I don't get the arguments for bioessentialism

[NN]

I mean being real, it doesn't in a hard sense, but does in a soft sense. I'll explain.

It's not like any measurable number of people reject games outright for having species-based stat mods or the like, but the issue is really down to how essentially harmless physical stuff like "halflings are small and strong for their size so very nimble" (hence +2 DEX -2 STR) can easily trend into a portraying orcs identically to how racist psychos from the 1950s portrayed Asian or Black people (mentally subnormal, inherently savage/barbarous, reproducing rapidly, incapable of building real culture, possibly physically stronger/tougher, due to their savage nature, etc. etc.). If you don't think that slide can happen, well 5E hard-proves it can, because it happened between the PHB in 2014, and Volo's in 2016, which like, that's incredibly rapid movement, and from well-meaning people who I genuinely don't think were trying to be racist, they just managed to because certain tropes clump together (especially in the minds of people raised in racist societies, which is to say pretty much all current societies).

The real problem, being very honest about this, isn't physical stat modifiers by themselves. It just isn't. They're caught up in the fact that mental stat modifiers often are basically involved in depictions that essentially (sometimes very precisely) replicate massively racist ideas. INT penalties particularly. And it's hard to get rid of just mental stat mods - I mean, it's not, but it would be too much of a leap for a lot of people I think, so it's easier to remove both at the same time.

The reason it caught on so quickly is that it also lines up with allow more diverse and interesting character design, because then you can have typical characters without them just being ones who push against the default modifiers (which isn't a mechanically or even really conceptually interesting thing to do, and itself potentially plays into racist tropes).

I don't think there's any real objection to games which have stat mods in existing, but I do think there's a reasonable case that it's probably not the right way to go for a mass-market-oriented game, and especially not if you're incredibly confident in your abilities to be sensitive, and rightly confident.

Because again, WotC absolutely screwed this up. WotC who have, relative to other RPG companies, infinite resources. A bunch of well-meaning people, some of them minorities themselves (though very few ethnically so at that point), managed to screw this up.

The other issue with stat mods is that they're not very interesting or evocative compared to more specific abilities.

Not directly related to what you're saying but one thing that I was thinking about whilst travelling was that Star Trek has sort of addressed this to varying degrees from the start, albeit particularly from TNG onwards. Spock isn't Vulcan. He's half-human, half-Vulcan. Vulcan logic is a cultural trait, not a biological one (c.f. Romulans), and without it, Vulcans aren't really smarter than humans (they are stronger, though). Worf is Klingon, but in Star Fleet, and in fact is rather atypical, showing his human upbringing has made him very different to a Klingon with a traditional upbringing, despite having fully Klingon biological traits.

Thanks for the considered reply.

You make a compelling case for making fantasy rpg settings humancentric with relativistic morality.

 

[Gradine]

The problem of stats and especially stat penalties is a game design one. Saying that Halflings get +2 Dex means you are encouraging players to make specific choices (ie, Halflings makes great Rogues!); while saying that Halflings get -2 Str means you are actively discouraging players from making specific choices (ie, Halflings make terrible Barbarians or Fighters). Stat penalties penalize players for making interesting choices, including choices that might be perfectly sensible in the setting (Halfling Barbarians would or should not be an unlikely site in settings like Eberron or Dark Sun).

Stat penalties by species is bad design because of the way that it discourages player creativity. Stat bonuses by species? Those honestly were never actually the problem; the problem was that it paved the way for species monocultures and didn't account for "fish of out water" backstories, which are deeply uninteresting. Ideally, IMO, you would get part of your stat bonus from your species and another part from your background, but I can understand that that adds unnecessary complexity so I get moving the whole thing to background.

Racist-coded language to describe entire species of "bad" sapient creatures is pretty inexorably linked to the foundations of the game of D&D (and thus the hobby as a whole), whether the racist origins of such language was intended or, much more likely, used out of ignorance ("nits beget lice" being something of a big glaring example of it). You can choose to ignore it if you like, or even deny it, but it's a pretty well established objective fact at this point. The issue is that the presence or lack of intent doesn't really matter in this instance; the impact is going to be the same regardless. And the impact is what we (we would hope) would most want to avoid. This is why sensitivity consultants (a) exist and (b) are great. You're not actually expected to know all of this intuitively, but there are people out there that can help you catch anything you might be not intending before you go to print <glares at the first print run of Spelljammer: Adventures in Space>

 

[Scribe]

ie, Halflings make terrible Barbarians or Fighters

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Speaking only for myself, getting a +2 from my background rather than my choice of fantasy species hasn't made me feel that 5e is more inclusive.

I mean, that definitely wasn't the right way to go. The essentially went went from boring bioessentialism to boring classism/stereotyping.

