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Message: <blockquote data-quote="RSKennan" data-source="post: 507032" data-attributes="member: 8256">While I don't think that the portrayal of D&D races (as different species) is racist, parts of me wonder at the thought processes of many of the fantasy genre's writer/creators. It is true that a great many fantasy and science fiction races are extreme parodies of human traits. I think that drawing these stereotypes large helps to point out how silly they are, as was noted by Orias, but I also feel that they can sometimes serve as an excuse to  symbolically bash "undesirable" human traits. There is a reason these races are "humanoid" after all.  For me, as long as they are treated as "other species" assigning traits to them for the sake of a game isn't offensive. What I do have a problem with is when a designer deliberately takes a human culture and plops it into the framework of D&D, and puts an evil race into the "niche" of a real world race. That is most certainly ignorant and racist. I've seen it time and time again, and though it might be a simple case of the designer being too unimaginitive to create a realistic culture for the species (orcs or what have you), it still rubs me the wrong way. If you are going to have a direct translation of a real world culture (not merely a human trait- a whole culture, complete with customs) in a mass-market game, at least make them humans! Don't get me wrong, there are going to be unavoidable parellels between fantasy races and real world peoples, since a culture is shaped by its history, and certain themes (opression, war, peace, prosperity, etc) crop up in any world. Of course it's natural to look to how real people have reacted to these events when considering their effects on a fantasy world. So I guess my opinion on the matter walks a fine line. An addendum: In a multiverse where a lion can be crossed with an eagle, or a dragon can mate with a human, there is no reason to think that any of the races are members of the same species or even genus. I think it's more interesting to think that they aren't , and their interbreeding is facilitated by magic.  The parents of the first centaurs must have been a cute couple <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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