the above seems to remove that "stereotyping" you mentioned, so personally think its the players/dms xenophobic attitudes rather then game itself restricting the potential of the other species of the d&d universe.
Bonus response! You bring up a good point here: I agree that WotC is trying to remove racist ideas from D&D, and though I don't think they're prepared to go far enough, we also can't ignore the effect that racist ideas held by players and DMs have on the game as it is actually played.
WotC removed much of the worst lore from its race descriptions in Monsters of the Multiverse, but the problem is that they replaced that lore with nothing. Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes might be out of print, but it has pages and pages of lore about Goblinoid and Orc societies, where MotM has, what, a couple of paragraphs? Established stories are not so easily deleted from the culture, particularly if there is no compelling replacement story. As such, I think WotC's new laissez faire approach to lore is going to make the problem worse, rather than better.
This leaves it to us as players (and DMs, who are also players) to push back against these ideas where we find them, at our tables and elsewhere. I appreciate you for engaging in this conversation in good faith; if things are going to get better, this is how it will have to start.
Moving some features out of racial traits and on to backgrounds is good, but it's not enough. It doesn't matter if we're just being "a little bit" reliant on a racist worldview for game mechanics. The idea that the races are irrevocably, biologically different in a way that matters to game design is rotten to its core. Any fragment that is allowed to remain will poison everything around it.
Hyperbolic posts like this are almost as nonproductive as those actively trying to preserve the problematic aspects of the game.
The real problems are things like “this race can never be as smart as another” or “this race is always evil.” Other, common sense mechanical elements are obviously sensible. A rabbit-folk should be better at jumping than a human; a sea elf should be able to swim better. Subterranean or nocturnal creatures should be better at seeing in the dark.
That is what Wizards is doing - rather than focus on penalties (“always worse at X” “always such and such morality”), they are focusing on giving everyone additive bonuses unique to their identity. That is the key difference between the Gygax system (which should be removed) and what Wizards is doing - these are things that add to the creatures, and not take away. Crossing the line to “let us also remove the additives also” is when you start moving away from the ultimate goal of positive representations of different species, and end up with a situation where your choice of species is little more than a coat of meaningless paint.
The real problems are things like “this race can never be as smart as another” or “this race is always evil.” Other, common sense mechanical elements are obviously sensible. A rabbit-folk should be better at jumping than a human; a sea elf should be able to swim better. Subterranean or nocturnal creatures should be better at seeing in the dark.
Do those traits need to be nature over nurture though? (Especially in a magical fantasy world...)
More of them being related to physiology is a better look, but you still get stuff like Dwarves having prof with smithing or brewing tools or a race having a bonus skill prof based on theming like Tabaxi getting Perception and Stealth or Lizardfolk being able to choose from a small pool of options. They haven’t dropped it completely, just dialed back a little.
My experience with games that don't assign any mechanical traits to species is that people will immediately turn around and try to build towards whatever they think the theme of that species is, so you still wind up with a lot of fairly stereotypical PCs, it's just by choice rather than the game system forcing them.
The real problems are things like “this race can never be as smart as another” or “this race is always evil.” Other, common sense mechanical elements are obviously sensible. A rabbit-folk should be better at jumping than a human; a sea elf should be able to swim better. Subterranean or nocturnal creatures should be better at seeing in the dark.
Do those traits need to be nature over nurture though? (Especially in a magical fantasy world...)
Sometimes, we do need the equivalent of "born with X." Tortle / warforged natural armor, winged species ability to fly, having a vampire's biological needs.
Some of these can very well be represented in class abilitiles (dragon sorcerer granting scale-based AC, for instance). But it does very much shift the narrative to "build your species via class choices" and makes it so that class is both nature and nurture. I'm actually not a huge fan of this approach, to be honest, simply because then it suggests that there's only one way to play a dragon-being. Or one way to be a fairy. Which is just as race-essentialism problematic as going back to 1e with Elf or Dwarf as your PC's class.
Othertimes, I wouldn't mind everything being just... feats. Level 0 feats, level 4+ feats, epic feats. Letting you build individual species via feats is actually my preferred option, because you can have as much or as little matter to your character as you need. They can be cultural or biological as necessary, because its all optional.
