That is true from a modern perspective when you have food, shelter and safety available. You have many options. Now go back to a time when humans, orcs, dwarves and tabaxi were not the top of the food chain. Your survival options start to limit.
Which still has absolutely nothing to do with having a strong identity for a species; similarity is driven by environment, economics, and technology.
Typically the barbarian at the gates, the Visigoths, the Francs, the Goths, the Timurids etc and drow, orc, goblin, hobgoblin, bugbear, ogres oh my are their stand ins.
'Barbarian' is about culture (and just being Not From Around Here), not about race -- and it should be obvious that all of your real world examples are humans.
WotC is treating characters and monsters as humans now. There is little to no difference, what matters now is culture. Hence why I gave you cultural references to set expectations. They are telling us now to just use the Knight and call it an Orc now. Just saying. So if we are going to be playing a game where everything is humans, then you should take the cultural examples as valid.
I think having races and cultures with a strong identity (even one which I dont agree with or find objectionable) is more inherently interesting then ones that don't because it actually offers a lot of opportunity for inspiration and such for both players and GMs; it's frankly my biggest problem with the player options from both mord's and the 2024 PHB: if you strip away any references to physical characteristics they're pretty much entirely interchangable with how they're described.
I get that this isn't a popular take around here and that WotC keeps screaming "setting agnostic" at the top of it's lungs whenever issues like this get pointed out but they're also consistently going back to established settings when releasing materials and also setting themselves up for a ton of work when it comes to establish the extent settings and the races/cultures therein.
What you may find interesting, others find to be harmful and this game is meant to be enjoyed by everyone. If you want that stuff in your game, no one is going to kick down your door and make you stop, but others should have the opportunity to play without having to be reminded of the game's controversial and painful roots.
And what you find harmful and to be enjoyed what you consider meant to be enjoyed by everyone, isn't to everyone you are finding that out in this thread. There is no monolith on this and it gets worse when you are dealing with people familiar with the content and have played with those designers. You need to have villain's and foils in the game. And having various drow, orcs, goblins etc being evil fits that role. Don't get me wrong, the current writing direction by D&D is aimed at 8 year old and above in my opinion so trying to be samey with everything could be useful when playing with children, which is how I adjust lore when DM'ing for kids. As to take up to the 8yr and up content, so far less than 4M characters have been built in D&D Beyond for 2024 and that is very low. I'm running 5E games at conventions and online, and generally have a wait list. I'm running Age of Worms (3.5E content) and I have 5 people waiting to get in the main group. No complaints on using original lore, they ask to bring their friends. Typically half of the new players become DM's using older content as well. This is anecdotal, but it is what it is.
If you really want to make a plea to authority (essentially WotC agrees with me - really dude?), then I suggest you look at Dungeon Magazine and Dragon magazine and you'll see a lot of current high level designers at Paizo and WotC and read their content, it doesn't agree with your statement you'll find a diversity of opinions. What you are seeing is an official company line from the marketing department - not from all of the designers, not by a long shot. Look up Dungeon Magazine 124 for Age of Worms, and look at the designer names on the adventure path and read it the village of Diamond Back. You can understand a persons views based on what they create. The town alone is incredibly well made and would make a small group of people clutch their pearls at gambling, brothel's and drugs oh my. Plenty of factions, adventure seeds and a good town to take you to level 20. WotC hasn't written a real town like that for 5E+.
You are confusing a few points here, which I am happy to clear up:
Reduction of harm is important.
No one claimed to be an absolute authority.
Villains can exist without harmful stereotypes or without needing to leverage biological determinism.
Furthermore, you misidentified me making a plea to authority (seriously, this was something someone else said) while also making an appeal to tradition?! Setting aside that WotC is the authority on WotC IPs, please make sure you are responding to the person you mean to. Additionally, people are often wiling to compromise on some issues that they might find distasteful just to play the game. Many people have not realized that 'no D&D is better than bad D&D', so your wait lists are virtually meaningless here and would not be commentary on the lore of the games even if that were not the case for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which is the anecdotal nature of it, but also because those player's feelings on the content does not serve to erase the feelings that others may have who you may not feel has value.
