Good for you? Did you learn about forced re-education and state schools where kids were beaten for speaking their native languages, in Canada, within living memory? Most Canadians I know only learned of those things when the internet helped them see stories from First Nations folk who lived it.
No, that isn't what people are saying. I don't understand how it is possible to not understand that "the language used in this book is almost word for word the same langauge used to describe Indiginous people by the people trying to annihilate and/or enslave them, and thus makes people very uncomfortable, especially when the language is being used to describe a people that the author knows players want to play as a character" is not the same thing as "orcs=Natives".
It's genuinely hard for me to even fathom how a person could manage to not understand the difference.
This is absurd on it's face.
That's literally what most of the people you're railing against are asking for.
You come across with these hyperbolic nonsensical queries as if you are intentionally just trolling the conversation.
Literally no one is suggesting anything remotely similar to "no groups can be villainous".
Well, no. Not portraying them as exclusively tribal, yes. Not including tribal communities at all, no. We don't fix racism in a game by whitewashing it.
They did, until 5e came along and the Kingdom fell apart because orcs are savages who can't build a proper society, apparently. Not at all an uncomfortably familiar thing to read for someone whose people have been described that way in texts books they were forced to read as children in schools where they were punished for speaking their native language.
And yet, it is very very clear that Volos and other parts of 5e and older lore does so.
But it isn't. I've literally never seen a single group play that way, I can't think of any actual play shows that do so, I've seen no traffic on social media that suggests that the wave of new players who are defining the game for themselves now play that way. DnD is becoming, year by year, a game about playing heroes.
Violence isn't the problem, the direction and nature of the violence is. 5e tried to go more old school than 3.5 and 4e with the depiction of "monster" races, resulting in the fall of Many Arrows in FR and a return to talking about orcs like Custer talked about Native Americans while trying to genocide them, and that is the problem. Not the fact that the game features combat a lot.
Balors are elementals. Even a djinn is a creature that has parents and can have children. Demons are spawned from the abyss fully formed. Devils are created by erasing the indivuality of a damned soul and then torturing it into a new form as a devil, I think? Something like that. The other fiends are dumb, and the game would be better without them.
The solution to which is fairly easy, as you yourself point out later, quoted below.
Yes. That doesn't interfere with the game at all. If you replace every creature with a human in every 5e adventure (I haven't read any reprints, as I don't experience nostalgia and thus couldn't possibly care less about them), the adventure works fine. Evil person does evil thing, good guys stop them.
Absolutely. As the same people who have a problem with how orcs are written about have been saying, how dwarves are written is also not great. Dwarves and Elves are pretty....model minority, in depiction, for a start, and like with orcs the way to fix that is to not define a race as having a defined personality and nature that they can't really change or deviate from.
A quick shorthand for this would simply be to treat Elves as "people who grow up speaking French" and treat them as having something like the number of cultures as French speakers do IRL.
They're not living creatures. Demons especially are literally elementals whose element is Destructive Evil That Seeks To Annihilate All Things.
But I also have no problem with a setting where fiends can be more complex than that. It would hardly be the first fantasy world wherein that is the case.
dnd.wizards.com
WTF?!