Which, honestly, is probably the main question of all this. Like, elves, humans, dwarves, dragons, fiends and angels... all have been having kids for how long now? The D&D speicies are probably so intermixed by now that its impossible to not find a human without a touch of elf and dragon inside their genome.
Hyperbolic posts like this are almost as nonproductive as those actively trying to preserve the problematic aspects of the game.
The real problems are things like “this race can never be as smart as another” or “this race is always evil.” Other, common sense mechanical elements are obviously sensible. A rabbit-folk should be better at jumping than a human; a sea elf should be able to swim better. Subterranean or nocturnal creatures should be better at seeing in the dark.
That is what Wizards is doing - rather than focus on penalties (“always worse at X” “always such and such morality”), they are focusing on giving everyone additive bonuses unique to their identity. That is the key difference between the Gygax system (which should be removed) and what Wizards is doing - these are things that add to the creatures, and not take away. Crossing the line to “let us also remove the additives also” is when you start moving away from the ultimate goal of positive representations of different species, and end up with a situation where your choice of species is little more than a coat of meaningless paint.
I am not being hyperbolic. I believe the correct path is to remove all fixed racial features from the game, including bonuses. Any of those features which are desirable can be moved to background and freely assigned to any species as feats. I acknowledge this will likely require a more in-depth feat system to maintain game balance.
It is not only pernicious to say that a given race is worse than others; it is equally pernicious to say that a given race is better than others. In real life, racialized oppression has often been justified based on alleged benefits the oppressed people supposedly had. Removing racial penalties is good, but racial bonuses are not an ideologically distinct phenomenon from penalties. They are the same thing. Both need to go.
"Positive representations of different species" is not a value-neutral goal, and biological "realism" is not a value-neutral method to achieve it. An alternative is that a rabbit person is not necessarily better at jumping than average, a nocturnal person is not necessarily better at seeing in the dark than average, and a dragon person is not necessarily more durable than average. We can easily imagine a world where some Harengon are good swimmers, some sea elves are good jumpers, some dwarves can breathe fire and some humans can fly, because it's all fantasy and it's absurd to base our ideas of what's reasonable on 19th century race science. If you feel that makes your choice of species meaningless, I'm sorry you think RP is meaningless.
Other systems and products are already rethinking "race" from the ground up. I suggest you try one (ICON is free) and see what you think before determining that it can't be done a better way.
And again we’re hitting the false equivalence of race/species dynamics in spec fic with race as it works in the irl paradigm. The races in D&D are not all the same genus and species with relatively minor genetic variations influencing things like pigmentation or skull structure. These are creatures with wholly separate origin points and many radically different physiologies. If you compare all the different canines in the world you will, as I previously pointed out, find some breeds that are better equipped for certain environments, some that are better scent trackers, etc. And that has absolutely no bearing in comparing groups of humans to one another because those are objectively two completely different paradigms. All this before we even bring in one of the cornerstones of spec fic, magic and deities. When magic is incorporated and a factor in racial/species traits, then I fail to see how an attempt to draw correlation between the material and reality can represent anything but such a specious position that anyone with half a brain will reject it out of hand unless they’re simply looking for an excuse to justify a position they already intend to hold, at which point the absence of material they can twist from any particular source is rather unlikely to alter their attitude.
TLDR: The only way someone can look at race traits as they are currently being applied in 5e/UA and consider them applicable IRL is if they are already approaching the topic with that intent. Everyone else can recognize that the differences between orcs and elves in a game has no corollary to differences between humans in real life.
Hyperbolic posts like this are almost as nonproductive as those actively trying to preserve the problematic aspects of the game.
The real problems are things like “this race can never be as smart as another” or “this race is always evil.” Other, common sense mechanical elements are obviously sensible. A rabbit-folk should be better at jumping than a human; a sea elf should be able to swim better. Subterranean or nocturnal creatures should be better at seeing in the dark.
That is what Wizards is doing - rather than focus on penalties (“always worse at X” “always such and such morality”), they are focusing on giving everyone additive bonuses unique to their identity. That is the key difference between the Gygax system (which should be removed) and what Wizards is doing - these are things that add to the creatures, and not take away. Crossing the line to “let us also remove the additives also” is when you start moving away from the ultimate goal of positive representations of different species, and end up with a situation where your choice of species is little more than a coat of meaningless paint.
