D&D General Demihumans of Color and the Thermian Argument

[mhd]

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.

Sorry, I'm sure that's presented in a much better light at the table, but from here this sounds like the players are set up to fail and then reprimanded for not being deep enough into the lore. Where every PC is almonst inevitably a Drizzt (not even a Spock).

Why would we write this in the background of a setting like this then in the first place? Plausible deniability?

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

I feel the push for more self-representation in game alien races tend to make them even less alien. @DEFCON 1 mentionned that we already define other species by comparison to humans and that it's very difficult to roleplay anything else than "funny looking humans with a differentating trait". But the more alien species are described as closely resembling humans ("hello, I am a pakistani-looking elf") the more difficult it is to assign them non-human traits.

Humans are not known from their tolerance to other species. With the exception of a few pets that we adopt but impose a lifestyle onto anyway, we tend to either eat them or destroy them (and their habitat) for our convenience. An alien species could very well see demi-XYZ with the same view we image having sex with animal. And should have no more qualm at killing humans as we have qualm at killing a dangerous animal. Most of us wouldn't go out of our way to kill a bear -- though some do it for sports -- but most wouldn't balk at the idea of eliminating crocodiles from a settled area. If you're in a world where the elves are like that, where they justify the Wild Hunt as a fun sport and kidnapping human children to replace them with changeling like acquiring a pet, is it really important to have them "representative" of your ethnicity? Would it be even acceptable to have a pakistani-looking elf slaver race? (because, it's not slavery, it's owning a pet... Humans have dogs, don't they?) Of course, humans would say that they are sentient being, something the elves could very well not recognize as a good criterion for determining who you own and who you treat as equal). Wouldn't you want that alien elf NOT to resemble humans at all?

Instead we're entering a self-feeding loop: people want to play inhuman races (including clearly monstrous ones, like the Tolkien orcs or the Dark Elves) but they want to roleplay them as "funny looking human" (hence the conceit of "I am from Menzoberranzan, but I'm special) that is the transitional step, then everyone want to play them as human with stat bonuses, then as they are cleary recognized as human, people want to identify with them and self-insert in the setting (instead of aknowledging that they are playing a role, like an actor playing Hitler in a movie not being actually embracing Third Reich ideology) and then, ultimately, it becomes difficult from writers of a particular setting to assign inhuman mentality to inhuman species because of the way most of them are played. And since they are depicted as quasi-humans and not from another species, people will want to play them as humans... until the point when they are effectively funny looking humans in the lore, and we could make them humans altogether with just cultural differences without losing anything.

 

[Fanaelialae]

Sorry, I'm sure that's presented in a much better light at the table, but from here this sounds like the players are set up to fail and then reprimanded for not being deep enough into the lore. Where every PC is almonst inevitably a Drizzt (not even a Spock).

Why would we write this in the background of a setting like this then in the first place? Plausible deniability?

They're not set up to fail. Some players engage deeply with the lore and others don't. Those who don't will not receive a reprimand, but rather will be remarked upon as such: "Don't take this the wrong way, but you sir are the most peculiar elf I've ever had the delight of meeting!" I can't recall a single time a player of mine took something like that in a negative light. Quite the opposite, actually.

 

[DEFCON 1]

Instead we're entering a self-feeding loop: people want to play inhuman races (including clearly monstrous ones, like the Tolkien orcs or the Dark Elves) but they want to roleplay them as "funny looking human" (hence the conceit of "I am from Menzoberranzan, but I'm special) that is the transitional step, then everyone want to play them as human with stat bonuses, then as they are clearly recognized as human, people want to identify with them and self-insert in the setting (instead of aknowledging that they are playing a role, like an actor playing Hitler in a movie not being actually embracing Third Reich ideology) and then, ultimately, it becomes difficult from writers of a particular setting to assign inhuman mentality to inhuman species because of the way most of them are played. And since they are depicted as quasi-humans and not from another species, people will want to play them as humans... until the point when they are effectively funny looking humans in the lore, and we could make them humans altogether with just cultural differences without losing anything.

This is how it has always been since the game was invented. 99.99% of people play what they think is cool... not to get into the mindset of an alien creature and trying to give an accurate representation of what being that type of creature would be. This is a game first and foremost, not an acting exercise.

How many people out here have had long philosophical arguments with themselves about how a truly "long-lived" species might behave? How would an 600 year old elf actually act? And how would you portray that at every game session, in every roleplay encounter, and in every combat? Why is this elf going out to "adventure" now, after 600 years, to team up with these insolent Humans who just can't sit still? Does that kind of stuff actually enter your mind on every decision you make when your wood elf rogue is leading your party members into some deadly dungeon? My guess is 99.99% of you do not. Instead, your experience is the same as most of us... your PC (whatever race it is) goes into the dungeon and kills stuff and takes their treasure. The exact same methodology players have had for over 40 years, whether they were playing humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, gnomes or whomever.

