I don't get the arguments for bioessentialism

[Distracted DM]

I think this post might've been largely missed- it's a good example of how a TTRPG could handle it differently than DnD:

Burning Wheel has all elves embodying Grief. They have seen so many sad things and experimented that things never change over centuries that they have a Grief stat that can increase by rolling with "experience" of sad things happening in the course of their adventure. They can mitigate it by lamenting, but at some point they'll reache Grief 10, and they either wither out or die, or leave the Mortal world for the West never to be seen again before the end of time. They learn slowly, but are immortal, so depending on age a starting character will have 20-40 stat points while a human will have 15-23.

Dwarves are embodiment of Greed, they must resist the urge to acquire things of notable value. At 10 Greed, they shut themselves down in their halls, thinking everyone will try to rob them, and become utterly sociopathic. That's why they'll probably kill a few people to acquire their coveted things when they reach Greed 8 or 9... When you resist Greed (by not taking the thing [or person] you crave), it increases (of course).

Orcs are the embodiment of Hate. It increase as they are confronted to violence (from witnessing a murder or being exposed to sunlight, losing a battle (mid-level), being mind-controlled or surviving a mortal wound (very hard). You might have noticed the pattern that if Hatred reach level 10, the character can no longer be played, having lost all remainder of free will and possessed by a destructive frenzy -- he has the choice to become suicidal instead of killing his friends in a murderous frenzy. Also, orcs can use Hatred as a bonus for a lot of situation... It's not that the orcs are stronger than human (they are, on average, with twice has many stat points) but even the weakest member of the species can tear a knight in two with his bare hand when enraged.

en are free willed and don't have any overpowering emotion that take control of their mind (unless they trade their soul away for magic or pledge it to a higher power, but the initial choice is always theirs).

Different creature operate on a different scale. Orcs have 10-19 points to spend on physical attribute, 3-9 on Mental, while humans have 5-7/9-16, dwarves 6-12/12-18and elves 7-16 and 13-24.

So, yes, some other creatures are sometime on a different scale than humans but the system forces you to avoid, if non-Human, making experience checks for your governing emotion, basically roleplaying the traits associated with the group of creature you're an example. You could ignore this stat and play yourself with pointy ears, but you'll probably be removed for play in adventure 3. Or you'll be aloof and uncaring, because if you attach yourself to humans, you'll see them die in droves of old age and make lots and lots of Grief tests.

It's a little heavy-handed, but it does bioessentialism better than D&D.

No amount of cultural explanation will explain why you can die of not having the Arkenstone or the halls of Moria.

Edit; note that it isn't Tolkienesque. The line of Feanor struck me as a good illustration of BW's Dwarves, for example, preferring to throw them into a chasm to the center of the world rather than give up on the last Silmaril...

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Especially when "a little" isn't even a universal thing but just a slightly different median of a distribution curve that mostly overlaps with the other races.

How much more graceful than Dwarves are Elves if you have to gather statistics from a lot of each in order to discern the difference?

According to everyone who wanted get rid of species ASIs that +2 was the difference between a perfectly playable character and unplayable trash, so obviously it is a huge difference!

 

[MGibster]

It’s like the warhammer 40k problem with the Aledari (space elves) or frankly any setting with elves or elf standins. They’re always emphatically described as utterly alien and incomprehensible to humanity, yet they basically act like arrogant, snobby traditionalists in a very human like way. Generally speaking.

Warhammer 40k wasn't originally intended to be taken seriously with the over-the-top setting serving simply as a framework to justify why your little metal miniatures were trying to murder my little metal miniatures. The Eldar view humanity like we might a toddler armed with a .357 Magnum who is throwing a tantrum because he doesn't want to share the ice cream with any of the other kids. We wouldn't really respect that child, but we'd all recognize he's a danger to himself and everyone around him.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I feel D&D increasingly made creatures similar to each other, to the point that it's now "heroic inspiration once per long rest vs darkvision and a cantrip?". They didn't really went toward more distinctiveness over time.

True, and one of many reasons I've moved on from WotC's version of the game.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Warhammer 40k wasn't originally intended to be taken seriously with the over-the-top setting serving simply as a framework to justify why your little metal miniatures were trying to murder my little metal miniatures. The Eldar view humanity like we might a toddler armed with a .357 Magnum who is throwing a tantrum because he doesn't want to share the ice cream with any of the other kids. We wouldn't really respect that child, but we'd all recognize he's a danger to himself and everyone around him.

