I don't get the arguments for bioessentialism

[UngainlyTitan]

Humans are capable of procreation at age 12, relatively safe procreation at 16 with a typical 4-score and 10 for the eldest... 90 years.
If an elf lives 300, that's 3 ⅓x, so 12 * 3.33 = 36+4 = 40, relatively safe at 53.

If we use 55 as the safe breeder age, and 300 as the meadian age of death, with 50 years between, that's 4-5 kids, more than plenty for reproduction.

Different games, settings, books, comics, have different multipliers. ElfQuest, death from age simply doesn't seem to happen... except maybe WolfRiders and Sea Elves.

53 years to reproduction is very expensive and an aggressive faster breeding neighbour could attrit an elven community into oblivion in 2 generations.
I think that elves would have to be able to reproduce at about 20 and be able to switch their reproduction on or off depending on circumstances.
That alone would make elven culture really strange from a human perspective.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Ohhhh okay lol I get it.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

And that's what I meant about it limiting imagination. If you can't (or won't) even imagine a super-strong halfling?

What's always been really funny to me about people getting SO MAD about strong, brutish halflings being possible is that they canonically exist in Tolkien (c.f. Bullroarer Took etc.). Like:

Bandobras, it was said, charged the goblins' ranks with a wooden club, and knocked the goblin chieftain Golfimbul's head clean off, sending it sailing a hundred yards through the air and down a rabbit-hole

Y'all trying to tell me Bullroarer here didn't have 20 STR? Because I'm pretty sure that's something you need 20 STR or more to to.

So, frankly, guys, if Tolkien could and did imagine super-strong halflings, and he's held up by you guys as this "gold standard", why is there a problem? Seriously, please explain!

(Also "You guys, I need to take my fantasy seriously, like Tolkien, and strong halflings stop me!!!" well maybe click on Golfimbul's name right there and see how seriously Tolkien took stuff.)

 

[Ruin Explorer]

we have few ways of thinking about this other than through the lens of Victorian-era, Euro-centric racial pseudoscience and centuries of this kind of cultural baggage

I mean, no, that's not actually true.

The problem is more complex and I'm sorry but America and American racists and racism specifically are actually a big part of it.

We have two really good lenses which are in fact much more useful and I'd argue kind of more common than weirdo racial psuedoscience. Science fiction and fantasy. Both used to be involved with the psuedoscience, but even by the 1960s were moving rapidly away from it, and we've had decades and decades of SF and fantasy which have much more interesting and relevant meditations on non-human species.

But there are three problems:

1) Racists in the US have worked incredibly hard to keep "racial pseudoscience"-style racism alive and part of the consciousness. They nearly lost the battle in the 1980s and 1990s, but thanks to the "brave" efforts of monsters like Charles Murray (author of The Bell Curve), they managed to keep it going, just barely, until 9/11 let the Alt-Right pick up the banner and use the internet and "ironic racism" (which rapidly curdled into "just racism") and then Facebook and then other social media to massively re-spread all that bollocks and remind your grandpa that weird racism was cool, actually. Plus there were just lot of Americans who had parents/grandparents with insane racist beliefs. RPGs weren't helped because Gary Gygax himself was absolutely racism-pilled (was a Kentucky Colonel from 1970s, "nits make lice", etc. etc.), and a number of early RPG designers were well, kooks with kooky racist beliefs (some still are, c.f. Tweet deciding to go hard on "scientific racism" for a while).

2) Science fiction gives us a much better lens that a whole bunch of people mindlessly reject because "science fiction isn't fantasy". Ironically many of those people do then fall into racist pseudoscience tropes, which are themselves essentially bad science fiction.

3) Written fantasy also has a lot of stuff, some really good here, but the reality is, about 80% of people who write RPGs have barely ever read fantasy beyond perhaps Tolkien and Jordan (or maybe Sanderson, today), and it's not any higher for the people who play it either. I do think this situation is improving, but slowly.

TLDR: It's not that we don't have other good lenses, we do, they just get rejected or ignored, whilst the racist pseudoscience lens is continually culturally promoted, and people fail to realize they're unconsciously using it, despite being the intellectual equivalent of the miasma theory of disease - wait what's that I'm being told...

 

[Desdichado]

The problem is that most people aren't capable of very nuanced thought, and so tend to fall back on false binaries. Real life is a like a scatterplot. You have to be able to notice two things simultaneously: 1) any given data point can, within reason, be anywhere on the plot, and 2) recognize that in spite of that, clear patterns are also obvious. If you are capable of simultaneously entertaining both of those ideas, then bioessentialism isn't really a problem. In game fiction, other fiction, or even reality itself.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The problem is that most people aren't capable of very nuanced thought, and so tend to fall back on false binaries. Real life is a like a scatterplot. You have to be able to notice two things simultaneously: 1) any given data point can, within reason, be anywhere on the plot, and 2) recognize that in spite of that, clear patterns are also obvious. If you are capable of simultaneously entertaining both of those ideas, then bioessentialism isn't really a problem. In game fiction, other fiction, or even reality itself.

