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Message: <blockquote data-quote="The Myopic Sniper" data-source="post: 8756793" data-attributes="member: 55013">Mechanically distinct half-races are probably more problematic than some of the other stuff that they already scrubbed from 5e for being steeped in racial essentialism. Other than a few hobbyist blog-style websites and podcasts, I haven't heard much fuss about it yet, but I could see it being thinkpiece and Twitter fodder for people looking for racist elements in D&D2024.  They could possibly choose to put racial heritage 1st level feats in the game so that a player could pick up some traits from the other parent like Darkvision from the beginning. They could also possibly have a mixed character give up their background ASIs and feat to get the benefits of two races, but that might play into some miscegenation tropes as well. WOTC may not want go down that road at all for futureproofing from possible critique reasons.  There is a certain faction on Twitter that refers to D&D as "that racist Dragon game" and WOTC is particularly sensitive to those sort of criticisms due to past issues in the game. WOTC didn't yield on changing the word "race" to some other term which some have demanded, so not including mechanically represented half-race characters may be part of their compromise to those arguments.  They certainly don't want to have to issue a revised PHB in 2022 because stuff like mechanically distrinct half-races that seemed fine to most people in 2022 are deemed racist or cringe in 2027.  I have concerns that they may still get some major pushback on their use of the term "race" and there is only so much futureproofing that they can do about those sort of things since it is an ever evolving discussion.</blockquote>

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