Yeah a lot of the seriousness and complexity of the races got added "after the fact" with 40K. Like even if you take Rogue Trader at face value, ignore the obvious joking and references and so on, it doesn't present the Eldar (long before any "Aeldari" nonsense lol) as anything but bizarrely human-like beings (right down to being able to interbreed with humans), who are just longer-lived, have infravision, and a different culture, essentially. There's none of this drivel about inscrutable alien logic and so on.

Even in 2E 40K ("Space Marine"), the level of hype re: the Eldar (still no Aeldari!) is much lower. They are more hyped, but they still have "feet of clay", which I would argue those feet have graaaaaduaaaaalllllly come back over recent editions. The maximum peak of "They are inscrutable totally alien beings" aligns with the peak of taking the Imperium 100% seriously and giving people the [extremely mistaken] opinion that maybe the Imperium is overall merely "hard men making hard choices", rather than overall corrupt lunatic theofascists who constantly trip over their own dick (GW has since endorsed the latter interpretation thankfully, whereas half of 4Chan and All The Worst People endorsed the former one). That peak was in like 3/4/5E 40K.

According to everyone who wanted get rid of species ASIs that +2 was the difference between a perfectly playable character and unplayable trash, so obviously it is a huge difference!

I mean, this is D&D. Anyone pretending that like 60%+ of D&D players wouldn't (metaphorically, I stress) throw their grandma in front of a bus for +1 to hit and damage on virtually every attack/damage roll forever with that character is being damn silly. And given the threshold here was much, much lower than grandma goes under the bus, but merely "limit race choice to ones that give at least a +1 (for people using the standard array, which is most people playing 5E) to the right ASI (+2 usually results in a 17, which longer-term is better but short-term is irrelevant), then yeah that was how it was working out in practice.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Yeah a lot of the seriousness and complexity of the races got added "after the fact" with 40K. Like even if you take Rogue Trader at face value, ignore the obvious joking and references and so on, it doesn't present the Eldar (long before any "Aeldari" nonsense lol) as anything but bizarrely human-like beings (right down to being able to interbreed with humans), who are just longer-lived, have infravision, and a different culture, essentially. There's none of this drivel about inscrutable alien logic and so on.

Even in 2E 40K ("Space Marine"), the level of hype re: the Eldar (still no Aeldari!) is much lower. They are more hyped, but they still have "feet of clay", which I would argue those feet have graaaaaduaaaaalllllly come back over recent editions. The maximum peak of "They are inscrutable totally alien beings" aligns with the peak of taking the Imperium 100% seriously and giving people the [extremely mistaken] opinion that maybe the Imperium is overall merely "hard men making hard choices", rather than overall corrupt lunatic theofascists who constantly trip over their own dick (GW has since endorsed the latter interpretation thankfully, whereas half of 4Chan and All The Worst People endorsed the former one). That peak was in like 3/4/5E 40K.


I mean, this is D&D. Anyone pretending that like 60%+ of D&D players wouldn't (metaphorically, I stress) throw their grandma in front of a bus for +1 to hit and damage on virtually every attack/damage roll forever with that character is being damn silly. And given the threshold here was much, much lower than grandma goes under the bus, but merely "limit race choice to ones that give at least a +1 (for people using the standard array, which is most people playing 5E) to the right ASI (+2 usually results in a 17, which longer-term is better but short-term is irrelevant), then yeah that was how it was working out in practice.

3e-5e was my active period of 40k play (just played RT and 2e sporadically). Thus, to me that era is the core of the setting.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

3e-5e was my active period of 40k play (just played RT and 2e sporadically). Thus, to me that era is the core of the setting.

Yeah with, no insult to you, is the most awful and weird era, because it's when, for entirely corporate profit-seeking reasons, they sucked almost all the humour and charm out of the setting, and started bizarrely trying to spin the Imperium of Man as "just doing what they had to", even though any closer analysis of the text showed they were mostly still demented theofascists who were their own main problem. But a lot of people, especially Americans of a certain age (mostly younger than us, but not all) got their start in that era, because it's also when (for the same corporate profit-seeking reasons) GW started marketing a lot more and lot more effectively in the US. I believe (but do not have harder proof) that these strategies were seen as being aligned, though that proved mistaken in the longer-term.

RT and particularly 2E clearly had the more enduring vision, because by 7E things were slowly starting to swing back around ("nature is healing"), and by late 8E/early 9E were basically full-on back in basically the same territory as 2E, right down to armies last seen in 2E having returned (Genestealer Cults and Squats/Votann being the biggest examples). The Imperium also gets a more interesting portrayal, with some actual "points of light" with saner people and the Custodes and some of the Marines trying to genuinely make things better, but the bulk of the Imperium is still theofascist hell (in direct disobeyance of the Emperor's orders!) and the books don't try and spin it like they did (imho) in 3/4/5E.