It is not only pernicious to say that a given race is worse than others; it is equally pernicious to say that a given race is better than others. In real life, racialized oppression has often been justified based on alleged benefits the oppressed people supposedly had. Removing racial penalties is good, but racial bonuses are not an ideologically distinct phenomenon from penalties. They are the same thing. Both need to go.
This is where your entire position enters the realm of hyperbole - and a clear misunderstanding of both the game’s goals and basic game design. It also is a clear misreading of what I said - you’ll find at no point did I say Wizards was trying to say anyone was “better” than anyone else.
Under the new design, there is no “better” species or “worse” species; just different species, each exhibiting their own traits. Gone are the days when star blocks made one group objectively better or objectively worse - everyone now gets different traits suited for different situations. No one is really better or worse - they are just all different peoples who evolved slightly differently.
In a well designed game, choices have meaning—both in terms of the flavor and the mechanics. If you want to play a sea folk species, you should not have to choose a sea-based species… then jump through other hoops just to get the basic traits your chosen creature would have evolved to have. Once you start breaking down those lines and moving pretty basic elements elsewhere, you start losing sight of some pretty basic aspects of how RPGs function.
And, perhaps worse - arguments like this, which go far afield of what both Wizards and players want, actively help the bigots get supporters to their cause. Bigotry loves a slippery slope argument - “they took away this [racist thing] now, but you should join our cause or they will go further and take away [non racist thing that has no real chance of going away].” Wizards and their team of actual racial experts seem pretty happy with their choice to have a diverse mix of species - so they are not providing fodder to support the bigoted trolls’ slippery slope arguments. But posts like yours? Posts which suggest Wizards should go further than their actual experts think is necessary? Some random, non-expert on the internet might not be a good source; but the bigots do not care about the quality of their sources. They just want to point to someone’s ramblings to justify “see! That is part of the conversation!”
Sometimes, we do need the equivalent of "born with X." Tortle / warforged natural armor, winged species ability to fly, having a vampire's biological needs.
Some of these can very well be represented in class abilitiles (dragon sorcerer granting scale-based AC, for instance). But it does very much shift the narrative to "build your species via class choices" and makes it so that class is both nature and nurture. I'm actually not a huge fan of this approach, to be honest, simply because then it suggests that there's only one way to play a dragon-being. Or one way to be a fairy. Which is just as race-essentialism problematic as going back to 1e with Elf or Dwarf as your PC's class.
Othertimes, I wouldn't mind everything being just... feats. Level 0 feats, level 4+ feats, epic feats. Letting you build individual species via feats is actually my preferred option, because you can have as much or as little matter to your character as you need. They can be cultural or biological as necessary, because its all optional.
Which, honestly, is probably the main question of all this. Like, elves, humans, dwarves, dragons, fiends and angels... all have been having kids for how long now? The D&D speicies are probably so intermixed by now that its impossible to not find a human without a touch of elf and dragon inside their genome.
I'm kinda babbling and forgot what I was saying.
I think we can have "born with X" and still not have fixed racial features because of all that free love stuff you bring up. If everyone can have kids with everyone, why should we say that a human can't be born with a shell, wings, or eyes that see in the dark? Plenty of games assign that kind of thing to a flexible "traits" system; you get points to spend at character creation, and you buy things like thick skin, keen vision, etc. D&D could get there pretty easily by just restructuring the features it currently assigns to race as selectable traits instead. Plus, you know... We're talking about magic here. It's not outrageous for a human to develop wings or gills or something in adulthood if they come in contact with the right kind of glowing goo.
My experience with games that don't assign any mechanical traits to species is that people will immediately turn around and try to build towards whatever they think the theme of that species is, so you still wind up with a lot of fairly stereotypical PCs, it's just by choice rather than the game system forcing them.
I've seen that happen, sure. It's maybe not ideal, but it's definitely better than the game forcing the issue, right? Addressing stereotypes at a table level is preferable in my opinion to having them normalized at a book level.
And again we’re hitting the false equivalence of race/species dynamics in spec fic with race as it works in the irl paradigm.
