The examples the OP gives are not a problem. Bioessentialism becomes problematic when two things happen:
1. The essentialism is about being "the bad guy" such that it's ok to kill them on sight (evil Drow, evil Orcs, etc).
In fictional worlds there's nothing wrong with exploring concepts that don't exist in the world, such as inherently evil races/ancestries/species/whatever-word-is-popular-now that can be killed on the spot. In fact, one of the things that makes fiction excellent is that is breaks from the real world and lets us explore... anything.
Bioessentialism doesn't even come into the picture until someone complains that X might maybe have some comparisons to real-world Y—but that really reveals much more about the complainer's Y-based view of the world much more than what X is or isn't, particularly when the overwhelming majority of people who interact with X see it as just X, a fictional thing in a fictional setting, and nothing more. Let games just be games, folks. We don't have to force metaphorical comparisons between fiction and the real world all over the place.
I know we're mostly talking about this in a game design context, but allowing for inherently evil creatures (and other things that give some people the ick in the real world) can make for truly exceptional narrative. I found the Drizzt Do'Urden stories (RA Salvatore) absolutely inspiring, but Drizzt's personal journey of redemption from the inherent evil of his people wouldn't be half as powerful if drow were just "misunderstood" rather than inherently, largely irredeemably evil.
In short, just exploring elements that don't exist in the real world makes for good fiction, and the gameplay or the narrative can choose to go one step further by giving some spotlight to a character that consciously breaks that mold.
Bioessentialism is also what gets us things like stat bonuses or penalties for gender.
Again, it's fiction. Whether or not you believe that such things exist in the real world doesn't matter in a fictional setting or the context of game rules—but it may affect your ability to suspend disbelief or your personal enjoyment, but there's no accounting for taste.
Sometimes intentionally building such differences into a setting could be really interesting, and, as far as game design is concerned, can let you do fun things that you couldn't do without asymmetrical design.
Let's take some inspiration from spiders. It's a biological fact that in the overwhelming majority of species female spiders are far larger and stronger than male spiders. If a creator wanted to take inspiration from this, he could make a fictional species of playable spider people where the females are always Medium and the males always Small, and maybe give the females a Strength bonus or the males a Strength penalty (or both!) and that would have interesting ripple effects on gameplay. Obviously that would push female spider-people of this race toward physical-oriented builds, and push male spider-people away from them—but intentionally making characters that buck this mechanical push can be exceptional fun, as I'll elaborate on when responding to a different quote later.
Another point: NOT including those Strength-based differences (or the literal size-based differences) would make the differences between the male and female spider people irrelevant. If for some reason that size/strength difference was a part of their lore... well, it wouldn't actually exist in-game, and there would be some dissonance there.
For people who don't enjoy having your stats forcibly changed, or the fact that stat bonuses can allow one option to start with a higher/ceiling/lower floor than others—an alternative design choice is "You may not select male spider-folk if your Strength is above X."
Speaking of mechanical ripple effects:
- I, personally, rarely enjoy games that only assign penalties to differences. In the example above, if the only differences between male and female spider-folk is that males had a Strength penalty AND were always Small, I'm not sure I'd ever play a male spider-folk.
- THAT SAID, intentionally weak character options do have their places. Sometimes such things have really unexpected, niche advantages; sometimes it's just fun to play an underpowered character and make it work. Some of the most fun characters I've ever played were kobolds and other underpowered races (using NPC classes) in 3.5.
This is not me saying you HAVE to build such differences into your game. I'm just pointing out that you CAN, and there's nothing wrong with that. Every rule, advantage, disadvantage, or mechanic you add is a tool that can work well to serve your design end-goal, or if can detract from it. In addition, every such thing will work for some players and not for other players. (By my read of the room, assigning stat-based differences between sexes is pretty unpopular right now, so you might have an uphill battle gaining widespread support if you include that element and one of your top goals is to achieve widespread popularity.)
The only two mistakes in assigning, or not assigning, stats or other mechanics to sex (& etc) are whether or not doing so will work for your target audience and whether or not doing so will meet your game/world design goals.
In my personal opinion (although I know others disagree) the problem with stat bonuses is less about the insidious aspects of bioessentialism, and more that it forces an unnecessary trade-off between optimization and roleplaying. Why dissuade people from playing Orc wizards or Halfling warriors? If you (meant generically, not @overgeeked) don't want to play an orc wizard or halfling warrior, then don't. Put your own floating stat bonus* wherever you want, but don't tell other people how to make characters.
*Or don't have stat bonuses. Real gamers roll 3d6 straight down the line.
Bioessentialism isn't an insidious aspect of game/world design—it doesn't even properly exist in game/world design until people start applying real-world offense to fictional things. Let games be games, folks.
Also—what's wrong with intentional trade-offs between optimization and role-playing? It exists in every element of the game—one feat is better at one thing than another, one class is, one skill is. We can't have a game with differences between options without trade-offs—otherwise everything would be a blank, nothing blob. Why not assign trade-offs to races, since that's another character choice? As long as races are asymmetrical, trade-offs will always exist anyway. Orcs having an increase in weapon damage after charging versus Elves having a bonus cantrip and spell or two is going to more softly push them in different directions (compared to direct stat differences), but it's still going to push them in different directions and have an effect on optimization and narrative.
