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Message: <blockquote data-quote="InkTide" data-source="post: 9576070" data-attributes="member: 7048463">This feels a little bit like trying to still have their cake after the ship has sailed away with it and the crew ate it.I'm not (just) mashing idioms together for fun here - family-friendliness in practice is largely dependent on the DM and the players. There's also plenty of baseline stuff well outside that image already in the game. One could argue foundationally so. Is the message they're now incidentally sending about 'ancestral purity' and 'personhood' family-friendly? I personally don't think so, but to be clear, I am also certain it was unintentional.I don't think this was a concerted thematic/narrative/philosophical push, really - I get the distinct impression that the changes to humanoid in particular are a mechanical/meta push with narrative implications they now have to kludge around. Mechanical for the few game systems that care about it, and meta for the out-of-game fear of stuff like giving orcs and drow statblocks. There's just a whole new avenue of controversy they opened by trying to condense all the humanoids into species-agnostic stat blocks and thus creating a type difference within species. It's... well, it's very WotC.I'd personally prefer stat blocks for playable species regardless of "expected alignment/hostility" (and that alignment - the only thing in a block of RAW text that explicitly isn't RAW - be removed entirely from stat blocks)... but I'd also probably okay a 1500 page Monster Manual if I were inexplicably in charge of this and bankrupt WotC with printing expenses.I'm used to the size constraints of digital libraries in my day-to-day, you see.This is what "they're bandits" or "they're cultists" etc. is used for. D&D isn't built for treating even human bandit lives with sanctity - everything except the PCs is a 'monster' according to the new PHB rules glossary, including NPCs (it even explicitly calls out benevolent NPCs as also being monsters). Sanctity of life in D&D is one of the more explicitly DM-dependent themes, but nothing about the game's structure implies killing a thousand humanoid goblins is any narratively different from killing a thousand fey goblins. Whether they were "just a goblin infestation you purged" or "goblins with lives and hopes and dreams and families you massacred" at that table, their type only mattered mechanically in that it possibly allowed wasting spell slots to Hold Person a goblin. Narratively it's just giving the dead goblins some dubiously coherent backstory about them being 'de-feyed' or not.The actual narrative difference in the value of their lives is entirely independent of the type in the stat block. Same as it is for the now mechanically extra-homogenized humanoid enemies.</blockquote>

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