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Message: <blockquote data-quote="squibbles" data-source="post: 8349710" data-attributes="member: 6937590">So [USER=779]@Kobold Avenger[/USER] 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 <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxV8gAGmbtk" target="_blank">Thermian Argument</a> or an ethics/politics argument. It's either:<ol> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">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.</li> <li data-xf-list-type="ol">Elves should inclusively represent diverse groups--thereby promoting equality/fairness--and should, therefore, be unbound by prior XYZ conventions.</li> </ol>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.</blockquote>

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