The new generation of players run games much more like Japanese anime where everybody is happy and character inclusivity is the name of the game.
Wow, there's so much to unpack just from that. I don't know what anime you've been watching, but there's tons of melodrama and angst and pathos in anime. Same with modern tabletop gamers, I think people love to have characters with some angst, but you're right, character inclusivity is the name of the game. That's because it's the players who want to be happy and being allowed to choose what kind of character we play makes us happy. It's about choice, you see. Plenty of people would choose to make angsty characters if allowed, but will leave the game if they aren't allowed to make basic decisions like having a tiefling who is an accepted member of society instead of being restricted to being hunted and despised.
There’s no real good or evil, or rather the edges have been dulled. The half-orc brute raised in savagery, suckled on a broad ax, is now your PC’s next door neighbor dropping by for a cup of sugar. The great Fiend warlock Tiefling son of Asmodeus is now your kid sister’s babysitter.
Of course there is still good and evil, it's just not necessarily who it looked like before. Because people got tired of settings where certain kinds of people were just innately evil just because of tradition. Again it's about choice. The DM that allows you to play any character of any alignment, but then says that literally everyone will prejudge you based on how you look is only really giving the illusion of choice.
All forms of fun are valid, just not profitable, and it seems the epic stories of good and evil are a thing of the past. It takes some getting used to.
I think maybe you just need to find the epic stories of good and evil, because they are still there. They're just not wearing the tired old tropes and masks they have always worn.
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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!
The new generation of players run games much more like Japanese anime where everybody is happy and character inclusivity is the name of the game.
Wow, there's so much to unpack just from that. I don't know what anime you've been watching, but there's tons of melodrama and angst and pathos in anime. Same with modern tabletop gamers, I think people love to have characters with some angst, but you're right, character inclusivity is the name of the game. That's because it's the players who want to be happy and being allowed to choose what kind of character we play makes us happy. It's about choice, you see. Plenty of people would choose to make angsty characters if allowed, but will leave the game if they aren't allowed to make basic decisions like having a tiefling who is an accepted member of society instead of being restricted to being hunted and despised.
There’s no real good or evil, or rather the edges have been dulled. The half-orc brute raised in savagery, suckled on a broad ax, is now your PC’s next door neighbor dropping by for a cup of sugar. The great Fiend warlock Tiefling son of Asmodeus is now your kid sister’s babysitter.
Of course there is still good and evil, it's just not necessarily who it looked like before. Because people got tired of settings where certain kinds of people were just innately evil just because of tradition. Again it's about choice. The DM that allows you to play any character of any alignment, but then says that literally everyone will prejudge you based on how you look is only really giving the illusion of choice.
All forms of fun are valid, just not profitable, and it seems the epic stories of good and evil are a thing of the past. It takes some getting used to.
I think maybe you just need to find the epic stories of good and evil, because they are still there. They're just not wearing the tired old tropes and masks they have always worn.
I was trying to avoid getting into an argument about which style of play is better. For every point you can make for one style, I suspect that the point becomes a negative under a different perspective.
I mean well of course everyone has different styles of play that suit different people differently, but that's not the same thing as saying "there's no more epic tales of good and evil anymore!"
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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!
I mean well of course everyone has different styles of play that suit different people differently, but that's not the same thing as saying "there's no more epic tales of good and evil anymore!""
Modern styles of play don't seem to have concepts like "archetypal" or "iconic." That web of meaning is where we also get things like "primordial evil" and "ultimate good." Nowadays, the closest to "evil" we get are "misunderstood." Jacen Solo is just a misunderstood child in need of a hug and a good spanking. That's a big difference from when we first saw Darth in the movies (of course, later movies turned Anakin into another child in need of a good hug and a good spanking).
That's what I mean when I say that there are no epic battles of good and evil anymore.
