We are playing in worlds where most of the time races are not living together. It is just silly to think that people in this setting were not racist.
Hell most worlds we have played in have had elves and dwarves not liking each other. There is nothing wrong with it.
Let's be 100% honest people. Are Orcs somehow a peaceful race that do not eat other humanoid creatures? Half Orcs are tolerated.
It's like saying Mindflayers shouldn't be hated. They are just misunderstood.
I hope WotC do not ruin this game with social constructs. It's a fantasy game. Roleplaying racism might just fix racism in real life.
And that's not to mention that the existence of half-"species" tends to be evidence of how people of different cultures can see past their differences. Like the tale of Aragorn and Arwen. And that of Beren and Lúthien before them. Were they to have ever produced offspring.
As I said elsewhere with regard to the use of the term "species":
The differences between a hobbit and a human are so small that if hobbits existed they would most definitely be considered human. And not an entirely different species. In fact it's safe to assume that anyone who would consider them a different species would be regarded with suspicion. Because that's the sort of language one expects from hateful individuals when talking about ethnic groups with a phenotype that sees them with a shorter stature than others.
Now I can understand why Wizards might want to move away from the term "race." I've little to no problem with their deciding to replace the term. But the term "species" comes with its own problems. But people who of the mind that Wizards can make no wrong decisions can't see what is so plainly obvious to others. Almost every step Wizards has taken to handle with sensitivity the issue of race and racism has been met with criticism from many individuals who count themselves among minority ethnic groups. Including how they were going to handle half-"species" as seen in the playtest material and now their removal of them altogether. Because Wizards aren't listening to ordinary everyday people who belong to minority ethnic groups. They are deferring to "experts" privileged enough to have gone to university who are out of touch with ordinary everyday people who belong to minority ethnic groups. It ain't rocket science what is happening.
We are playing in worlds where most of the time races are not living together.
I think this is a flawed assumption right from the get go because 1) not all the setting in D&D are written like this, after all Eberron is an official D&D setting where people of different species lived together pretty commonly and 2) even if it were universal to write official settings that way, the multiversal emphasis they are taking with D&D basically allows any kind of homebrew setting to be used as well.
It is just silly to think that people in this setting were not racist.
And this is also a flawed conclusion to come from that flawed assumption. This is fantasy. Racism doesn't have to be a natural default to all societies. That is very limiting and restrictive to the near infinite creativity that world builders can, and should, have when conjuring a world for this game.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
And this is also a flawed conclusion to come from that flawed assumption. This is fantasy. Racism doesn't have to be a natural default to all societies.
True.
But, also, if you randomly assign a large group of a label (oh... let's say Orange-red and Periwinkle-blue) they will immediately descend into tribalism. There's no reason different species wouldn't find excuses to be discriminatory.
And this is also a flawed conclusion to come from that flawed assumption. This is fantasy. Racism doesn't have to be a natural default to all societies.
True.
But, also, if you randomly assign a large group of a label (oh... let's say Orange-red and Periwinkle-blue) they will immediately descend into tribalism.
That is an assumption, and doesn't have to hold true for all societies, for all species, across all universes. That's just a limited imagination.
Wait, you just agreed that racism doesn't have to be a natural default to all societies and then turned around and said that it basically is?
There's no reason different species wouldn't find excuses to be discriminatory.
And since we're talking about fantasy, there's no reason they would, either.
We are playing in worlds where most of the time races are not living together.
I think this is a flawed assumption right from the get go because 1) not all the setting in D&D are written like this, after all Eberron is an official D&D setting where people of different species lived together pretty commonly and 2) even if it were universal to write official settings that way, the multiversal emphasis they are taking with D&D basically allows any kind of homebrew setting to be used as well.
It is just silly to think that people in this setting were not racist.
And this is also a flawed conclusion to come from that flawed assumption. This is fantasy. Racism doesn't have to be a natural default to all societies. That is very limiting and restrictive to the near infinite creativity that world builders can, and should, have when conjuring a world for this game.
