NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="PsyzhranV2" data-source="post: 8181809" data-attributes="member: 7015332">That would be WotC trying to have their cake and eat it too. Not good enough. This is exactly the mentality that led to the half-measures in Tasha's that failed to live up to the promises WotC made about addressing the issues of racial sensitivity in their game. Sure it offered players more flexibility in their chargen choices, but that was the problem: everything was focused on the player characters, who were presented as being "exceptional" and "unique"; nothing was there to address the issue of the portrayal of the general population beyond an anemic "do what you want".The very notion that there must an "iconic" elf/dwarf/halfling/gnome/etc. is a problem in and of itself. Presenting a people as a monolith, and then codifying that monolithic depiction through mechanical reinforcement, is one of the biggest contributors to the racial essentialism that WotC themselves has acknowledged permeates their game, as unsatisfactory and incomplete their attempts to correct course have been so far. People in the thread have been talking about "elf culture", "dwarf culture", "gnome culture" - as if there ever could be a singular, all-encompassing culture for any of those species! As innocent as this desire may start off as, it leads to the typecasting and reinforcing of stereotypes that create a shallow and unrealistic notion of there being an "essential" ideal of an "elf", "dwarf", "gnome", etc. And that same typecasting impulse takes a darker turn when combined with the idea of some peoples being intrinsically less "pure" or more "evil" than others. Combine that with unconscious use of racialized language, and a binary, absolutist view of right and wrong reinforced by White privilege, and you get the racially insensitive portrayals of the "monstrous races", who are being essentialized and presented as a monolith, much like the dwarves and the elves but even moreso.Wired recently published two articles on D&D that I think are relevant to the general discussion.[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.wired.com/story/dungeons-dragons-diversity/[/URL][URL unfurl="true"]https://www.wired.com/story/dandd-must-grapple-with-the-racism-in-fantasy/[/URL]</blockquote>

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