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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Levistus's_Leviathan" data-source="post: 8506255" data-attributes="member: 7023887">WTF? No. I never said that. Just because some settings might be left behind doesn't mean that there will be less material in future editions. You can add new settings if you get rid of old ones. You can replace races that are taken away with new ones that don't have the problems that the old ones did (again, Caliban and Hexblood). That's the price of inclusion. We have to discuss issues and not ignore them or dismiss them out of hand when they're brought up. That's how society works. We communicate, we debate, and we change what needs to be changed. We don't excuse problems when they show up and say "oh well, they were bound to happen, we're only human after all". We instead address them when they come up while acknowledging that this will continue to happen because we are human. If we ignore the problems, they get worse. That's simply how the world works. And I answered. Because there is not just one problem, so there's not just one solution. And I'm not the one that can or should be making those changes. They should listen to the experts (sensitivity readers and cultural consultants). I'm not one of those, so I don't have the answer. Again, I'll point you to the <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/PerfectSolutionFallacy" target="_blank">Perfect Solution Fallacy</a>. I don't have a perfect solution for every single problem in D&D's present issues and its historical issues. It's not fair to demand that I attempt to give one, either. The philosophy is the answer, because this isn't just one problem, it's a collection of problems and all of them have different solutions. Maybe I misunderstood you and you're asking for specific changes that I think would help avoid these issues in the future, which I will put in the spoiler below. Again, I don't claim that these are perfect, just that I think they'll help. I am not an authority on this, and this should be taken with as much weight as any other internet rando that likes to debate with people a little too much. [SPOILER="What I, Personally, Would Change"]Firstly, the game needs to stop conflating Race and Culture. This change started with Tasha's, but it needs to be a part of the core rules. D&D has a ton of different settings, and none of them have different races and cultures exactly the same any other, so the base books need to stop assuming that Orcs, Drow, Goblinoids, and so on are evil or that Lolth, Gruumsh, Maglubiyet, or similar entities exist in the base game. Racial features should be unconnected from culture, and all cultural mentions should be in setting-specific books and sections of the core rulebooks if they feel the need to give examples. If the game wants to support Eberron, Exandria, and similar settings, it needs to from the Core Rulebooks, instead of relying on those books to re-teach who the races are to people that buy them. (This involves moving Culture to a "Background"-like feature.)Secondly, stop stealing real life cultures to use in new settings. It's fine to take inspiration from certain real life cultures (especially if the culture is long-dead), and it is impossible to not take inspiration from real world cultures, but having your world's different cultures explicitly be <a href="https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FantasyCounterpartCulture" target="_blank">fantasy-counterpart cultures</a> (especially if you tie foreign cultures to non-human/"monstrous" races) is often a problem. If you consciously take inspiration from real world cultures, it's often better to mix-and-match certain cultures together to make something new to avoid stereotyping real world peoples. Brandon Sanderson is a great example of this, as his fantasy cultures do draw from the real world, but blend so many aspects of different cultures together to the point where the possibility of stereotyping real world people really isn't a problem anymore. Third, stop treating Antagonists, Villains, and Monsters as the same thing. I blame Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes and Volo's Guide to Monsters for creating this problem in D&D 5e (there were parts of it in the Monster Manual, but way less than in these two books). If the Duergar, Goblinoids, and Orcs are supposed to be evil, why are they written to be the victims (Duergar being captured by mind flayers and abandoned by Moradin and his followers because they were enslaved, the Goblinoids having their gods be killed/conquered by Maglubiyet and having to serve him in an eternal war, Orcs being cheated out of a place in the world and having to claim what was rightfully theirs from the "good" gods that cheated Gruumsh in the first place)? If they're villains, don't code them like victims. If they're victims that are fighting the party, they're antagonists, not villains. Don't say they're "monsters" or "villains" that are okay to kill if they were the victims, because even if they are trying to kill the party, they're not villains, they're antagonists. [/SPOILER]That's all that comes to mind at the moment.</blockquote>

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