I don't get the arguments for bioessentialism

[Corinnguard]

But, changing the name of the chapter from "races" to "species" doesn't do that in and of itself.

The change from races to species doesn't really change much. You still get the same collection of traits your character was born with and traits they learned from growing up in a particular culture. It's merely changing the label and playing it safe.

Level Up otoh split up the traits your character had. Any trait a character was born with became their heritage. And any trait that your character could learn while growing up into culture. Then it allowed you the choice of picking any culture for your character's heritage. You could pick a culture that matched your heritage, or you could pick a completely different culture (thus getting that culture's benefits instead). A very RL move.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

The change from races to species doesn't really change much. You still get the same collection of traits your character was born with and traits they learned from growing up in a particular culture. It's merely changing the label and playing it safe.

I think they attempted to play safe.

"Hey we're being lambasted because orcs qualities are reminding people of what racists said about Black people"
"Sure, that's a problem, they likened humans to gorilla that was awful, how can we fight that?"
"Well, let's openly clarifiy that they are indeed gorillas, not humans."

Which opened them to the criticism that "hey, your gorillas are reminiscent of what Black people were said to be by racists!".

 

[Umbran]

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).

Well, fetishizing, and attributing superior physical attributes to "less civilized" people, are also forms of racism.

I don't think the goal here should be finding a formulaic way to avoid racist tropes. The best way to avoid racist tropes is to educate yourself on them, or collaborate with someone who is educated, and then not use them.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Also what even is evil in this context - like, if you're really assigning some "biological evil" to a species, what exactly is that "evil"?

Like, look a predators IRL - big cats, wolves, etc. - they have a biological imperative to hunt, to kill, yet most of the time when they interact with humans (even in the wild) it's without doing that (usually instead they avoid us), and if we interact with them a lot, they're generally pretty cuddly even if sometimes lose it and decide to eat somebody. Even Tigers, one of the greatest, most stunningly dangerous animals nature has ever created, more dangerous, I suspect, pound-for-pound than any dinosaur ever was, are basically capable of being pretty friendly if you are kind to them and keep them fed and so on. Yeah you have to be careful, but that's because they're not sapient.

The "evil", if there is one, is specific - the urge to hunt and kill (which interestingly I'm not sure humans inherently possess, we are good predators but the desire to hunt and kill seems to acculturated rather than inherent, but that's a separate discussion, though perhaps relevant here).

Why is it instead with these "bad" races we just get this generic pile of "bad motivations"? (Which often seem to map closely to generic piles of "bad motivations" assigned by racists to human ethnicities hmmm). I think a lot of it comes down the idiocy of alignments, which don't map to... well... anything real or even really to fiction particularly effectively. Because early D&D featured a lot of lazy half-considered "Race X is alignment Y" stuff (which was often near-immediately counterpointed by some member of that race which wasn't that alignment, something that tends to get lost in the mix), people think you "need" races which are "just evil" or w/e, and you really don't.

If you want a species to have something dangerous or bad about them "biologically" or "inherently", maybe just think about what exactly that would be? Like, do your orcs have a profound, instinctive desire to burn down wooden buildings? Or pull down any structure above 10' tall or something? Presumably as sapient beings, they're capable of overcoming this, in the way humans don't just punch, kick or bite every human who annoys them. Even if it's a divine curse or something, why not make it highly specific rather than vague, nonsensical "evil"? And if a species really is sapient, they can, pretty much definitionally, overcome that urge.

 

[Cadence]

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!

I'm wondering if he ever would have imagined Bullroarer Took as strong as the strongest part-ogre person* or whatever (not just as strong as a typical part-ogre person, but as strong as the strongest one). I am certainly willing to drop my objection as not being a good objection to many, but the problem for me isn't that it breaks the stereotype for the halflings, but that it breaks the ability to play into all of the would-presumably be physically strongest big ones*. **

* insert some tangent about the best of the Elves vs. best of the anything else
** insert some tangent about "strength"s conflation with combat ability in D&D
*** insert disclaimer about I would rather have the limits gone from the game than have a bunch of past iterations of them, especially the way the mental stats are done and the flexibility they stifle

 

[Umbran]

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.

So, this touches on an important point: the difference between "broad average" for a people, and how you depict individuals.