 

[Scribe]

3rd to 5th codified what modern 40K is. The fact 4chan got (gets?) a lot wrong doesn't mean that codification was bad.

I still look at that era as the peak of the game/lore.

Pretty much any post 8th change is an abomination in the eyes of the Emperor.

The Imperium is, was, remains, a theofacist (is that a word?) hellscape, and the good guys, are Chaos Space Marines...

But that's off topic.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Yeah with, no insult to you, is the most awful and weird era, because it's when, for entirely corporate profit-seeking reasons, they sucked almost all the humour and charm out of the setting, and started bizarrely trying to spin the Imperium of Man as "just doing what they had to", even though any closer analysis of the text showed they were mostly still demented theofascists who were their own main problem. But a lot of people, especially Americans of a certain age (mostly younger than us, but not all) got their start in that era, because it's also when (for the same corporate profit-seeking reasons) GW started marketing a lot more and lot more effectively in the US. I believe (but do not have harder proof) that these strategies were seen as being aligned, though that proved mistaken in the longer-term.

RT and particularly 2E clearly had the more enduring vision, because by 7E things were slowly starting to swing back around ("nature is healing"), and by late 8E/early 9E were basically full-on back in basically the same territory as 2E, right down to armies last seen in 2E having returned (Genestealer Cults and Squats/Votann being the biggest examples). The Imperium also gets a more interesting portrayal, with some actual "points of light" with saner people and the Custodes and some of the Marines trying to genuinely make things better, but the bulk of the Imperium is still theofascist hell (in direct disobeyance of the Emperor's orders!) and the books don't try and spin it like they did (imho) in 3/4/5E.

I agree with the first part of your post, but not the second. It has gotten much worse, not better lately. The de-facto leader of the fascist totalitarian and genocidal Imperium is depicted as a noble shiny, if tragic, heroic figure. And the Custodes being depicted as "good guys" is not actually a good thing either. Making the top echelons of your super terrible tyrannical regime "good guys" is sending the wrong message pretty damn fiercely. The accidental fascism apologia has never been as strong in 40K than it is currently. If you want to have "points of light" within the Imperium, they need to be people who lack the real power, just cogs in the terrible machine that are trying to do their best in the terrible circumstances until they get crushed.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I agree with the first part of your post, but not the second. It has gotten much worse, not better lately. The de-facto leader of the fascist totalitarian and genocidal Imperium is depicted as a noble shiny, if tragic, heroic figure. And the Custodes being depicted as "good guys" is not actually a good thing either. Making the top echelons of your super terrible tyrannical regime "good guys" is sending the wrong message pretty damn fiercely. The accidental fascism apologia has never been as strong in 40K than it is currently. If you want to have "points of light" within the Imperium, they need to be people who lack the real power, just cogs in the terrible machine that are trying to do their best in the terrible circumstances until they get crushed.

I'm not seeing it completely myself, because I don't agree that those people are at the top, but perhaps my understanding of the Imperial power structure is different to yours?

As I understand it, in recent editions, the rulers of the Imperium are still The High Lords of Terra who are still woefully corrupt and greedy individuals and very much want to preserve the theofascism and disobeyance of the Emperor's will (literally his entire deal was "yo let's kill all the gods and religions, even the nice ones"). The Ecclesiarchy are even worse.

I think the only really solidly "problematic" issue is with Roboute Guillman because they want to have their cake and eat it, with him being "very powerful" (I dunno about de facto leader of the Imperium because he's less powerful than the High Lords of Terra imho) but also not able to redirect the Imperium at a fundamental level. I agree that they should have made him less powerful to fit with this scheme. Like, have the Ultramarines be openly at-odds with the Lords of Terra and so on, rather than it being vaguely implied.

I'd also like to see the individual High Lords of Terra brought more to the forefront as villains.

But I would suggest that, whilst I get where you're coming from, it's very different in style:

In 3/4/5E, they literally are apologists for the theofascism, the genocides, the pointless slaughters, and so on (I mean apologists in the most accurate sense of the word, not the colloquial).

In 8/9/10E, they are clearly against the theofascism, present the theofascists as "bad" (even like the one Space Marine legion who are fully "like that", the Black Templars), but they keep trying to make out the Custodes and Guilleman are "good guys", which I agree rings a little hollow but I do think points in the right direction.

I guess I agree with you because you use the word "accidental", because with 3/4/5E, it wasn't an accident. It also wasn't because they wanted to promote theofascism, but they knew what they were doing. Where he's it's like "Uh we have good guys in the Imperium, how do we do that?", and it's a bit of a mess.