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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Malmuria" data-source="post: 8369693" data-attributes="member: 7030755">We do have a framework, which are the tropes and language used to define otherness and dehumanize individuals and groups in recent and continuing history.  It's a framework, though, amenable to argumentation and historical citation but not reducible to a one page checklist.Let's say as a rule of thumb (that is, a quick summation of an aspect of that larger framework, not a set-in-ston-apply-in-all-cases type of rule), we say giving different creatures inherent physical abilities--like flying, not having to sleep, being resistant to fire, breathing electricity, or shooting lasers out their eyes--is a kind of essentialism or archetype-making that is not likely in itself to cause correspond to real-world bigotry, and so is generally ok.  But that ascribing what we usually think of as individual personality traits to entire species is more likely to be similar to the language employed by real world racism (and moreover, reductive and simplistic world building.Between the two comments quoted above, you seem to be arguing that the former (differentiation by physical/supernatural abilities) is cosmetic and superficial and thus not worth bothering over and that thus the latter (assigning individual personality traits to entire creatures, wholescale) is the only way to provide meaningful differentiation?    I think this is an unreasonable demand.  Differentiating fantasy creatures by their supernatural abilities, shooting lasers out of their eyes for example, is a very practical and actionable method of differentiating fantasy biology from culture in a way that could both remove problematic language and provide opportunities for richer worldbuilding.  Maybe it's not completely internally consistent, in one view, that readers would be offended by a fantasy race that was uniformly hot tempered but not one that could uniformly shoot lasers from their eyes, but that's why we have a framework for reading and not a determinative one page checklist when we design and play games.side note on this discussion: have elves, dwarves, or halflings ever been described as truly alien in any edition of dnd?  To my knowledge, they have always been very human-like.  From the 1e PHB, p. 15:Indeed, the succeeding race descriptions in that book hardly mention personality differences and focus instead on physical abilities (and languages)</blockquote>

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