There is a difference between a GM saying, "In this world, Dwarves are often tougher and stronger than humans, and their culture values those traits" and "In this world, if you play a dwarf your character WILL BE tough and strong, because dwarves are tough and strong."

 

[BrokenTwin]

Not directly commenting on the biological determinism in RPGs, but in terms of mechanical limits: for a lot of us, working around/against those limits is part of the fun. Playing against type isn't nearly as satisfying when doing so requires zero tradeoffs or sacrifice. I don't want my halfling barbarian to be effortlessly as strong as the other player's goliath barbarian, I want them to kick butt despite the limitations they're operating under. It's hard to push against the limits of the system when the system lets you do whatever you want.

Having said that, I do think it would work better from an attribute point of view if the ancestry stats were based on limits and not bonuses. If, for example, the generic strength cap was 20, but goliaths' strength cap was 22, that's functionally the same thing in the long run, but in the lower levels where most people play, it would rarely come up, and it would be a lot easier for me to create a "weak" goliath.
Or, considering point buy, if the modifiers were applied to the baseline BEFORE the point-buy hits, making them worth significantly less "points". That would make default stat arrays significantly harder to do though. Or, for rolled stats, if the benefit was "roll 4 keep 3" for their favoured attributes.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I'm wondering if he ever would have imagined Bullroarer Took as strong as the strongest part-ogre person* or whatever (not just as strong as a typical part-ogre person, but as strong as the strongest one). I am certainly willing to drop my objection as not being a good objection to many, but the problem for me isn't that it breaks the stereotype for the halflings, but that it breaks the ability to play into the stereotype of all of the would-presumably be physically strong races**.

* insert some tangent about the best of the Elves vs. best of the anything else
** insert some tangent about "strength"s conflation with combat ability in D&D

I mean, I think Tolkien actually kind of thought in a somewhat D&D-ish way (or vice-versa) here because beings who can say lift thousands of pounds get defeated in one-on-one combat by beings who are just like, human.

I think this actually illustrates the "stat vs. specific ability" pretty well. Like, I think he'd have been fine with Bullroarer Took having the same to hit and damage bonus as Grognar of the Rock-People or whoever, the same bonus to Athletics. Like that in combat or climbing or swimming, they're actually well-matched. But Grognar of the Rock-People would have Powerful Build, which gives Grognar Advantage on checks to break Grapples and Grognar of the Rock-People counts as one size larger when checking carry/lift capacity (so a total of what, two sizes larger than Bullroarer?).

I'm not being difficult when I say I genuinely think this is a good illustration of why to use specific abilities for heroic fantasy, epic fantasy, hell even most dark fantasy features similar situations. The Witcher often parries beings weighing 3-10x as much as he does, beings who can push over trees, and yeah there's no way he's benching as much as them. There's no way he's crushing a rock to dust like them. But is he hitting for same sort of damage and with the same sort of chance as them? Yeah actually he pretty much is. Maybe for more even...

(I will say I think if we went for "realism" in fantasy things would look a lot more like The Boys than Tolkien.)

 

[Cadence]

I mean, I think Tolkien actually kind of thought in a somewhat D&D-ish way (or vice-versa) here because beings who can say lift thousands of pounds get defeated in one-on-one combat by beings who are just like, human.

I was remembering Morgtoh vs. Fingolfin (granted it is possibly the single least representative of anything outlier) where it felt to me like the to-hit chance and damage chance were separated (of course part of that could have been huge target vs. fast little target).

 

[Umbran]

The "evil", if there is one, is specific - the urge to hunt and kill (which interestingly I'm not sure humans inherently possess, we are good predators but the desire to hunt and kill seems to acculturated rather than inherent, but that's a separate discussion, though perhaps relevant here).

So, there's a nice example from a commonly known fiction we can look to: Klingons.

At one point (I think it might have been in ST: ENT, but i might be wrong on that), Trek makes it clear that all the Klingon obsession with combat and glory is cultural. A Klingon scientist (!) notes to a Starfleet officer that there was a time, not all that long ago in Trek-terms, in which Klingons valued science and literature, and all. But, for reasons, a cult of Kahless came to cultural dominance, and, then everything went to heck in a handbasket with "warrior culture".

All that stuff where another Klingon asks Worf, "Do you feel the call of battle in your blood?" are trying to portray their culture as a bio-essentialist fact.

And that's the problem with bio-essentialism, in a nutshell.