I don't get the arguments for bioessentialism

[Shades of Eternity]

I've always preferred GURPS Goblins
They are clever, social beings with the personality of a mad scientist and are usually the default short species of Banestorm.

They were the inspiration for my work.

I never could stand the "childish monsters" that Pathfinder loves to use.

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I think that might be an example of bioessentiallism that I really don't agree with.

 

[Bill Zebub]

This to me is a really weird take. I see the rules as a framework to make it a game.

No, @Alzrius is exactly right. The point of rules is to apply constraints within which a problem must be solved. That's what games are.

 

[kigmatzomat]

One aspect of species I'd like addressed is age.

The USA would have only seen a few elven generations: the ones here prior to 1776, those born 1776-1950, 1950-current. (I'm assuming elves have kids on average at 170yro, which corresponds to a 26yro human). The oldest 1st gen american elves wouldn't reach adulthood until 1876 and likely didn't have kids until the early 1900s, and in 2025 are 250yro, meaning they are equivalent to 30-something humans.

Imagine if your parents were 300+ years old. What kind of assets would they have accrued? How well connected are they compared to humans? What kind of accumulated life learnings would they have?

Now imagine that you were physically mature at 25 but spent the last 75yrs as a "minor" (non-adult) where your parents could manage your finances. What kind of "housewarming" gifts might you receive from parents that spent collecting your nickels and quarters to buy stocks, bonds, land, or just flatware, dishes, furniture, horses, etc?

Of course culture could mean the tween-elf earnings go to the parents, so what if a married couple had a minimal cost laborer for 7 decades?

Gnomes and dwarves would have similar factors but different cultures.

 

[Shades of Eternity]

yeah most elves , if they were young, might have only shown up during the age of exploration and are only now looking forward to their retirement plan.

 

[zakael19]

One aspect of species I'd like addressed is age.

The USA would have only seen a few elven generations: the ones here prior to 1776, those born 1776-1950, 1950-current. (I'm assuming elves have kids on average at 170yro, which corresponds to a 26yro human). The oldest 1st gen american elves wouldn't reach adulthood until 1876 and likely didn't have kids until the early 1900s, and in 2025 are 250yro, meaning they are equivalent to 30-something humans.

Imagine if your parents were 300+ years old. What kind of assets would they have accrued? How well connected are they compared to humans? What kind of accumulated life learnings would they have?

Now imagine that you were physically mature at 25 but spent the last 75yrs as a "minor" (non-adult) where your parents could manage your finances. What kind of "housewarming" gifts might you receive from parents that spent collecting your nickels and quarters to buy stocks, bonds, land, or just flatware, dishes, furniture, horses, etc?

Of course culture could mean the tween-elf earnings go to the parents, so what if a married couple had a minimal cost laborer for 7 decades?

Gnomes and dwarves would have similar factors but different cultures.

The absurd age of many species is something that most TTRPG fantasy doesnt really reckon with well at all. Somebody mentioned a few pages back that most species wind up feeling like interesting "skins" in the video game sense over a human base with some funky quirks.

One of my favorite deeply outside the mainstream fantasy series (the Commonweal by Graydon Saunders) has a great reason for all teh species differences. In that world, folks who can wield the Power (wizards, sorcerers, etc) can really and genuinely rework reality depending on talent flavor/skill/inclination. When you run into the long lived species that's tall and gorgeous and has no capacity for emotional connection, a perfect memory, and a strong inclination towards innate subservience to any wizard exercising significant power the explanation is simple: they are how they are because a significant Life Talent wished them so.

But as @Ruin Explorer noted, that sort of thing is far more interesting to express via descriptive innate traits/used abilities that a player can grasp and run with in their role-play and conception of what it means to be a Typical 7; and recognize that culture and training /= biology as well.

When I took the Orcs of Daggerheart and suggested that they're generally norse-style reavers, it was very clearly "the orcs that people have encountered in this part of the world that fled their homeland and settled in the islands here when they were told there was no place for them in the greater land mass."

 

[Theory of Games]

not disagree,

Just don't understand.

PC species feel different and part of the reason they think differently is because of their physiology.

That's a piece of it: the reality is - for LotR and D&D - it isn't about "Bioessentialism". It's about the gods: they created each races to be exactly as they wanted them to be.

Using my rpg concepts to try to figure it out.

1. If you play a Feylin, one of the ongoing themes is building your life around pulp culture. It creates a varied throughput (mixes in the conceptual model that the fey imitate the real world, but it's taken to the logical extreme). Because it is built on the bones of our world, it gives options for a wide variety of characters without feeling anachronistic.

Plus, they can fly (if you take the right feats), which is something a human can't do without magical or technological assistance.

2. If you play a garter folk, you are a snake person based on the humble garter snake, and you can take feats to work on your venom, something a human can not do. Plus, Garter Folk in general are friendly, even if they have slightly different social boundaries than humans.

Never heard of either.

Species will feel different and have different traits as they aren't just human. Their physiology (whether magical or mundane) will allow for different options.

Is this bio-essentialism or something different?

Something different. Tolkien's & Gygax's Orcs are evil because an evil god made them that way. Lolth seduced the Drow into becoming Dark elves. 75% of the races and monsters were created by the gods to be exactly what the they wanted, with the remaining 25% manufactured by some insane wizard with too much time & money on their hands.

You won't find many (if any) mention of "Evolution" or "Natural Selection" in most Fantasy rpgs or the Fantasy fiction that inspired them.

Can somebody explain it to me?

What's easier: creating a genetic lineage of various species paired with a timeline spanning tens of thousands of years that pinpoints each evolutionary "jump" of each species OR --- just saying "the gods and magic did it"? The latter is far less complicated and allows the author(s) more time to focus on the stories, settings, or monster manuals.