This is a very confused, if emotional argument. What Paizo says or does is irrelevant to D&D. I am baffled as to why you are including that company in this discussion at all. At the end of the day, WotC made an intentional decision to make their content accessible to more people. Part of this decision necessitated revising content and throwing out some long held and weirdly-coveted ideas, so that those who were previously harmed, as those people define it, felt they were able to play and enjoy this game fully. You can add whatever biological determinism you want to your game - it's your party. But people always matter more than ideas.
WotC is treating characters and monsters as humans now. There is little to no difference, what matters now is culture. Hence why I gave you cultural references to set expectations. They are telling us now to just use the Knight and call it an Orc now. Just saying. So if we are going to be playing a game where everything is humans, then you should take the cultural examples as valid.
This was an argument about whether species should have a strong identity -- i.e. arguing that what 2024 is doing is wrong. You're not going to get very far arguing that 2024 is wrong because 2024 is right.
D&D absolutely needs foes for the PCs to fight. Some groups of enemies will in fact consist primarily of a single species. There's just no reason for the rules to tell the DM what species the enemy should be made up of.
WotC is treating characters and monsters as humans now. There is little to no difference, what matters now is culture. Hence why I gave you cultural references to set expectations. They are telling us now to just use the Knight and call it an Orc now. Just saying. So if we are going to be playing a game where everything is humans, then you should take the cultural examples as valid.
This was an argument about whether species should have a strong identity -- i.e. arguing that what 2024 is doing is wrong. You're not going to get very far arguing that 2024 is wrong because 2024 is right.
D&D absolutely needs foes for the PCs to fight. Some groups of enemies will in fact consist primarily of a single species. There's just no reason for the rules to tell the DM what species the enemy should be made up of.
Yeah 2024 is wrong by telling people to just add racials essentially to build your own monster based on this stat, it leads to sameness. And telling people to use 2014 is a reason not to buy 2024. I'm running VTT and I'm not liking a company telling me to spend my time building their monsters for them because they decided for political reason and not game play reasons to provide statblocks. I'm money rich and time poor and when you are running 4 campaigns you tend to avoid time sinks. Now, 2024 is right for you, and I'm happy. But the decisions 2024 made on not providing premade stats is not wrong for a lot of their player base as well. One of the good things about D&D was you could easily take old content, use the MM and for the most party insert newer edition content and its playable. You can still do that with 2024, just remake all the humanoid races. It's D&D with extra steps, what were they thinking?
I'm a fan of the change as well, and I think it was a design choice just as much as a cultural one. Even if you did want to run orcs as villains (which is totally fine - everyone should be able to tell their own stories), what were the chances that the handful of orc stat blocks were going to meet your needs? Now, you can use Warrior, Tough and Berserker and none of them would feel out of place at all. And each of them does different things and present different challenges to the players.
But maybe in your game orcs aren't like that - maybe they're pirates in your game. Or knights. Or maybe the elves are the berserkers. Or maybe you don't want species to be a central theme at all and all of your humanoid enemies are a mix of various species.
It just gives a lot more flexibility and raises the chances that more of these stat blocks are actually useful to more DMs.
Exactly. Instead of one Orc statblock in the MM we now have 45. The only people who see that as a bad thing seemingly want Orcs to stay one-dimensional in perpetuity.
Yeah 2024 is wrong by telling people to just add racials essentially to build your own monster based on this stat, it leads to sameness.
2024 could certainly do with better advice on how to customize stat blocks to create a distinctive flavor for your enemy group, but having dozens of largely duplicate NPC stat blocks is a colossal waste of pages. For CR 1+ creatures, you can generally just add a PC species block and assume it won't significantly affect CR, pretty much the only PC species that will actually warrant a CR change of 1 are Aasimar (blinding radiance is a lot of damage) and Human (if you take Tough as your origin feat and assume it's based on HD, not CR), the only real problem is the CR 1/8, 1/4, and 1/2 mooks.
Exactly. Instead of one Orc statblock in the MM we now have 45. The only people who see that as a bad thing seemingly want Orcs to stay one-dimensional in perpetuity.
So at what species we stop this are we next going to only have dragons whittled down to their age groups and no colors? Just add the flavor you want/need and go look up the lore you need for your campaign?
This is only a good direction for the game if one assumes players that want the traditional stats/lore are promoting a part of the game that has long since been left by the wayside. Do you really need 45 options for an Orc in the rules, talk about paralysis from analysis. I guess we should start rolling up npc's and monsters same as we do PC's. Which here on DDB has gotten ridiculous as of late.