You're arguing in favor of race essentialism, I hope you know. Don't be surprised when people reject that way of thinking.
Its fantasy. The writers get to choose how to represent fae-like beings, or dragon -adjacent beings, or whatever. There are plenty of speculative fictions where becoming like a dragon is very much a practice of absorbing the appropriate energy / alchemical reagents and transforming your body under controlled situations.
Including real world racist tropes in any body of fiction is a choice made by the writers. Any in character excuses are just that - excuses for a decision the writer(s) wanted to make. Take... Dofus / Wakfu, a game-turned-cartoon by a French company. With only three or so exceptions (Dragony people from another world, demons from a parallel dimension, blue skinned folk), the vast majority of folk are humans transformed from worship of a god of choice.
Want to be a catboy? Worship the cat god of luck. An elf? There's a god for that. Two or three, I'd say, though there's overlap with fairy- and dryad-like humans.
Its even worse in D&D, because all the PC options can intermix. There shouldn't be a single human or elf in all the Forgotten Realms that doesn't have at least one or the other in their family tree. And that's before we start adding in dwarves, halflings, tieflings and more.
The idea of distinct, pure-blooded species is nothing more than a fiction within a fiction at this point in time.
Sometimes, we do need the equivalent of "born with X." Tortle / warforged natural armor, winged species ability to fly, having a vampire's biological needs.
Some of these can very well be represented in class abilitiles (dragon sorcerer granting scale-based AC, for instance). But it does very much shift the narrative to "build your species via class choices" and makes it so that class is both nature and nurture. I'm actually not a huge fan of this approach, to be honest, simply because then it suggests that there's only one way to play a dragon-being. Or one way to be a fairy. Which is just as race-essentialism problematic as going back to 1e with Elf or Dwarf as your PC's class.
Othertimes, I wouldn't mind everything being just... feats. Level 0 feats, level 4+ feats, epic feats. Letting you build individual species via feats is actually my preferred option, because you can have as much or as little matter to your character as you need. They can be cultural or biological as necessary, because its all optional.
Which, honestly, is probably the main question of all this. Like, elves, humans, dwarves, dragons, fiends and angels... all have been having kids for how long now? The D&D speicies are probably so intermixed by now that its impossible to not find a human without a touch of elf and dragon inside their genome.
I'm kinda babbling and forgot what I was saying.
I think we can have "born with X" and still not have fixed racial features because of all that free love stuff you bring up. If everyone can have kids with everyone, why should we say that a human can't be born with a shell, wings, or eyes that see in the dark? Plenty of games assign that kind of thing to a flexible "traits" system; you get points to spend at character creation, and you buy things like thick skin, keen vision, etc. D&D could get there pretty easily by just restructuring the features it currently assigns to race as selectable traits instead. Plus, you know... We're talking about magic here. It's not outrageous for a human to develop wings or gills or something in adulthood if they come in contact with the right kind of glowing goo.
Your first solution about better recognizing hybrid species is already part of the rules update, so they are already taking care of that.
Your second suggestion is not a particularly good one - it might work in other, newer games, but it is not necessary and would almost certainly fail in D&D.
Part of the fundamental appeal of D&D is that you can pick it up and play a game and story with everyone. There are some universal elements, such as species everyone knows and loves. There are not just a mess of mutated creatures with traits chosen for optimization - which is the endgame your “solution” creates. The current system works fine - it gives players dozens of options to customize what they want to be (bot to mention an intensive homebrew system to go further than that) and a solid baseline upon which everyone can build their D&D experiences
Wizards is tackling the real racism head-on by removing defined ASI and defined moralities. Those are the actual elements of racism Gary Gygax intentionally injected into the game; it makes sense to get rid of them. They do not need to rock the boat and attack the issues you are raising - they simply are not real issues (as evidenced by the fact their experts are clearly not concerned and not requesting Wizards fundamentally rework species as a concept). Wizards is not going to risk a 4e-style massive change to a fundamental game system because some one made up a problem online.
If you want to homebrew a different system, feel free to do that. If you want to play a different game, you can do that also. But, please, do not make Wizards’ job harder by continuing to pretend a non-issue is a problem, and thus give bigots ammunition to support their quest to convert more sensible people to their cause.