One of Tolkien's possible stories for how the orcs came to be is they were once elves; corrupted by Morgoth. Orcs are thus associated with evil in a cosmological sense, but they're also victims. They didn't choose to be evil because they were made that way. And that's how D&D treated them for the longest time. They're evil because someone else made them to be evil. Killing them is only "good" in the sense that it's ridding the world of evil. And early D&D tried to strip this of any and all nuance. Gygax himself once wrote that even if an orc swore to reject evil and embrace lawful goodness, a paladin would be right to slay the orc before it could recant. And I shouldn't have to say how messed up this is.
Some of it might come from embracing the writings of Moorcock. He's where we got the earliest alignments from. Law stood in as much for organized "civilization" as it did for the status quo of its inhabitants being the dominant powers in the world. Chaos wasn't just the wilds, but also change. It's rudimentary, but an oversimplification of the politics would be lawful = conservative/regressive and chaos = liberal/progressive. The thing is change is the only constant, so Law, almost by definition, became a reaction to Chaos. I think the additions of the Good-to-Evil axis became necessary to justify Law and Chaos was because the writing was on the wall.
So what we now have is a more nuanced view. Orcs might have initially been created by chaotic evil, however you wish to define that, but it doesn't have to define them. They're still sentient, sapient, intelligent life. Orcs can reason, and they can choose for themselves. So, naturally, they don't all choose to follow a deity who is something of an abusive parent. And every other "evil" people should be given the same treatment.
Maybe that's gray. Maybe it's just not simplistic storytelling. I don't know. I just know what I like. And I like the evolution.
One of Tolkien's possible stories for how the orcs came to be is they were once elves; corrupted by Morgoth. Orcs are thus associated with evil in a cosmological sense, but they're also victims. They didn't choose to be evil because they were made that way. And that's how D&D treated them for the longest time. They're evil because someone else made them to be evil. Killing them is only "good" in the sense that it's ridding the world of evil. And early D&D tried to strip this of any and all nuance. Gygax himself once wrote that even if an orc swore to reject evil and embrace lawful goodness, a paladin would be right to slay the orc before it could recant. And I shouldn't have to say how messed up this is.
Some of it might come from embracing the writings of Moorcock. He's where we got the earliest alignments from. Law stood in as much for organized "civilization" as it did for the status quo of its inhabitants being the dominant powers in the world. Chaos wasn't just the wilds, but also change. It's rudimentary, but an oversimplification of the politics would be lawful = conservative/regressive and chaos = liberal/progressive. The thing is change is the only constant, so Law, almost by definition, became a reaction to Chaos. I think the additions of the Good-to-Evil axis became necessary to justify Law and Chaos was because the writing was on the wall.
So what we now have is a more nuanced view. Orcs might have initially been created by chaotic evil, however you wish to define that, but it doesn't have to define them. They're still sentient, sapient, intelligent life. Orcs can reason, and they can choose for themselves. So, naturally, they don't all choose to follow a deity who is something of an abusive parent. And every other "evil" people should be given the same treatment.
Maybe that's gray. Maybe it's just not simplistic storytelling. I don't know. I just know what I like. And I like the evolution.
I don’t think “more nuanced” is the best way to look at it. I propose that the difference is “simulationist” vs. “mythical.”
In the “mythical” pov, the orc is a symbol. In the “simulationist” pov, the orc is a person.
I don't think modern stories or games are any less mythical, I think we just expanded our repertoire of myths. We have a lot of characters that are symbols, they just don't have to wear the same faces as they have worn since Grampa Tolkien's day. Characters can very much be symbols using a different parlance than the ones you're used to. And we also don't have to rely on entire groups of people being the same symbol.
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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!
I don't think modern stories or games are any less mythical, I think we just expanded our repertoire of myths. We have a lot of characters that are symbols, they just don't have to wear the same faces as they have worn since Grampa Tolkien's day. Characters can very much be symbols using a different parlance than the ones you're used to. And we also don't have to rely on entire groups of people being the same symbol.