It is like they are combining the worst parts of 4e and 5e to make 5.5, and people are throwing everyone that disagrees with the change is to be cutaway from the game and labeled. It is not a good direction or look. The game is suffering because of it heck this site is suffering from it.
I don't think 2024 is going to be an issue in the long run. It's irrelevant to the groups I run. I only lost one player to 6E out 12 D&D players. I'm not seeing the conversion and the MM 2024 other than the visible stats, it is going to cost me too much work in VTT to make it usable. Maybe Fantasy Grounds, Roll 20 and Foundry VTT are such a smaller use case that it won't matter for those running 1E to 3.5E content updated to 5E. That is the only reasoning I can give WotC at this time.
So at what species we stop this are we next going to only have dragons whittled down to their age groups and no colors?
It would totally be possible to redo dragons as "look up CR on this table to find base stats, then apply this color template", and it would arguably be a better experience for a DM, because currently as a DM you can easily run into the problem of "The story is appropriate to a black dragon, but I need about CR 10 to match the PCs... guess I should reskin a young red dragon?" The only problem with templates is that they don't tell you how to apply a species template, and the low number of templates (a tough plays totally differently from a orc, but that's because one of them has 32 hp and 5 damage, and other has 15 hp and 9 damage, not because one of them is an orc).
So at what species we stop this are we next going to only have dragons whittled down to their age groups and no colors? Just add the flavor you want/need and go look up the lore you need for your campaign?
Humanoids are defined by their profession, not dragons. Are you familiar with "Slippery Slope Fallacy?"
Cultures are still there I think they are just in the DMG rather than the monster manual and the DMG is where deciding how your world's cultures and history work belongs. I don't see how it is more generic to have all npc models for all races compared to only 2 or 3 stat blocks for a single race. Like I can make Warcraft style shaman orcs by putting in druid or ranger style npc's if I want. It is much easier to add a "species defining trait" like dark vision to a cultist for an orc worshiper of asmodeus than it is to come up with a dozen stat blocks to represent all the different types of orcs that I may want in my campaign from level 1 to 12.
It effectively multiplies the monster count by a large number. The 2014 listings aren't good even if I want to use orcs as my villains, because there aren't enough distinct orc templates -- I'm still going to have to homebrew my CR 1/8 orc rabble (whatever I use for that... maybe tribal warriors?), and my CR 1/2 orc scouts, and my CR 2 orc berserkers, and so on.
Cultures are still there I think they are just in the DMG rather than the monster manual and the DMG is where deciding how your world's cultures and history work belongs. I don't see how it is more generic to have all npc models for all races compared to only 2 or 3 stat blocks for a single race. Like I can make Warcraft style shaman orcs by putting in druid or ranger style npc's if I want. It is much easier to add a "species defining trait" like dark vision to a cultist for an orc worshiper of asmodeus than it is to come up with a dozen stat blocks to represent all the different types of orcs that I may want in my campaign from level 1 to 12.
Yes but for a monster "manual" should it not be more representative than generic? Mabey not every iteration, but not only the generic? It would be a far more useful tool if it had both the generic with a sprinkling of the specific would it not. Then fill in the Uber specific in setting and adventure books? Otherwise the MM becomes insignificant rather than a specialized tome of useless that could just be a side bar in the PHB & DMG which seems to be the direction it is going. It is like wotc just made a better DMG at the expense of the MM. The new cor 3 is, as a whole, not an improvement over 2014, just a reshuffling of the deck that has brought more confusion while being marketed as an improvement especially when the digital character tool has been compromised at the expense of the end users. Thought this edition is proving to be geared towards selling whole books rather than the smorgasbord it was.
It does cover the "generic" in the humanoid section, because their cultures are just as diverse as any other humanoid, be that human, dwarf, halfling or anything else. They have the generic stat block for all the races you want by allowing you to use 40+ stat blocks of various humanoids that can represent each different part of each different species culture. They have MORE options for your orc now than they did before, they have MORE options for your dwarf, your elf, your halfling, your tiefling than you had before because they made more humanoid stat blocks. You are bending over backwards to ignore the extra 50+ stat blocks in this Monster manual compared to the 2014 one including more humanoid stat blocks for ALL playable races as NPC's as well as the diversification of several other monster groups. The change in functionality of D&D Beyond has nothing to do with the books themselves when WOTC designed the books they were always designed to be sold as whole books otherwise they would just make individual buyable pdf's and stat blocks or stat cards for monsters instead of books.
