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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Chaosmancer" data-source="post: 8370466" data-attributes="member: 6801228">Grouping this all together, because you've sort of missed the boat I was building. If biological essentialism means that your biology sets limits on your culture, then asking it about things like "I have wings" or "I breath fire" make no sense. Those things cannot limit culture. We don't ask this question about other species because, well, it is only recently that we've even started thinking some different species might have something similiar to culture. Culture is nearly entirely a human thing on Earth. So, we can't ask "what is the culture of ants" because as far as we can tell, they don't have one. And why don't they have one? It boils down, if I was to use DnD's highly simplistic model, to the mental stats.  Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma. The thing is, you can't make racial ASIs without including these, it is impossible. Even if you set out to say that strength and constitution don't impact culture at all, you can't escape from the fact that saying someone is less intelligent than someone else based on their race/species isn't something we want to encourage. Which then inevitably leads to the wrong questions. It leads to "but isn't a sea cucumber less intelligent than a raccoon, why isn't saying that a problem?" And this is the wrong question because the similiarities between the human scale, and the scale we have placed elves, dwarves, orcs, goblins, giants, ect ect ect is too big. Every "race" in DnD has reached the human level of intelligence and culture. None of them are at the level of sea cucumbers or of raccoons. So the question doesn't apply. Anything we normally say about a different species is usually at such a drastically different level, that it breaks the scale of DnD. Is it wrong to say that eagles have better eyesight than humans? No, but the difference is so vast that it would be impossible to model in the game of DnD.Why do elephants have a higher strength than badgers? Well, let us say that a badger can move double its weight, and a cursory glance shows that a high end badger weighs 40 lbs. So, they can move 80 lbs. That makes the elephant 175 time stronger. Do you think we can model that scale in DnD? Do you think that is useful in anyway? See, this is the illusion breaking. DnD ability scores have never been meant to accurately portray biology. Attempting to do so ends up ludicrous. We would need a system that goes from 1 to 1,000 not one that goes from 1 to 30. So, what we need to be asking is if it is worthwhile to try and accurately represent biology. Or, if instead... we try and model what is needed for combat in the game of DnD. Because 99% of the time, stats are only used for combat. I don't need to roll charisma for a dog, unless someone is using magic to charm it. And even that is kind of silly sometimes. So, do we want to highlight biological reality of different species, to accurately show that elephants are stronger than badgers, or do we want simply model what is useful for the game to model... which then raises the question, why is it useful to use the model to enforce a population model that we don't even care about? We need individual stats for our characters to be mechanically effective, we don't need to model the entire population of dwarves or elves like what was the goal of racial ASIs in the beginning.</blockquote>

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