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

[Chaosmancer]

I'll have to get to Bedrock in the morning. I've got to get to bed. Six hours til I need to be up for my sister's wedding, and Jet Lag is doing weird things.

 

[Maxperson]

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

...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!

There are no non-humans to be people, even under your definition. Bigfoot doesn't exist man. If you're arguing that pretend elf game text is a person, you're wrong. It's not alive. It's not a person.

And no, the definition doesn't need changed

Glad you agree that only humans are people. See I can do that too!

because many many writers and directors over decades and perhaps even centuries of work have referred to non-humans as people.

Then those people need therapy, because they are out of touch with reality. There are no non-humans to be people even under their warped definition.

 

[Guest 85555]

I'll have to get to Bedrock in the morning. I've got to get to bed. Six hours til I need to be up for my sister's wedding, and Jet Lag is doing weird things.

Don’t sweat it Chaosmancer. That is a lot more important than this thread. Get some rest and enjoy !

 

[MGibster]

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.

I'm not sure it is a problem. If I were reading a novel, most novels at least, little world building tidbits like that kind of nag at me. Because you're absolutely right, it takes a tremendous amount of resources to train, equip, and maintain a significant fighting force and that will rely on some very sophisticated infrastructure (even when taking into account magic and whatnot).

But I admit that I take a slightly different approach to world building for a game. I typically only concern myself with what matters during the actual game play. Does it matter how my city of a million people feeds itself? Not unless it matters during the adventure. Does it matter how a seemingly "tribal" society with no cities, countries, or empires of their own maintain a well trained and equipped standing army? Not unless it matters during the adventure.

And it gets a little odder still, because while I accept that for fantasy games like D&D, I don't necessarily accept that kind of thinking in other games. I've a tough time figuring out how a wooden suburbian home in what was once the United State s is still standing after 200 years of neglect or how Yum Yum Deviled Eggs can remain in their package for the same amount of time and be edible. I just sing to myself:

If you're wondering how he eats and breathes/
And other science facts/
Tra la la/
Just repeat to yourself/
It's just a show/
I should really just relax

But my way is not the only way. I recogize the validity of your approach to world building and recognize that it leads to a richer more interesting setting.

 

[AnotherGuy]

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?

Yes.

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?

This is a focused forum. RPGs for the most part. I cannot answer fully since this is not a Meta thread.

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.

Except for the example of the dude with the KKK members but you said that only works face to face and not on the internet (as much) which I generally agree with. But in that example good people on both sides did exist whether they would converse face to face or on the internet, the swaying of sides is a separate issue right?

 

[AnotherGuy]

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

It wasn't. But the post you were replying to was in defense of not equating romans with orcs and having their description reduced to barbaric raiders.

If I misunderstood you I apologise.

 

[AnotherGuy]

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.



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.



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.

The examples I'd like to cite in defense of my argument so you could see the nonsense of the statement "science having settled it" would not be appreciated by the moderation staff so I'll need to stop.
Needless to say, the science on a great many things is not settled (amongst scientists) despite what the corporate aligned media would have you believe. So I struggle with the misinformation tag being applied too loosely and too easily.

That's all I can say on that.

 

[Faolyn]

Except for the example of the dude with the KKK members but you said that only works face to face and not on the internet (as much) which I generally agree with. But in that example good people on both sides did exist whether they would converse face to face or on the internet, the swaying of sides is a separate issue right?

I wouldn't call the KKK people good so much as being willing to go against their indoctrination.

 

[Hussar]

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.

Agreed.

But that’s largely the crux of the issue. The stuff we don’t examine is really icky a lot of the time.

 

[gban007]

There are no non-humans to be people, even under your definition. Bigfoot doesn't exist man. If you're arguing that pretend elf game text is a person, you're wrong. It's not alive. It's not a person.

Glad you agree that only humans are people. See I can do that too!

Then those people need therapy, because they are out of touch with reality. There are no non-humans to be people even under their warped definition.

But in their fantasy worlds there is. Like James Cameron's Avatar with the Na'vi (translation the people), or with the various Star Trek races treated as people.
Am I misunderstanding somewhere, or is there an argument being made that it is all fantasy, so fantasy racism doesn't match with real life racism, but in these fantasy games only humans can be people because in real life only humans are people?