Just to be clear most games I run are set in a sprawling cosmopolitan medieval/fantasy city so cosmopolitan it was renamed as it used to be named in honor of the deity whose disciples were once most common in the city while now the city is home to clerics and lay people of many faiths.
I kind of agree with what you are saying here. The possibilities in fantasy should be limitless. But the exact opposite of what you are suggesting with a game's setting being one without even a trace of racism is also among those possibilities. That is to say a setting in which racism is universal. Which is a setting I would not particularly want to play in!
But I also get where others are coming from.
I would remind you that we live in a world in which there is no consensus when it comes to what a racism-free world would even look like. So how exactly does someone possessed of his or her own prejudices in that regard manage to produce a setting for use at his or her table that satisfies the criteria of others? It is impossible. I wouldn't trust most people in the hobby to come even close to managing such a thing. And probably least of all those with a tendency to talk about the subject at every opportunity. Because their views are too often informed more by affiliations that matter much more to them than does any real engagement with or genuine concern for ethnic minorities. I am black. Some of the most racist people I have ever encountered have ranked among those who consider themselves to be not racist or even anti-racist. This is why I would say it is nigh inconceivable that a world in which different cultures exist not even oneindividual might harbor prejudices. Because someone's idea of their not being at all prejudiced is someone else's idea of that someoone's being among the worst of culprits. Fantasy is limitless. But let's not get fanciful.
I just feel there wasn't a need to get rid of the half-races period. It has been a thing for this game for over 40 years. Like I said earlier in this thread. Are we going to retcon Tanis Half-Elven as a human now? Or is he going to be a full eleven? It's just stupid to me.
EDIT: After looking through the thread and seeing the posts by Davyd, I now know they aren't getting rid of mixed races in DnD. Just the mechanical part of it. So I withdraw my sentiment.
I just feel there wasn't a need to get rid of the half-races period. It has been a thing for this game for over 40 years. Like I said earlier in this thread. Are we going to retcon Tanis Half-Elven as a human now? Or is he going to be a full eleven? It's just stupid to me.
Tanis just won't exist in 5e. Or he'll just be "Tanis" with no qualifiers. And mechanically, yes, he will be either Human or Elven.
I just feel there wasn't a need to get rid of the half-races period. It has been a thing for this game for over 40 years. Like I said earlier in this thread. Are we going to retcon Tanis Half-Elven as a human now? Or is he going to be a full eleven? It's just stupid to me.
Tanis just won't exist in 5e. Or he'll just be "Tanis" with no qualifiers. And mechanically, yes, he will be either Human or Elven.
I think you're both making the mistake of conflating mechanics with flavour. Flavour is free, Tanis would still be a half-elf and that would still impact his story, but there'd just be no mechanical benefit to being a half-elf in the same way I once played a half-dwarf and had to use the dwarf stats. And that's the problem I always had with half elves and half orcs; why just those two? What 2024 has really missed a trick on is not introducing mechanics to increase the number of mixed heritage options rather than remove them entirely
My solution is to allow any half race no matter what combination. Even races with four or more species ancestry. The player character gets to pick one single species for their abilities. The reasoning behind it is that for some unknown reason evolution made a single part of their ancestry dominate. So a Tiefling/Halfling/Drow/Dwarven/Human could choose one of their ancestry species and use those features. If they wanted more spells Tiefling could be their dominate species. As long as they only get abilities from one species, the game doesn't break, IMHO. Another thing to consider would be a hybrid species like Tiefling/Drow/Centaur, they have the species abilities of a Tiefling but look exactly like a Centaur. Or a Drow with tiny horns or vestigial tail. :-D
I just feel there wasn't a need to get rid of the half-races period. It has been a thing for this game for over 40 years.
“We’ve always done it like this” is a terrible reason to do something.