It seems to me like you are just interested in arguing that the new way of gaming is all-together better in every way. I have no interest in that kind of argument. So, how about you give me three ways that the old way was better and that the new way lost something?
To be fair, here are three ways the new way is better
1.) More focus on roleplay
2.) More development of what goes on between adventures
Have we been watching the same anime's? Cause even in something like Ascension of the Bookworm you have things like extreme classism present and characters who do unmistakably evil things... and it's an anime about a girl who just wants to make a book. While I will agree that 'good vs. evil' has become mired and a lot of writers either try to defy the notion with bad writing or are overly moralistic above calling others evil, it's not Japanese anime that's causing the problem.
Anyways, i want to re-iterate here, the question I'm asking is not 'should we discriminate against tieflings'. It's 'is 1DD misunderstanding the appeal of tieflings that draws players to them in the first place?' My experience says yes, but I can see that there's ample people here saying it's not. While I am skeptical I will admit that I am wrong here though I have to wonder what the appeal is (as my prior perception was, appearently, wrong).
Have we been watching the same anime's? Cause even in something like Ascension of the Bookworm you have things like extreme classism present and characters who do unmistakably evil things... and it's an anime about a girl who just wants to make a books. While I will agree that 'good vs. evil' has become mired and a lot of writers either try to defy the notion with bad writing or are overly moralistic above calling others evil, it's not Japanese anime that's causing the problem.
Anyways, i want to re-iterate here, the question I'm asking is not 'should we discriminate against tieflings'. It's 'is 1DD misunderstanding the appeal of tieflings that draws players to them in the first place?' My experience says yes, but I can see that there's ample people here saying it's not. While I am skeptical I will admit that I am wrong here though I have to wonder what the appeal is (as my prior perception was, appearently, wrong).
There is a style of anime that I had in mind which, frankly, I couldn't remember the name of and didn't know how to go about finding it. This style often takes place in settings such as schools, athletic clubs, etc. and focus on "day in the life" stories.
I acknowledge that I should have been more precise than just say "anime." I didn't know how to find the specific genre name.
Having said that, I did not say that Japanese anime is causing the problem, did I?
As for tieflings, there is no reason at all that there need to be tieflings anywhere else in the campaign world. The one in the party could be the _only_ one in existence. PCs are meant to be exceptional. And, if it is the only tiefling in the world, then the typical NPC won't know what they are looking at and will have an extreme reaction.
I don't think there's really a "new way" of gaming, to be honest.
-If anything has been lost it's that people have less patience because we're kind of in the internet dating age, where a new group can be found with a swipe.
-I'm also not fond of how memey everything has gotten, but that's just a personal gripe, I don't think anything's actually wrong with it.
-Kind of along those lines I also don't like how much mmo's have affected the hobby, they are different mediums and deserve different ways of thought.
I don't really think we've actually lost anything of the old ways, they're still there. We just learned that some of the traditional tropes we used weren't the most sensitive and just learned new ways to bring the epic and the mythic. We don't need an entire race of people to represent evil when we can evoke the myth and symbols of evil in different ways.
Like, here's an example from the discussion on D&D and disability with Todd Kenreck and Jen Kretchmer: traditionally we've represented evil characters with some kind of "deformity" whether that be facial scars or limb differences, but that sucks for people with scars and limb differences who are only able to see themselves depicted as villains in media. So we do reserving that as something only for villains. I've been seeing sympathetic characters with limb differences lately, I think the latest was in Seis Manos, on Netflix. It's been nice.
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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!
Have we been watching the same anime's? Cause even in something like Ascension of the Bookworm you have things like extreme classism present and characters who do unmistakably evil things... and it's an anime about a girl who just wants to make a books. While I will agree that 'good vs. evil' has become mired and a lot of writers either try to defy the notion with bad writing or are overly moralistic above calling others evil, it's not Japanese anime that's causing the problem.
