D&D General Old School DND talks if DND is racist.

[Haffrung]

Whereas Hobgoblins at least have a slightly more complicated culture, and whilst you could probably sum it up as "Like Romans", that conjures up a heck of a lot more potential depth and interest than "generic barbarian".

Which raises the question of how you distinguish hobgoblins and orcs behaviourally without being a racial essentialist. Because even being 'like Romans' by default is the sort of thing some want to remove from the game.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Maybe?

Not only are there billions of people who believe evil spirits exist, there are probably more people who actually believe evil monsters live in the forest than people who are upset when you call a monster "evil." They can be really upset by this topic, a lot more so than I've ever seen anyone get upset over the idea of a monster being evil.

I mean, I think the critique is more along the lines of "This stuff can be taken badly largely because it was created 30 years ago, trying to continue on with it just keeps building on bad tropes and there's just no reason to keep it around when we can just change it."

This doesn't sound much different than, "Well maybe somebody could be inspired to worship demons or do drugs because of this some day. And there's no reason to keep these pagan gods or miraculous clerics around when we could just change them." I just don't think it's compelling to change something because somebody else imagines that a hypothetical third person might be corrupted by it. It's not even worth a Parental Advisory label.

No one says that anyone is a bad person for enjoying stuff like Keep on the Borderlands.

You're arguing that imagining a ravenous hyena-demon whose feast of death spawns psychotic, human-eating, sentient hyena-folk in its wake is morally wrong.

 

[Scribe]

That said this blog made a decent case for "Maybe just delete Derro" based on their 2E description (but I think he misunderstands "for breeding" - pretty sure that means chattel slavery, not what he thinks):

Eh. I would have to look, nothing like that in the Abyss entry for them. Sometimes the past has poor takes.

They are noted as cruel, and racially crazy. Nothing much to call for their deletion.

I wouldn't want to see them changed personally.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Which raises the question of how you distinguish hobgoblins and orcs behaviourally without being a racial essentialist. Because even being 'like Romans' by default is the sort of thing some want to remove from the game.

I dunno, I think we can still specify typical cultures, we just can't say "they're all evil!". I mean, I'm pretty sure not all Romans were "evil" by D&D standards (though an awful lot were), and "like Romans" is nuanced enough in people's minds that they don't think "so automatically evil" (ironically it would be people like me who were more likely to think that lol!).

Like this is the issue with Orcs, what is culture? Unidentified Generic Violent Barbarians. If they instead were "Like Vikings", in the way that Hobgoblins are "Like Romans", by default, then we'd have a much more nuanced idea of them. Yeah, we'd assume some were violent raiders, but not all of them. I think it should be a little more complex note, I actually think the "like Romans" thing is a bit lazy but it's been pretty consistent.

Just if you're going to identify someone's culture, give them, y'know, a culture with at least a tiny bit of depth, or use language and ideas which will cause people to imagine it with some depth. Doesn't mean they don't need to be one that's potentially going to be in conflict with PCs.

I honestly think we could stand to use more conflict with what used to be called "demihuman" races, but I've literally always thought that - again in part I think because my introduction to D&D involved settings with a lot of that - the FR has much of the conflict being with "evil humans", for example, and Taladas has a ton of "monster" races as playable (with Minotaur Rome, even, as a multi-cultural sort of place, and without the slavery as a major deal - in fact it might be deleted entirely), and much of the conflict likely to be with humans and elves with bad intentions.

You're arguing that imagining a ravenous hyena-demon whose feast of death spawns psychotic, human-eating, sentient hyena-folk in its wake is morally wrong.

I don't see a single post from anyone in this thread that says anything of the sort.

Maybe don't make things up about what other people said? It's so much easier if you quote them when saying this sort of thing - that way you yourself may see you are wrong whilst typing it.

 

[PsyzhranV2]

You're arguing that imagining a ravenous hyena-demon whose feast of death spawns psychotic, human-eating, sentient hyena-folk in its wake is morally wrong.

1. Nobody argued that.
2. Rather than morally wrong I'd argue that the 5e take on gnolls is boring, and an unnecessary change from when gnolls used to be officially playable. They could have gone with a new type of undead or fiend if they wanted to use the "big demon spawns little demons by eating" concept (which IMO would have made more sense for the concept rather than using humanoids).

 

[Haffrung]

I mean, the better question seems to be "Why are people so attached to an older, less interesting version than this new, cool version someone else came up with?"

Like, why don't we just go to what Eberron created as the standard? It's far more interesting and much less problematic.

Because Eberron is more complex and challenging. And this may be frustrating to sophisticated gamers like us, but most people don't want complex and challenging in their light entertainment. They want accessible and straightforward. They want snooty elves and ale-swilling dwarves.

One of D&D's great strengths has always been its genericism. Anyone who's familiar with baseline fantasy novels and videogames can hit the ground running in D&D. Tekumel, on the other hand, is rich and complex, and created by an incredibly creative linguist and cultural historian. But no matter how much promotion and resources Tekumel had behind it, the setting will never have more than cult, fringe appeal. It's just too weird and alien, lacking familiar tropes and symbols.

