D&D General Demihumans of Color and the Thermian Argument

[squibbles]

So @Kobold Avenger started an interesting thread about diversity in D&D--in fantasy worlds broadly, really--and the degree to which 'races' that are not humans ought to be more representative of IRL humankind than they tend to be. I wanted to reply to that thread with a long and pedantic post, but at about 5 pages in it meandered into a long comic tangent about Dwarven luchadors (you do you, folks) so I am starting a new thread instead. A brief recap of that OP (if it's not still on the front page):

Previously only Humans were ever shown as being non-European in D&D, and the other common core races of Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes and Halflings were always depicted as being "white" even if some published campaign settings have for example said that some Dwarves have brown skin or that Wood Elves are "bronze" colored. Now I pick those four in particular because they're the most human-like (not counting the hybrids) and they're a core part of D&D along with all the classes and alignment, it's generally assumed they're there unless the DM says they aren't.

So if a player wants to play an "Asian" Elf or a "African" Dwarf, I suspect most DMs in most campaigns would just let them be with very little questions. It doesn't necessarily need to be fully explained why that Elf or Dwarf is like that. Some people might just want to have character who might be like them, or might fit some image they have (or justification for a class/subclass with a lot of cultural baggage). I'm approaching this as a Person of Color, who is a minority in the western country I live in. So I care less about cultural purity, and more about representation.
[...]
overall I feel that Humans should not be the only race with diversity as its thing. Despite whatever the origins of Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes and Halflings, in core D&D they are now far removed from their mythological Earth origins, so they don't need to be locked in as exclusively European.

There are some pretty obvious practical ways to handle diversity--inviting players to be co-creators of the setting and the peoples that live in it, imagining settings that are diverse to begin with, or, in an established setting, having generally modern sensibilities about ethnic difference--but the elephant in the room whenever this topic comes up is that elves, dwarves, and what have you are imaginary. Their differences are constructed from nothing but pop culture, and they can be recreated as symbols for anything a prospective DM, author, or screenwriter wants.

Any argument about what they are/should be in any particular setting is, ultimately, a Thermian Argument or an ethics/politics argument. It's either:

1. The tradition of description of elves in D&D (or other property) is that they are XYZ; elves need to have XYZ characteristic or they aren't really elves.
2. Elves should inclusively represent diverse groups--thereby promoting equality/fairness--and should, therefore, be unbound by prior XYZ conventions.

This seems to me to be kind of silly. Why do we have an emotional stake in peoples that are imaginary? To the extent that we invent fantastical creatures to inhabit fantastical worlds, why do we need to police our tropes or replicate our historical baggage in microcosm? Either elves, symbolically, are just people (who arbitrarily live 1000 years), and there's no particularly compelling reason that they shouldn't look like anything that people look like. Or--alternately--elves are not symbolic of people, in which case they look like a specific thing that is purposively orthogonal to people and has no relevance to contemporary concerns.

Consider, for example, how little it matters what color the fur of a Tabaxi is. Tabaxi are about as anthropomorphic as it gets, but our diversity concerns are basically irrelevant to them. Consider also dragonborn, yuan-ti, hobgoblins, loxodons, and so on.

So, my thinking is that, unless elves, dwarves, halflings, and gnomes are different enough from humans that we don't care about their race-politics, they are symbolically just lumpy humans. And lumpy humans don't need a different color scheme. Moreover, we should be honest with ourselves that lumpy humans don't really add much to D&D/fantasy fiction beyond just... humans.


...FYI, my elves have four arms and camouflage patterned skin--they are a back-to-nature luddite sect of space aliens that used crystal tech to engineer themselves for arboreal fitness.

 

[Zardnaar]

Doesn't bother me to much they're usually depicted as Caucasian because they originated in European folklore.

If they're from non European environment (or because magic) makes sense some will have different skin tones.

And pretty much anything makes Halflings and Gnomes more interesting good luck with that (I like Athasian Gnomes and Halflings).

 

[DammitVictor]

...FYI, my elves have four arms and camouflage patterned skin--they are a back-to-nature luddite sect of space aliens that used crystal tech to engineer themselves for arboreal fitness.

Antennae, like Insectare, and cow tails. They are insanely overconfident and reckless, by human standards, for their first couple of centuries... but as they age, they get much, much worse. The actual purpose of chromatic dragons, in the grand scheme of things, is to make sure that elves do not ever, ever, ever become gods.

I've never put much thought into what color their skin is, except that it isn't neon ROYGBIV like goblins are in that setting, or like elves are in most settings I have them.

EDIT: ON-TOPIC TAX: You make a solid point that the less humanlike a race is, the less we can superimpose human racial issues over them, the less concerned we are with the "diversity" of that race in fiction/mechanics. That's actually one of the reasons I so aggressively promote more inhuman lineages over the classic Tolkien Trio.

 

[Shiroiken]

While I don't care about the skin color of demi-humans (they could be bright orange for all I care), I do feel that too many people look upon the original demi-humans as just "funny looking humans." They should have a culture and mentality completely alien to our own (humans), which helps disassociate them from any real world baggage that they may have started with. My examples:

• Dwarves are so in tune with the earth, they can feel the difference between each type of metal and stone. Certain metals, particularly gold and mithral, evoke a joyful sensation within them unknown to others.
• Elves have no concern for normal material wealth, concerned only with beauty. They only use them when they have to deal with the other races.
• Gnomes are part of the ecology of small burrowing creatures, once having innate claws that have faded away. Most creatures see them as a type of large burrowing animal, rather than a humanoid.
• Halflings have several senses that allow them to differentiate each ingredient of food & drink. By examining tilled earth, they can tell how long it lay fallow and the best type of crop to grow.