For which group of players the seasoned or the new players (specifically DM's) which is what the DMG and MM are for. This is more an advanced edition than a better beginners edition.
Is it really that "advanced" for a DM to say "I want this Tough to be an Orc with the Orc features, so I'm going to add Adrenaline Rush, Relentless Endurance, and Darkvision to the statblock"? They have everything they need to do that.
And DMs who want to run the Tough as-is and simply say it's an Orc can do that too.
For which group of players the seasoned or the new players (specifically DM's) which is what the DMG and MM are for. This is more an advanced edition than a better beginners edition.
Is it really that "advanced" for a DM to say "I want this Tough to be an Orc with the Orc features, so I'm going to add Adrenaline Rush, Relentless Endurance, and Darkvision to the statblock"? They have everything they need to do that.
And DMs who want to run the Tough as-is and simply say it's an Orc can do that too.
I like that the new video just tells you to do that.
Also, the fact that there will be more stat blocks available in the setting books that are representative of specific cultures of the setting is a nice touch as well.
The lord of the rings roleplay expansion gives a pretty good take on the original orc and this is what I will use. The portrayal here is rather absurd.
I miss the old EVIL drow and the Lolth inspired matriarchal culture. The story of Drizzy breaking away from this was an enjoyable read back in the day.. Disappointed that it's gone from here however no reason not to use the older sources which have many options.
None of that is gone. What is gone is the idea that, as a matter of biology, some things are inherently evil. You can still have evil Drow, evil Drow cultures matriarchal Drow cultures,, and stories of exceptional individuals who break away from their culture. You can still do whatever you want with orcs.
Wizards, however, is not going to make that part of their biology - there is no “evil” genome. And there is good reason for Wizards scaling that back - the “evil as part of their biology” element of D&D was expressly included as a racist trope. Gary Gygax even spoke about this - he was quoted talking about how he was a eugenicist and compared orcs to Native Americans when advocating for genocide. Nothing wrong with Wizards removing the biological politics of a self-proclaimed bigot from the game.
It is not a racist trope though. That is just a misconception This is a game and there is no equivalence in the real world for drow elves or orcs. I am curious where you found those "quotes", because I haven't. The mistake is to make orcs and drow exclusive playable races (or species if you so prefer), not the other way around.
I find it strange that people can't acknowledge that this is a game. In my campaigns, orcs will continue to be evil brutes opposed to the players.
Within the realm of spec-fic in general, exploring the concept of sapient beings who are axiomatically aligned with with concepts such as “good” or “evil” is a common and not inherently flawed trope. But, it does get a lot more iffy when a species whose existence closely mirrors humanity’s is simply stated to be born evil without an explanation why, particularly when other tropes commonly used to indicate a primitive or otherwise developmentally stunted culture appear alongside that first trope. Deliberately or not, that narrative does have a lot of parallels with the specious arguments that have been put forth irl about how X demographic is inherently superior to Y. Now, to a certain degree I will grant that within a typical D&D fantasy setting with its diverse pantheons the “they’re like that because their god made them that way” is a valid explanation, but I can understand why WotC doesn’t want to make that their official narrative for human-equivalent beings since such narratives have also been used irl in the manner I previously described.
Just wanted to point out, the Humanoids video dropped today (well, there's other stuff in it, but humanoids start at 15:30) and it clearly states the designer intent for those who were demanding it. Here's the relevant quote:
Kenreck:
"We have also the humanoid category which has a lot of our NPC statblocks which has already made my life so much easier, just to have that like - okay, I need cultists, we talked about this before, I need pirates, there's a entire pirate category now, Toughs - you know like if you're looking for a tough guy to put up against the the party, uh, this is independent of species or anything else, this is giving you a statblock of like, if this person is a Bruiser this is what you would have in this type of environment. This is so helpful because there's so many different versions of this."
