to be very into these books)

 

[Guest 85555]

Eh. The game started off as murder hobos seeking treasure in places where the dead seek rest as much as the occasional heroics.

Plus Planescape and Dark Sun are both explicitly complicated settings.

I think grave robbing murder hobos are definitely something that works in the default game. I don't think you want every party to be that, but I like when D&D can bridge that style and more heroic play at its default. It is in the settings where I think it can really layer in more interesting levels of complexity and flavor detail.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Because humans are cruel to one another and there is a long history of atrocity showing what we are capable of. I think setting aside human life as special, is key here. If you simply say we aren't special, there is nothing about human life that intrinsically makes it worth more than a dolphin, a plant or an ant, then it becomes very easy for whole societies to say "there is no ought in this world preventing us from harming you for the betterment of society".

Okay, but even if you propose that right now we see human life as the most special thing in all of existence... we still are harming humans for the betterment of society, because human society is made up of more humans than a single human. Society already does this, not because humans are worth the same as an ant, but because "the good of the many outweigh the good of the few" and unless you, individual human, are so special and so worthy that you outweigh multiple other humans, the same argument will always apply.

It is a bad argument, but that's because all humans are equally balanced against all other humans (barring actions that make them actively harmful to society, like serial killers) not because human life is somehow special and unique beyond all other life.

This doesn't work over the long term. When you make an idea simply taboo, or make it so evil we don't even deign to argue against it, it enable evil ideas to flourish because we aren't contending with them in a serious way. I don't think you can simply appeal to peoples emotions or morality here, you also need to appeal to reason and persuade. So I am not saying ideas aren't wrong, but I would agree with John Stuart that engagement is always a much better way to go than to simply dismiss, censor or refuse to engage because we don't like what people are saying.

And I agree if people have used an idea for violence, we can certainly hold that up and point to it. I did that when people were talking about things like bloodlines and lineages. But I also think you can't stop there and say 'it's bad so no conversation happens now' because that is how those bad ideas start to look like they might have some truth in them that we don't want to acknowledge (which is the last thing you want).

And yet we have found the opposite to be true. When we allow for "debate" on things, we are telling people there is something to debate. I recently had someone comment to me in a story that they had heard all Jewish people worship Moloch and are cannibals. What is there to debate here? They were wrong. Completely, utterly, and undebatedly wrong. If I engaged with them in "good faith" I'm not going to be making it seem like they are wrong, but that they have a point worth debating.

Or, to use an example that is less racially charged, look to Flat Earthers. Flat Earthers want to debate you, but there is no debate. Their "evidence" is often based in ignorance. You can contend with their ideas, but in doing so you will be accused of either ignorance or lying, because "the Earth is Flat" does not have any basis in reality. The evidence against it is so overwhelming and so complete, that the very idea of there being a "debate" is ludicrous.

Or, to use another example that greatly worries me at times working in education, Evolution. The scientific theory of evolution being true is not debatable. We have more evidence for it being true than one person could reasonably read in an entire lifetime. Yet, under this idea that we must give equal weight and debate to ideas, that we must engage with challenges lest we be seen as there being some truth we are unwilling to acknowledge, we have people who debate that evolution is false. And they have gone so far as to make it illegal to teach evolution in some places, unless you ALSO teach the things they want to have taught. To present it as a debate, with good ideas and strong evidence on both sides. When it isn't.


When we allow a conversation to happen over a topic, we are acknowledging that both sides are reasonable and are due consideration. Which is a noble goal, but when we state that, we sometimes give far too much weight to ideas that do not deserve them. Some times, the conversation just ends, because there is so little value in the other side that it is not due consideration. Now, that line can be challenged, that line is going to be different for different people, but that line must exist, as the spiraling of conspiracy theories and such have shown. Misinformation doesn't need to be debated, it needs to be called false and moved on from.

Now when it comes to fictional races hating one another, I am sorry but I don't think you can draw the line you are drawing here. Having races that reflect even real world racism, doesn't mean there is a message people are meant to get that is racist or something. And having fictional races that are distinct, the way humans might be from an imaginary humanoid species, is I think very different from something like statting different human races or ethnicities. There are also lots of reasons designers might explore these topics, even reasons where they are trying to contend against the arguments you are concerned about, by applying a thought experiment to races in a fantasy setting.