Not quite. It’s a terrible reason for doing something that doesn’t make sense anymore or is no longer good or possibly even bad now. It’s a perfectly fine reason to keep doing something that still works when nothing better has presented itself.
I just feel there wasn't a need to get rid of the half-races period. It has been a thing for this game for over 40 years. Like I said earlier in this thread. Are we going to retcon Tanis Half-Elven as a human now? Or is he going to be a full eleven? It's just stupid to me.
Tanis just won't exist in 5e. Or he'll just be "Tanis" with no qualifiers. And mechanically, yes, he will be either Human or Elven.
I think you're both making the mistake of conflating mechanics with flavour. Flavour is free, Tanis would still be a half-elf and that would still impact his story, but there'd just be no mechanical benefit to being a half-elf in the same way I once played a half-dwarf and had to use the dwarf stats. And that's the problem I always had with half elves and half orcs; why just those two? What 2024 has really missed a trick on is not introducing mechanics to increase the number of mixed heritage options rather than remove them entirely
Right, but he won't be Tanis Half-Elven, he'll just be Tanis. If they're not including the half-_____ options because that upsets some people, then they're not going to have a character with that term in his name. He'll be Tanis Elven who has a human father for flavour.
(Personally, not having half species feels far, FAR more racist and insulting. Because, while you can have elven and human parents, you still have to pick one. You can't be both. You are either an elf or a human. Which feels like saying some can't be both Indian and Black, almost coming across as a dog whistle. But that's a whole other conversation...)
Right, but he won't be Tanis Half-Elven, he'll just be Tanis. If they're not including the half-_____ options because that upsets some people, then they're not going to have a character with that term in his name. He'll be Tanis Elven who has a human father for flavour.
He can call himself whatever he wants. Names are names, mechanics are mechanics; having "race mechanics" in the first place was a bad idea.
(Personally, not having half species feels far, FAR more racist and insulting. Because, while you can have elven and human parents, you still have to pick one. You can't be both. You are either an elf or a human. Which feels like saying some can't be both Indian and Black, almost coming across as a dog whistle. But that's a whole other conversation...)
I think the reason they removed half-elf and half-orc were because they invoked the real-world racism too much. "All people of mixed race are outcasts? check. You only count as 'half' if one half is whitehuman? check." The fact that racespecies mechanics still exist at all isn't an excuse to keep the worst stereotypes.
I think the reason they removed half-elf and half-orc were because they invoked the real-world racism too much. "All people of mixed race are outcasts? check. You only count as 'half' if one half is whitehuman? check." The fact that racespecies mechanics still exist at all isn't an excuse to keep the worst stereotypes.
Well that was the stated reasoning, and as a "Half" IRL the way they handled it was horribly disenfranchising. And their responses to the critics have been not good. Sure the bigoty I got for being a half was real, just like the bigotry that the Democrat Presidential candidate is getting is real. But at the same time, we are here, there are a lot more "halves" in the world than people realize. And sometimes when we play games we want to see ourselves in them. The analogy of Half-elf to me worked really well for my ethnic origins, and how starkly different my moms ancestry from my dads was.
I was hoping the Hybrid rules would be in the PHB, or at least something of the like, so we could still make our mixed ancestry self inserts. Maybe it'll be in the DMG.
I was hoping the Hybrid rules would be in the PHB, or at least something of the like, so we could still make our mixed ancestry self inserts. Maybe it'll be in the DMG.
If not there then the Dungeon Master's Guild. I have an idea of how I'd do "half" people and might do a book at some point when WotC finally ships me my copy of the PHB.
I was hoping the Hybrid rules would be in the PHB, or at least something of the like, so we could still make our mixed ancestry self inserts. Maybe it'll be in the DMG.
If not there then the Dungeon Master's Guild. I have an idea of how I'd do "half" people and might do a book at some point when WotC finally ships me my copy of the PHB.
i think the bolded is probably the right approach for WotC. You have an idea. And another DM or player will have another idea and a third table will have yet another idea of how they would handle it in their world. Best that WotC keeps out of it altogether instead of doing something stupid or letting something slip through the cracks (see Hadozee). And no matter what someone will not be satisfied
Let each table decide amongst themselves how they want to handle half species.