Anyways, i want to re-iterate here, the question I'm asking is not 'should we discriminate against tieflings'. It's 'is 1DD misunderstanding the appeal of tieflings that draws players to them in the first place?' My experience says yes, but I can see that there's ample people here saying it's not. While I am skeptical I will admit that I am wrong here though I have to wonder what the appeal is (as my prior perception was, appearently, wrong).
There is a style of anime that I had in mind which, frankly, I couldn't remember the name of and didn't know how to go about finding it. This style often takes place in settings such as schools, athletic clubs, etc. and focus on "day in the life" stories.
I acknowledge that I should have been more precise than just say "anime." I didn't know how to find the specific genre name.
Having said that, I did not say that Japanese anime is causing the problem, did I?
As for tieflings, there is no reason at all that there need to be tieflings anywhere else in the campaign world. The one in the party could be the _only_ one in existence. PCs are meant to be exceptional. And, if it is the only tiefling in the world, then the typical NPC won't know what they are looking at and will have an extreme reaction.
I don't think there's really a "new way" of gaming, to be honest.
-If anything has been lost it's that people have less patience because we're kind of in the internet dating age, where a new group can be found with a swipe.
-I'm also not fond of how memey everything has gotten, but that's just a personal gripe, I don't think anything's actually wrong with it.
-Kind of along those lines I also don't like how much mmo's have affected the hobby, they are different mediums and deserve different ways of thought.
I don't really think we've actually lost anything of the old ways, they're still there. We just learned that some of the traditional tropes we used weren't the most sensitive and just learned new ways to bring the epic and the mythic. We don't need an entire race of people to represent evil when we can evoke the myth and symbols of evil in different ways.
Like, here's an example from the discussion on D&D and disability with Todd Kenreck and Jen Kretchmer: traditionally we've represented evil characters with some kind of "deformity" whether that be facial scars or limb differences, but that sucks for people with scars and limb differences who are only able to see themselves depicted as villains in media. So we do reserving that as something only for villains. I've been seeing sympathetic characters with limb differences lately, I think the latest was in Seis Manos, on Netflix. It's been nice.
I kind of question that as things like 'scarred badass' tend to be common among the heroic side as well. But I do certainly agree that there is a bunch of lazy set-up in which the pretty people are all either actually good by the end of the story and/or the sort of evil person who uses their good looks for evil ends (like a seductress). I'm thinking of games like Triangle Strategy where you can tell who is actually good/redeemable and evil just by looking at their character art or Fire Emblem where you can pretty much tell who is actually recruitable based on how good they look.
They gained traction once they put them in as core in 4e and multiple DND sourced games.
I was going to say this. The change to 4E was a big deal for tieflings. Yes, they all became "Children of Asmodeus" through some divine prank. It also wasn't their fault. They were reminders of the arrogance and folly of a human empire long ago. For my games in the Forgotten Realms, I made it Netheril. And I think Matt Mercer did something similar with tieflings in Exandria with the Age of Arcanum. He really likes 4E, if you haven't noticed.
But I digress. Throughout the D&D multiverse, tieflings have been walking around as adventurers, even heroes, and just regular folk for well over a hundred years. In some placed, far longer. And they're more of a sore spot to remind them of past mistakes; which not everyone takes well to. Some don't like to be reminded, so they lash out. Others view them welcomingly, like a cautionary tale to be learned from. And still more probably just take pity on them because, at the end of the day, tieflings are people who a fair number (I'd wager) don't view as people. They see them as something bigger than that, for good and for ill.
I quite preferred when Tieflings we’re more “exotic” and primarily a Planescape race. It made them feel more special.
Have we been watching the same anime's? Cause even in something like Ascension of the Bookworm you have things like extreme classism present and characters who do unmistakably evil things... and it's an anime about a girl who just wants to make a book. While I will agree that 'good vs. evil' has become mired and a lot of writers either try to defy the notion with bad writing or are overly moralistic above calling others evil, it's not Japanese anime that's causing the problem.