Is classism less bad? Oh yes, absolutely, significantly so. Is is still cheap lazy stereotyping which doesn't really serve a purpose or really allow nuance or complexity by packaging together a bunch of stuff that doesn't need to go together? Also yes.

And being real again, a lot of people didn't like bioessentialism at all but also didn't hate it enough to demand change solely for that reason, but what they did hate was unnecessary restrictions on stat choice (as proven by 5E from Tasha's to 2024), which 2024 inexplicably reintroduced without even playtesting or acceptance-testing the concept (after it had essentially been essentially eliminated from D&D for half a decade). And I assure you that would NOT have met 70% approval, there's just absolutely no way. They dodged their own evaluation system to put in a concept literally nobody asked for! Classic WotC bum move.

Is it fair to say that mechanically representing differences in species is not by itself "bad," but perhaps the approaches that D&D has taken to doing that have been?

I would say so. Stats bonuses are boring and kind of annoyingly limiting (and as I noted, often don't really match the lore and instead seem like arbitrary "Well the bonus has to go somewhere!!!" stuff, which usually leads to just to putting it in a good place for the most stereotypical possible class for that species).

but there are people out there that can help you catch anything you might be not intending before you go to print <glares at the first print run of Planescape: Adventures in the Multiverse>

Wait what happened with Planescape? I know Spelljammer had the hilariously racist stuff with the monkey people (which is such a giant red flag as a concept you should always be incredibly careful, and WotC weren't even slightly careful), but I didn't hear anything about Planescape's first printing!

Why is there a picture of what is clearly a halfling? We know what a halfling looks like.

 

[Bill Zebub]

It's way more complicated than that, particularly since ERB introduced the white and supremacist Therns in 1913, years before the Nazis were an itch in their founders' metaphorical political pants. Moreover, while ERB detested fascism and Nazism, he was a fan of eugenics. That kind of makes the point of the Therns a bit... less blatant than Barsoomian Nazis.

I've seen an argument that the Therns are more representative of the US southern planter class - still reprehensible and worth overthrowing by a more honorable Virginian gentleman-soldier (ERB having a certain fascination with the American Revolution and its mystique).
In any event, it's likely that, given the timing, the Therns are more representative of US domestic issues than Germany's slide into mystical Aryan supremacy.

Awesome. You clearly know a lot more about this than I do.

The point I'm making is that an effective way to portray "evil" is to use tropes & symbolism that readers will recognize from the real world.

But that in cases where the origin of those tropes & symbolism is that they were used against entire ethnicities in order to justify subjugation....yeah I think I'd rather that official material stay away from that.

But I'm definitely ok with making punching bags out of Nazis.

 

[Gradine]

Wait what happened with Planescape? I know Spelljammer had the hilariously racist stuff with the monkey people (which is such a giant red flag as a concept you should always be incredibly careful, and WotC weren't even slightly careful), but I didn't hear anything about Planescape's first printing!

 

[Fanaelialae]

I kind of come at the problem in the opposite direction. It's probably reasonable to assume that 75% of goblins are vicious cannibals who only want to kill, enslave, and eat everything that isn't a goblin. But the PC's are very unlikely to encounter that "representative goblin" as their first encounter with goblins, because if they did then they'd probably die from that encounter. Instead, the first encounter they had with goblins in my last big D&D campaign was as some of the buccaneers getting off a warship in the harbor alongside the PC barbarian that was ultimately destined to join the party, led by some rich looking pale skinned red headed human officers who were specifically called out as being an ally of the nation that the PCs were currently in. And the first five or so encounters with goblins are like that, members of society that weren't attacking them or being attacked on sight by "in groups", because if you meet a goblin living in cosmopolitan lands amongst other races, chances are they are already "weird" from the standpoint of goblins as a whole. Even like the goblin knight they met in the woods was going about his business and they let him go about it by that point, because they really had no way of knowing what that knight was up to. What they did know by that point is that goblins aren't all easily characterized and don't attack on sight. Looks and greetings were exchanged and they both warily went around each other. Now, there is an argument to be made that if you meet a goblin knight in civilized lands there is a good chance he's scouting for a raiding party and will return and murder people and eat babies in the campaign season, but that wasn't really something I'd introduced to the players at that point.

In fact, one of the few characters that they captured and let go on parole was a hobgoblin mercenary, because by this point they had no preconceptions about goblins even though in the campaign setting it really is true that the majority of goblins are brutal murderous violent individuals. They were judging them as individuals despite that because that's the direction the presentation had gone.

Now, in a different setting on the fantasy planet where they start out directly near a goblin kingdom, a very different set of first impressions could have been created, and it would be I think an interesting sort of experiment to see how players in my game exposed to both first impressions reacted.

Cool! I wasn't suggesting that 10% as a rule of thumb. It was just meant as an example of how the vast majority of orcs could completely defy what is written in the MM, but that stereotype might be all that most people see.

