D&D (2024) Half Race Appreciation Society: Half Elf most popular race choice in BG3

[Remathilis]

BG3 is a new story, designed to reflect modern values. That's great, and I can't imagine anyone having a problem with that.

As opposed to the classic story from the halcyon days of 2014...

 

[MGibster]

One day our children and our children's children will look back on these discussions about drow and orcs much the same way we do about discussions of whether Endor is a moon.

"Mommy, did grandpa really get upset about these discussions?"

"He really did, sweetie. In the end he was buried under a stack of 1st and 2nd edition AD&D books."

 

[Scribe]

If you read the racial description of orcs from Volo's it's very hard to see how you could. The way he describes them is... vile.

So again this is lip-service at best. If you say something could be the case, but then write about that thing in a way that doesn't really allow for that (which was very much the case with Volo's), you are indeed guilty of paying lip-service to an idea but in practice undermining that idea.

Volos was/is an issue, without a doubt. There are multiple issues.

 

[Remathilis]

Volos was/is an issue, without a doubt. There are multiple issues.

Part of the problem was WotC started wanting evil humanoids to be monsters, not people. There is a lot of work in the MM, the PHB, and Volo that wanted players to treat orcs as monsters to slay and not a complex species with free will. Of course, that's now on its head and we are treating them as people not monsters.

 

[Scribe]

Part of the problem was WotC started wanting evil humanoids to be monsters, not people. There is a lot of work in the MM, the PHB, and Volo that wanted players to treat orcs as monsters to slay and not a complex species with free will. Of course, that's now on its head and we are treating them as people not monsters.

Which I fine and all, but to try and 'fix' this by removing a half elf, an entity of its own, just to make some 'not all drow' point, is flawed.

 

[Micah Sweet]

As opposed to the classic story from the halcyon days of 2014...

"Classic" doesn't enter into it, and had nothing to do with this.

 

[Yaarel]

Which I fine and all, but to try and 'fix' this by removing a half elf, an entity of its own, just to make some 'not all drow' point, is flawed.

The Pandelver authors could easily have a Drow family move to town, purchase the orchard, and be its new proprietors.

There was no reason to erase a Human-Elf from existence.

I suspect this "Drow" is a placeholder for when how to stat a "Drow Human-Elf" becomes official. But still.

 

[CleverNickName]

This need to spell things out officially, is why I sympathize with the fans who want the Human-Elf to be in the 2024 Players Handbook − explicitly and officially. I agree, if there is only the mention of a possibility of a Human-Elf without supplying a clear example of it, the Human-Elf really can disappear from the D&D lore.

I dont think the Human-Elf should count as a separate species. I do think the Human-Elf should be a prominent example of a multispecies in the 2024 Players Handbook. Maybe the 2024 Players Handbook should have two examples of multispecies characters: the Human-Elf because it is extremely popular and a convenient pregen using multispecies rules, and something because it is obscure, such as a Dragonborn-Halfling, to showcase the creative possibilities.

If something is an important part of the D&D tradition, then officialdom needs to spell it out in full.

I agree, @Yaarel. It would be nice to have a description of the half-elf lore in the new Player's Handbook. It could even be the textbook example of "Here's How You Build a Custom Ancestry" or whatever, and walk the player through the whole process over in the sidebar, while presenting the stats, background, lore, and artwork in the main body of text like they do for all of the other Core ancestries. I think that would be a good way to satisfy the folks who need half-elves in their home games, and introduce the "new way" of doing things, in one fell swoop.

The part I'm struggling with is things "disappearing from D&D lore." How does that happen? What does it look like?

Because if "disappearing from D&D lore" means that half-elves won't be included in any new books that Wizards of the Coast writes, that's not really a problem: from third-party publishers to the creative people sitting at your game table, anyone can contribute to the lore of your game. And even if this wasn't true, or relevant to your argument, there are still hundreds of "official D&D" products--spanning multiple editions--on DriveThruRPG with all of the half-elf lore you could ever use. That lore will always be there, it isn't "disappearing."

And if "disappearing from D&D lore" means that nobody will ever want to play a half-elf again, maybe ask yourself why you wanted to play a half-elf in the first place. I'd wager that all of those things are still there, just in different places. And that's not a dismissal, I totally get it--I hate it when my local grocery store decides to reorganize everything for no good reason and now it takes me twice as long to complete my shopping. But it's not like they discontinued my oatmeal and prunes, I just have to go to different aisles. It's annoying, but it's not like they're forcing me to stop eating oatmeal.

Ahem. Anyway.

If "disappearing from D&D lore" means that half-elves will no longer be unique or distinct, I imagine that is the whole purpose of the exercise from Wizards of the Coast's point of view. Here's the deal: historically, the things that made the half-elf and half-orc races unique or distinct have been problematic for certain groups of people. So I hear people panicking about "erasure" but we need to understand that the goal isn't to remove the half-elf, the goal is to redefine it in less-problematic terms. (And I think this is where I need to spend a little more time listening to others, instead of doing all of the talking.) If this is indeed the case, the only way the half elf will "disappear from D&D lore" would be if there wasn't enough distinction and uniqueness to let them stand out. And I doubt that's the case.

If you read the racial description of orcs from Volo's it's very hard to see how you could. The way he describes them is... vile.

So again this is lip-service at best. If you say something could be the case, but then write about that thing in a way that doesn't really allow for that (which was very much the case with Volo's), you are indeed guilty of paying lip-service to an idea but in practice undermining that idea.

And that's the other thing. Some of these lore changes are both necessary and long overdue. If you're arguing that these problematic elements need to stay just because they are "part of the lore" or whatever, you are really saying that you are opposed to WotC removing problematic content. Which is another way of saying you don't mind that problematic content, and I'm sure you have your reasons.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

No, but adventure writers have to refer to core books for lore. And if half-elves have no lore in the PHB nor in the MM, where are they going to get lore from? More so since the desing team has boldly called them out as inherently racist? They have started to retcon them out of existing adventures!

Please tell me you at least see how this is entirely different from what I actually replied to and challenged.

 

[Vaalingrade]

If you read the racial description of orcs from Volo's it's very hard to see how you could. The way he describes them is... vile.

And people wondered aloud multiple times why I kept voting the book down in the survivor thread.