Anyways, i want to re-iterate here, the question I'm asking is not 'should we discriminate against tieflings'. It's 'is 1DD misunderstanding the appeal of tieflings that draws players to them in the first place?' My experience says yes, but I can see that there's ample people here saying it's not. While I am skeptical I will admit that I am wrong here though I have to wonder what the appeal is (as my prior perception was, appearently, wrong).
Ascension of a bookworm really is in a setting where if a peasant so much as inconveniences a noble it can be "off with their head!" Literally a crime for a peasant to hurt a noble in anyway, even in self-defense.
Anyways, races have many appeals, it's foolish to think there is only one answer that question, the fact is some appealing factors will catch people and others won't. So one of the appealing factors for you with Tiefling was the whole "outcast" angle, it maybe for some others too but others might like the connections to the lower realms themselves, the lore of the race in other areas or even just the aesthetic of how the race generally looks. Prior to 4E I believe the race also was one of the most customizable with various skin colours and mixture of subtle and not subtle features to choose from.
Yea. That's... kind of my point. It's a show about a girl who just wants to make a book and it's setting is DEFINATELY not one where everything turns out happy and everyone gets along and the such. Rising of the Shield Hero, Goblin Slayer, Overlord, and plenty of other anime don't fill the 'where everybody is happy and character inclusivity is the name of the game. There’s no real good or evil, or rather the edges have been dulled.' description provided.
Heh. All this reminds me of a story my old DM told me. He was in a Star Wars game and one of his fellow players insisted, up and down, that only good Jedi wore brown robes and could use blue or green lightsabers. The DM then proceeded to make a Sith that looked like Obi Wan, blue lightsaber and brown robe included. Apparently that guy, years later, was still convinced the obviously evil Sith was a good guy.
Might have been my DM pulling my leg, but its kinda funny story.
Tieflings being discriminated against is a cultural thing, which means it's subject to change from setting to setting and from table to table. It doesn't have to be baked into the rules for it to be an element in your setting, and removing it from the race lore makes it possible for more people to introduce them however they wish. The devs had specifically said they are moving toward more setting neutral writing for races and monsters, so that people can fit them in their campaigns in more flexible ways.
So they're not making tieflings more widely accepted, they are leaving it up to you how accepted they are.
Completely agree. In our company of friends, we never bother with the difference between half-orcs and orcs, we just call them orcs and there's almost always someone who's playing one. We grew up on Warcraft and Elder scrolls and would rather see orcs as a race with savage roots and troubled past, perhaps problematic reputation, but still, free people with their own identity, philospohy, and sense of humor, rather than faceless mob in the service of evil god of random violence. Same with tieflngs. Of course, there is a smell of wokeism behind it - but no one bans you from making evil violent classic orcs, perverted sadistic drukhari, communist dwarves (it is a strange recurring theme I always run in my games btw, can't help but associate dwarves with Marx and laborer's revolution), nazi Imperium of Man and whatnot.
I find the argument that being inclusive prevents DMs from having “Good vs Evil” plots, or from using Truly Villainous Villains, very narrow minded. The game has plenty of solidly evil monsters (aberrations, fiends, undead) without needing to also make entire sentient species (which will probably forever unfortunately be called “races” in d&d) also be evil. Racism is a very sensitive topic, and the game as a whole is improved if this becomes something unique to home tables, rather than baked in.
My last campaign was very “shades of gray” in terms of morality. From elves to orcs, members of all the species could be good or evil, just like people on Earth. And just like on Earth, most “bad guys” are bad because of their unfortunate upbringing, or because of differences in opinion. Of course, there are also sociopaths, so true villains can be made from any species. But the idea of having carte blanche to kill people just because they have a certain color skin, and not because of their actions, doesn’t belong in the base game.
I also made heavy use of aberrations, fiends, and undead. One of the main villains was a rakshasa, and it was hard core villainous. There was no gray, no “I’m just misunderstood”, no “I had a rough childhood and I just need to be loved.” It was Evil, and needed to be put down.
