D&D 5E (+)What Ubiquitous DnD Tropes Get It Totally Wrong?

[wingsandsword]

Literacy. D&D (except barbarians in AD&D) assumes that everyone, even peasants, are literate in every language they speak. Literacy in the West wasn't even that common among the aristocracy until the Renaissance, kept mostly to the priesthood. Books themselves shouldn't even be common unless the printing press is, and it's never mentioned anywhere, except in the FR (possibly Ebberon, but not familiar).

The idea of everyone being literate except Barbarians was a 3e invention.

There was NOTHING explicitly in AD&D that I'm aware of saying otherwise. It was an incredibly common house rule that Wizards (and usually Clerics) got Read/Write NWP for free, but it wasn't in the core rules-as-written.

I even remember a Scale Mail letter in Dragon Magazine asking how a Wizard could use a spellbook if they didn't automatically get Read/Write, and the answer was to say that magical notation for spells wasn't the same as literacy and that reading a spellbook would be like reading music, an entirely separate notation that is a separate skill and you could know how to read one without understanding the other.

I even saw it pointed out that one of the flaws in the 2e NWP system is that it would take two NWP slots for a Fighter to learn Read/Write because it wasn't in their NWP groups, and if they didn't know it at character creation it would take numerous levels to get two NWP slots to be able to spend on reading and writing, long enough that in a low-power game they might never even learn.

If I'm wrong, and I may well be, I'd love to see it pointed out with a quote from the 1e or 2e core rulebooks that AD&D had universal literacy.

 

[Charlaquin]

I find that argument, in general, very weak, as many DMs create a varied system of settings, and there is no real "official" setting or canon in D&D.

There’s nothing wrong with creating and using your own setting lore, but “according to the monster manual orcs have to be evil because they were created by Gruumsh” is a very different argument than “in my setting orcs are evil because they were created by Gruumsh.” In the latter case you’re owning your own decision to make races irredeemably evil. And the former still ignores the fact that dwarves were created by Moradin and yet they can be non-Good.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

I'll just say that if your in-world justification is that orcs have souls and dragons do not it's fine.

According to the MM, orcs are a created race

Such was the role of the orcs, he [Gruumsh] proclaimed, to take and destroy all that the other races would deny them. To this day, the orcs wage an endless war on humans, elves, dwarves, and other folk.​

I think all living, sentient creatures should either qualify or not. There's nothing that says orcs have souls but dragons do not.

This isn't about race per se but different species. In the case of orcs and elves at least sub-species of humans.

I'm also not saying my way is the only way. I just think you take something away if you say that orcs are just ugly humans. To each their own.

Dragons are clearly fully sentient beings that can act against their assumed alignment, so no, I’d rather not say they don’t have souls.

That’s my point with saying they don’t make sense.

But devils and beholders are what they are. They aren’t remotely natural beings. Dragons, in D&D, are.

devils and demons are basically to evil what a fire Elemental is to fire. Change their alignment and they become something else.

But orcs are people. They canonically can act against their assumed alignment, they can have other alignments, they are born and form bonds and feel stuff and die of old age.

It’s incongruous to then say, “they’re always evil”.

Completely aside from the issue of parroting scientific racism, which we’ve been asked to not dissect in this thread, it’s a consistency issue.

Now, if orcs are created in slime pits by fell magic, and have no families nor bonds, and do not age but expire like fruits left out too long, then sure make them evil. Bc then they’re unnatural creatures.

But I’d the gods wield so much power that a true race they create cannot become other than what the god intends, that simply strips the game of a wide swath of possible stories, and rings a bit too similar formany folks taste of certain very gross religious arguments from the real world.

 

[Charlaquin]

Well, everything in D&D was created started with these guys Arneson and Gygax.

Touche

But I don't see a reason to believe that humanoids are somehow different from other monsters. If you want gnolls to have free will and their culture of their own and the idea that they were created by a demon is just myth ... well that's fine. I even had fun playing a gnoll barbarian in LFR.

Why is “have free will and a culture of their own” mutually exclusive with “the idea that they were created by a demon” being factual? Especially when dwarves have free will and a culture of their own despite being created by a celestial.

But in my campaign world? Maybe it's just because I'm a bit old school about some aspects of game structure, maybe it's because I want some bad guys that the PCs can just slaughter without remorse.

Which makes me cringe, personally. It’s your game, you do what you like, but for me the concept of specifying a group of people as ok to kill without remorse just doesn’t sit well with me.

There will be plenty of times when there are gray areas and difficult choices, but I want those times to stand out. If it's always a moral dilemma of whether to kill your enemies then it doesn't stand out when I set up a situation where I want a moral dilemma. Well, that and a lot of times I just don't want to have to worry about it. Trolls are evil, kill them with fire.

But like... I don’t know, I think it’s pretty easy to remove the moral dilemma without saying “every single member of this species is evil and therefore morally fine to kill.”

 

[Oofta]

There’s nothing wrong with creating and using your own setting lore, but “according to the monster manual orcs have to be evil because they were created by Gruumsh” is a very different argument than “in my setting orcs are evil because they were created by Gruumsh.” In the latter case you’re owning your own decision to make races irredeemably evil. And the former still ignores the fact that dwarves were created by Moradin and yet they can be non-Good.

Just to be clear: in my campaign world I assume the origin story for orcs is accurate and not a myth. It has no bearing on other campaigns. If that wasn't clear, because I'm not sure how many ways I can say it.

