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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Haldrik" data-source="post: 8021418" data-attributes="member: 6694221">I agree that the problem of racism in D&D is fundamental, being structural and systemic. D&D is literally a game about fantasy racism. Where you pick "race", that is objectively and innately "racially superior" to other "races". The game has been about racism since its origins.Fortunately, there is only one Human race, representing all ethnicities. The problem is, the other Humanoid races are too Human. Thus concerns about persistent racism remain.If I had my way, the game would be more like a superhero game. You build your character statistics, and if you want to call it a robot, it is a robot, and if you want to call it an elf, it is an elf, and if you want to say it was bitten by a radioactive spider then that is how these stats happened. In this way, there is no racist essentialism.But you can see, this choice to make race optional flavor was in this poll, and there is only roughly 3% support for it. Unsurprising, because D&D is a game about racism, and to make it a game about something else is a drastic change that players dont seem up for at this time.That said. WotC has already said, all "humanoid races" will lack fixed alignment, thus Good Orcs and Good Drow will exist in significant numbers, and have complex societies. I expect that even within dysfunctional Evil societies there will be Good individuals, and conversely within healthy Good societies there will be Evil individuals.Meanwhile, players will be able to customize the features of a "race" − so there will be Intelligence Orcs and Non-Dexterity Drow, and this will mitigate the problem of racist essentialism.Meanwhile with these fundamental solutions in place − freewill alignment and feature customizability in place − the semantic change has a reallife benefit. Retiring the term "race" helps distance the D&D game from reallife racism and race politics.As mentioned, all humanoids will have free will and be of any alignment. So attacking a random anonymous Orc would be an Evil crime of terrorism.Most of us agree, injustice against people because of their ethnicity, sex, gender or orientation is unacceptable.People feel passionately about this and sometimes overstep irrationally, and patience toward everyone is necessary.I view a fair justice system as the foundation of a Good society.If the justice system is corrupt, becoming unfair, it means the society is less Good, perhaps even Evil.</blockquote>

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