D&D General Demihumans of Color and the Thermian Argument

[Charlaquin]

If I have a patriarchal society, I have it for a reason. I'm not going to Red Sonja women (or anyone else) but many societies are patriarchal whether I like it or not and whether I think it's a good thing or not. There are certain stories - off the top of my head a riff off of Mulan - that can only be told with that kind of society.

On the other hand, for some people certain things do cut too close to home which is why I tend to avoid it or to make the societies "foreign". There's several areas I'm going to avoid unless I've run it by my players first. It's a complicated subject. Having a campaign set in ancient Rome that had accurate social standards could be problematic, or at least lead to questions of morality that personally I don't want to deal with in a D&D game for example. What I'm objecting to is that in the link provided there were aspects of the fiction that were implied to be "bad" because of in-world justification and that was the end of the argument.

Not sure how to explain it better than saying I have a patriarchal society because I think it's preferable and I'm indulging in my personal fantasy or I have a patriarchal society because it makes sense for the world logic.

I think you may have misunderstood me. I’m not saying any of this is bad or wrong to do in your setting, or that you don’t have good reasons for it. I’m saying… well, pretty much what @jmartkdr2 said in response to your same comment, only not as eloquently as they said it.

 

[squibbles]

Sure, there’s nothing wrong with fantasy races with little to no resemblance to humans. Dragonborn are a good example of this. But a lot of the staple fantasy races - elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes, etc. do look very human, and are therefore likely to have ethnically-coded features, even if the artist doesn’t consciously design them that way. You can avoid the most obvious features like skin tone easily enough, but there are other things, like facial proportions for example, that can unintentionally suggest an ethnicity. And in a world where whiteness is treated as the default, artists often end up unconsciously coding characters white if they aren’t consciously trying to code them nonwhite.

Furthermore, even in a hypothetical fantasy world where no races resembled humans - a setting populated entirely by dragonborn, warforged, thri-kreen, and other races typically considered “too weird” by the same people who complain of elves and dwarves being too human - would that be better? I don’t know. It feels to me like if there’s a problem of POC not being able to find characters that look like them, making sure white folks can’t find characters that look like them either is a worse solution than adding characters that look like POC.

That's an interesting thought experiment. I tend to be drawn to settings that are humanocentric but with lots of "too weird" creatures in the secondary cast, such as Bas-Lag.

But removing humanlike creatures entirely would be quite different. I wonder if characters would fall into the first half of the uncanny valley--and be relateable because they are sufficiently different enough for us to project ourselves onto them--or be generally less relatable/interesting.

It might not be better, but I think the novelty would be welcome anyway.

 

[Charlaquin]

That's an interesting thought experiment. I tend to be drawn to settings that are humanocentric but with lots of "too weird" creatures in the secondary cast, such as Bas-Lag.

But removing humanlike creatures entirely would be quite different. I wonder if characters would fall into the first half of the uncanny valley--and be relateable because they are sufficiently different enough for us to project ourselves onto them--or be generally less relatable/interesting.

It might not be better, but I think the novelty would be welcome anyway.

Honestly, I suspect players would still play characters in such a setting more or less as humans with small exceptions, they would just look more different. The thing is, most players are human, which makes it very difficult to roleplay something that isn’t fundamentally human in thought process. We can try our best to imagine what it might be like to have distributed intelligence, or to be part of a eusocial species, or to exhibit negligible senescence, but we’ll still be coming at it from a human frame of reference. We can only imagine these things in terms of small exceptions to how we ourselves think.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

I don't understand this whole argument at all. Are people saying that demi-humans shouldn't be depicted as having characteristics identifiable with any existing human ethnicity BECAUSE it will somehow impede depicting them in a non-human way? This seems like a very forced argument.

I mean, OK, I get the "Elves are slavers, we should be careful about which ethnicity they resemble because it might offend someone." HOWEVER that seems like pretty much an excluded middle kind of an argument! Not only that, but its a bad argument to start with, since the elves are going to look a bit like SOMEBODY anyway. OK, maybe you should only make 'slaver elves' blue-skinned, etc. Maybe. Or maybe they contain a lot of ethnicities within their culture, or maybe you just make their culture complex enough to avoid the 'evil humanoid' problem (because that's all this is).

No doubt cultural sensitivity is not always easy, but nothing about it seems to exclude any possibilities, just constrain overall presentation. You cannot avoid the work, and lame 'Thermian Arguments' or whatever are not going to change that, right?

 

[slobster]

Okay so for anyone who says they're not human therefore no diversity is required...