Crawford:
"Now I'd love to pause for a moment on something you said here, and that is these statblocks work for humanoids of any species - so humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, gnomes, and so on and so forth, we have you covered with these statblocks. And then - just as we mentioned in the 2014 books, here again - if a DM wants to flavor any of these statblocks with rules elements from the playable versions of the species, you can always take traits from the Player's Handbook and apply them to these stat blocks. And I encourage also DMs to not only think outside the box where - like, don't fall into the trap of thinking humanoid means human, but also don't get trapped by the names of these statblocks. More than I think any other category in the Monster Manual, the humanoid statblocks, their names are suggestions only. What I do as a DM when I'm looking for humanoid statblocks, I usually am looking at what the stat block does more than I'm looking at the name, and so I might take a Pirate stat block but use it for a rascally noble or a bandit, so I'd say go through all of them look at what they do and as you're doing stat block selection as a DM, consider that you can use these for a whole variety of things, and they also make it easy for you to populate communities of really any humanoid species that you are using in your game. Also, for anyone who eager to see more sort of "species-tailored" humanoid statblocks, people are going to get to see more of that in our setting books that are coming up. So you're going to see that in the Forgotten Realms product for example - in that setting the malevolent Drow of Menzoberranzan are a important part of that setting, and so they get their own stat blocks in that product, and this is really true of all the creature categories in the Monster Manual. This is your massive starting toybox of monsters that are usable anywhere in the Multiverse, and then the bestiaries in our setting products, that's then where we can provide you versions of things tailored to the cultures and histories of our different worlds."
Two main takeaways:
1) If there was any doubt that their intent was for you to take a humanoid statblock and apply species traits to it (if you want the statblocks to vary by species), consider that quashed. Crawford explicitly stated that's what they had in mind.
2) These statblocks are fully intended to be generic NPCs that can fit anywhere in the Multiverse. But for those who really do want Evil Orc and Evil Drow statblocks, those are still coming, just in setting-specific material where they can be properly placed in context. The example he gave was that there will be Evil Drow in the Forgotten Realms book, but those Drow are evil because they live in Menzoberranzan and serve Lolth, not merely because they are Drow.
1) If there was any doubt that their intent was for you to take a humanoid statblock and apply species traits to it (if you want the statblocks to vary by species), consider that quashed. Crawford explicitly stated that's what they had in mind.
It would be nice if the DMG or MM would say so (I will say that the humanoid stat blocks are CR-appropriate without any species traits, so adding combat-relevant species traits may be a problem).
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WotC is treating characters and monsters as humans now. There is little to no difference, what matters now is culture. Hence why I gave you cultural references to set expectations. They are telling us now to just use the Knight and call it an Orc now. Just saying. So if we are going to be playing a game where everything is humans, then you should take the cultural examples as valid.
You are confusing a few points here, which I am happy to clear up:
Reduction of harm is important.
No one claimed to be an absolute authority.
Villains can exist without harmful stereotypes or without needing to leverage biological determinism.
Furthermore, you misidentified me making a plea to authority (seriously, this was something someone else said) while also making an appeal to tradition?! Setting aside that WotC is the authority on WotC IPs, please make sure you are responding to the person you mean to. Additionally, people are often wiling to compromise on some issues that they might find distasteful just to play the game. Many people have not realized that 'no D&D is better than bad D&D', so your wait lists are virtually meaningless here and would not be commentary on the lore of the games even if that were not the case for a variety of reasons. Not the least of which is the anecdotal nature of it, but also because those player's feelings on the content does not serve to erase the feelings that others may have who you may not feel has value.
This is a very confused, if emotional argument. What Paizo says or does is irrelevant to D&D. I am baffled as to why you are including that company in this discussion at all. At the end of the day, WotC made an intentional decision to make their content accessible to more people. Part of this decision necessitated revising content and throwing out some long held and weirdly-coveted ideas, so that those who were previously harmed, as those people define it, felt they were able to play and enjoy this game fully. You can add whatever biological determinism you want to your game - it's your party. But people always matter more than ideas.
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This was an argument about whether species should have a strong identity -- i.e. arguing that what 2024 is doing is wrong. You're not going to get very far arguing that 2024 is wrong because 2024 is right.
D&D absolutely needs foes for the PCs to fight. Some groups of enemies will in fact consist primarily of a single species. There's just no reason for the rules to tell the DM what species the enemy should be made up of.
