What is the most despised race?

[rounser]

Hi Darkness
[sblock]

Now, true, lizardmen are not evil - but their job is still to get slaughtered by the PCs.

Vaguely amusingly given this discussion, it appears that someone cottoned on to this and "fixed" the lizardmen alignment problem with the Lizard King in the original Fiend Folio. Ah, much better - no more "Danger at Dunwater"-type misunderstandings to be had. In fact, I can't think of a better example of what evil alignment does for the game.

(For those who aren't familiar with them, the Lizard King was a suped-up lizardman of evil alignment with a special trident, and once he started leading a tribe they all started following his evil commands. A workaround for an inconvenient alignment if ever there was one.)

Next alignment thread that comes up, someone might want to mention this little oddity as an example of what alignment does for D&D...
[/sblock]

 

[drakhe]

KENDER Aaaaaaaaaargh!

We've met several kender in our Warhammer campaign and they had two traits in common:
BLATHER (a skill: you rant incoherently, forcing your opponent to roll any kind of check (can you keep your cool, are you diverted, ...)
NO FEAR (they literaly have no fear, go read Dragonlance)

With trait one they turn everybody against the party
And if that's not enough, with trait two they get the party in ALL kinds of trouble and then some

 

[Azazyll]

I vote "elves" just because I am ~~so~~ tired of them being worshipped by my players as some kind of uber-race... That's why IMC they're a dying race on the edge of extinction.

And Tolkien has <i>nothing</i> to do with that. Elves are a dying race in practically every campaign. It's probably my biggest gripe with FR and SL, in both of them you're pretty much just playing the typical elf from Tolkien. And while the Silmarillion may be one of the best books ever written, I agree that the stereotype gets tiring. That's why everybody loved Drow, they were a breath of fresh air. And thank god for eberron, elves of different cultures WITHOUT a whole new set of stats, and none of them are dying out. In fact, most of them kick @**.

 

[Warden]

IMC, gnomes always end up being the annoying twirps that even paladins want to strangle and leave for dead. Plus, we always seem to play them out as a race of creatures incapable of using periods in their sentence.

Or should I say...

IMCgnomesalwaysendupbeingtheannoyingtwirpsthatevenpaladinswanttostrangleandleavefordeadpluswealwaysseemtoplaythemoutasaraceofcreaturesincapableofusingperiodsintheirsentencesisn'tthatweirdwhatisaperiodanywayneverheardofthatyou'llhavetoshowmesometime...

 

[Christopher Lambert]

Kender!

Drow, especially those who are good-aligned. They're still pretty good in the novels, though. I also have venom for drow deities other than Lolth and Vhaerun.

Most elven subraces. Even the regular elves (in the novels) deserve to get a slap. (Go on, kill Corellon. Please! Just for a little while?) There's also way too many elven deities.

Half-dragons.

Chosen of Mystra. No other deities get this many Chosen (and most don't have any).

Gnomes - I don't actually hate them as much as I don't see a point to them. Giving them spell-like abilities didn't help them any.

 

[Dark Jezter]

And Tolkien has <i>nothing</i> to do with that. Elves are a dying race in practically every campaign. It's probably my biggest gripe with FR and SL, in both of them you're pretty much just playing the typical elf from Tolkien.

Actually, elves are no longer a dying race in FR. Previous editions of the Realms stole from Tolkien with the concept of dwarves slowly going extinct and elves departing west across the sea.

When FR was converted to 3e, the developers decided to break away from ripping off LotR. Now the dwarves are making a big comeback due to the Thunder Blessing, and the elves are actually coming back from across the sea.

 

[JackGiantkiller]

On the claims of fantasy's racism, I have to wonder about the climate that made drow happen. The big evil race, eternal foes of the "good" race (most source seems to hold up elves as paragons of good), bane of all they encounter, dwelling in a society based off cruelty, torture, and hate...are black-skinned and ruled by women. Does this plague no-one else?

But anyhow, my vote was "other". As a DM, my hatred is divided:
1 - Kender, because people play them ONLY to cause havoc with the entire party. I'd sooner evil characters than kender, because the rules allow evil characters to control their own actions (depending on how you read the alignment rules )
2 - Good-aligned drow fleeing their homeland. Done. To. DEATH.

However, as a player of D&D and gamer in general...it's either the "we need more animal-men!" monsters...Giff, Loxo, etc...or what my group calls "dartboard monsters", like the Marrash. "Okay, we need a new monster. Hmmm...head of a...goat? Okay, good. Ummm, bear legs...uh...mandibles! Yeah. Like a spider. And...parrot wings! Now THIS is why we're on top of the industry. Quality work like this ridiculous hodgepodge." Sigh.

i'm with you up to the marrash. Composite monsters are not only a standard of real world myth...but I believe the marrash specifically *is* from real world myth. And animal men are extremely popular with a large subsection of gamer society, IME...as well as having a great deal of precedent in real world myth themselves.

 

[Psion]

[sblock]I always had a hard time buying this "drow elves are racist and mysoginist" thing. People are making a decision based on assumptions rather than anything explicit.

I have no idea why Gygax made drow elves dark skinned, other than perhaps he wanted to make them negative images of elves, who were typically depicted as fair skinned. But the source of female-rules is pretty apparent to me: the "spider" angle. To me, they were very clearly patterned after spiders like the black widow spider, which are known to kill the male after mating.[/sblock]

 

[davidschwartznz]

i'm with you up to the marrash. Composite monsters are not only a standard of real world myth...but I believe the marrash specifically *is* from real world myth. And animal men are extremely popular with a large subsection of gamer society, IME...as well as having a great deal of precedent in real world myth themselves.

I like the Marrash, in part because it's a 'real world' monster. However, Imret has a point. Reading through the MMIII, several critters made me ask 'Why?' and many of those also made me ask 'WTF?' I mean, really, who's going to use a race of barbarous half-gorrilla, half-spiders with a straight face?

 

[Arbiter of Wyrms]

In my game, the wee races are the most maligned, deserved or not. This is likely because of the way they've been played in the past. Halflings were played, by the one player who played them exclusively, as fiendish anarchic kender, and gnomes, by his girlfriend, as bubbly, greedy, capricious tinker-gnomes. The funny thing is that I don't know that either of them read Dragonlance.

Last night, my wife and I were watching LoTR:RotK, and I was telling her that if I wanted to design a D&D campaign true to Tolien's archetypes, I'd make elves LA+3 (telepathy, see ethereal, CON 20, body equialibrium at will, etc,) and halflings so weak that a player who chose to play one would get three or four of them which would work as a team and count as one character for balance purposes.