Eberron is somewhere in the middle. And though I'm glad WotC re-released it for 5th edition, there's no chance WotC were going to make it the default D&D setting (and I suspect sales numbers for the book have validated that choice).

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Simple and quick fix for those of you who keep asking "if I can't have kill-on-sight Orcs, what can I have be kill-on-sight?!?!" Easy.

Bandits, pirates, and assassins. Elementals (possibly excluding genies and azer). Wild animals, typically carnivores (griffons, perytons, piercers/ropers, shadowmantles, wyverns, etc). Barbarian tribes that want to destroy settlements (like the Gruul Clan in Ravnica). Serial killers. Evil wizards and other magic users. Cultists to evil deities/entities (Rakdos Cult, Devil Worshippers, Elder Evil followers, etc). Demons, devils, and almost all other fiends. Most unseelie fey (hags, meenlocks, quicklings). Almost all undead. Irredeemably evil NPCs (like Thanos, the Joker, or Lex Luthor). Priests to evil deities that are doing evil things. Evil druids. Most aberrations (except gnome flayers and flumphs). A lot of plants (vegepygmies, fungi, etc). Dragons that want to destroy/murder people.

The possibilities are endless. Taking away black-and-white, kill-on-site player races doesn't take away your ability to make enemies that you can kill on sight without facing moral repercussions. You can add moral repercussions to most of these, too. Maybe someone only became a bandit because they were forced into that lifestyle. Maybe killing a specific animal will reveal that they were actually a humanoid victim of a true polymorph spell that the party just brutally killed. Maybe the serial killer is being possessed against their will and don't deserve death, or the barbarians/dragons were provoked by a greedy magistrate of a specific town.

If you want to dumb it down and have simple kill-on-sight enemies, you can still do that without having orcs, goblinoids, and the like being genetically evil.

 

[Haffrung]

Like this is the issue with Orcs, what is culture? Unidentified Generic Violent Barbarians.

It seems peoples' idea of what orcs are differs pretty substantially depending on what era of D&D and other media sources they call back to. Orcs as barbarians doesn't seem to have been a thing until well into 2E. And then it really took off outside of D&D in World of Warcraft. I draw on earlier inspirations, where orcs are the pig-men slaves of evil wizards and other powerful monsters.

 

[Argyle King]

Speaking of dwarves, in my campaign I do have tweaks to the cultures. Some major, some minor. But because we have a common starting point (I use slightly tweaked FR/Greyhawk deities for non-human races) I can say these are standard dwarves except. That way several hundred words of text still apply, I only need to explain the difference for a lot of people.

On the other hand, dwarves from the far north are completely different. While they respect their brethren, they don't believe in gods per se but in the elements of nature earth, air, water, fire. Gods such as Moradin are just images the other dwarves have constructed, they're manifestations of the basic elements.

So on and so forth. But I still fall back on the basic tropes most of the time because it makes the groups that go against the grain stand out.

That's cool.

I handle dwarves in my homebrew differently too.

I have Stone Dwarves, which are based on Grecco-Roman themes, ancestor worship from Dragon Age Dwarves, and a little bit of Catholicism. Currently, I still have Moradin (from D&D) as their overall deity because that's familiar to players (and because the campaign was created on the fly after our usual DM stopped being able to come).

I also have Jade Dwarves, which use a lot of themes from Feudal Japan and Three Kingdoms Era China. The clan structure usually attributed to dwarves seemed to fit a lot of that. I haven't yet fleshed much of their culture out, but that's because I haven't yet had players take much of an interest in that area of the world.

Oddly, some of my inspiration for having two branches was D&D 4E Elves. I liked that 4E took a very vague and broadly defined part of fantasy and tried to explore two aspects of it in a clearer way. As said above, some of the choice also came out of just kinda throwing together whatever influences I had from games, movies, and whatever to get the game moving.

I also have a group of semi-nomadic minotaurs based loosely on Mass Effect's Krogan culture.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

It seems peoples' idea of what orcs are differs pretty substantially depending on what era of D&D and other media sources they call back to. Orcs as barbarians doesn't seem to have been a thing until well into 2E. And then it really took off outside of D&D in World of Warcraft. I draw on earlier inspirations, where orcs are the pig-men slaves of evil wizards and other powerful monsters.

Orcs as barbarians is certainly around in 1E a ton - it's already far from the Tolkienian "servants of evil wizards", because the orcs have "tribes" that live in places and so on (c.f. pretty much all the early settings and a lot of early adventures). In 2E though they generally lose the "pig-men" angle, I think as a result of Warhammer's vision of what Orcs look like starting to overtake that of D&D in the "genre imagination" (even though IIRC the MC in 2E still shows them as pig-men). By 3E, the Warhammer/Warcraft version has solidly taken over, so we basically get that with grey skin and very much a "barbarian", and that's stuck around.