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

[Vaalingrade]

Humans, like in real life, were a regrettable error.

Neanderthals were clearly the divinely created ones considering they're the ones that had super powers like faster healing and cold resistance.

But humans had sex technology no one could resist.

 

[Faolyn]

That's called censorship.
People are entering the debate all the time. It's disingeneous to shut down conversation from now on because you've settled on the matter.
Kid asks questions, you don't shut them down - you attempt to educate. It's also non scientific to not allow an idea to be challenged.

That really depends on the type of conversation, though.

@Chaosmancer, in the post you replied to, talked about some extremely antisemitic comments they had heard. You can't educate people out of that sort of stuff, at least not online. Maybe you can do it in person, through an introduction to actual Jewish people and Jewish culture, like how Daryl Davis deconverted hundreds of KKK members. But online? No. The odds of being able to turn someone's mind around through online discussion is so very small as to be negligible. Look at this very forum, and the arguments here are all about a game, not something that's actually important in the long run.

(Nor, quite frankly, is it Chaosmancer's job to educate people out of the belief that Jews are cannibalistic Moloch-worshipers.)

 

[Remathilis]

Elves, dwarves, and orcs in D&D have explicitly divine origins, with humans having uncertain origins.
"Divine" also includes Vecna.

I actually liked how there was a human creator deity in 4e, but he was killed by Asmodeus and their name and memory struck from the Multiverse, their realm turned to Baator, and their servants turned to devils. Thus humanity had a racial deity but due to them being lost, humanity has adopted all manner of other deities (some racial, some primal, and some monstrous) and that lack of a deity is why humanity is so diverse. It was a far bit more novel than "humans are special snowflakes" thing most settings do to justify humanity having no unified culture or traits.

 

[Frozen_Heart]

It was a far bit more novel than "humans are special snowflakes" thing most settings do to justify humanity having no unified culture or traits.

One thing I'm actually liking about 1DnD is that it's giving humans a real (mechanical at least) identity. Beyond just +1 in ability scores and a language. The resourceful trait is something which finally feels memorable.

 

[AnotherGuy]

That really depends on the type of conversation, though.

@Chaosmancer, in the post you replied to, talked about some extremely antisemitic comments they had heard.
You can't educate people out of that sort of stuff, at least not online. Maybe you can do it in person, through an introduction to actual Jewish people and Jewish culture, like how Daryl Davis deconverted hundreds of KKK members. But online? No. The odds of being able to turn someone's mind around through online discussion is so very small as to be negligible.

Right, so I missed that part about the Jews-Moloch-cannibal thing the first time round. The way @Chaosmancer described it some dude heard another dude say what he heard.
At that point you can easily with a few questions determine if the poster was just trolling or actually believed what he heard.
If one doesn't want to engage in convo that's fine - but I don't believe limiting the ability for conversation to occur. That's the angle I was coming from.

(Nor, quite frankly, is it Chaosmancer's job to educate people out of the belief that Jews are cannibalistic Moloch-worshipers.)

I was talking about actual censorship because that's what it sounded like he was condoning. Because who then draws the line of what can actually be cconversed and what cannot?

 

[Faolyn]

Right, so I missed that part about the Jews-Moloch-cannibal thing the first time round. The way @Chaosmancer described it some dude heard another dude say what he heard.
At that point you can easily with a few questions determine if the poster was just trolling or actually believed what he heard.
If one doesn't want to engage in convo that's fine - but I don't believe limiting the ability for conversation to occur. That's the angle I was coming from.


I was talking about actual censorship because that's what it sounded like he was condoning. Because who then draws the line of what can actually be cconversed and what cannot?

Private websites have a right to police what goes on on their channels and game companies have a right to determine what they will and will not print. ENWorld has a pretty strict policy--no politics, no religion, personal attacks, "granma" levels of vulgarities only, etc. Breaking that policy too many times or in the wrong way gets you banned. Are they engaging in censorship? If so, is it of a bad type of censorship and there should be no moderation at all? Or is it an acceptable type, in that allows for people to have actual conversations that aren't being hijacked by bigotry and other nastiness and allows for people to converse here safely?

The problem with allowing hateful ideas to flourish, as Bedrockgames was suggesting should be the norm, is that it doesn't actually allow people to engage in reasonable conversation about them in the hopes of getting people to see the error of their ways. As the saying goes, you can't reason people out of something they didn't reason themselves into. All it does is feed into the "good people on both sides" mentality.

 

[Chaosmancer]

That's called censorship.

No, it isn't. Why does everyone call everything censorship? Censorship is the suppression of speech. Saying "No, that is false" is not censorship. I'm not suppressing your speech.

News organizations don't put every person with an opinion on the air. People who claim that world leaders are a race of sentient lizards from the core of the earth don't get air time to discuss politics. Because they are clearly not adding to the discussion. That isn't censoring them, that is not giving them a platform.

People are entering the debate all the time. It's disingeneous to shut down conversation from now on because you've settled on the matter.

So should we discuss whether it is obscene and monstrous to cut open bodies for medical research? Back in the day, that could get you killed. But, strangely, I don't think there is much discussion about whether bodies donated to medical science should be legal or not. We seem to have settled the matter.

What about the discussion of whether we should ride horses or drive cars? New people have entered the discussion, so maybe we need to go back and discuss highways and whether or not we should build them.

Or, maybe, new people entering the conversation DOESN'T make much of a difference, when the matter is actually settled. Gravity is real. The Earth is Round. Racism is a terrible evil. Don't need to really have debates about these things, unless you've brought some gigaton level evidence to challenge them.

Kid asks questions, you don't shut them down - you attempt to educate. It's also non scientific to not allow an idea to be challenged.

A few points.

1) I don't care if I'm non-scientific, I'm not a scientist. And even scientists don't just sit and take any and all challenges seriously. If you wrote to a scientific journal claiming that the Earth is flat, because you don't see the curve, you won't get published. No one is taking that challenge seriously. You need massive, paradigm destroying evidence, not "I don't understand how this works, therefore it must be wrong"

2) Children are very different in this regard. Firstly, children often don't know, which is why we attempt to educate them. But if a 55 year old man, who is on a major platform like Youtube is talking about the flat earth, or about how birds are fake to disguise spy drones, I don't need to educate that man. Other people have attempted to educate that man. The problem is not a lack of attempts to educate him, but a lack of willingness to be educated. Most children aren't entrenched in their beliefs. They will be willing to listen, and to accept the evidence for how it really works.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Bru I'm not going to debate this. If you feel that barbaric raiders is an apt description for the Roman Empire, have at it.

That isn't what I said. Ever. At all.

 

[Chaosmancer]

It's almost like D&D has a rather simplistic tradition of world building that works for adventuring purposes so long as you don't squint too hard and examine the details.

Sure, and that is a problem, right? I mean the property is 50 years old, with multiple world-settings, and dozens upon dozens of books. And it has been updated five times since it started. At some point, we might have wanted to fix the giant glaring errors we created when we started taking this seriously enough to publish multiple magazine, and an actual libraries worth of rule books.

 

[Chaosmancer]

Then there's no such thing as special.

And yes, the zebra is special. Is it the same as humans? No. Humans have more uniqueness than a zebra.

So, you agree that humans aren't special. Glad we got back to where I started.

Then get the definition changed. Right now the deciding factor is human and doesn't change just because you feel like it should.

...What do you think me spending multiple pages defending the idea of non-humans being people is FOR? Obviously challenging the idea that all non-humans aren't people is the entire POINT!

And no, the definition doesn't need changed, because many many writers and directors over decades and perhaps even centuries of work have referred to non-humans as people. What needs to be changed is people's narrow point of view