D&D 5E I thought WotC was removing biological morals?

[DarkCrisis]

Probably because, no matter what people claim, D&D has always been focused on races as being of nearly all one alignment. Any exceptions are just that, exceptions. Whenever a writer wants to create a differently-aligned sub-culture of a monster race, it gets turned into a sub-race instead, with different attributes and a different statblock or a different set of PC traits. It's why there were (in 2e) fey-touched LG Odanti orcs, instead of just regular orcs who decided to beat their swords into plowshares and had an alignment change when they took up farming. This is also why PC races have sub-races. There's no good reason why high and wood elves need different stats; after all, forest-dwelling humans and city-dwelling humans don't have them. There's no good reason why mountain and hill dwarfs have different stats, either. But in D&D, culture = (sub)race = different traits and abilities.

Whether that continues to be the case for these arctic Aevandrow and jungle Lorendrow remains up in the air, since I don't believe they've been turned into playable races yet. But note that neither of them live underground, which already marks them as different from the Lolth-worshiping, subterranean Udadrow.

Because a human has access to more stuff. Be it more classes in older Ed or more bonus points to point into whatever stat you want.

where as a typical Mnt Dwarf worked the mines and forged and got strong. The typical wood elf knows how to move unseen in the forest. Etc

Not all Mnt Dwarves obviously but “the typical whatever” gets the typical adjustments. Race in D&D is tied with a culture which is reflected in stat boosts and skills etc.

Where as your typical human can just place extra stats into str to show “I worked the mines”

and I get people issues with “Why would my Mnt dwarf Wizard have worked the mines? I don’t need the +2 to str.” And I suppose that all made more sense when dwarves couldn’t be Wizards.

 

[Mirtek]

Assuming they're a social species. Sadly, since monsters no longer have a Habitat/Society section or a Number Appearing section, it's difficult to tell if a creature is solitary, communal, or something else. It could be that they hunt in groups but don't actually care about one another at all. It could be that they're "born" in groups but immediately split ways.

We know that there are still archfeys and that they have courts. Even on the material plane I could imagine redcaps working for hags.

I always though that the servant of the white witch in the first narnia movie was supposed to be a redcap. But apparently it was just a narnian dwarf

 

[Hexmage-EN]

Except for those living in the Feywild with other fey. There they have something that would be called "society" in mortal terms.

The hag Mad Maggie in Descent into Avernus has a number of redcaps (plus "madcaps" who have mutated due to soaking their caps in demon ichor). Here is what is said about them:

• They have few goals other than reveling in chaos and slaughter.
• To facilitate violence, a redcap may give a PC a grisly trophy only to later claim the PC stole it and start an attack.
• Mad Maggie doesn't hold it against visitors if they kill her redcaps and madcaps, knowing the PCs probably did it in self-defense.
• The redcaps and madcaps harass and threaten other creatures in Mad Maggie's camp, such as a pair of imps and a flameskull. The redcaps and madcaps are playing keep away with one of the flameskull's teeth after having knocked it loose from its jaw, and if a PC gets the tooth thirteen redcaps immediately attack to try and get it back.
• A fiendish flesh golem named Mickey has shards of a bone devil in his foot, causing him to hop awkwardly. Rather than helping him, the redcaps and madcaps mock his movement by turning it into a dance. If a PC helps remove the shard so that Mickey can walk normally the redcaps and madcaps become angry.

 

[reelo]

Given that D&D "races" really are more along the lines of species, I personally can't help but wonder what a world where the other relatives of homo sapiens persisted to the present day (like neanderthals and homo florensis aka hobbits) would be like.

There was a time (several times, actually) when different species of homo lived concurrently on Earth.
Each time, willingly or not, knowingly or not, our ancestors out-hunted, out-smarted, out-bred, and assimilated them.
And that's precisely why fantasy settings with dozens of sentient, culture-bearing species are hard for me to swallow: it wouldn't really work.

 

[Charlaquin]

1) You're certainly right about angels being able to think for themselves. I was suggesting they had no ability to make Moral decisions. Not that they cannot perform evil actions, as committing genocide is evil but angels have had such acts attributed to them, but they cannot make the decision to do so in any way which bears moral weight. The same way that bunny rabbit eats her own babies in a clearly horrific and evil act of infanticide but it means jack and diddly because the rabbit doesn't have the ability to question the good and evil of her actions. She does it because she must, as angels do evil or good because they must.

2) Angels and Demons would have the intellectual capacity to interact with people under this precept. Their inability to make decisions on a moral basis wouldn't hamper that. People who believe that they're always in the right, without any ability to self-reflect on their own culpability, independent of any moral consideration, still have kids, after all. We just generally recognize that they're self-centered jerks whose self-righteousness blinds them to the harm they do.

3) Indeed, a divine higher power would want beings acting on it's behalf using higher thought and rational, tactical, thought in order to achieve it's own will. But it wouldn't want them questioning it's authority/morality/etc since that could lead to disloyalty.

You know, I had always thought that such beings ought to have fixed alignments based on their nature, but you make a really excellent case for them being unaligned.

 

[Charlaquin]

There was a time (several times, actually) when different species of homo lived concurrently on Earth.
Each time, willingly or not, knowingly or not, our ancestors out-hunted, out-smarted, out-bred, and assimilated them.
And that's precisely why fantasy settings with dozens of sentient, culture-bearing species are hard for me to swallow: it wouldn't really work.

You could assume the setting takes place during one such time, and that it is only a matter of time before one of these species becomes dominant and the others die off or assimilate.

 

[Faolyn]

And that's precisely why fantasy settings with dozens of sentient, culture-bearing species are hard for me to swallow: it wouldn't really work.

Well, to be fair, for all we know the gods prevent various species from actually dying out.

 

[Faolyn]

Because a human has access to more stuff. Be it more classes in older Ed or more bonus points to point into whatever stat you want.

Not sure what that has to do with it...

Not all Mnt Dwarves obviously but “the typical whatever” gets the typical adjustments. Race in D&D is tied with a culture which is reflected in stat boosts and skills etc.

Which is what I was talking about. Because they have always conflated race with culture, it's why they insist on creating new types of drow rather than just saying that this group of drow is like A and that group of drow is like B.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Probably because, no matter what people claim, D&D has always been focused on races as being of nearly all one alignment. Any exceptions are just that, exceptions. Whenever a writer wants to create a differently-aligned sub-culture of a monster race, it gets turned into a sub-race instead, with different attributes and a different statblock or a different set of PC traits. It's why there were (in 2e) fey-touched LG Odanti orcs, instead of just regular orcs who decided to beat their swords into plowshares and had an alignment change when they took up farming. This is also why PC races have sub-races. There's no good reason why high and wood elves need different stats; after all, forest-dwelling humans and city-dwelling humans don't have them. There's no good reason why mountain and hill dwarfs have different stats, either. But in D&D, culture = (sub)race = different traits and abilities.

Whether that continues to be the case for these arctic Aevandrow and jungle Lorendrow remains up in the air, since I don't believe they've been turned into playable races yet. But note that neither of them live underground, which already marks them as different from the Lolth-worshiping, subterranean Udadrow.

Humans dont have those distinctions because it would have been too obviously racist, not because having them would make no logical sense from a mechanical perspective. Now the line has been redrawn, and things that used to be acceptable now no longer are.
I dont know how they're going to address this. Addressing the race issue properly would require an overhaul of the system, which would require a new or substantially modified edition. Making that update to a game that is extremely popular (and continues to grow more so) is usually not good business sense.

 

[Charlaquin]

Humans dont have those distinctions because it would have been too obviously racist,