And with that methodology... it doesn't matter in the slightest what the color of skin your PC has. So if you want it to match your own regardless of the race... there's absolutely no reason for you not to be able to do it.

 

[Shardstone]

Why do we need an emotional stake in imaginary people?

Because we people of color are sick and tired of seeing nothing but white people in Fantasy. White elves, white gnomes, white halflings, white dwarves, etc. And when you're white, it is whatever. But when you're not white, especially in today's racial climate (specifically in America), it sure makes the entire hobby seem a lot more alienating to see that you aren't represented in the vast majority of the art, and that your skin color never gets to be shared by anything as awesome or cool as elves.

 

[Zardnaar]

This is how it has always been since the game was invented. 99.99% of people play what they think is cool... not to get into the mindset of an alien creature and trying to give an accurate representation of what being that type of creature would be. This is a game first and foremost, not an acting exercise.

How many people out here have had long philosophical arguments with themselves about how a truly "long-lived" species might behave? How would an 600 year old elf actually act? And how would you portray that at every game session, in every roleplay encounter, and in every combat? Why is this elf going out to "adventure" now, after 600 years, to team up with these insolent Humans who just can't sit still? Does that kind of stuff actually enter your mind on every decision you make when your wood elf rogue is leading your party members into some deadly dungeon? My guess is 99.99% of you do not. Instead, your experience is the same as most of us... your PC (whatever race it is) goes into the dungeon and kills stuff and takes their treasure. The exact same methodology players have had for over 40 years, whether they were playing humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, gnomes or whomever.

And with that methodology... it doesn't matter in the slightest what the color of skin your PC has. So if you want it to match your own regardless of the race... there's absolutely no reason for you not to be able to do it.

There used to be articles in Dragon about things like that.

An elf could tell you about first hand knowledge of Elizabethan England, Fall of Constaninople, America's being "discovered".

Older Elves might remember the Mongols,the last land areas being reached by humans, the Crusades etc.

Depending on edition and subrace the oldest Elves might remember Rome, Jesus, rise of Islam etc.

Human scholar could just go and ask them what they witnessed.

 

[Professor Murder]

Woof.
It's a heavy topic. Most "Demihumans" in rpgs spring from Tolkien. As a result, most times, Dwarves, Elves, Halflings and Gnomes are pastiches of various European cultural tropes. As a result, they tend to be depicted as white. Gaming has long laboured under the spectre of being a "white man only" hobby. As a result, the natural inertia is to reinforce the white-centered narrative of how the humans and near human races are depicted. As such, there will be this persisting tendency to if not defend than to give a pass to the overwhelming whiteness of the setting. It is something the hobby will struggle to move past. Be mindful of when you find yourself siding with scoundrels. When you throw up your hands and say "I don't understand why anyone needs to play a black halfling," perhaps you are not doing so because you want to keep some people out of our hobby, but understand that: A) Said people may reasonable view it as you do not want to make space for them and B) Bigots rightly view your indifference as a win.

"But Prof! Are you saying I am being racist?"

Who knows. But you aren't doing any favors to those fighting racism in our hobby.

 

[Steampunkette]

So... The Thermian Argument is misplaced at best for 4 core reasons and dozens of more minor ones.

1) Flesh as we know it doesn't have a myriad of different colors across the spectrum. Feathers, Scales, Chitin, and Hair can have an array of different colors due to the way different chemical compounds suspended in a thin piece of keratin can reflect and refract light, but having those chemicals in flesh to a density that alters the tone of flesh is either damaging or extremely unusual in the requirements to get it to stay a given color. Take Sjorgen's Syndrome or "Papa Smurf" Syndrome. Dry mucosal tissues and eyes, nerve damage, swollen glands, brain fog, dental issues, and chronic coughing. Meanwhile Lycopenemia, orange-red skin from ingesting too much red foods, requires a constant continued intake of red foods to keep your skin that unusual color but has no long term side effects except looking weird. If a creature has Flesh as we understand it (Skin, dermal tissues, fat, muscle, blood) it's gonna be somewhere on a scale from albino to hypermelanistic with very few outlying options caused primarily by environmental interactions.

2) Unless your D&D world has a drastically different surface environment than Earth (And pretty much every D&D Setting is just Earth with Different Geography) where humans, dogs, monkeys, deer, and foxes have "Evolved" in the same way as on Earth, there's no significant environmental expectation for Purple six-armed elves with a single eye in their forehead.

