D&D (2024) Should 2014 Half Elves and Half Orcs be added to the 2025 SRD?

[Not a Decepticon]

Perhaps you should have sidestepped the comics examples altogether then.

I could focus on that incredibly bad Last Samurai example.

 

[Maxperson]

Did you really just put Japanese people into one bracket with blue aliens and talkig racoons?

He kinda sorta did, but not really. And he's not wrong. A lot has changed with regard to movies and the international market, but during the time of The Last Samurai the primary market for movies was America, and to the overwhelming majority of Americans, the Japanese culture is alien(not space alien) and they don't understand it well.

Tom Cruise's character would be much more relatable at first and through him and his interactions with the Japanese culture, people would find the Japanese culture more relatable by the end of the movie as they learn about it.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

I assume it's because they're not seeing it as fantasy vs. Real people, but rather different culture (from the audience perspective) vs. Similar culture (from that same intended audience perspective).

Edit: meant to say different culture, not difficult. Sorry.

That is an incredibly bad positon that effectively dehumanizes the people of "different culture"

 

[Minigiant]

All good reasons to leave WotC to it's mass-market, profit-driven ways and move on to more interesting pastures.

Again the issue is 90% of the industry designs the same way due to laziness, nostalgia, or fear.

TSR was the market leader and they did the exact same thing.

Fantasy TTRPRGS is similar to Hollywood what it just copy the same thing over and over (poorly) because of the guaranteed audience and don't dive into the why of the things they copy except with a fear being sued by another entity for having the exact same lineup.

 

[Maxperson]

The ideology that the Japanese are not aliens?

No. That wasn't @AnotherGuy's point. See my above post for what he was getting at. It wasn't equating the Japanese with animals and space aliens.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I could focus on that incredibly bad Last Samurai example.

Not interested in the explanations provided? Different cultures can divide and provide a more or less different perspective just as well as different species, and that movie was clearly designed for an American auduence (at least primarily).

 

[Micah Sweet]

That is an incredibly bad positon that effectively dehumanizes the people of "different culture"

Then what do you think the movie was about? Or do you hate that one too and refuse to discuss it?

 

[Maxperson]

1. This literally flips the bird to Eberron, which does all races with a twist. So now Eberron doesn't count? Now any setting where Gnolls aren't inherently mindless monsters spawned from blood of a specific demon lord, is doing dnd wrong?

:sigh: That isn't what he is saying. D&D has a default position. In that default, elves are D&D elves, not Cumagorian elves. If you make a Cumagorian setting where you change elves to give them antlers, they cease to be the default D&D elves and become Cumagorian elves.

So of course Eberron counts. It's a setting that changed a bunch of default assumptions. See also Dark Sun.

2. Last pragraph once again destroys the idea of playing fantasy races, since if I'm not actually playing the same species as all npcs of that name, what's the point of having fantasy species to begin with?

This is finally something I agree with you on! If I play a gnoll, it's the same species as NPC gnolls.

 

[Maxperson]

Eh. All it shows is even Tolkien couldn't be effed to come up with a backstory for hobbits.

Which leaves us with the backstory we have. THREE races. Elves, dwarves and humans. Hobbits, not having a backstory of their own and not being a fourth race in the lore, get put into the human category and become an offshoot of humanity. Besides, nothing says that there weren't multiple races of humans like there are multiple races of elves.

 

[Not a Decepticon]

Then what do you think the movie was about? Or do you hate that one too and refuse to discuss it?

I do think it was a horrible movie about Mighty hitey coming to another culture and instantly becoming the best at it, pretty in my opinion.