D&D 5E Yes to factionalism. No to racism.

[Minigiant]

Was Ravnica sort of like this?

Ravinca overrides base D&D race and class culture with the 10 guilds.

 

[Yaarel]

I feel 5e today already has enough mechanics to represent cultures.

I consider the choice of background to already be enough of a nod toward participating in and learning from a culture. The background is a flexible tool, and this culture might national, regional, local, ethnic, communal, professional, or so on, whatever culture seems focal to the character concept.

Ravnica uses backgrounds to reward membership in a planetary guild, such as the Azorius background granting spell knowledge.

Descent into Avernus uses backgrounds to reward membership in one of the local institutions in the city of Baldurs Gate.

By itself, the background mechanic is a powerful tool. A DM can easily create or remove backgrounds, to sketch out a particular setting.

Moreover, depending on the nature of the faction, its culture might favor certain class archetypes (Ravnica), or even grant a free setting feat at level 1 (Theros).

As @Bolares and @Marandahir point out, the patron mechanic in Tashas works well to describe an institution of a culture.

5e can do culture well.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Even Obould Many-Arrows, who is well-known for uniting orcs, making allies with non-orcs, etc., was still chaotic evil. At least according to the FR Wiki.

It is and always has been quite astonishing just how few FR characters have alignments that remotely match their actual in-story/setting behaviour.

A raging psychopath who happens to be the "good guy" in novel will be LG. A total jerk, who does nothing nice for anyone, and is so edgy you might cut yourself on her is NG. A relatively straightforward person who behaves in a perfectly sensible way but is technically working for the baddies, even though they didn't seem to do anything bad "on-screen" is CE.

Back in the early 1990s, when the internet wasn't here to waste all our time, we wasted our own time by going through those FR "Heroes and Villains" books, and seeing if:

A) The alignment assigned to the character even remotely matched up to their behaviour and life-story and so on. The answer was usually "Hell no" - I'd say about 50% of the time their alignment was just totally unjustifiable, 30% it was a huuuuuuuuuuuuge stretch but at least one part was right, 20% it was fine.

B) If the character was "street legal", i.e. you could create, or only using actual rules in actual books, get to be an identical character to that. I think this was a lot better, it was like 60% were. But then there were numerous munchkin-ass offenders or people with just totally cheesy and cheat-y abilities.

 

[FrozenNorth]

A) The alignment assigned to the character even remotely matched up to their behaviour and life-story and so on. The answer was usually "Hell no" - I'd say about 50% of the time their alignment was just totally unjustifiable, 30% it was a huuuuuuuuuuuuge stretch but at least one part was right, 20% it was fine.

B) If the character was "street legal", i.e. you could create, or only using actual rules in actual books, get to be an identical character to that. I think this was a lot better, it was like 60% were. But then there were numerous munchkin-ass offenders or people with just totally cheesy and cheat-y abilities.

This continues even now. Wrath of the Righteous is a recent PF game (though based on an older AP), and canonically has a LN follower of the god of justice that burns non-evil people at the stake and murders a priest of a good god without a trial.

Really makes you wonder exactly what sort of **** the evil characters in your party have gotten up to.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

This continues even now. Wrath of the Righteous is a recent PF game (though based on an older AP), and canonically has a LN follower of the god of justice that burns non-evil people at the stake and murders a priest of a good god without a trial.

That's was one of the question I always wonder.... If you are in an society, that say in this case that Inquisitors have the right to try people on the spot, do not need to hear the accused, do not need evidence, can pass judgment on the spot as a single sitting judge and without appeal, are you supposed to loyal-neutrally embrace this job because "that's the law"? The NPC in case is certainly a jerk, but he's obviously empowered to do that by the lawful ruler of the land... The designers obviously thought that when procedures are blatantly wrong, but legal, a LN character would follow them [I didn't get the feeling he was having a blast burning people at the stake, he was just doing his best to protect his country against the demonic threat, much like McCarthy acted against the communists, except demons are real ].

Really makes you wonder exactly what sort of **** the evil characters in your party have gotten up to.

Mmmm, I won't spoil you if you didn't finish the game but...

Spoiler

the obvious romantic interest for a guy will shed some light about this

 

[Vaalingrade]

And sadly, this is why I dont see WotC pulling it off, and am placing my faith in other publishers. WotC is a decent company, but the one thing I'm sure they can't do is something no one else has ever done.

Good thing that's not what they're doing and are instead dealing with a very problematic element most other game worlds either don't have or have abandoned.

 

[Lyxen]

Good thing that's not what they're doing and are instead dealing with a very problematic element most other game worlds either don't have or have abandoned.

It's clear that D&D, mostly because of its visibilty, but also because of the types of game that it has encouraged to play (mostly in the past), is much more of a target than all other roleplaying games combined. And yes, the good thing is that they are adressing the small number of real issues not holistically with an approach which might shock and break down the dynamic, but by slow small steps that allow them to try things out first and judge the response, then moving forward or backing off. It's careful and fairly controlled, which also makes for a way more stable game and environment.

 

[Yaarel]

Backgrounds are especially useful to represent a culture because each specifies one of the roles within the culture.

For example, there would be no "American" background. Rather, there could be an "American Business Owner", an "American Football Player", an "American Movie Actor", and so on. Together these prominent cultural backgrounds sketch out a feel for an American culture.

The fluidity of the method, to add or remove particular backgrounds, helps avoid a reductionist essentialism that might stereotype every single member of the American culture.

Meanwhile, backgrounds from immigrants from outside America can also contribute to the feel of the American culture.

 

[MGibster]

However, the stereotypes do not appear to be going away. Rather, they are reorganizing into a different mechanic of the game. Not the "race" mechanic, but the "faction" mechanic. An entire "race" cannot be a specific alignment, now. It cannot even "tend" toward a specific alignment. But an entire "faction" can be or tend toward a specific alignment.

In one of my anthropology classes the professor showed us an American produced map from the late 19th century that listed different parts of the world as civilized, semi-civilized, uncivilized, and barbaric. I think Japan was civilized, China was semi-civilized, vast swaths of Africa was uncivilized, and there were only a handful of barbaric places. He then showed us an American produced map from the 1980s that listed different parts of the world as 1st world, 2nd world, and 3rd world. And damn, if 2nd and 3rd world didn't correspond very closely with semi-civilized and uncivilized

It kind of seems like we're going to see something similar here. Oh, no, this race isn't "evil." It's just that most of them belong to this faction which is evil. The map is going to have different names but it's going to look eerily similar.

 

[Yaarel]

In one of my anthropology classes the professor showed us an American produced map from the late 19th century that listed different parts of the world as civilized, semi-civilized, uncivilized, and barbaric. I think Japan was civilized, China was semi-civilized, vast swaths of Africa was uncivilized, and there were only a handful of barbaric places. He then showed us an American produced map from the 1980s that listed different parts of the world as 1st world, 2nd world, and 3rd world. And damn, if 2nd and 3rd world didn't correspond very closely with semi-civilized and uncivilized

It kind of seems like we're going to see something similar here. Oh, no, this race isn't "evil." It's just that most of them belong to this faction which is evil. The map is going to have different names but it's going to look eerily similar.

I share your concerns about reincarnating the racist stereotypes.

Factions help.

By focusing on different factions, a particular nation becomes more complex. For example, one faction can describe the backgrounds within a wealthier locality and the industry taking place there, even if this locality is only a small part of the wider nation.



By not baking the description into a D&D race itself, and instead using backgrounds to describe various cultures that are prominent within a subrace, it is easier diversify the race.