The problem is the human brain is continually looking for patterns and very, very frequently sees them where they don't exist. In fact an awful lot of racism is precisely that - false patterns, or self-creating patterns. Like, if you're continually fearful of a group and treat them with hostility, you're likely to have a bad time and interpret all experiences in a negative light. So a lot of "clear patterns" aren't real at all. They're the equivalent of pareidolia. Again c.f. Tweet and his endorsement of "scientific racism". I'm sure he was thinking that he was "capable of nuanced thought" (and probably he is, most of the time) and was seeing a "clear pattern".

And bioessentialism can absolutely still be a problem if you recognise both, if you then still choose to just write the species in your setting like you were a 1930s eugenicist psycho and creep everyone the hell out.

 

[Alzrius]

The -2 strength bonus on a species is shutting down some character concepts.

No, it's not.

There are absolutely some ideas that can't be executed under a given framework of rules, and other ideas that can be executed under such a framework but not very well. A -2 penalty to a single ability score does not fall under either of those headings.

The idea that they do is an optimizer's argument, insisting that if you can't have a character be the absolute best at something—eking out every bonus that it's possible to receive under the system—then that character isn't worth playing. Which is, quite frankly, easily refuted by using such a character in an actual game. I know, because I've done it, and so have numerous other gamers that I know.

Yes, your halfling barbarian won't have the highest Strength score possible under the system. But they'll likely still have the highest Strength score in your party, and probably higher than most of the enemies you fight, so what's the practical difference? You can absolutely still have a lot of fun with such a character, and they can fulfill their role very adroitly.

Limits can absolutely make some character ideas unworkable, but that doesn't mean that any limit, no matter how minor, rules out a related character concept.

 

[TiQuinn]

I mean, no, that's not actually true.

The problem is more complex and I'm sorry but America and American racists and racism specifically are actually a big part of it.

We have two really good lenses which are in fact much more useful and I'd argue kind of more common than weirdo racial psuedoscience. Science fiction and fantasy. Both used to be involved with the psuedoscience, but even by the 1960s were moving rapidly away from it, and we've had decades and decades of SF and fantasy which have much more interesting and relevant meditations on non-human species.

But there are three problems:

1) Racists in the US have worked incredibly hard to keep "racial pseudoscience"-style racism alive and part of the consciousness. They nearly lost the battle in the 1980s and 1990s, but thanks to the "brave" efforts of monsters like Charles Murray (author of The Bell Curve), they managed to keep it going, just barely, until 9/11 let the Alt-Right pick up the banner and use the internet and "ironic racism" (which rapidly curdled into "just racism") and then Facebook and then other social media to massively re-spread all that bollocks and remind your grandpa that weird racism was cool, actually. Plus there were just lot of Americans who had parents/grandparents with insane racist beliefs. RPGs weren't helped because Gary Gygax himself was absolutely racism-pilled (was a Kentucky Colonel from 1970s, "nits make lice", etc. etc.), and a number of early RPG designers were well, kooks with kooky racist beliefs (some still are, c.f. Tweet deciding to go hard on "scientific racism" for a while).

2) Science fiction gives us a much better lens that a whole bunch of people mindlessly reject because "science fiction isn't fantasy". Ironically many of those people do then fall into racist pseudoscience tropes, which are themselves essentially bad science fiction.

3) Written fantasy also has a lot of stuff, some really good here, but the reality is, about 80% of people who write RPGs have barely ever read fantasy beyond perhaps Tolkien and Jordan (or maybe Sanderson, today), and it's not any higher for the people who play it either. I do think this situation is improving, but slowly.

TLDR: It's not that we don't have other good lenses, we do, they just get rejected or ignored, whilst the racist pseudoscience lens is continually culturally promoted, and people fail to realize they're unconsciously using it, despite being the intellectual equivalent of the miasma theory of disease - wait what's that I'm being told...

Those are three really big problems and to bring it back to D&D and related games specifically, the game’s origins are not based upon the type of fantasy and sci-fi that is out there that bucks this trend. That will take time and concerted effort, and I think that’s only just begun. Those problems are deep rooted, IMO.

Edit: Also didn’t know about Tweet’s issues. That escaped my radar. Sucks.

 

[FrozenNorth]

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).

One of the problems with bioessentialism in the game is that it draws attention to how poorly defined the attributes are.

Your species gets a +2 to Wisdom. What does that mean? Are they particularly spiritual? Do the have a particular connection to nature? Or are they just particularly observant?

In previous editions, Dwarves got a -2 to Charisma. Were Dwarven bards just objectively worse at performing? Are dwarves just more likely to be convinced by other species that have a bonus to Cha rather than their own people?

Finally, certain species get a ton of subspecies (cough elves) whereas others don’t. Seems kind of unfair that if you want to play an elf you can basically choose where your bonuses go but if you play an orc you can’t.

 

[Umbran]

I think there must be something more here. If culture was such a broad palette to work from, then what do we even need fantasy species for? If an elf raised in a farming community is pretty much the same as a human, orc, or dwarf raised under such conditions then what's the point of having an elf in the first place?

That's an excellent question.

I think the answer is that we don't actually need them most of the time.

It is perhaps key to remember that the work of fiction that has most influenced our game's thoughts on "races", The Lord of the Rings, by Tolkien, does not use them as simulation of how biology impacts personality. They were metaphors!

Hobbits are not an exploration of what being short does to behavior. They are his expression of the character and strength of British country folk and gentry!