I've now seen how different the reactions are to this change (and the previous rules, and the UA rules about it), and I can also see why they decided to just get rid of it. It may be giving them too much credit, but I feel like what happened was that they knew the "half-" races of yore were not universally loved by actual multi-ethnic players (limited to two and only with humans), they tried out a different system which some multi-ethnic people liked and others didn't, and then realized that they were never ever going to satisfy everyone with whatever rules they come up with, mechanically.
Even this iteration of "dealing" with the issue has differing viewpoints all from multi-ethnic players, as evidenced by this thread. They will never win this game. Might as well not waste the ink on it. If it appears in the DMG, I will be happy that the idea has mechanical support (I am not multi-ethnic, so I don't hold much weight to my personal opinion on the matter), but if their internal polling showed that just about as many multi-ethnic players loathed the UA rules as loved them, then that's not really a whole lot of incentive to move forward with them.
I don’t miss the half-races. Half Elves were over powered and Half-Orcs are basically the same as Orcs in most respects.
They have have some ‘half-Species’ rules coming in the DMG but here’s the thing: from a biological perspective different Species shouldn’t be able to breed. There DNA doesn’t mix and would make, at very least infertile offspring.
I also wonder if playing a Dragon blooded Sorcerer is essentially a half-species though?
i think the bolded is probably the right approach for WotC. You have an idea. And another DM or player will have another idea and a third table will have yet another idea of how they would handle it in their world. Best that WotC keeps out of it altogether instead of doing something stupid or letting something slip through the cracks (see Hadozee). And no matter what someone will not be satisfied
Let each table decide amongst themselves how they want to handle half species.
Right. Except the way to do that is to provide them as an option and let people decide to keep them or ban them. By not including them, they're not giving people the choice. That's like saying they're giving people a choice of whether or not to have demons and devils in their campaign setting by not including any fiendsi n the Monster Manual.
Letting people "decide for themselves" what content they want by adding the content only works to a limited extent. If the game isn't providing me the options I want and I have to homebrew too much, it's easier for me to just find a new system that actually gives me all the content I desire.
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And that's not to mention that the existence of half-"species" tends to be evidence of how people of different cultures can see past their differences. Like the tale of Aragorn and Arwen. And that of Beren and Lúthien before them. Were they to have ever produced offspring.
As I said elsewhere with regard to the use of the term "species":
The differences between a hobbit and a human are so small that if hobbits existed they would most definitely be considered human. And not an entirely different species. In fact it's safe to assume that anyone who would consider them a different species would be regarded with suspicion. Because that's the sort of language one expects from hateful individuals when talking about ethnic groups with a phenotype that sees them with a shorter stature than others.
Now I can understand why Wizards might want to move away from the term "race." I've little to no problem with their deciding to replace the term. But the term "species" comes with its own problems. But people who of the mind that Wizards can make no wrong decisions can't see what is so plainly obvious to others. Almost every step Wizards has taken to handle with sensitivity the issue of race and racism has been met with criticism from many individuals who count themselves among minority ethnic groups. Including how they were going to handle half-"species" as seen in the playtest material and now their removal of them altogether. Because Wizards aren't listening to ordinary everyday people who belong to minority ethnic groups. They are deferring to "experts" privileged enough to have gone to university who are out of touch with ordinary everyday people who belong to minority ethnic groups. It ain't rocket science what is happening.
I think this is a flawed assumption right from the get go because 1) not all the setting in D&D are written like this, after all Eberron is an official D&D setting where people of different species lived together pretty commonly and 2) even if it were universal to write official settings that way, the multiversal emphasis they are taking with D&D basically allows any kind of homebrew setting to be used as well.