If you compare all the different canines in the world you will, as I previously pointed out, find some breeds that are better equipped for certain environments, some that are better scent trackers, etc.
My sibling in Mystara, how do you think they keep the dog breeds like that. Hint: it's not by allowing them to live full happy lives and have puppies with whoever they want. If you put a bunch of different breeds of dogs together on an island and leave them alone for, say, 236 years, you are not going to see greyhounds, mastiffs, and schnauzers when you come back. You're going to see dingoes.
"Oh, but the gods!" Man, I don't care about the gods. These kinds of Watsonian arguments are pointless. It doesn't matter what the magic does. The magic isn't real; it does whatever we say it does. Why is it so important to you that, when the magic could do absolutely anything, what the magic does is replicate the world view of bigots? That is the connection to real life: real life players are sitting down to play in this game world which relies on outdated race science to define its people. And that sucks.
I am happy for you that you do not see anything hurtful in the way D&D presents its fantasy races, but I have at least one friend who will never play D&D "as long as the Goblins have noses like that", so I guess we're just not gonna agree on this.
If you compare all the different canines in the world you will, as I previously pointed out, find some breeds that are better equipped for certain environments, some that are better scent trackers, etc.
My sibling in Mystara, how do you think they keep the dog breeds like that. Hint: it's not by allowing them to live full happy lives and have puppies with whoever they want. If you put a bunch of different breeds of dogs together on an island and leave them alone for, say, 236 years, you are not going to see greyhounds, mastiffs, and schnauzers when you come back. You're going to see dingoes.
"Oh, but the gods!" Man, I don't care about the gods. These kinds of Watsonian arguments are pointless. It doesn't matter what the magic does. The magic isn't real; it does whatever we say it does. Why is it so important to you that, when the magic could do absolutely anything, what the magic does is replicate the world view of racists? That is the connection to real life: real life players are sitting down to play in this game world in which, per the written rules, race realists are objectively correct. And that sucks.
I am happy for you that you do not see anything hurtful in the way D&D presents its fantasy races, but I have at least one friend who will never play D&D "as long as the Goblins have noses like that", so I guess we're just not gonna agree on this.
Okay, setting aside the fact that dogs were clearly “kept” in multiple different forms by their environment well before humanity had the wherewithal to breed distinct lines, if I say “big cats” or “bears” instead of “dogs” my point remains; polar bears and lions aren’t gonna climb trees like black bears or jaguars, a tiger is unlikely to beat a cheetah at a 100 yd dash, etc. And again, that’s within the confines of reality, which is not inherently applicable to spec fic. These kind of fictional races you’re so worried are supposed to say something about humans represent at least one if not several orders of magnitude more diversity of physiology and origins. Drawing parallels between that and the comparably minor variants all covered under Homo sapiens is a fallaciously flawed analogy. D&D humanoids would not all be classified as one species; heck there’s enough variance that you probably couldn’t even group them under one family if you were scientifically classifying them. Ergo, again, their having some variance in capabilities that is almost always associated either with physiology or magic is more true to reality than the idea that somehow there is no unique or even less than universal trait among a pool of several dozen clearly disparate forms of life.
My experience with games that don't assign any mechanical traits to species is that people will immediately turn around and try to build towards whatever they think the theme of that species is, so you still wind up with a lot of fairly stereotypical PCs, it's just by choice rather than the game system forcing them.
Not really here to comment, as I have many thoughts on this subject, but don't want to argue them.
But I want to address a few things. My Opening Arguments are not my opinions but the opinions I'm hearing as a DM. Some I agree with others I don't. "Sciency Words" being one of them. Yes I know DNA from two separate Species can mix, recent news on a Butterfly in South America is a great example. But for the Lay person their understanding of Science ends in High School, and the vast majority of people playing this game have a High School Education in the US Public School System. Which is amongst the worst in the "Western" world. So pointing out "Well Acktually" is being pedantic, and you know it.
On the honest real issue, Race/Species or other Birth Traits should be optional background and a listed out set of choices unrelated to the Race you choose. Which is why I bring up the quote above. Because it is objectively false.
Using MMO's as an example, specifically Final Fantasy 14, where the Race can be changed freely, and there is no real bonus to any race (Start stat is like a +2 in different spots, by level 90 when you have 10k+ in a stat that +2 means nothing.) Every Player Character can play as any Job (Class) in the game, and you can have all Jobs on one Character.