One of my recurring themes in my gaming material is "the monstrous in everyday life," where creatures that are monsters do relatively normal things (most likely because of Sesame Street), and that reflects that. I have a feeling this term refers to something completely different.

I was raised on monsters (even if they were of the cookie variety)

Well - "Monstrous" wouldn't normally be identified as "relatively normal" for most people. Outside of Sesame Street or a cartoon

So it's avoid cultural stereotypes masquerading as species?

Hmmm. More like "mythological tropes as species". Tolkien & Gygax both were inspired by ancient mythology like that of Sumer and Greece. The monsters weren't just monsters, they were usually normal people transformed by a god into monsters due to some flaw (of the victim, or sometimes of the god). But myth was teaching lessons that escapes most ttrpgs.

But what if the species were smarter than average (such as corvids, which are wicked smart, pass on generational knowledge, and seriously hold grudges, and that's just the birds in our world).

You can create, play and run races however your group likes. Never let outsider poopoo on your fun - and they will if you let them.

 

[Umbran]

not disagree,

Just don't understand.

PC species feel different and part of the reason they think differently is because of their physiology.

...

Is this bio-essentialism or something different?

Can somebody explain it to me?

I have no idea who feylin or garter folk are, so I cannot speak to them, specifically. But, I can try to address some of the core question here, and I'm going to try to do so without reading the 11 intervening pages that already came up today - so please pardon if I cover ground someone else already has...

A major issue here is that the "race" we think of for humans is, biologically speaking, pretty much nonsense. We have been taught that people with different skin colors and small differences in facial features are a different "race", and we attribute all sorts of differences to being of different races, with no actual biological differences behind that. For humans, "race" is a social construct.

Which means that all the different human behaviors we see among people are not race-biology based - they are all cultural or individual.

So, while we want to say, "well, hey, this species is biologically different, so they'll have different behavior" - if that behavior difference is on the order of differences we see among humans, claiming that difference as based in biology is hard to swallow.

Why are we heck-bent on trying to peg behaviors on biology, when culture gives us as broad a palate to work with, while avoiding bad armchair psychologist takes on how biology impacts sentient behavior?

 

[Corinnguard]

Follow-up note: Having one culture to one race just makes running a game easier.

It might make the game easier for the DM, but what if you are player who wants to play a human raised within a Dwarven culture? Your character isn't going to be raised as a human; they are going to be raised like a Dwarf. So, it doesn't make sense for such a human to still have the bonus feat, and the bonus skill typically associated with humans. It does make sense, however in a very RL way, for them to have picked up Dwarven weapon and armor proficiencies and to perhaps learn Dwarvish as their very first language. Being able to choose any culture for your character allows you to make some very interesting and unique characters.

The thing about pc races, or species, is that too often they are "planet of hats" trope.

Whereas humans are from the planet of many hats. There was a scene from Star Trek: Enterprise where the Vulcan ambassador told the human head of Starfleet about how hard it was to define humans. They were as stubborn as Tellarites, logical at times as a Vulcan, belligerent as Andorians, etc. They had all of these traits. Everyone else just appeared to have one definable trait about them. Which is not true and not very RL. They appear to be that way because that one trait is the trait seen most often by others.

5E swapping this for the idiocy of making the stat mods all based on dreadful backgrounds

The backgrounds in Level Up are a lot better IMO. You get one fixed ASI and one floating ASI of your choice.

 

[dragoner]

Whereas humans are from the planet of many hats. There was a scene from Star Trek: Enterprise where the Vulcan ambassador told the human head of Starfleet about how hard it was to define humans. They were as stubborn as Tellarites, logical at times as a Vulcan, belligerent as Andorians, etc. They had all of these traits. Everyone else just appeared to have one definable trait about them. Which is not true and not very RL. They appear to be that way because that one trait is the trait seen most often by others.

Hell, that's one person. I understand in the TV show it works because it is trying to say something though. As far as games, I want the player to make a character they want to play, if that is +2 strength, cool.

 

[aramis erak]

TLDR: To those who make moral claims about assigning mechanical differences between races/sexes/etc in games, you're wrong. Period.

The originator of the concept of Orcs, and introduced it into the world, grounded them in racist stereotypes... Mongols, to be specific... then later lamented that in a letter. Tolkien described Orcs thus
"squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types".

As for the name, the one citation is heavily conjugated, or Orc is part of a longer rood.
Given that the author himself regretted the racism inherent in his creation...

It's not morally right or wrong. It's a neutral tool with a mechanical effect on how the game feels and plays. Increased differences between creatures will strengthen that creature's identity, while decreased differences will eventually make everything feel like a human in cosplay—and both directions work for different game design goals. As well, both directions work for different target audiences.

I've seen the human in cosplay effect, too... most strongly in Dragonbane.

I read the subject of dispute as about things like "should halflings have a STR penalty". That seems fine with LotR to me. Likewise class restrictions, like "Frodo has to be a fighter or a thief", or species-as-class, like "Frodo will use the halfling class".

I'd rather have the species mods... halflings should be weaker due to less leverage from shorter limbs. Probably should be
Orcs might be stronger biologically. Dwarves made of tougher stuff, especially Gloranthan ones.

I don't much care for race as class, tho' I've used them in TSR D&D and Palladium. And the one shot of Talislanta I ran.

I think most people here would not want those rules to be core, but are ok with the GM imposing them for their table, correct?

I suspect not correct. I've gotten zero pushback for racial/species mods in core; I've gotten pushback for changing/adding them to games without them. I suspect the actual majority simply don't care.

And I've always (since first encountering species concept, considered D&D "races" as species. then Krynn added subspecies (elves, dwarves)...