In any case I've stated what I do and why. I want there to be monsters that are ... well monsters. Once you start saying that some monsters (whether humanoid or not) are not really monsters then it gets blurry quickly. What gives a monster free will to override their nature? Intelligence? Because then Demons should have free will so that can't be it.

Is it origin? Well then if the origin story of gnolls is correct they're demon spawned. Orcs were created as a force of destruction and revenge. Why do gnolls and orcs have free will to be any alignment they want but demons do not?

 

[Aldarc]

So I will go back to my original answer: religion.

No matter what angle you look at it, D&D's grasp of religion is shallow and weird. The aesthetic D&D religion seems to want - this weird hodgepodge of Greco-Roman polytheism and Medieval Christianity - feels so detached from the world and its people. What would Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms look like without their religions? Not without their gods, but their religions. There may be a few cases where these settings would feel different, but a lot of these settings would feel the same. I don't exactly get the impression that the religions in these settings have much weight in these settings in the way that real world religions had in either the Middle Ages or Antiquity. Religion in D&D feels more like window dressing that is there simply because creators are paying lip-service to the fact that since gods exist, religions should probably be there. Here's a church/temple.

So what TTRPGs (IMHO) show a fairly good grasp of fantasy religion where the gods are real? Probably Glorantha, Tékumel, and Hârn. Also a shout out to Scarred Lands.

 

[Oofta]

Which makes me cringe, personally. It’s your game, you do what you like, but for me the concept of specifying a group of people as ok to kill without remorse just doesn’t sit well with me.

Except that's where we fundamentally disagree. Orcs are not people in my campaign. They're monsters.

I know I'll be accused of "slippery slope" again but should Ripley have felt guilty about killing xenomorphs? Would it have mattered if the aliens had looked more like humans? They were at least somewhat intelligent even if we don't know exactly how intelligent they were.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

So I will go back to my original answer: religion.

No matter what angle you look at it, D&D's grasp of religion is shallow and weird. The aesthetic D&D religion seems to want - this weird hodgepodge of Greco-Roman polytheism and Medieval Christianity - feels so detached from the world and its people. What would Greyhawk or Forgotten Realms look like without their religions? Not without their gods, but their religions. There may be a few cases where these settings would feel different, but a lot of these settings would feel the same. I don't exactly get the impression that the religions in these settings have much weight in these settings in the way that real world religions had in either the Middle Ages or Antiquity. Religion in D&D feels more like window dressing that is there simply because creators are paying lip-service to the fact that since gods exist, religions should probably be there. Here's a church/temple.

So what TTRPGs (IMHO) show a fairly good grasp of fantasy religion where the gods are real? Probably Glorantha, Tékumel, and Hârn. Also a shout out to Scarred Lands.

Eberron is a good example, IMO, of religion done right.

Except that's where we fundamentally disagree. Orcs are not people in my campaign. They're monsters.

I know I'll be accused of "slippery slope" again but should Ripley have felt guilty about killing xenomorphs? Would it have mattered if the aliens had looked more like humans? They were at least somewhat intelligent even if we don't know exactly how intelligent they were.

The aliens were hunting them. Killing what’s hunting you is pretty much always morally acceptable. It was also fine for Arnie to kill the Predator, for the same reason.

Nuking either species out of existence, though...there we get into trouble.

As for having creatures that it’s okay to kill without remorse, while that mode of play is alien to me, we do actually have that dynamic in our games in the form of organizations. If we are fighting the necromantic demon-worshipping cultists that kidnap people to perform necromantic experiments on them and seek to break the seals that keep demons from coming into the world in order to bring about an apocolypse that they beleive will lead to a new utopia...we kill them without remorse.

When we see a Sahuagin, we are careful because Sahuagin are very dangerous, but we don’t just kill them on site because they’re people and don’t always just want to eat other people.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Just to be clear: in my campaign world I assume the origin story for orcs is accurate and not a myth. It has no bearing on other campaigns. If that wasn't clear, because I'm not sure how many ways I can say it.

In any case I've stated what I do and why. I want there to be monsters that are ... well monsters. Once you start saying that some monsters (whether humanoid or not) are not really monsters then it gets blurry quickly. What gives a monster free will to override their nature? Intelligence? Because then Demons should have free will so that can't be it.

Is it origin? Well then if the origin story of gnolls is correct they're demon spawned. Orcs were created as a force of destruction and revenge. Why do gnolls and orcs have free will to be any alignment they want but demons do not?

Because demons are elementals of evil. They are physical manifestations of Elemental evil.

Orcs and Gnolls were create as a race of natural, mortal, beings.

 

[Aldarc]

I know I'll be accused of "slippery slope" again but should Ripley have felt guilty about killing xenomorphs? Would it have mattered if the aliens had looked more like humans? They were at least somewhat intelligent even if we don't know exactly how intelligent they were.

Are xenomorphs given the veneer of historical real world cultures like orcs often are? Is racism documented as part of the historical depiction of xenomorphs like with orcs? I would say that the line has a lot to do with what real world cultures and peoples are being aligned with the "monstrous" through the lens of D&D and its "monster races."

It's not as if the typical D&D player requires biological essentialism to justify killing human cultists and bandits without much guilt. Nor is D&D somehow bereft of other monstrous species that the players could kill relatively guilt-free (e.g., undead, demons, devils, aberrations, magical beasts, constructs, etc.).

Eberron is a good example, IMO, of religion done right.

Most definitely.