3) The Gods are generally the ones creating all the player races rather than actual evolution. Which, y'know, -explains- why the worlds are all earth-like and have dogs and foxes and otters and bears and stuff.

4) You're trying to use a discussion of Alien Life to discount the possibility of players enjoying an environment where they have representations of themselves in a fantasy setting. Like. Maybe you enjoy a situation where you can flick on a TV Screen or pop open a Fantasy Novel and be abjectly certain that SOMEONE on that screen or in that narrative is gonna look like or be like you in enough ways for you to envision yourself in that role, but it ain't that way for the rest of us most of the time. And using infantilizing speech such as "This seems to me to be kind of silly. Why do we have an emotional stake in peoples that are imaginary?" is just the cherry on top for the dismissive ice-cream sundae.

People crave representation. That's all. Enjoy your settings where you get into ridiculously wild crazy stuff. Lots of people will. But that's massively irrelevant to the actual question of people wanting to play characters who are like themselves.

 

[Cap'n Kobold]

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):


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.

I think that the intent of the thread is that in (generally pre 5e) D&D art, most of the human-like races were depicted as "white" - Which satisfies neither of your conditions.

If Elves, Dwarves, Halflings and Gnomes are all non-human enough that human diversity concerns no longer apply, then there is no particular reason why most of their skin colours would all be the same as a specific ethnicity of humans.

If Elves, Dwarves, Halflings and Gnomes are all human enough that human diversity concerns do apply, then they should show that diversity, rather than all the illustrations defaulting to the same shade as a single ethnicity of humans.

 

[Zardnaar]

So... The Thermian Argument is misplaced at best for 4 core reasons and dozens of more minor ones.

1) Flesh as we know it doesn't have a myriad of different colors across the spectrum. Feathers, Scales, Chitin, and Hair can have an array of different colors due to the way different chemical compounds suspended in a thin piece of keratin can reflect and refract light, but having those chemicals in flesh to a density that alters the tone of flesh is either damaging or extremely unusual in the requirements to get it to stay a given color. Take Sjorgen's Syndrome or "Papa Smurf" Syndrome. Dry mucosal tissues and eyes, nerve damage, swollen glands, brain fog, dental issues, and chronic coughing. Meanwhile Lycopenemia, orange-red skin from ingesting too much red foods, requires a constant continued intake of red foods to keep your skin that unusual color but has no long term side effects except looking weird. If a creature has Flesh as we understand it (Skin, dermal tissues, fat, muscle, blood) it's gonna be somewhere on a scale from albino to hypermelanistic with very few outlying options caused primarily by environmental interactions.

2) Unless your D&D world has a drastically different surface environment than Earth (And pretty much every D&D Setting is just Earth with Different Geography) where humans, dogs, monkeys, deer, and foxes have "Evolved" in the same way as on Earth, there's no significant environmental expectation for Purple six-armed elves with a single eye in their forehead.

3) The Gods are generally the ones creating all the player races rather than actual evolution. Which, y'know, -explains- why the worlds are all earth-like and have dogs and foxes and otters and bears and stuff.

4) You're trying to use a discussion of Alien Life to discount the possibility of players enjoying an environment where they have representations of themselves in a fantasy setting. Like. Maybe you enjoy a situation where you can flick on a TV Screen or pop open a Fantasy Novel and be abjectly certain that SOMEONE on that screen or in that narrative is gonna look like or be like you in enough ways for you to envision yourself in that role, but it ain't that way for the rest of us most of the time. And using infantilizing speech such as "This seems to me to be kind of silly. Why do we have an emotional stake in peoples that are imaginary?" is just the cherry on top for the dismissive ice-cream sundae.

People crave representation. That's all. Enjoy your settings where you get into ridiculously wild crazy stuff. Lots of people will. But that's massively irrelevant to the actual question of people wanting to play characters who are like themselves.

Generally I don't care to much it has to be vaguely plausible though unless it's not a vaguely humanoid species.

Current campaign Drow. One player played a kobold one is looking at a mountain dwarf.

Previous game was Caribbean. Anything skin tone from America's, Africa, Europe was fine. I may have said no to a Samurai or something but it never came up.

Previous to that was Nuria Natal (not Egypt). Everyone was not white apart from that one guy who wanted a not Viking and Midgard has that as an option so I allowed it.

Generally I prefer somewhat locals vs far off lands but somewhat far off is plausible so I usually allow that.

The player pick the theme though and 80% of then tend to roll with it and pick the spotlighted options..

Midgard doesn't have Drow and elves are Uber rare so I wasn't allowing either I Nuria Natal but they have a not Egyptian Dwarf which is cool.