Yeah 2024 is wrong by telling people to just add racials essentially to build your own monster based on this stat, it leads to sameness. And telling people to use 2014 is a reason not to buy 2024. I'm running VTT and I'm not liking a company telling me to spend my time building their monsters for them because they decided for political reason and not game play reasons to provide statblocks. I'm money rich and time poor and when you are running 4 campaigns you tend to avoid time sinks. Now, 2024 is right for you, and I'm happy. But the decisions 2024 made on not providing premade stats is not wrong for a lot of their player base as well. One of the good things about D&D was you could easily take old content, use the MM and for the most party insert newer edition content and its playable. You can still do that with 2024, just remake all the humanoid races. It's D&D with extra steps, what were they thinking?
So does having various humans, elves, dwarves, halflings and gnomes being evil.
Exactly. Instead of one Orc statblock in the MM we now have 45. The only people who see that as a bad thing seemingly want Orcs to stay one-dimensional in perpetuity.
2024 could certainly do with better advice on how to customize stat blocks to create a distinctive flavor for your enemy group, but having dozens of largely duplicate NPC stat blocks is a colossal waste of pages. For CR 1+ creatures, you can generally just add a PC species block and assume it won't significantly affect CR, pretty much the only PC species that will actually warrant a CR change of 1 are Aasimar (blinding radiance is a lot of damage) and Human (if you take Tough as your origin feat and assume it's based on HD, not CR), the only real problem is the CR 1/8, 1/4, and 1/2 mooks.
I don't think 2024 is going to be an issue in the long run. It's irrelevant to the groups I run. I only lost one player to 6E out 12 D&D players. I'm not seeing the conversion and the MM 2024 other than the visible stats, it is going to cost me too much work in VTT to make it usable. Maybe Fantasy Grounds, Roll 20 and Foundry VTT are such a smaller use case that it won't matter for those running 1E to 3.5E content updated to 5E. That is the only reasoning I can give WotC at this time.
It would totally be possible to redo dragons as "look up CR on this table to find base stats, then apply this color template", and it would arguably be a better experience for a DM, because currently as a DM you can easily run into the problem of "The story is appropriate to a black dragon, but I need about CR 10 to match the PCs... guess I should reskin a young red dragon?" The only problem with templates is that they don't tell you how to apply a species template, and the low number of templates (a tough plays totally differently from a orc, but that's because one of them has 32 hp and 5 damage, and other has 15 hp and 9 damage, not because one of them is an orc).
Humanoids are defined by their profession, not dragons. Are you familiar with "Slippery Slope Fallacy?"
Cultures are still there I think they are just in the DMG rather than the monster manual and the DMG is where deciding how your world's cultures and history work belongs. I don't see how it is more generic to have all npc models for all races compared to only 2 or 3 stat blocks for a single race. Like I can make Warcraft style shaman orcs by putting in druid or ranger style npc's if I want. It is much easier to add a "species defining trait" like dark vision to a cultist for an orc worshiper of asmodeus than it is to come up with a dozen stat blocks to represent all the different types of orcs that I may want in my campaign from level 1 to 12.
It effectively multiplies the monster count by a large number. The 2014 listings aren't good even if I want to use orcs as my villains, because there aren't enough distinct orc templates -- I'm still going to have to homebrew my CR 1/8 orc rabble (whatever I use for that... maybe tribal warriors?), and my CR 1/2 orc scouts, and my CR 2 orc berserkers, and so on.
That should really be reserved for things that actually play differently in a meaningful way.
It does cover the "generic" in the humanoid section, because their cultures are just as diverse as any other humanoid, be that human, dwarf, halfling or anything else. They have the generic stat block for all the races you want by allowing you to use 40+ stat blocks of various humanoids that can represent each different part of each different species culture. They have MORE options for your orc now than they did before, they have MORE options for your dwarf, your elf, your halfling, your tiefling than you had before because they made more humanoid stat blocks. You are bending over backwards to ignore the extra 50+ stat blocks in this Monster manual compared to the 2014 one including more humanoid stat blocks for ALL playable races as NPC's as well as the diversification of several other monster groups. The change in functionality of D&D Beyond has nothing to do with the books themselves when WOTC designed the books they were always designed to be sold as whole books otherwise they would just make individual buyable pdf's and stat blocks or stat cards for monsters instead of books.
Is it really that "advanced" for a DM to say "I want this Tough to be an Orc with the Orc features, so I'm going to add Adrenaline Rush, Relentless Endurance, and Darkvision to the statblock"? They have everything they need to do that.
And DMs who want to run the Tough as-is and simply say it's an Orc can do that too.
