I don't get the arguments for bioessentialism

[Deset Gled]

I feel the same way to the point where I really don't care what species the players choose for their characters. I don't even bother with lighting most of the time because either the PC has darkvision or someone has the Light cantrip.
...
I'm not arguing that some player characters should be more important than others, I'm arguing they'll all really human to begin with. i.e. They're not really, truly alien and I don't see that as a bad thing.

I agree with your earlier assessment, but disagree about what I want out of the game. One of the things I would really like from a TTRPG is the ability to explore the non-human-ness of different characters. If I play a Warforged, I want the option to be the opposite of Data; a robot in search of being more robotic and less human. I want to explore how a fey ancestry is fundamentally non-human in nature. I want extreme mechanical differences in species that allow the player to celebrate those differences.

I feel like the more disparate abilities of older editions (from Elves as a class to ASIs) made it easier to explore that part of the game. And I think that 5e has made huge strides in changing things to the point where the effect of a character's species is extremely minimized. It's a choice that barely matters anymore.

The caveat to that, though, is that I don't blame WotC for making the choices they have made. I have seen the history of D&D where species has been used as an unfortunate expy for real races, and I know they need to distance themselves from that. I understand that it's harder to make art and stories that don't accidentally fall into human-centric styles that they're trying to avoid. And I get that they're trying to cover the widest swatch of the market. If publishing D&D was part of my professional career, I'd be pushing them to do exactly what they're doing, even if it's not what I want from the game.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Last time I played an elf, their backstory was that they had been married to a human, and watched them grow old and die. Then watched their children grow old and die. As such they were burdened by grief, and had adopted many of the manerisms of an elderly human, despite being biologically quite young. And that’s about that same level of alienness to me as pretending to be a mighty warrior.

Do you have to play elves that way? No, of course not. Many players play elves as humans with pointy ears. And so long as everyone is having fun they are doing it right.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

One of the reasons players make the choices they do is they want to play a character who looks attractive. Tieflings are an example of this. Despite being introduced as highly variable, they quickly settled to largely human with small to medium horns and a pointed tail. Characteristics that are culturally associated with “devilishly handsome”. You can see a lot of roguishly sexy tieflings in computer games. Then 4e tried to make them ugly. Perhaps by some puritan reasoning that evil must be ugly (see Star Wars). Understandably, it didn’t stick.

Also notice the sexification of orcs in the way they have been depicted through the editions, as they became more common as PCs.

 

[gban007]

The entire presumption that "if you portray something evil in your work of creative fiction, and don't issue a disclaimer about how you don't agree with it, then you're endorsing it" is an incredibly toxic idea that has inexplicably become the default presumption for a particularly vocal minority of fandom.

I don't think Jeff Lindsay (author of Dexter) endorses serial killers, or that Vince Gilligan (creator of Breaking Bad) endorses cooking and selling meth, or that the writers for Law & Order: Special Victims Unit endorse sexual assault. I give the same benefit of the doubt to people who write fantasy and science fiction, regardless of how grimdark it might be.

I generally agree, I only get concerned if someone is doing a somewhat more black and white type story with clear good guys, and their thoughts/ behavior sometimes , whether they are trying to portray them as flawed, or is a genuine view of author that that is good. Examples where I'm unsure is main character in Meg, and some of Asimovs characters. The latter especially as somewhat repeated behavior when it comes to gender views, at least ealier in his career.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

One of the reasons players make the choices they do is they want to play a character who looks attractive. Tieflings are an example of this. Despite being introduced as highly variable, they quickly settled to largely human with small to medium horns and a pointed tail. Characteristics that are culturally associated with “devilishly handsome”. You can see a lot of roguishly sexy tieflings in computer games. Then 4e tried to make them ugly. Perhaps by some puritan reasoning that evil must be ugly (see Star Wars). Understandably, it didn’t stick.

And Sophia Lillis in the movie.

 

[Staffan]

One of the reasons players make the choices they do is they want to play a character who looks attractive. Tieflings are an example of this. Despite being introduced as highly variable, they quickly settled to largely human with small to medium horns and a pointed tail. Characteristics that are culturally associated with “devilishly handsome”. You can see a lot of roguishly sexy tieflings in computer games.

For values of "quickly" that include "14 years later." Planescape was released in 1994, and 4e where tieflings got a more-or-less similar appearance in 2008.

Then 4e tried to make them ugly.

Huh?

I don't think I'd call these "ugly" per se. It's a rather distinct aesthetic, but one a lot of people appreciate. It should also be noted that 4e also made the change from tieflings having a Charisma penalty (2e and 3e) to having a Charisma bonus (4e and 5.0) – not that Charisma is the same as appearance, but it can be related. I also do think that in addition to wanting a coherent appearance for the minis, another driving factor in 4e tiefling appearance was WoW (albeit moreso on the female side):