I think I'm somewhere in the middle in this - absolutely there should be suspicion and in-game racism against tieflings - but for absolutely no good reason. As a d&d race they should be no more innately good nor evil than any other. No D&D sentient races should be innately good or evil IMO, certainly not any playable ones; but even some monsters are dubious; why exactly is that perfectly sentient eg. manticore innately evil?
Back to Tieflings - they can serve as a great metaphor for real world discrimination - they should be d&d's version of mutants from Marvel comics; feared and even hated, but generally just a wide range of perfectly normal attitudes - some good or heroic, some bad and even evil etc. but all wrongly judged just because of their genetics. It makes for great storytelling and can hold a mirror up to real world bigotry.
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Wow, there's so much to unpack just from that. I don't know what anime you've been watching, but there's tons of melodrama and angst and pathos in anime. Same with modern tabletop gamers, I think people love to have characters with some angst, but you're right, character inclusivity is the name of the game. That's because it's the players who want to be happy and being allowed to choose what kind of character we play makes us happy. It's about choice, you see. Plenty of people would choose to make angsty characters if allowed, but will leave the game if they aren't allowed to make basic decisions like having a tiefling who is an accepted member of society instead of being restricted to being hunted and despised.
Of course there is still good and evil, it's just not necessarily who it looked like before. Because people got tired of settings where certain kinds of people were just innately evil just because of tradition. Again it's about choice. The DM that allows you to play any character of any alignment, but then says that literally everyone will prejudge you based on how you look is only really giving the illusion of choice.
I think maybe you just need to find the epic stories of good and evil, because they are still there. They're just not wearing the tired old tropes and masks they have always worn.
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!
I was trying to avoid getting into an argument about which style of play is better. For every point you can make for one style, I suspect that the point becomes a negative under a different perspective.
I mean well of course everyone has different styles of play that suit different people differently, but that's not the same thing as saying "there's no more epic tales of good and evil anymore!"
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!
Modern styles of play don't seem to have concepts like "archetypal" or "iconic." That web of meaning is where we also get things like "primordial evil" and "ultimate good." Nowadays, the closest to "evil" we get are "misunderstood." Jacen Solo is just a misunderstood child in need of a hug and a good spanking. That's a big difference from when we first saw Darth in the movies (of course, later movies turned Anakin into another child in need of a good hug and a good spanking).
That's what I mean when I say that there are no epic battles of good and evil anymore.
If I may.
One of Tolkien's possible stories for how the orcs came to be is they were once elves; corrupted by Morgoth. Orcs are thus associated with evil in a cosmological sense, but they're also victims. They didn't choose to be evil because they were made that way. And that's how D&D treated them for the longest time. They're evil because someone else made them to be evil. Killing them is only "good" in the sense that it's ridding the world of evil. And early D&D tried to strip this of any and all nuance. Gygax himself once wrote that even if an orc swore to reject evil and embrace lawful goodness, a paladin would be right to slay the orc before it could recant. And I shouldn't have to say how messed up this is.
Some of it might come from embracing the writings of Moorcock. He's where we got the earliest alignments from. Law stood in as much for organized "civilization" as it did for the status quo of its inhabitants being the dominant powers in the world. Chaos wasn't just the wilds, but also change. It's rudimentary, but an oversimplification of the politics would be lawful = conservative/regressive and chaos = liberal/progressive. The thing is change is the only constant, so Law, almost by definition, became a reaction to Chaos. I think the additions of the Good-to-Evil axis became necessary to justify Law and Chaos was because the writing was on the wall.
So what we now have is a more nuanced view. Orcs might have initially been created by chaotic evil, however you wish to define that, but it doesn't have to define them. They're still sentient, sapient, intelligent life. Orcs can reason, and they can choose for themselves. So, naturally, they don't all choose to follow a deity who is something of an abusive parent. And every other "evil" people should be given the same treatment.
Maybe that's gray. Maybe it's just not simplistic storytelling. I don't know. I just know what I like. And I like the evolution.