Half-breeds are a bit problematic, because it should be based on the two parent races. Half-Elves are always human-elf hybrids, and so really are "funny looking humans." Half-orc blood burns hot, usually with rage from their orc parentage, but this is incorporated with the other parentage, giving them a more intense version.

 

[Dragonsbane]

We have 8 varieties of elves in our game, and between them every skin color imaginable is there. Same with humans, we have 8 subraces based on real world mixes of regions. All have different cultures, looks, traditions... and one could play an elf raised by the asian subrace we use, great concept, elven samurai or ninja! We also use racial modifiers in our games, and while OOC we are a diverse and accepting group, IC there is racism between different races, even subraces.

 

[Minigiant]

I just think too many RPGs and their fans run other races as different versions of humans. This is the core to the color diversity issue to me. If you make them act like humans, they should look like more versions of human. If you make the demihumans very human, you then must justify their existence. Then you must line that up with why they look how they look.

That's why my elves don't have human skin tones when I DM. Their hair and skin are first pure white and both change color with the seasons and which deities they worship the most. Wood Elves are green. They grey when they get older because they mentally no longer care enough about the world to change color.

 

[DammitVictor]

I am 1,000% down with weirding up the standard PHB races instead of (or in addition to) adding more weird new races, but it feels like the community at large is pulling very passionately in the other direction-- they seem to be allowed to have abilities and, especially, sensory abilities that differ from humanity, but any suggestion that they're less capable or wholly incapable of something humans can do is met with (sometimes harsh) pushback.

Which gets really frustrating sometimes, and I know I'm not helping my situation or the discourse any by lashing back.

---

Last setting I had dwarves in-- which I shelved to avoid purely human racism-- they didn't have darkvision; they could innately tell the total mass and density of any object in their line of sight, roughly, and more precisely than scientific instruments at the current tech level (1870-1920) by touch. This is how they could live underground without artificial light, and this is what made them such canny merchants and miners. They also had heavily skewed sex ratios that I did some neat things with, culturally.

They also have the obsessive focus thing from Dark Sun.

My elves... in addition to being physically weird (think 2e insectare plus huldra), I took the "change sex at long rest" thing and ran with. Adult elves, by human standards, are insanely overconfident and reckless and instead of mellowing and maturing with age, they just get worse and worse until something kills them.

Gnomes, on the other hand, aren't brave. They're utterly fearless, but not driven by the same innate braggadocio that keeps most elves from seeing their third century. They don't know fear, they have little regard for pain, and the only thing keeping them from being sociopathic-- in human terms-- is their borderline telepathic ability to read people and a powerful drive to seek and spread joy. Gnomes know things, getting bardic knowledge and legend lore as racial abilities.

 

[mhd]

They should have a culture and mentality completely alien to our own (humans), which helps disassociate them from any real world baggage that they may have started with

The problem is that it's very hard to come up with a mindset that both separates them from human cultures, while still being able to play them. Or at least play them with a decent enough sense of immersion.
Never mind that a lot of alien abilities often have some baggage of their own.

 

[Fanaelialae]

The problem is that it's very hard to come up with a mindset that both separates them from human cultures, while still being able to play them. Or at least play them with a decent enough sense of immersion.
Never mind that a lot of alien abilities often have some baggage of their own.

As someone who likes to give their demihumans an inhuman mindset, I don't really see this as a problem. Only a fraction of my players over the years have deeply engaged with the lore to such a level. Often times, their characters were played as "funny looking humans". I use this as an opportunity to spotlight the distinction. NPCs will comment what an unusual elf/dwarf/whatever they are. More often than not, the player takes this as a compliment IME, because it makes them feel unique.

At the end of the day, while I make the setting, it's their character and they can play it as they like. If they want to be the most human-minded elf in the world, that's fine. The world will respond to them as such, and the game will be all the richer for it.

 

[DEFCON 1]

We humans are playing the demi-humans. Thus all our demi-humans are not going to be truly alien, because everything these characters do is colored by how we humans play them. Everything these demi-humans are, how they behave, what is important to them... is always going to be in relation to humanity. It is impossible for it to be otherwise.

Vulcans are the epitome of logic. Why do we define them that way? Because we are comparing that species to how human beings are, and in the "scale of logic" humans are at one point and Vulcans comparatively are much moreso. Likewise... how typical dwarves are is in comparison to how we describe the typical human. If they are described as "gruff", it is because we know how gruff humans are, and dwarves are moreso. Elves are more "ethereal"? Yes, compared to humans. And when we play these races... we are affecting an attitude that is just further in a direction away from how we as humans might typically behave. But our behaviors are still human... they are just more stereotyped and over-emphasized.

So what this means is that yes... ALL aliens and fantasy races and such are portrayed as nothing more than funny-looking humans... because we as humans have no reference for anything else. All we have is our experience as human beings. Which means that every single non-human race we play in D&D (or any game) is going to be a representation of humanity in some form or fashion... and because we wish to play them, we are going to want to imbue them with our individual humanity-- including both attitudes and visual representation.

If elves are just a facet of humanity dialed up to 11... if you are Pakastani, why wouldn't you want to to have an elf that is dialed up to 11 that looks, feels, and embodies many of the traits that you have as a proud member of that nation? You desire to play an elf... thus you wish to layer the stereotypical elven traits upon your humanity. And why would anyone want to deny that experience for you?

Representation matters. Including in "almost-but-not-quite-humans".