They're still from the same planet as humans, right? With the same sun ball lancing them with radiation all the live-long day or Pelor basting them with garlic butter or whatever

I just needed to do something to acknowledge how much this makes me laugh, and the site only let's me like it once.

I think some people hear me say it would be cool to let people play Indian looking halflings, or have Polynesian looking elves in a settings art, and they start thinking I'm trying to insinuate that their setting is racist for not doing so.

No dude, if it isn't an issue at your table, don't sweat it. But if someone comes to your group one day and asks if they can be a Chinese looking Goliath, what really are you gaining by turning them down? How does art that reflects some diversity in other races in professional sourcebooks somehow lessen your game?

If you play a hyper lore intensive setting where you've worked out how latitudes affect melanin production in your literal magical elf people and it affects your immersion to have any exceptions, well okay, but in my games where lizards the size of buildings can somehow fly and literal gods exist and sometimes accidentally give birth to entire races of sentient beings on a drunken dare, it seems fussy to ever police the skin color of the party gnome.

I mean how many times has a player asked me to play a tabaxi fencer that wears nothing but boots, or an elf that ran away from. his tribe because he isn't obsessed with baking cookies? (actual characters...and the elf was actually pretty fun) Give me a player that just wants her character to reflect part of her identity any day...

 

[jmartkdr2]

The Canonical Answer to why she dresses in a Chainmail Bikini is 3 layers of horrible writing by dudes trying to come up with some excuse to keep her in the chainmail bikini.

1) Combat Distraction.
2) She was raped and secretly wants the sexual attention. (Implied that she wants to be raped again 'cause she hasn't had sex since)
3) She was raped and wants to lure rapists over so she can kill them when they try something.

She was written to have given these answers, canonically, when bluntly asked about her bikini.

 

[jmartkdr2]

Furthermore, even in a hypothetical fantasy world where no races resembled humans - a setting populated entirely by dragonborn, warforged, thri-kreen, and other races typically considered “too weird” by the same people who complain of elves and dwarves being too human - would that be better? I don’t know. It feels to me like if there’s a problem of POC not being able to find characters that look like them, making sure white folks can’t find characters that look like them either is a worse solution than adding characters that look like POC.

So, all-furry settings are a thing. They do not avoid the underlying issue, as people will make associations anyways. Lions might be African or European, but people will base that on things like names and word choice rather than physical features.

 

[jmartkdr2]

The Canonical Answer to why she dresses in a Chainmail Bikini is 3 layers of horrible writing by dudes trying to come up with some excuse to keep her in the chainmail bikini.

1) Combat Distraction.
2) She was raped and secretly wants the sexual attention. (Implied that she wants to be raped again 'cause she hasn't had sex since)
3) She was raped and wants to lure rapists over so she can kill them when they try something.

She was written to have given these answers, canonically, when bluntly asked about her bikini.

Anyways, even if the in-universe answer was good (like, they're silver dragon scales so they protect her from the cold and make her skin hard as steel but they also make wearing anything else uncomfortable for some reason) - you could justify the character's decision. And that's the right answer to the in-universe version of the question.

But you're still left with the very valid question of why the author chose to put her in that outfit and write up a reason for the character's choice (after all, the author made the rules for scalemail bikinis) - whether "because it sells more books" is a justified response is a matter of personal opinion. Responding to that question with flaffle about silver dragons is a fallacious response: a Thermian argument.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

I am not sure I follow your systematic and general rejection of Thermian arguments expressed in this thread as if the fact that it was a Thermian argument was enough to make it invalid. Let's take another example: unless the PCs are systematically outlaws, there is a strong possibility that they will support, at least nominally, at some point, a monarchy, despite democracy being a better form of government. Players are probably using Thermian arguments to explain their support : "our characters were raised in that kingdom and didn't conceive other forms of government", "the king is rather benevolent" or "it's the setting that put kingdoms there." It is possible that they are supporting oppressive regimes in real life as well, but I suspect they are just considering that Thermian arguments are OK to justify in-universe behaviour. Same with the habit of killing criminals and taking their stuff. OK, it's an evil wizard, he killed people for his demon-summoning ritual, that's naughty and we're law enforcement and therefore... we kill it and loot his treasure? Err, of course very few people will support police force to kill and plunder in real life, but the arguments is often made using Thermian arguments that it is totally OK to behave like that. Outside of Thermian arguments, what would be the answer to "why do adventurers think it's OK to loot the enemy's treasure after killing?"

 

[Minigiant]

Tell me more about these Dwarven Luchadors.

Dwarves doing tope suicidas doesn't sound off at all.