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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DammitVictor" data-source="post: 9799674" data-attributes="member: 6750908">I don't know how to respond to a factual assertion that is this blatantly and thoroughly untrue. All of those things are powerfully influenced by the biology of the brain, up to and including the biology of the brain providing the necessary requirements for a person to exhibit any of these attributes.Other non-sapient (or debatably sapient) real world organisms don't display these qualities-- or display them in ways we don't understand-- entirely because the physical structure of their brains does not support human cognitive behavior. There are biological differences within the structures of human brains that (partially) account for these differences.That's debatable. A number of their legacy racial features from previous editions are purely cognitive-- you can argue that mining and dungeoneering as proficiencies are learned skills, but "stone sense" is an intellectual capacity that isn't displayed even by other ancestries that live in underground constructions.Also, they have a WIS bonus in some editions of D&D and a CHA penalty in most. (Ironically, not in the ones where Dwarf is a class.) Those are relatively significant differences in cognitive behavior and development.(Not that I'm praising the mechanic; merely pointing out that it's been part of the game for a long time. I don't like racial mods.)Isn't that the problem, the exact problem, this thread is asking to fix? The Tolkien races were also a lot less human in Tolkien's work and the process of them being aggressively humanized started i  AD&D-- when Gygax established separate race and class and then decided one of them didn't matter.Second Edition made them more human-- 99% of races can be Clerics, Fighters, and Thieves and 90% of them only those classes.Third Edition made them more human, by giving them unlimited access to every "base" character class and very few racial prestige classes to choose from.Fifth Edition made them more human again by removing all race-exclusive mechanics, and then by removing ability score mods. (A good change, but part of the problem.)Fourth Edition made it a little better, but then those changes got walked back. Several D&D offshoots have done some very clever things. But other than that, D&D has been making nonhuman PCs less special and different for going on fifty years.Of course they're barely even rubber forehead aliens anymore. The D&D fandom won't countenance any mechanical or narrative restriction that might say otherwise.Respectfully? You're not even doing that; you're basing how you think nonhuman minds must work in a fantasy game on a staggering level of denial of how human minds work.You're not wrong about us making it up as we go along, but you're being rigidly dogmatic about how we make it up as we go along-- based on axioms that are not even true in real life.But, at least, that's a baseline; we can start at that point and say that a dwarf is at least this much different from the average human, that they're at most this much different from the most exceptional human.I don't want them to conform perfectly to the stereotypes-- I want the stereotypes to be true enough that conformity and nonconformity are meaningful choices and people know what to expect so that it's possible for them to be surprised.Sure, fine. But people-- not you-- are trying to have it both ways. They want their funny hat to be unique and different, but then they want it to be able to do what everyone else's funny hat does, and then they complain that everyone else is infringing on their funny hat.You don't (seem to) want nonhuman fantasy races to be different from human cultures and peoples. I hate that, you have no idea how much I hate that, but at least you're not clamoring for mechanics to make them shiny and new and then whining until you can apply them to your other funny hats.Which is fair... and I guess I can see how you're getting that from what I'm saying. I'm not saying there's only One True Way, and I don't want there to be One True Way.Like I said earlier (in this post, I think: it's been a long day) I don't want all the stereotypes to be true; I want them to be true enough that players can make meaningful decisions whether to play into or against them. And I want player races to be defined objects within the game world, not just abstractions for game objects that may or may not be related.Narrative consistency is a load-bearing pillar of the kind of roleplaying I enjoy and I hate the fact that the developers and the new fans of the game I grew up with are actively and scornfully dismissing the very concept.You'll forgive me for my first response being, "yes, once would be a good start". You started this interaction by belittling my preferences and telling me it was a good thing nobody cared about them anymore. So... yeah. You don't get to pretend you've been taking the high road all this time.But yeah, if you want to try taking the high road now, I'll try to keep up.I think we can agree here. The problem isn't that I want dwarves-- or any other race-- to be just one thing, it's that I want them to be at least one thing. Axes and Moradin, sure, but I want the Chultan jungle dwarf to have identifiable mechanical and narrative traits in common with the Mithril Hall dwarf.And yeah, they do have to be a little less subtle than the traits almost all humans have in common, because most humans simultaneously do not recognize that they have traits in common while also being incapable or unwilling to believe that other humans don't share them.I don't like people very much.This, yeah. I want most dwarves to have some identifiable personality traits in common-- but alignment is a mess of hypocrisy. Hobgoblins are Lawful Evil and "cowardly" for the exact same behaviors that make Elves "clever" and Chaotic Good.Like, I would be very happy if dwarves and other playable ancestries came with a list of two or three things that are true-- yes, all dwarves, and you need a very good reason if yours isn't-- and a list of like eight or nine things everyone (including other dwarves) believes but only two or three of them actually have to be true.Point of the exercise isn't to force people to play 'to type', it's to have an actual type for them to play or against. Rules have to be rules for someone to be an exception to them.I don't mind the concept. It's actually pretty great... except when it's being used the way it's being used here, to make ancestry as a vestigial of a mechanic as alignment.I didn't start getting salty about Backgrounds until idiots started whining that it was unrealistic and insensitive for what species your parents were to modify your ability scores, so we had to make sure those bonuses came from what your parents did for a living instead. Because that makes complete sense, doesn't limit character options, and isn't offensive to people whose parents were actually criminals and peasants, the way species was offensive to people whose parents were tortles and gnomes.But a couple of skill picks and a minor social ribbon feature to represent having a normal job before becoming a tomb raider? That's good stuff.I don't mind the way they're set up in 14/24 (except the Hill/Mountain Dwarf), I just don't think "race" has carried enough weight in the official rules since AD&D, and I resent people trying to keep stripping out more and more of it.I popped into this thread to say A5E did a really good job with racial abilities, in a way that's compatible with the 21st century paradigm, even if they did also saddle the system with this nonsense.Well, for what it's worth, I only want one of those things, and I think the other two are as bad as you do. And I don't want the class restrictions to be nearly as restrictive (or as uniform) as they were in AD&D. Just enough to say "these are not human people; their capabilities are different".You're supposed to say that before the argument; it's much more effective that way.</blockquote>

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