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

[Justice and Rule]

It's actually the opposite. His quotes come explicitly from individuals and mine are from broad racial views about other races.

It's not really the opposite, since they only included one quote like that while the other is from an impartial narrator. Yours are just quotes from a person, even if they want to be ascribed more broadly. It's not quite the same, nor do the sentiments come close to the antipathy shown towards Orcs as a race.

They aren't really Tolkien's dwarves, though. That greed comes from the old Norse tales which is where Tolkien pulled his dwarves from. I doubt that the Norse created their dwarves to be representative of jews.

Well, that's why I said that it would be a discussion on Tolkien's dwarves, not D&D dwarves (though they obviously took inspiration from both myth and JRR himself).

 

[Justice and Rule]

Well then I think it should be easy to overwrite the default idea that dragonborn are exotic (which is a naughty word according to the article) likely based on the FR setting. Just fill up the Sword Coast with more dragonborn and reduce some of the other races. Then you won't have to deal with the vileness of that word.

Or you could just, I dunno, not include it in the first place and if people want it to be as such, they can add it at their game table.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Well then I think it should be easy to overwrite the default idea that dragonborn are exotic

It'd also be easy not to make them 'exotic' in D&D's ISO Standard weird passive-aggressiveness toward non-Tolkien species.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Or you could just, I dunno, not include it in the first place and if people want it to be as such, they can add it at their game table.

An argument that be used to allow or disallow literally any element in an RPG book. People keep throwing that idea out as if it settles the matter.

 

[Justice and Rule]

An argument that be used to allow or disallow literally any element in an RPG book. People keep throwing that idea out as if it settles the matter.

You're not wrong in the abstract, which is why we should discuss why we want to remove it. As it stands, is there much value in keeping it?

 

[AnotherGuy]

You're not wrong in the abstract, which is why we should discuss why we want to remove it. As it stands, is there much value in keeping it?

I would say it depends on the setting. Something sadly the author in his "extensive" audit was not able to comprehend given his laser focus.

 

[Guest 85555]

You're not wrong in the abstract, which is why we should discuss why we want to remove it.

Again, I would go back to my point about the things being criticized are often fundamental to the D&D, even the RPG experience. Here we are taking away what I would call non-essential but still important elements (half orcs and half elves). The game functions without those so you don't have to have them, but I think they add a lot. However many of the critiques have been about colonialism and how killing things and taking their stuff, even just the act of exploring a dungeon or wilderness, echo colonialist tropes. Increasingly I think you also see an imposition of real world morality (around say violence) into the settings too, and it just seems the logical conclusion of this type of hyper criticism leads to taking important and essential elements away from the game, maybe even making the game itself untenable.

 

[Micah Sweet]

You're not wrong in the abstract, which is why we should discuss why we want to remove it. As it stands, is there much value in keeping it?

Well, dragonborn are markedly different from every other PC species that has ever appeared in a D&D core book (all of which are on a mammalian base physically), so it's hard to look at a dragonborn and not see them as  very different. Adding a lot more of them into a setting in an attempt to "normalize" them would likely change the feel of said setting quite a bit and may not be desired.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Again, I would go back to my point about the things being criticized are often fundamental to the D&D, even the RPG experience. Here we are taking away what I would call non-essential but still important elements (half orcs and half elves). The game functions without those so you don't have to have them, but I think they add a lot. However many of the critiques have been about colonialism and how killing things and taking their stuff, even just the act of exploring a dungeon or wilderness, echo colonialist tropes. Increasingly I think you also see an imposition of real world morality (around say violence) into the settings too, and it just seems the logical conclusion of this type of hyper criticism leads to taking important and essential elements away from the game, maybe even making the game itself untenable.

This is why I've been asking what people who have a problem with these things want D&D to be.

 

[Guest 85555]

That sounds a lot like the Native American Nations. It's terribly hard to come up with a description that can't be applied to some real world people somewhere if you want to find one to apply it to.

I think this is a lot of the problem. Fantasy races and fantasy cultures borrow from real world analogs and from cartoonish depictions in media all the time. I think while something like this could be used to make a genuinely racist setting with an actual racist message, most of the time, it is just taking what exists in the world, blending it and hopefully having something new and interesting. Sometimes it is handled in a disrespectful way, and I think designers should aim for treating things with respect. But the problem is the bar is so low now virtually any treatment that isn't exactly 100% what a group of people online say it should be, can get castigated. And I think that is a problem on a number of fronts. Not just for creative expression (which I think is extremely stifled when designers feel like they are walking on eggshells) but also for the actual exchange and learning about other cultures. What I have seen is more and more designs just say, well I am not even going to try doing anything outside my own culture and start sticking with their own culture (whatever that happens to be) and that to me seems like a recipe for people just locking themselves away from folks of other backgrounds. That doesn't mean offensive things don't happen and can't be called out, but it seems to me that we are really going over this stuff with fine toothed combs and we are all just a little more on edge with one another than is healthy for us to be.