Are they replacing D&D's blacktop playground with foam?

[Brown Jenkin]

The bigger problem I see is that a "community standards" clause no matter its intent or scope make this not an OGL but a d20 STL with WotC now responsible for monitoring anything and everything that is published under it. The whole point of an OGL was as a safe harbor where no litigation had to be feared. With this clause there will always be fear, justified or not, that whatever someome publishes might be deemed "bad" at some point in the future and they might be sued over it.

 

[Transit]

Half-Orcs are NEVER the result of Orcs raping human women, they're always the result of Human men being seduced by frisky Orc females.

Orc males have very strict taboos that prohibit having relations with "frail and weak" females from other species, but Human boys will be boys...

Does that fix it?

 

[Hussar]

The community standards clause does not ban certain things from D&D products. They ban them from non-WotC D&D products. This gives WotC the permanent advantage of being able to decide how far they want to go and push boundaries, while forcing all others to be careful about boundary-pushing.

Good.

I understand the cries of censorship and the like, but, for better or worse, this is a game played by a lot of teens. D&D books, with a "Compatible with the World's Most Popular RPG" tagline, featuring hentai tentacle porn is not something I particularly want associated with my hobby. I have no problem with a company that invests hundreds of thousands of dollars, having some say in what people do in the sandbox they have provided.

Because, at the end of the day, they're the ones who get to wear the bad press.

 

[DreamChaser]

Half-Orcs are NEVER the result of Orcs raping human women, they're always the result of Human men being seduced by frisky Orc females.

Orc males have very strict taboos that prohibit having relations with "frail and weak" females from other species, but Human boys will be boys...

Does that fix it?

*smile*

no, because at the end of the day, my character is pretty much guaranteed to have a "dark" origin shrouded in the shame and outcasting of one parent or another.

honestly, I dislike half-x races by definition; they aren't races but rather hybrids. If half elves were as common as they seem to be in most games, then they would start hooking up with each other and become a true breeding race (which, to my knowledge Eberron is the only campaign to ever come out and do; in that case, they even have a name (Korrivar) which unfortunately is too rarely used)

if they are so rare that they remain thought of as merely half-x, then they seem odd for a standard race.

That said, I agree with the idea of "sanitizing" this background. make them true breeding, make them NPCs, or get rid of them.

DC

 

[Asmor]

The community standards clause does not ban certain things from D&D products. They ban them from non-WotC D&D products. This gives WotC the permanent advantage of being able to decide how far they want to go and push boundaries, while forcing all others to be careful about boundary-pushing.

Unfortunately, they are owned by Hasbro. Thus, I suspect that WotC is laboring under even more restrictive guidelines than the so-called community standards, since Hasbro has a very real interest in protecting its name as a toy company which is best known for marketing toys to young children.

That's my biggest concern right there... I don't think that WotC themselves would be too heavy handed about it, by choice, but I do fear the fact that they're not the ones with the final say about what's okay and what's not.

 

[Arkhandus]

They did that with Races of Destiny. If you're going to monkey around like that though, you might as well make a new race entirely, like the Dragonborn.

Of course, a group of good half-orcs would be more like WoW...

Hrm. Maybe half-orcs could originate as humans who've been touched by the orcish deities, or orcs touched by the human deities?

Say, a human becomes the hero of an orcish tribe by chance, and the local shaman of Gruumsh blesses him in Gruumsh's name, making him an 'honorary orc' so to speak. The human is transformed and appears something like an orc, but still recognizably humanesque too. Ergo a half-orc.

As a half-orc, the blessed fellow can breed true with both humans and orcs, so his progeny would also be half-orcs (though after enough generations down the line, when breeding with pureblood humans or orcs, they'd just be orcs or humans as appropriate).

Similar situation: an orc orphan is adopted by humans, and the adoptive parents take him to be baptised in a church of Pelor. The holy water and baptism ceremony purges some of the orcish uglyness, savagery, and dull wits, granting the infant a more humanlike appearance and mentality, giving him at least a chance of being accepted into normal human society (and not just turning into a troublesome brute).

 

[Darrin Drader]

Half-Orcs are NEVER the result of Orcs raping human women, they're always the result of Human men being seduced by frisky Orc females.

Orc males have very strict taboos that prohibit having relations with "frail and weak" females from other species, but Human boys will be boys...

Does that fix it?

So as long as there remains second-tier frat houses and an unlimited supply of beer, there will always be half-orcs? Sounds reasonable to me.

Unfortunately, they are owned by Hasbro. Thus, I suspect that WotC is laboring under even more restrictive guidelines than the so-called community standards, since Hasbro has a very real interest in protecting its name as a toy company which is best known for marketing toys to young children.

That's my biggest concern right there... I don't think that WotC themselves would be too heavy handed about it, by choice, but I do fear the fact that they're not the ones with the final say about what's okay and what's not.

I'm sensing both foam and bubble wrap here, and I think you hit the nail on the head. The fact that there will be tieflings is mitigated by the fact that they no longer possess fiendish ancestry. I've never been a huge tiefling cheerleader, but I think watering them down is a mistake, and frankly, I don't even see a reason to include them in the core rules at all.

I'm not crazy about the idea of community standards in the first place, but I suppose it's a relatively small price to pay.

 

[Lanefan]

Yeah, my impression is that WoTC's stance is "Devil worship OK. Sexism not OK."

"Sexism not OK" is good. "Sex not OK" is bad.

Lanefan

 

[Fenes]

The webcomic "Dungeon Inc." has that backstory for its half-orc barbarian hero: The father, a human noble, was so drunk one night, he mistook the female orc ambushing him for a beautiful maiden - and seduced her.

Ed Greenwood's recent interview in the Kobold Quarterly #3, where he touches sex and the Realms, could be a sign that this is not some new moral crusade for a sex-free game, just an assurance that we won't get hit with FATAL-esque rape rules/fluff in game books.

 

[S'mon]

Agreed. Devil worship is pure fantasy, while sexism & rape are very real and very harmful to people in real life.

Being stabbed to death is also harmful to people in real life. But I don't see WoTC banning it from D&D. And there are no orcs IRL, rapist or otherwise.

Edit: Home invasion is also harmful to people in real life, and something I've had direct experience of (I chased the burglar away & the police caught him from fingerprint evidence). But I don't see WoTC banning it from D&D, a game centred on breaking into the homes of other people, killing them and taking their stuff. Furthermore half-orcs don't require on-screen rape in D&D, any more than they did in Tolkien. I wouldn't want the game to be advocating rape by PCs. But the idea that an indirect allusion to rape by an evil monster is unacceptable, is not something that sits well with me.