I don't get the arguments for bioessentialism

[FrozenNorth]

I dont grasp how

“be senstive to the way racist ideologies have portrayed outgroup humans as sub-human”

means that halflings shouldnt be +2 Dex -2 str

Because no one ever argues that bonuses and penalties should be limited to physical traits, and when you bring in mental traits, it opens a whole can of worms.

 

[FrozenNorth]

Likewise that's why 3E and 5E didn't bring back race/class limits, and even the majority of OSR/NSR games don't have them. Because they're wildly unpopular and putting them in a game just makes people less likely to play it. Bioessentialism is an issue but it needs to seen in context, it was kind of lucky because it became an issue at the same time as people were increasingly tiring of species-based modifiers (a lot of which were very weakly supported in the actual lore, and just seemed like cheap/lazy and not necessarily even mildly offensive but almost worse extremely boring stereotypes - like +WIS on Wood Elves? Ever seen a Wood Elf be portrayed as wise in a meaningful way in D&D? Not really, they're usually described as capricious, often petty and territorial, none of which smells very "wise". It's just Druid/Ranger bait!), so the combined feeling pushed to move away from that for a lot of games, and honestly one doesn't miss it.

It’s not only that, it’s also that some class choices are extremely disconnected from their main attributes.

Dwarves are supposed to be gruff and unfriendly, that is why they get a penalty to Cha. But why the heck does this mean there are fewer Dwarf sorcerers and Dwarf sorcerers are less effective?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

the game’s origins are not based upon the type of fantasy and sci-fi that is out there that bucks this trend.

Yes that's a good point - I mean, it is a little bit, but the majority of the old Appendix N was either stuff that predated the change in thinking or evaded it (or it just wasn't relevant).

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?

I feel like the vast majority of +WIS races it's just "Uhhhh I guess they should have a bonus somewhere?!".

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.

Preach it. This was one of the major reasons elf PCs were so common for a long time (also them being "humans but better" helped).

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It’s not only that, it’s also that some class choices are extremely disconnected from their main attributes.

Dwarves are supposed to be gruff and unfriendly, that is why they get a penalty to Cha. But why the heck does this mean there are fewer Dwarf sorcerers and Dwarf sorcerers are less effective?

Yeah agree 100%. If CHA is "force of will" as is implied, dwarves surely do not lack that!

Honestly I feel like in 6th or 7th edition we're probably just going to be having "pick a mental stat" for all the spellcasting classes, CON may well get eliminated (it's vestigial at this point, barely a stat at all, more like a weird way of using a spare ability score to get an HP and Save bonus), and most/all weapons will take the best of STR/DEX or [New Stat] to hit/damage.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

That's an excellent question.

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

Especially for playing oneself with pointy ears. If one is not exploring the situation of a hardy member of the british gentry facing the horrors of WWI, you might not need hobbits. If you don't want to explore the challenge of being short and lucky, you don't need halflings. If one isn't exploring the difficulty of being a kleptomaniac adapting to a society that has grown completely crazed with the silly, greedy and alien concept of personal ownership, you don't need a kender.

You also don't need culture, most of the time.

 

[Umbran]

When elves, dwarves and humans were described as races, I could understand the reasoning. But if they are defined as species, they can be as different as chimanzees or fruit fly.

In theory, perhaps.

But, changing the name of the chapter from "races" to "species" doesn't do that in and of itself. You'd have to redesign those species, to actually be different. I don't see many fruit flies in the PHB.

Saying "race X is inherently stronger and stupider than the average human" may evoke bad things to some people whose ancestry was described by racists as a race inherently stronger and stupider, but we're speaking of species. I don't think it applies. When we speak of species, saying "Adult gorillas are stronger and less intelligent than humans (despite their young developping quicker)" isn't associated IMHO with the kind of racist propaganda you're refering to.

Sorry, as above, that's what we'd call "filing the serial numbers off". Changing the name doesn't change the nature of the underlying thing.

"This trope has racist undertones, but if we call it a 'species' we will be safe from criticism!" is pretty transparent. If you don't want to get the hairy eyeball over it, you also have to remove the nastier racist undertones.

Edit to add: Again, the question - Why are we heck-bent on ascribing sentient behavior to biology?

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

"This trope has racist undertones, but if we call it a 'species' we will be safe from criticism!" is pretty transparent. If you don't want to get the hairy eyeball over it, you also have to remove the nastier racist undertones.

This tend to defeat the idea of renaming races to species, if we still can't have different species, the move was pointless. I think that adopting the correct term for different, unrelated creatures because the term initially used had a baggage was maybe a right move if it could drop the baggage.

Edit: Maybe the solution would be to give wildcard -2 to humans, so nobody could say "this combination of having +something and -something reminds of a racist trope" because there were probably no racist trope that said "this race is better at everything than us".

 

[Umbran]

This tend to defeat the idea of renaming races to species, if we still can't have different species, the move was pointless.

You can have different species.

But you can't just say, "it is the same old racist-orc, and we are calling it a species" and get away with it.

You actually have to do the work to create species that aren't rehashes of current racist tropes.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

You can have different species.

But you can't just say, "it is the same old racist-orc, and we are calling it a species" and get away with it.

You actually have to do the work to create species that aren't rehashes of current racist tropes.

I edited but you were to quick. Maybe the only way to avoid it is to have human have a baseline of -2 everywhere. So a -2 race would just be "as idiot as humans" and "+2 str" would make them stronger, even stronger than say, a dwarf (+0), without the baggage of making them "less than human" in any way. If the racist trope is "people X were accused of being less "something" than humans", having everyone better or on par with humans would totally remove the risk of replicating them, without needing to alter them significantly (though I still think that as they are mostly played races and cultures are mostly superfluous).

Most setting having humans could be explained by the fact that they breed much more frequently than other races who tend to live centuries and have only one or two offsprings.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Edit to add: Again, the question - Why are we heck-bent on ascribing sentient behavior to biology?

I think one of the major things creating issues here is people wanting to have their cake and eat it - i.e. they want a sapient/sentient being who can learn and change and so on, but they also want to say he can't not be evil, because it's biologically inherent that he's evil.

It's really easy to have like, sapient and killable enemies without crashing into racism, too.

Like, Draw Steel! has an entire vast faction of frankenstein-people with bomb collars, who do, technically, have free will, but have been created in vat (essentially), subjected to extensive brain-washing from re-birth (or whatever updated terminology we want to apply - certainly they're "members of a high-control group"), and fitted with a bomb collar, then sent to conquer - and any that don't obey tend to get weeded out early on (usually by being exploded).

People just need to be a bit more imaginative than "I want all the racism of traditional portrayals of orcs, and indeed to use a traditional portrayal of orcs, but also to be immune to criticism for it because I call then blorks, made them red and said they were 'biologically evil'!"