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<blockquote data-quote="Bedrockgames" data-source="post: 8861407" data-attributes="member: 85555"><p>The interesting thing here is I feel very much the opposite, as I do share a lot of the real world concerns people have expressed. But I think when you start turning elves and dwarves into people, in the sense of a people, like Italians, Germans, etc. That is when you start running into problems because the races in D&amp;D are clearly not meant to be anything like the differences between people. In real life, as you say we are one race, we are one species. The difference between someone who is Italian and someone who is Chinese is cultural. And physical differences are superficial. But the physical differences between a dwarf and human are enormous, the difference between an elf and halfling equally so. I think using people to refer to beings in a setting that are visibly a different species from humans, actually opens the door more into that old racialist science and that old way of talking about peoples (which led to the kind of thinking that underpinned Nazi Germany). I am not saying that it would lead there, or that people advocating for peoples are consciously invoking that. But I don't have much issue with race or species in D&amp;D, because I can make the distinction in my mind between a human and an elf, and they don't really compare to the difference between two different human groups in the real world (elves are visibly something way beyond normal human). But when I hear people talk about the elven people, that actually starts to make me much more uncomfortable (and not because it is humanizing elves but because they represent the kind of difference among people that racists used to believe in when they talked about difference races or different peoples in the world).</p></blockquote><p></p>

[QUOTE="Bedrockgames, post: 8861407, member: 85555"] The interesting thing here is I feel very much the opposite, as I do share a lot of the real world concerns people have expressed. But I think when you start turning elves and dwarves into people, in the sense of a people, like Italians, Germans, etc. That is when you start running into problems because the races in D&D are clearly not meant to be anything like the differences between people. In real life, as you say we are one race, we are one species. The difference between someone who is Italian and someone who is Chinese is cultural. And physical differences are superficial. But the physical differences between a dwarf and human are enormous, the difference between an elf and halfling equally so. I think using people to refer to beings in a setting that are visibly a different species from humans, actually opens the door more into that old racialist science and that old way of talking about peoples (which led to the kind of thinking that underpinned Nazi Germany). I am not saying that it would lead there, or that people advocating for peoples are consciously invoking that. But I don't have much issue with race or species in D&D, because I can make the distinction in my mind between a human and an elf, and they don't really compare to the difference between two different human groups in the real world (elves are visibly something way beyond normal human). But when I hear people talk about the elven people, that actually starts to make me much more uncomfortable (and not because it is humanizing elves but because they represent the kind of difference among people that racists used to believe in when they talked about difference races or different peoples in the world). [/QUOTE]

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