D&D 5E (2024) Half Race Appreciation Society: Half Elf most popular race choice in BG3

[Veltharis ap Rylix]

One setting out of how many?

Other settings handling mixed ancestry poorly in the past is reason to fix how those settings handle mixed ancestry going forward.

Not to strip mixed ancestry from them all, especially the one setting that handled it well.

 

[Frozen_Heart]

Should they move forward with "Pick a Parent" and provide nothing else, the next Eberron book will now either have to reintroduce distinct Khoravar and Jhor'guntaal statblocks (literally just recreating the "legitimate hybrid" options this whole thing was supposed to make unnecessary) or essentially erase them as distinct groups from the setting lore, taking two major population blocks in Khorvaire and three Dragonmarked Houses down in the crossfire.

Yep just outright removing any mixed species at all (flavour or mechanics doesn't matter here) has the side effect of nuking a huge chunk of the Eberron setting.

Half-Elves and Half-Orcs here have essentially become their own species, forming their own nations completely separate from their ancestors.

 

[Frozen_Heart]

This is a fallacy. It's not a 1:1 stand-in, but it IS that the language used to describe certain species reflects how certain RW races have likewise been characterized. For example, a race of physically strong, low intelligence, aggressive, lazy, and violent savages can describe any number of D&D races (orcs, goblins, ogres, etc) but it's also been used to describe various human groups (Africans, Indians, Mongols, etc.). That isn't to say orcs are supposed to represent any specific one of these cultures, but they fill the same narrative role as them ("the natives are restless") in the stories.

It was a shock to me when I first realised people equated orcs to mongols, africans, or native americans. As I'd hopped across from Warhammer I kind of thought of orcs as based on a combination of gallic tribes and british football hooligans.

(I also always had warhammer Dark Elves in my head when thinking of drow, so thought they had pale skin until someone pointed it out to me).

 

[Scribe]

It's just too typically on brand for Wizards to learn the wrong lesson, and solve for the wrong problem, incorrectly.

Whatever, add another complaint come Survey time.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It was a shock to me when I first realised people equated orcs to mongols, africans, or native americans. As I'd hopped across from Warhammer I kind of thought of orcs as based on a combination of gallic tribes and british football hooligans.

(I also always had warhammer Dark Elves in my head when thinking of drow, so thought they had pale skin until someone pointed it out to me).

Same here. I encountered Warhammer around the same time as D&D, but because minis are more of a visual medium, I think, and Orcs and Dark Elves discussed much more, their impressions were the primary ones I had.

Orcs/Orks particularly were just incredibly strongly characterized by GW, and not entirely negatively. Like, they weren't that bright, but they were also geniuses at making machines work, and things they believed, just came true. And yeah absolutely Gallic tribes + Football Hooligans (possibly stressing the latter).

So yeah the racist take, when I encountered in Orcs of Thar, a couple of years later, just absolutely blew my mind.

WH Dark Elves are basically straight-up Elric's Melniboneans, who I was also becoming familiar with at that age.

 

[Cadence]

Because some people convinced themselves that the various fantastical species, are actually just 1 for 1 stand in's for very specific real world ethnic groups. Its pure nonsense of course, but there it is.

Slow update on my end and ninja'd by @Remathilis ...

I'm resisting the urge to dig up the threads where folks laid out all kinds of the things where some of the D&D races were described (in modules and by creators) using tropes (and pretty close to direct quotes in some cases) from pretty reprehensible actual real world racists. Anyway, we have enough threads on here that have gotten shut-down over this that it is probably best to just dodge it and snideness about it.

 

[Remathilis]

Yep just outright removing any mixed species at all (flavour or mechanics doesn't matter here) has the side effect of nuking a huge chunk of the Eberron setting.

Half-Elves and Half-Orcs here have essentially become their own species, forming their own nations completely separate from their ancestors.

Um... No?

The Khorvar were a part of the Kingdom of Galifar until the latter broke apart, just like every other race on Khorvaire. They have no unique lands and are culturally the same as humans or any other species living in that Nation. The only cultural element unique to them are their unique Marks/Houses.

Likewise, the Shadow Marches are a unqiue orcish in culture, being a backwater part of Galifar and never having been settled. Orcs and humans co-existed there in relative peace, hence a higher-than-normal half-orc population, but they are still enough of a minority that the only mark/house half-orcs had they still shared with regular humans.

Don't oversell Eberron's contribution: both races still lack a unique culture and exist as intermediates between their parent races. The difference is that not every half-elf is first generation human/elf caught between the disdain of their elvish parent and distrust of their human one, nor is every half-orc a child of violence rebelling against one or the other of their parent's species. They are not defined by the fact they don't fit in larger society, and that is a small but important detail. Eberron half-elves and half-orcs aren't culturally unique, it's just that they aren't ostracized as part of their racial backstory.

 

[Scribe]

I'm resisting the urge to dig up the threads with all of the things laid out where some of the D&D races were described using tropes from pretty reprehensible actual real world racists. Anyway, we have enough threads on here that have gotten shut-down over debating this that you should know your snideness won't help anything on the issue.

I've been in them. This isn't snide. It's being changed as there have examples of problematic to out right racist lore, which Wizards seeks to be distanced from.

Half Orc has lefit historical issues, so Half Elf is dropped by association.

That causing OTHERS (it's it's big tent after all) to feel slighted and so the cycle continues.

Fix the lore.

 

[Remathilis]

It was a shock to me when I first realised people equated orcs to mongols, africans, or native americans. As I'd hopped across from Warhammer I kind of thought of orcs as based on a combination of gallic tribes and british football hooligans.

(I also always had warhammer Dark Elves in my head when thinking of drow, so thought they had pale skin until someone pointed it out to me).

I honestly never blamed the authors. D&D was always more of a Western than a Medieval fantasy game and if you're going to play cowboys and Indians, SOMEONE has to play the Indians. People wrote what they knew.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Um... No?

The Khorvar were a part of the Kingdom of Galifar until the latter broke apart, just like every other race on Khorvaire. They have no unique lands and are culturally the same as humans or any other species living in that Nation. The only cultural element unique to them are their unique Marks/Houses.

Likewise, the Shadow Marches are a unqiue orcish in culture, being a backwater part of Galifar and never having been settled. Orcs and humans co-existed there in relative peace, hence a higher-than-normal half-orc population, but they are still enough of a minority that the only mark/house half-orcs had they still shared with regular humans.

Don't oversell Eberron's contribution: both races still lack a unique culture and exist as intermediates between their parent races. The difference is that not every half-elf is first generation human/elf caught between the disdain of their elvish parent and distrust of their human one, nor is every half-orc a child of violence rebelling against one or the other of their parent's species. They are not defined by the fact they don't fit in larger society, and that is a small but important detail. Eberron half-elves and half-orcs aren't culturally unique, it's just that they aren't ostracized as part of their racial backstory.

Are those reasons to broom them then? What are you saying?