If you want to optimize and that's your highest priority, you're always going to pick the options that give you the biggest numbers (and your brain will go "BRRRRRR"—mine does, anyway) regardless of the game or rules you're playing.
As well, choosing to prioritize narrative over optimization—while still making the best optimization you can within an unoptimized starting point—both can't exist without some races (or etc) being better at one thing or another, and has the potential to be a lot more fun than always choosing the biggest number option ("most optimized") as your start and going from there toward your optimized end-goal. It might put you in surprising places. Sure, your Halfling fighter generally won't be as good as your Orc fighter, but you wouldn't have picked the Halfling in the first place if your biggest goal from the beginning was optimization over everything else.
An example of this at my table is one of the most fun characters I've ever played in my life—Rockchuck the Gnome Barbarian. In terms of stats, he was a goblin Monk/Rogue multiclass, and that's what he was in-game, too, despite being completely personally convinced that he was just a malformed gnome abandoned at birth and raised by goblins. My goal was to make the most Barbarian character I could without having a single level in Barbarian and fighter, and I ended up making this little guy who played hyper-aggressive, did lots of damage, had more tankability than might be expected. In trying to make this guy work, I discovered that climbing on a larger creature's back, per the 5e DMG rules, nearly always grants advantage to hit, so that immediately became this guy's playstyle, and turned his smaller size and one-handed weapons into an advantage—since nearly every enemy was Medium, he could climb on nearly every enemy, and he could use one-handed weapons while holding on with the other hand, and it just worked. Nearly always having advantage meant nearly always having Sneak Attack, increased chance to crit, etc.
It was fun. And I only discovered this character by starting at an unoptimized location and building toward optimization.
Regardless of my (or your) opinion about how sensitive other people should or shouldn't be, the fact is that some people...a LOT of people...with personal and cultural backgrounds very different from mine, feel unwelcome by some of the tropes that have existed in the hobby since it was created by people in my demographic. I'd rather have more people in the hobby instead of fewer, so if I need to make a houserule that orcs are inherently evil and you can slaughter them on sight, instead of having that written into the monster manual, I'm willing to pay that price without kicking and screaming about it.
I think it's a bigger problem to feel, or project, a need to self-police your stories and tropes to make other people more comfortable—or use that as an excuse to make a "rule" on what is or isn't allowed to be an element in a fictional setting. I'm not going to limit myself because of complaints made by individuals that may be presented as representing some group they are part of, despite them just being individuals and not, in reality, ambassadors representing that entire group. In short, treat people as individuals, not bundles of group identities.
If X game includes inherently evil creatures as part of it, that simply means it is not including in its target audience people who don't like that game element, and that's OK. Not every game should try to catch every possible audience member ever—and doing so tends to dilute identity and flavor anyway.
It's a theory. I don't think the theory holds up though, because my experience talking with 5e players is the lack of mechanical crunch to racial heritage doesn't get people to lean more into the question of "What would it be like to have a different biology or body or culture than my own" but rather just gets everyone to treat all characters as humans with rubber prosthetics glued to them. I don't see any sign that it gets people trying to imagine being something other than themselves.
Rules choices have a meaningful impact on the game—and definition cannot exist without limitation.
In other words, yeah,
@Celebrim is hitting on something here that a lot of people have felt. The more the sharp edges are filed off of various fictional races, the more they all feel like humans in cosplay, and that's not interesting or fun for anyone who wants a fictional setting to explore more than just humans in cosplay.
Pointing back at the spider-folk example I made earlier, mechanical differences between options can also be important for upholding narrative differences. If there weren't a Size/Strength difference between male and female spider-folk, any narrative difference would be erased by actual play.
I think Goliaths are a good example of this in DnD. Supposedly they are huge, massively strong people descended from/connected to giants—but they rarely feel like this, mechanically. Since they are Medium sized and don't actually have any bonuses to Strength or Athletics, any Halfling Rogue with Expertise in Athletics could easily pin them to the ground, despite being a third their literal size. The Goliath bonus to carrying capacity, in practice, doesn't make up this mechanical difference in strength to support the narrative—in practice, it makes them more like donkey-people, natural-born pack mules.
(Unless your DM is totally willing to let you get silly with carrying capacity and carry around a several-hundred-ton wall as your primary weapon. Rules as intended? Absolutely not. Rules as literally written? Oh yeah.)
And like I said, this strikes me as going to far the other way. Erasure of differences even in cases they'd be expected suggests a massive discomfort with "the other" rather than tolerance and acceptance of diversity. I generally want a lot of markers of "Hey, I'm an elf" or "Hey, I'm a sentient badgerfolk." or "Hey, I'm an algae colony with emergent intelligence" or whatever we are doing.
No further comments. I just thought this was an excellent point.
The sort of people who actually care about RP play non-optimized characters on purpose in part precisely because they aren't optimized. It's actually probably part of the attraction to go against type. But if there is no type to go against, well, where is the RP attraction?
No further comments. I just thought this was an excellent point.
TLDR: To those who make moral claims about assigning mechanical differences between races/sexes/etc in games, you're wrong. Period. 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.