And this is also a flawed conclusion to come from that flawed assumption. This is fantasy. Racism doesn't have to be a natural default to all societies. That is very limiting and restrictive to the near infinite creativity that world builders can, and should, have when conjuring a world for this game.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
True.
But, also, if you randomly assign a large group of a label (oh... let's say Orange-red and Periwinkle-blue) they will immediately descend into tribalism. There's no reason different species wouldn't find excuses to be discriminatory.
That is an assumption, and doesn't have to hold true for all societies, for all species, across all universes. That's just a limited imagination.
Wait, you just agreed that racism doesn't have to be a natural default to all societies and then turned around and said that it basically is?
And since we're talking about fantasy, there's no reason they would, either.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Just to be clear most games I run are set in a sprawling cosmopolitan medieval/fantasy city so cosmopolitan it was renamed as it used to be named in honor of the deity whose disciples were once most common in the city while now the city is home to clerics and lay people of many faiths.
I kind of agree with what you are saying here. The possibilities in fantasy should be limitless. But the exact opposite of what you are suggesting with a game's setting being one without even a trace of racism is also among those possibilities. That is to say a setting in which racism is universal. Which is a setting I would not particularly want to play in!
But I also get where others are coming from.
I would remind you that we live in a world in which there is no consensus when it comes to what a racism-free world would even look like. So how exactly does someone possessed of his or her own prejudices in that regard manage to produce a setting for use at his or her table that satisfies the criteria of others? It is impossible. I wouldn't trust most people in the hobby to come even close to managing such a thing. And probably least of all those with a tendency to talk about the subject at every opportunity. Because their views are too often informed more by affiliations that matter much more to them than does any real engagement with or genuine concern for ethnic minorities. I am black. Some of the most racist people I have ever encountered have ranked among those who consider themselves to be not racist or even anti-racist. This is why I would say it is nigh inconceivable that a world in which different cultures exist not even one individual might harbor prejudices. Because someone's idea of their not being at all prejudiced is someone else's idea of that someoone's being among the worst of culprits. Fantasy is limitless. But let's not get fanciful.
I just feel there wasn't a need to get rid of the half-races period. It has been a thing for this game for over 40 years. Like I said earlier in this thread. Are we going to retcon Tanis Half-Elven as a human now? Or is he going to be a full eleven? It's just stupid to me.
EDIT: After looking through the thread and seeing the posts by Davyd, I now know they aren't getting rid of mixed races in DnD. Just the mechanical part of it. So I withdraw my sentiment.
Tanis just won't exist in 5e. Or he'll just be "Tanis" with no qualifiers. And mechanically, yes, he will be either Human or Elven.
I think you're both making the mistake of conflating mechanics with flavour. Flavour is free, Tanis would still be a half-elf and that would still impact his story, but there'd just be no mechanical benefit to being a half-elf in the same way I once played a half-dwarf and had to use the dwarf stats. And that's the problem I always had with half elves and half orcs; why just those two? What 2024 has really missed a trick on is not introducing mechanics to increase the number of mixed heritage options rather than remove them entirely
My solution is to allow any half race no matter what combination. Even races with four or more species ancestry. The player character gets to pick one single species for their abilities. The reasoning behind it is that for some unknown reason evolution made a single part of their ancestry dominate. So a Tiefling/Halfling/Drow/Dwarven/Human could choose one of their ancestry species and use those features. If they wanted more spells Tiefling could be their dominate species. As long as they only get abilities from one species, the game doesn't break, IMHO. Another thing to consider would be a hybrid species like Tiefling/Drow/Centaur, they have the species abilities of a Tiefling but look exactly like a Centaur. Or a Drow with tiny horns or vestigial tail. :-D
“We’ve always done it like this” is a terrible reason to do something.
Not quite. It’s a terrible reason for doing something that doesn’t make sense anymore or is no longer good or possibly even bad now. It’s a perfectly fine reason to keep doing something that still works when nothing better has presented itself.
