D&D 5E WotC On Tasha, Race, Alignment: A Several-Year Plan

Lanefan said:

I'll give you that "people" has slowly been changing to "monsters" over time and that this change is still in progress; but otherwise killing things and taking their stuff is every bit as front-and-center as ever.

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At your table, maybe. Meanwhile the rest of the gaming community has moved on to a model of D&D that is generally more about completing quests. Violent conflicts are of course still a major part of the game, but it’s rare that these conflicts are initiated by the protagonists unprovoked. It’s not killing monsters and taking their stuff, it’s protecting villages from bandit raiders, recovering stolen goods, or saving the world from cults to evil gods.

Crimson Longinus said:

I find it really unfortunate that they half-arsed this. Pretty much no one is happy with what they did. Neither the people who wanted changes nor those who didn't are satisfied with what we got. I always felt that the real issue was never the rules (aside the alignment), it was how the races were represented in the fiction and this does nothing to that, and furthermore their 'rebalancing' of the races is just an utter mess from mechanical perspective.

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Isn't that why it is a multiyear plan? These are just the first steps on along journey from what I understand

DemoMonkey said:

The switch from a default "Entire cultures can be uniformly bad or good but some individuals may not be" to a default "Cultures cannot be uniformly good or bad, but individuals may be" is an interesting one. The effect on playstyle is to significantly limit the ability of non-evil PC groups to strike first.

You go from "kill em unless there is a clear and present indicator that is wrong" to "never kill em unless there is a clear and present indicator that is right".

It may be more nuanced, but I question if it is more fun.

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I attempted to encourage the players in my current campaign to not kill intelligent creatures by default by having them at one point be accompanied by a pacifistic priestess who at one point used Calm Emotions to stop a group of goblins from attacking. I also had a gnoll NPC whose personal goal was to learn how to fight without being overcome by killing intent.

It didn't work. They fight to kill every time. I guess I can make it so that some of the relatives of the enemies' they've killed seek revenge when otherwise they wouldn't have.

Crimson Longinus said:

To be fair, some people have decried 'biological essentialism' and unless we replace it with 'cultural essentialism' the logical conclusion is that all differences between the races must be removed.

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Haha yeah. If people paid attention AND were not literal, this would be obvious. But again, dead horse abuse.

Charlaquin said:

At your table, maybe. Meanwhile the rest of the gaming community has moved on to a model of D&D that is generally more about completing quests. Violent conflicts are of course still a major part of the game, but it’s rare that these conflicts are initiated by the protagonists unprovoked. It’s not killing monsters and taking their stuff, it’s protecting villages from bandit raiders, recovering stolen goods, or saving the world from cults to evil gods.

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I don't know. Do you have any data to back that up? Why make such a claim? Why not just say: "some of the gaming community...." I I get your argument, but the way you stated is simply incorrect if any other group still plays like murder hobos. Since I know of at least three who do, you statement is wrong. It really undermines the point of your argument when it starts with a falsehood.

"At your table, maybe. Meanwhile the rest of the gaming community has moved on"

Was that intended to sound superior and judgmental, or was that unintentional?

Crimson Longinus said:

To be fair, some people have decried 'biological essentialism' and unless we replace it with 'cultural essentialism' the logical conclusion is that all differences between the races must be removed.

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Yes, both biological essentialism and cultural essentialism are poor reasons for orcs to universally be better barbarians and worse wizards than everyone else. Which is why giving them a bonus to the game statistics that the majority of barbarians’ abilities key off of and a penalty to the game statistics that the majority of wizard abilities key off of is a bad idea. Biological essentialism is not a bad reason to say that orcs are taller, or able to carry more, or see better in the dark than other races. Those traits just aren’t problematic in the same way.

dave2008 said:

I don't know. Do you have any data to back that up? Why make such a claim? Why not just say: "some of the gaming community...." I I get your argument, but the way you stated is simply incorrect if any other group still plays like murder hobos. Since I know of at least three you do, you statement is wrong. It really undermines the point of your argument when it starts with a falsehood.

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That’s fair.

Charlaquin said:

At your table, maybe. Meanwhile the rest of the gaming community has moved on

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No. This is not a legitimate generalization you're making. I pointed out multiple adventures WOTC published for 5e demonstrating their support for that play style. I mentioned some do still enjoy that play style, in addition to other kinds of play styles, and several others here have said they agree. You had no response.

Your continued mischaracterization of that play style as somehow extreme-fringe to the point where you'd accuse that poster of it being JUST his table and the entire "rest of the gaming community" is different than that poster is gate-keeping and baloney.

So, why are you engaging in this kind of gate keeping? Are you trying to make someone feel alienated in what they enjoy in D&D? Why are you telling people there is only one acceptable way now to play and it's not the one he enjoys? I want to know your motivation for this kind of behavior. Are you just having a bad day or something?

Lanefan said:

I'll give you that "people" has slowly been changing to "monsters" over time and that this change is still in progress; but otherwise killing things and taking their stuff is every bit as front-and-center as ever.

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I'd argue that while this is entirely true, the killing/taking aspect is less the point of the exercise than it used to be. Back in very early D&D, you'd have adventures centred around actual treasure seeking. Dungeon of the Fire Opal etc. PCs who explicitly got together to go adventuring to seek treasure.

This is something that has been de-emphasised progressively over time. I can't think of the last D&D adventure where the primary character motivation was 'find cool treasure X for the benefit of my personal wealth!' SKT - stop the giant attacks. ToA - fix broken resurrection magic. Rime - end the eternal winter. They're in-world benevolent goals, and in many cases a lot of the intermediate steps to achieving these goals can be achieved without violence. The killing and the taking is incidental to the goal, rather than central. Not to say that old-school adventures like this didn't exist, or even weren't common, but these days you simply don't see the default assumption that PCs are treasure-hunting in modules any more.

None of which changes the fact that the 'gameplay loop' (as the video game jargon goes) is very kill thing/take stuff focused. Combat in D&D is time-intensive and we all spend a lot of real-world game time on it. But (without looking) I'd guess that the proportion of the PHB devoted to combat rules in 5e is probably smaller in relation to stuff about character motivations and backgrounds for instance, than it has been in any other D&D version. The emphasis has evolved and changed massively, and the evolution is generally away from killing/taking. This isn't a new thing either, it's been in progress for many years.