I have had at least one campaign where the majority of orcs were vicious raiders, but it wasn't because they were orcs. The majority of the world was covered in this strange mist which negatively affected the minds of creatures living within it. There were isolated settlements which had survived outside the mist (on top of a mountain, in the bough of a world tree, and a city surrounded by a force field created by a goddess) and there were orcs in those that were normal people. But the orcs that lived in the mist were pretty much "shoot first, ask questions later", not because they were orcs, but because the mist did bad things to most creatures' minds, and it made most orcs xenophobic and hyper-aggressive. (The PCs were among the few people with a natural immunity to the mist.)

I have also had campaigns where something like that 10% concept did apply (not that I ever worked it out that precisely, but my lore had it that most orcs just wanted live their lives, and it was the raiders that gave them a bad name). My players even encountered a non-hostile orc settlement in their explorations and had peaceful interactions with them.

So it really varies according to the campaign world I've built. I set up my campaigns to allow the players to completely trash them (including fixing most of the major problems) so I usually create a new world for each campaign. Which means new lore for each campaign. Though they coexist in the same multiverse, so crossovers do occasionally happen.

 

[Tonguez]

The problem of stats and especially stat penalties is a game design one. Saying that Halflings get +2 Dex means you are encouraging players to make specific choices (ie, Halflings makes great Rogues!); while saying that Halflings get -2 Str means you are actively discouraging players from making specific choices (ie, Halflings make terrible Barbarians or Fighters). Stat penalties penalize players for making interesting choices, including choices that might be perfectly sensible in the setting (Halfling Barbarians would or should not be an unlikely site in settings like Eberron or Dark Sun).

Stat penalties by species is bad design because of the way that it discourages player creativity. Stat bonuses by species? Those honestly were never actually the problem; the problem was that it paved the way for species monocultures and didn't account for "fish of out water" backstories, which are deeply uninteresting. Ideally, IMO, you would get part of your stat bonus from your species and another part from your background, but I can understand that that adds unnecessary complexity so I get moving the whole thing to background.

I dont know if I agree with that and in fact think the opposite is true. I think having halfling barbarian be as strong as a goliath barbarian discourages creativity as it makes species irrelevant. I agree Halfling barbarians should be encouraged but they should not play the same way as a Goliath Barbarian does - they need to utilise their nimbility, luck and small size as part of their barbarian identity not in spite of it. Thats where the 'unusual species-class' combo becomes a creative challenge.

 

[Gradine]

I dont know if I agree with that and in fact think the opposite is true. I think having halfling barbarian be as strong as a goliath barbarian discourages creativity as it makes species irrelevant. I agree Halfling barbarians should be encouraged but they should not play the same way as a Goliath Barbarian does - they need to utilise their nimbility, luck and small size as part of their barbarian identity not in spite of it. Thats where the 'unusual species-class' combo becomes a creative challenge.

The problem is that the character is still being penalized within the gameplay function of their primary ability. Especially when in 3.5 where your Halfling Barbarian has a worse chance to hit, has a smaller bonus to damage, and has a lower damage die to begin with. And hitting things, really hard, is your primary role as a Barbarian, and there was little to nothing in the rules to support compensating for lower strength in a strength-based class. I'm the last person to support character optimization and I have a history of making mechanically weaker in 3.x, but it's hard to deny that optimization was the prevailing way to approach 3.x (at least in the places on the internet where people talked about 3.x). I did, by the way, play a Halfling Barbarian in an Eberron campaign in 3.x, and I was deeply unhappy with how the mechanics consistently got in the way of me trying to play the character that I wanted to play.

Maybe if the system was built better to accommodate suboptimal statistics I would agree with you but that has never been D&D's strong point, and it certainly wasn't in the era where you could (a) playing a halfling barbarian while (b) halflings suffered strength penalties. The rules, in practice and I would argue by design, are clearly communicating with its stat penalties which character archetypes not to play. That's not encouraging creativity in the least, and it's been a positive development that they've been resigned to history.

 

[Morrus]

I dont know if I agree with that and in fact think the opposite is true. I think having halfling barbarian be as strong as a goliath barbarian discourages creativity as it makes species irrelevant.

And that's what I meant about it limiting imagination. If you can't (or won't) even imagine a super-strong halfling? In fact, from what you just said, the only difference in your mind between a halfling and a goliath is their strength score? Nothing else? If a halfling with a high strength score exists then the whole species is irrelevant? There's nothing else that distinguishes them?

This is why I said that these limitations squash creativity and imagination. Why can't Zidi Wheatling, the Halfing Titan exist? It's an awesome concept! Why can't a feeble goliath exist? I can't think of any reason to bar these ideas from existing by hard-coding them into the core rulebooks. That's telling people not to imagine anything beyond the very specific thing that the writers (of a game which encourages you to make your own worlds) said.