Yeah. And that's pretty common in Dragonlance. (It's common in the FR, too, but Dragonlance has major plot points hinge around it.) Saying "a god made this race be evil kleptomaniacs/absolutely terrible at the thing they're supposed to be good at/very clear stand-ins for people with mental illnesses" is not an argument in favor of that thing. "A Wizard Did It" doesn't make it any better. In many cases, it can actually make it worse.
Considering that YA fiction is probably the best selling fiction of all time (thank you JK), I'm not sure being in the YA genre is a bad thing.
------------
But, just a thought about cutting stuff for "modern sensibilities" and the like.
Take the slavery in Dark Sun. Some are saying that it will be cut because we can't have slavery in works. That's not what's being argued at all. Slavery in a D&D product is perfectly fine (read the Monster Manual if you think it's not). What isn't fine would be to celebrate slavery. To try to justify it somehow and make it acceptable or even just accepted. Slavery in Dark Sun is evil. It's shown (and has always been shown) to be evil. There's no shying away from the horrors of slavery in the setting. And, making slavers the bad guys in adventures is pretty easy.
What would be problematic would be an adventure where the PC's are hired to go around to villages, kill all the males they find, round up all the women, bring them back to be sold into sexual slavery and then rewarded. But, fortunately, no one is publishing that adventure.
OTOH, you look at kender kleptomania. Here we have mental issues being paraded as parody and celebrated. They're not mentally ill, they're just "that way". They were just "made that way". It's diminishing the actual issues that mental issues cause in the world and those who suffer from them. Psychotic as hero instead of someone who is suffering. So, yeah, kender are problematic and, in a future Dragonlance product, you will probably either see the whole kleptomania thing fade to the background, or be seen as a curse. The Greygem didn't do them any favors when it twisted their minds and turned them into Kender.
If the defining elements of a setting are grounded in concepts best consigned to the dustbins of history, then that setting either needs to be changed or consigned as well.
I'm sorry, but I see this as such a poor take on Kender, but perhaps I'm simply naive and looking at it from the perspective of a kid reading the books.
If the only parts of their identity that separate them from Halflings and Gnomes are extremely problematic (mocking mental illness), then they don't deserve to exist. I know that people would complain about it because of nostalgia, but that's not an argument against changing them. If the only thing not making Dragonlance be just another generic fantasy setting filled with generic fantasy races is making fun of mental health issues, then it doesn't deserve to be updated to 5e, especially if there is no compromise between "get rid of these problematic things" and "getting rid of them destroys their core identity!!!"
I was referring to three different races there. Kender, Tinker Gnomes, and Gully Dwarves. The Gully Dwarves are the most problematic of the three, and are who I was referring to with the "very clear stand-ins for people with mental illnesses". Of the problematic things from Dragonlance's races, the Gully Dwarves would be the first ones getting dumped if I were in charge of a modern translation of Dragonlance.
I read DL when I was 10 or 11, and it was perfect for those ages. I came back to one of the novels when I was 14, and was horrified to find my beloved novels were filled with overdone purple prose!
Not just that. More in general the problematic elements of Dragonlance's race and how "A God did it" doesn't make them any less problematic.
'A God did it', is why I have said Wizards needs to address Gods in general, or distance themselves from them as we see in Eberron, and this upcoming CR book.