I don’t think “more nuanced” is the best way to look at it. I propose that the difference is “simulationist” vs. “mythical.”
In the “mythical” pov, the orc is a symbol. In the “simulationist” pov, the orc is a person.
I don't think modern stories or games are any less mythical, I think we just expanded our repertoire of myths. We have a lot of characters that are symbols, they just don't have to wear the same faces as they have worn since Grampa Tolkien's day. Characters can very much be symbols using a different parlance than the ones you're used to. And we also don't have to rely on entire groups of people being the same symbol.
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!
It seems to me like you are just interested in arguing that the new way of gaming is all-together better in every way. I have no interest in that kind of argument. So, how about you give me three ways that the old way was better and that the new way lost something?
To be fair, here are three ways the new way is better
1.) More focus on roleplay
2.) More development of what goes on between adventures
3.) A closer relationship with NPCs
Have we been watching the same anime's? Cause even in something like Ascension of the Bookworm you have things like extreme classism present and characters who do unmistakably evil things... and it's an anime about a girl who just wants to make a book. While I will agree that 'good vs. evil' has become mired and a lot of writers either try to defy the notion with bad writing or are overly moralistic above calling others evil, it's not Japanese anime that's causing the problem.
Anyways, i want to re-iterate here, the question I'm asking is not 'should we discriminate against tieflings'. It's 'is 1DD misunderstanding the appeal of tieflings that draws players to them in the first place?' My experience says yes, but I can see that there's ample people here saying it's not. While I am skeptical I will admit that I am wrong here though I have to wonder what the appeal is (as my prior perception was, appearently, wrong).
There is a style of anime that I had in mind which, frankly, I couldn't remember the name of and didn't know how to go about finding it. This style often takes place in settings such as schools, athletic clubs, etc. and focus on "day in the life" stories.
I acknowledge that I should have been more precise than just say "anime." I didn't know how to find the specific genre name.
Having said that, I did not say that Japanese anime is causing the problem, did I?
As for tieflings, there is no reason at all that there need to be tieflings anywhere else in the campaign world. The one in the party could be the _only_ one in existence. PCs are meant to be exceptional. And, if it is the only tiefling in the world, then the typical NPC won't know what they are looking at and will have an extreme reaction.
I don't think there's really a "new way" of gaming, to be honest.
-If anything has been lost it's that people have less patience because we're kind of in the internet dating age, where a new group can be found with a swipe.
-I'm also not fond of how memey everything has gotten, but that's just a personal gripe, I don't think anything's actually wrong with it.
-Kind of along those lines I also don't like how much mmo's have affected the hobby, they are different mediums and deserve different ways of thought.
I don't really think we've actually lost anything of the old ways, they're still there. We just learned that some of the traditional tropes we used weren't the most sensitive and just learned new ways to bring the epic and the mythic. We don't need an entire race of people to represent evil when we can evoke the myth and symbols of evil in different ways.
Like, here's an example from the discussion on D&D and disability with Todd Kenreck and Jen Kretchmer: traditionally we've represented evil characters with some kind of "deformity" whether that be facial scars or limb differences, but that sucks for people with scars and limb differences who are only able to see themselves depicted as villains in media. So we do reserving that as something only for villains. I've been seeing sympathetic characters with limb differences lately, I think the latest was in Seis Manos, on Netflix. It's been nice.
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!
Slice of Life is the anime you are thinking of.
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
I kind of question that as things like 'scarred badass' tend to be common among the heroic side as well. But I do certainly agree that there is a bunch of lazy set-up in which the pretty people are all either actually good by the end of the story and/or the sort of evil person who uses their good looks for evil ends (like a seductress). I'm thinking of games like Triangle Strategy where you can tell who is actually good/redeemable and evil just by looking at their character art or Fire Emblem where you can pretty much tell who is actually recruitable based on how good they look.
