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The 2nd edition Monstrous Manual had humans in it, but no statblock for a normal human, only bandits etc.

lol at Klingon society being "feudal" and "authoritarian".... they're different things! Most feudal societies were not authoritarian because the complex ties of loyalty and feudal service meant no king could act without the consent of his powerful vassals. Authoritarianism emerged in the modern...

No, no, it's all good. New players can just use the orc statblock from the Monster Manual that was printed 10 years ago and has been superseded and will shortly disappear from all storefronts.

Hilariously because I'm not American those orcs look more to me like Boers on the Veldt. And I thought, they've turned the orcs into Afrikaners? Bold choice...

I'm familiar with it, and it's not a particularly compelling argument. It's pretty much "oikophobia" in that certain things can't be said, not because there's anything wrong about those words in particular, but that they might inflame the sensitivities of the less-educated or less-intelligent in...

That sounds like what happened with that THAC0 npc in the Witchlight publication!

Oh no, WoTC long ago decided the multiverse means no setting can have its own identity. You can have a toolbox and have some basic lore. 2E seemed far more toolboxy to me than 5E and it had a stack of lore. And orc statblocks that managed to not talk about Gruumsh.

Strangely elves in D&D seem less complex than Tolkien's are - have a look at some of the stuff they got up to in the Silmarillion. All of this is testament to WoTC's general lack of imagination and wimpiness when it comes to these things - instead of complexity and diversity we just get vanilla...

I find the easiest way to avoid othering any group in your homebrew is to exercise your creative chops and write some lore from their perspective. So I combine goblinoids or orcs etc into one group in my homebrew, who call themselves "Orschans" (orc being a term others call them). Now both elves...

Historically there's been quite a great swath of humanity who have very much seen a "might is right" type of view as being righteous. I'd have a read on how the Mongols saw themselves versus other cultures. Quite an alien cultural viewpoint to what a 21st century westerner might expect.

They've been applying that philosophy for any TSR-era setting they revived recently so why not make it true across the board.

As a non-American I will say a lot of orc descriptions (particularly more modern ones) seem to be awfully close into making them what people commonly conceive as of American stereotypes. Yes, all of those should have statblocks. (like in 2E). (By the way, there is a tiefling acrobat in keys...

So the "Bothered about Dungeons and Dragons" crew had a point then?

"We're bringing [x] back with a fresh new look to appeal to today's audiences!"

Oh wow, I only ever saw the first one.

That would require everyone to confront the real "problematic" part of D&D, the huge amounts revolving around violence and the casual reaction to that. Far easier (and safer) to just pretend you've solved the problem by deleting a whole bunch of humanoids from the Monster Manual and draining...

Yep that’s the biggest issue for me, it all amounts to creating a product that when it comes down to it, has less utility than the one produced 10 years ago.

I’m pretty sure you vastly misunderstood both Tolkien and his core beliefs if that’s what you got from his writings. He also was pretty well known for not thinking of his works as allegorical.

Except that D&D goblins/hobgoblins have almost nothing to do with traditional mythological goblins? You might as well start calling D&D medusa "gorgons" because that's what they are in myth.