I like that the new video just tells you to do that.
Also, the fact that there will be more stat blocks available in the setting books that are representative of specific cultures of the setting is a nice touch as well.
It is not a racist trope though. That is just a misconception This is a game and there is no equivalence in the real world for drow elves or orcs. I am curious where you found those "quotes", because I haven't. The mistake is to make orcs and drow exclusive playable races (or species if you so prefer), not the other way around.
I find it strange that people can't acknowledge that this is a game. In my campaigns, orcs will continue to be evil brutes opposed to the players.
Within the realm of spec-fic in general, exploring the concept of sapient beings who are axiomatically aligned with with concepts such as “good” or “evil” is a common and not inherently flawed trope. But, it does get a lot more iffy when a species whose existence closely mirrors humanity’s is simply stated to be born evil without an explanation why, particularly when other tropes commonly used to indicate a primitive or otherwise developmentally stunted culture appear alongside that first trope. Deliberately or not, that narrative does have a lot of parallels with the specious arguments that have been put forth irl about how X demographic is inherently superior to Y. Now, to a certain degree I will grant that within a typical D&D fantasy setting with its diverse pantheons the “they’re like that because their god made them that way” is a valid explanation, but I can understand why WotC doesn’t want to make that their official narrative for human-equivalent beings since such narratives have also been used irl in the manner I previously described.
Just wanted to point out, the Humanoids video dropped today (well, there's other stuff in it, but humanoids start at 15:30) and it clearly states the designer intent for those who were demanding it. Here's the relevant quote:
Kenreck:
"We have also the humanoid category which has a lot of our NPC statblocks which has already made my life so much easier, just to have that like - okay, I need cultists, we talked about this before, I need pirates, there's a entire pirate category now, Toughs - you know like if you're looking for a tough guy to put up against the the party, uh, this is independent of species or anything else, this is giving you a statblock of like, if this person is a Bruiser this is what you would have in this type of environment. This is so helpful because there's so many different versions of this."
Crawford:
"Now I'd love to pause for a moment on something you said here, and that is these statblocks work for humanoids of any species - so humans, elves, dwarves, orcs, gnomes, and so on and so forth, we have you covered with these statblocks. And then - just as we mentioned in the 2014 books, here again - if a DM wants to flavor any of these statblocks with rules elements from the playable versions of the species, you can always take traits from the Player's Handbook and apply them to these stat blocks. And I encourage also DMs to not only think outside the box where - like, don't fall into the trap of thinking humanoid means human, but also don't get trapped by the names of these statblocks. More than I think any other category in the Monster Manual, the humanoid statblocks, their names are suggestions only. What I do as a DM when I'm looking for humanoid statblocks, I usually am looking at what the stat block does more than I'm looking at the name, and so I might take a Pirate stat block but use it for a rascally noble or a bandit, so I'd say go through all of them look at what they do and as you're doing stat block selection as a DM, consider that you can use these for a whole variety of things, and they also make it easy for you to populate communities of really any humanoid species that you are using in your game. Also, for anyone who eager to see more sort of "species-tailored" humanoid statblocks, people are going to get to see more of that in our setting books that are coming up. So you're going to see that in the Forgotten Realms product for example - in that setting the malevolent Drow of Menzoberranzan are a important part of that setting, and so they get their own stat blocks in that product, and this is really true of all the creature categories in the Monster Manual. This is your massive starting toybox of monsters that are usable anywhere in the Multiverse, and then the bestiaries in our setting products, that's then where we can provide you versions of things tailored to the cultures and histories of our different worlds."
Two main takeaways:
1) If there was any doubt that their intent was for you to take a humanoid statblock and apply species traits to it (if you want the statblocks to vary by species), consider that quashed. Crawford explicitly stated that's what they had in mind.
2) These statblocks are fully intended to be generic NPCs that can fit anywhere in the Multiverse. But for those who really do want Evil Orc and Evil Drow statblocks, those are still coming, just in setting-specific material where they can be properly placed in context. The example he gave was that there will be Evil Drow in the Forgotten Realms book, but those Drow are evil because they live in Menzoberranzan and serve Lolth, not merely because they are Drow.
Does this give everyone what they want?
It would be nice if the DMG or MM would say so (I will say that the humanoid stat blocks are CR-appropriate without any species traits, so adding combat-relevant species traits may be a problem).