Yes dog whistles exist, but when you call everything under the sun a dog whistle (especially when you have posters like you do in this thread who are explicitly against racism and clearly not using these things as dog whistles) then you just cheapen what that means and it becomes like looking for subliminal messages in music

But where do you think the idea for Racism against other fictional races/species comes from? All fiction starts from seeds of truth, so where did that seed start from? From actual racism. And when you make a distinction of "this is the pretty, smart, good race" and "this is the brutish, dumb, bad race" what do you think people who believe that the different people of humanity are distinctly different types of people hear? And when you make this distinctions self-evident and true, what do you think those people get from that?

Yes, there can be good reasons to engage with these ideas, just like there are good reasons to work with radioactive material. But there is a reason highly radioactive material isn't sold on Wal-Mart's shelves, and is only handled by skilled experts. It can be powerful, but it is dangerous. And sometimes, the right answer isn't to see whether or not you can use it to power your devices, and look for alternative power sources.

My biggest problem with drawing this thick line between fictional racism and real-world racism and saying "these two can never interact" is that they do interact. And the only people who might believe you are the people who have a problem with real-world racism. Those that don't have a problem with it will wink and go "ah, right, those two are completely different, wink wink" and start using it as a code. That doesn't mean I'm accusing you of racism, I'm not, but I just don't see the value in pretending that ideas can't be shared between the real world and fiction, when the purpose of fiction is to explore ideas for the real world.

Is the racism between elves and orcs 1 to 1 identical to real world racism? No. Can I see how "these are the pretty, smart, powerful people who deserve good things, and these are their degenerate "cousins" who are strong and brutish and need to be destroyed or controlled because of their bestial urges" can be problematic? Oh yes, yes indeed I can.

Except we aren't grouping fruit. We are deciding how much value human life has, what its importance is in the world, and whether or not we should extend a concept that protects our rights to theoretical species. I am not saying don't. But I am saying have the conversation (especially if it turns out that species is malevolent from a human point of view). If you encountered an intelligent alien race capable of space travel, that was free willed, but had no sense of morality at all (for example what if our sense of morality is a product of our biology and their biology just doesn't compute that some things are good and some things are bad)...wouldn't that maybe make them another category of being? Or at the very least, we would say, yes they may be people in theory, but in practice trying to extend the rights of personhood to them is self destructive to our own species

It would give them very different morals, and that should be considered, but yes I think we should give them rights of personhood. After all, you forget that human sociopaths are often considered to have "no sense of morality" and yet we still extend to them personhood. And we can still engage with them. We just have to keep in mind that they don't think like us.

The point I'm trying to make, I think, is two-fold.

1) You keep desiring to frame "harmful to humans" as a key and constituent part of personhood. And this is very troubling to me. There may exist a species to whom water is so highly reactive and caustic, it might as well be acidic death. From that species perspective, humanity is a walking biological threat, we cannot interact physically without death to them, but we would argue that does not make us less of a "people" than they are, even if we are innately harmful to them. We wouldn't desire them to unperson us and wipe us out, so why create a double standard where we would do the same to a species made of hydrochloric Acid? Why is "harmful to humans" a major criteria in deciding whether or not personhood exists in them, when "humans are harmful to us" is not a standard we humans would accept?

2) We don't need to make human life "special" and "worth more" to want to protect human life. We protect human life because we are human, and that's fine. That doesn't require us to be uniquely worthy of protection.

It is useful when dealing with other human beings for sure. But again what if you essentially meet a race of terminators who just won't stop until humanity is dead. I get that this is a crazy hypothetical but so is the AI or aliens from outer space scenario. Even if the terminators were fully aware, intelligent and freewill, it doesn't seem we are contending with anything resembling humanity at that point.

Why would a race of terminators be different from Alien Roman Empire that won't stop until all of us are killed or enslaved?

And, if they are fully intelligent, fully aware, and have as much free will (as much as that concept exists) as humans... then they have likely decided to kill humanity, and we can defend ourselves without moral worry. Self-defense against other people is allowed. And at a certain point, both species would likely decide to stop going to the region where they will fight to the death, or find some other way past this. And if the only possible way is wiping one or the other out, then that is the only way.