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Right, but he won't be Tanis Half-Elven, he'll just be Tanis.
If they're not including the half-_____ options because that upsets some people, then they're not going to have a character with that term in his name. He'll be Tanis Elven who has a human father for flavour.
(Personally, not having half species feels far, FAR more racist and insulting. Because, while you can have elven and human parents, you still have to pick one. You can't be both. You are either an elf or a human. Which feels like saying some can't be both Indian and Black, almost coming across as a dog whistle. But that's a whole other conversation...)
He can call himself whatever he wants. Names are names, mechanics are mechanics; having "race mechanics" in the first place was a bad idea.
I think the reason they removed half-elf and half-orc were because they invoked the real-world racism too much. "All people of mixed race are outcasts? check. You only count as 'half' if one half is
whitehuman? check." The fact thatracespecies mechanics still exist at all isn't an excuse to keep the worst stereotypes.Well that was the stated reasoning, and as a "Half" IRL the way they handled it was horribly disenfranchising. And their responses to the critics have been not good. Sure the bigoty I got for being a half was real, just like the bigotry that the Democrat Presidential candidate is getting is real. But at the same time, we are here, there are a lot more "halves" in the world than people realize. And sometimes when we play games we want to see ourselves in them. The analogy of Half-elf to me worked really well for my ethnic origins, and how starkly different my moms ancestry from my dads was.
I was hoping the Hybrid rules would be in the PHB, or at least something of the like, so we could still make our mixed ancestry self inserts. Maybe it'll be in the DMG.
I disagree. They're different species and shouldn't all have the same traits. It'd be weird if playable Aarakocra couldn't fly.
Just like Vulcans and Wookies don't have the exact same physical capabilities of humans.
If not there then the Dungeon Master's Guild. I have an idea of how I'd do "half" people and might do a book at some point when WotC finally ships me my copy of the PHB.
i think the bolded is probably the right approach for WotC. You have an idea. And another DM or player will have another idea and a third table will have yet another idea of how they would handle it in their world. Best that WotC keeps out of it altogether instead of doing something stupid or letting something slip through the cracks (see Hadozee). And no matter what someone will not be satisfied
Let each table decide amongst themselves how they want to handle half species.
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I've now seen how different the reactions are to this change (and the previous rules, and the UA rules about it), and I can also see why they decided to just get rid of it. It may be giving them too much credit, but I feel like what happened was that they knew the "half-" races of yore were not universally loved by actual multi-ethnic players (limited to two and only with humans), they tried out a different system which some multi-ethnic people liked and others didn't, and then realized that they were never ever going to satisfy everyone with whatever rules they come up with, mechanically.
Even this iteration of "dealing" with the issue has differing viewpoints all from multi-ethnic players, as evidenced by this thread. They will never win this game. Might as well not waste the ink on it. If it appears in the DMG, I will be happy that the idea has mechanical support (I am not multi-ethnic, so I don't hold much weight to my personal opinion on the matter), but if their internal polling showed that just about as many multi-ethnic players loathed the UA rules as loved them, then that's not really a whole lot of incentive to move forward with them.
I don’t miss the half-races. Half Elves were over powered and Half-Orcs are basically the same as Orcs in most respects.
They have have some ‘half-Species’ rules coming in the DMG but here’s the thing: from a biological perspective different Species shouldn’t be able to breed. There DNA doesn’t mix and would make, at very least infertile offspring.
I also wonder if playing a Dragon blooded Sorcerer is essentially a half-species though?
Right. Except the way to do that is to provide them as an option and let people decide to keep them or ban them. By not including them, they're not giving people the choice.
That's like saying they're giving people a choice of whether or not to have demons and devils in their campaign setting by not including any fiendsi n the Monster Manual.
Letting people "decide for themselves" what content they want by adding the content only works to a limited extent. If the game isn't providing me the options I want and I have to homebrew too much, it's easier for me to just find a new system that actually gives me all the content I desire.