I quite preferred when Tieflings we’re more “exotic” and primarily a Planescape race. It made them feel more special.
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Ascension of a bookworm really is in a setting where if a peasant so much as inconveniences a noble it can be "off with their head!" Literally a crime for a peasant to hurt a noble in anyway, even in self-defense.
Anyways, races have many appeals, it's foolish to think there is only one answer that question, the fact is some appealing factors will catch people and others won't. So one of the appealing factors for you with Tiefling was the whole "outcast" angle, it maybe for some others too but others might like the connections to the lower realms themselves, the lore of the race in other areas or even just the aesthetic of how the race generally looks. Prior to 4E I believe the race also was one of the most customizable with various skin colours and mixture of subtle and not subtle features to choose from.
Yea. That's... kind of my point. It's a show about a girl who just wants to make a book and it's setting is DEFINATELY not one where everything turns out happy and everyone gets along and the such. Rising of the Shield Hero, Goblin Slayer, Overlord, and plenty of other anime don't fill the 'where everybody is happy and character inclusivity is the name of the game. There’s no real good or evil, or rather the edges have been dulled.' description provided.
Heh. All this reminds me of a story my old DM told me. He was in a Star Wars game and one of his fellow players insisted, up and down, that only good Jedi wore brown robes and could use blue or green lightsabers. The DM then proceeded to make a Sith that looked like Obi Wan, blue lightsaber and brown robe included. Apparently that guy, years later, was still convinced the obviously evil Sith was a good guy.
Might have been my DM pulling my leg, but its kinda funny story.
Completely agree. In our company of friends, we never bother with the difference between half-orcs and orcs, we just call them orcs and there's almost always someone who's playing one. We grew up on Warcraft and Elder scrolls and would rather see orcs as a race with savage roots and troubled past, perhaps problematic reputation, but still, free people with their own identity, philospohy, and sense of humor, rather than faceless mob in the service of evil god of random violence. Same with tieflngs. Of course, there is a smell of wokeism behind it - but no one bans you from making evil violent classic orcs, perverted sadistic drukhari, communist dwarves (it is a strange recurring theme I always run in my games btw, can't help but associate dwarves with Marx and laborer's revolution), nazi Imperium of Man and whatnot.
I find the argument that being inclusive prevents DMs from having “Good vs Evil” plots, or from using Truly Villainous Villains, very narrow minded. The game has plenty of solidly evil monsters (aberrations, fiends, undead) without needing to also make entire sentient species (which will probably forever unfortunately be called “races” in d&d) also be evil. Racism is a very sensitive topic, and the game as a whole is improved if this becomes something unique to home tables, rather than baked in.
My last campaign was very “shades of gray” in terms of morality. From elves to orcs, members of all the species could be good or evil, just like people on Earth. And just like on Earth, most “bad guys” are bad because of their unfortunate upbringing, or because of differences in opinion. Of course, there are also sociopaths, so true villains can be made from any species. But the idea of having carte blanche to kill people just because they have a certain color skin, and not because of their actions, doesn’t belong in the base game.
I also made heavy use of aberrations, fiends, and undead. One of the main villains was a rakshasa, and it was hard core villainous. There was no gray, no “I’m just misunderstood”, no “I had a rough childhood and I just need to be loved.” It was Evil, and needed to be put down.
I think I'm somewhere in the middle in this - absolutely there should be suspicion and in-game racism against tieflings - but for absolutely no good reason. As a d&d race they should be no more innately good nor evil than any other. No D&D sentient races should be innately good or evil IMO, certainly not any playable ones; but even some monsters are dubious; why exactly is that perfectly sentient eg. manticore innately evil?
Back to Tieflings - they can serve as a great metaphor for real world discrimination - they should be d&d's version of mutants from Marvel comics; feared and even hated, but generally just a wide range of perfectly normal attitudes - some good or heroic, some bad and even evil etc. but all wrongly judged just because of their genetics. It makes for great storytelling and can hold a mirror up to real world bigotry.