You have for Race Options:
Hyur: Humans (Small and Thick)
Elezen: Tall Elves (Dark and Sunny)
Miqo'te : Cat Boys and Cat Girls (Night and Day)
Lalafell: Gnomes/Dwarves (Greedy, and More Greedy)
Roegadyn: Orcs (Pirate and Volcano)
Viera: Bunny Girls and Bunny Boys
Hrothgar: Lion People
Look at this list, going on the logic that Racial assumptions means Roegadyn should be Tanks, and Lalafells should be casters. This is even something you see in the Early game. But the player base kind of bucks the sterotypes, Lala Warrior Tanks are very popular, and White Mage Roegadyns are in almost every group. The reality is, people will just play what they want, and ignore the Sterotypes. Even in D&D I see this all the FN time. I've had players go Orc Wizard, Elf Barbarian, and other combos that seem counter to stereotypes. And the thing is, we should embrace this mind set, not double down on the idea race means you have to be some sterotype. That is the hold over of the Racism of Gygax, and that is what needs to be changed.
But I want to address a few things. My Opening Arguments are not my opinions but the opinions I'm hearing as a DM. Some I agree with others I don't. "Sciency Words" being one of them. Yes I know DNA from two separate Species can mix, recent news on a Butterfly in South America is a great example. But for the Lay person their understanding of Science ends in High School, and the vast majority of people playing this game have a High School Education in the US Public School System. Which is amongst the worst in the "Western" world. So pointing out "Well Acktually" is being pedantic, and you know it.
“I think people are ignorant, therefore I want Wizards to cater to the ignorant” is not as compelling an argument as you seem to think it is.
Part of the fundamental appeal of D&D is that you can pick it up and play a game and story with everyone. There are some universal elements, such as species everyone knows and loves. There are not just a mess of mutated creatures with traits chosen for optimization - which is the endgame your “solution” creates. The current system works fine - it gives players dozens of options to customize what they want to be (bot to mention an intensive homebrew system to go further than that) and a solid baseline upon which everyone can build their D&D experiences
Wizards is tackling the real racism head-on by removing defined ASI and defined moralities. Those are the actual elements of racism Gary Gygax intentionally injected into the game; it makes sense to get rid of them. They do not need to rock the boat and attack the issues you are raising - they simply are not real issues (as evidenced by the fact their experts are clearly not concerned and not requesting Wizards fundamentally rework species as a concept). Wizards is not going to risk a 4e-style massive change to a fundamental game system because some one made up a problem online.
If you want to homebrew a different system, feel free to do that. If you want to play a different game, you can do that also. But, please, do not make Wizards’ job harder by continuing to pretend a non-issue is a problem, and thus give bigots ammunition to support their quest to convert more sensible people to their cause.
Oh good lord. You know what gives bigots ammunition? Constantly hand-wringing over what they'll think if you take a principled stand on something. "Sensible people" do not suddenly adopt racist ideas because of changes to media properties. That's a thing bigots tell you so that they can exercise control over media properties.
I recommend you think hard about what comes of telling people who are passionate about inclusion to play a different game, while at the same time taking pains to ensure you don't upset the bigots. One day you might wake up and realize you're in a nazi bar, so to speak.
But I want to address a few things. My Opening Arguments are not my opinions but the opinions I'm hearing as a DM. Some I agree with others I don't. "Sciency Words" being one of them. Yes I know DNA from two separate Species can mix, recent news on a Butterfly in South America is a great example. But for the Lay person their understanding of Science ends in High School, and the vast majority of people playing this game have a High School Education in the US Public School System. Which is amongst the worst in the "Western" world. So pointing out "Well Acktually" is being pedantic, and you know it.
“I think people are ignorant, therefore I want Wizards to cater to the ignorant” is not as compelling an argument as you seem to think it is.
Stop putting words in other peoples mouths. No where did I say anyone was ignorant, nor do I want Wizards to cater to the ignorant. I want Wizards to sit back look at what was actually a racist design choice, make adjustments to that, and go with terminology that wont cause issues in the future. Because as soon as a book is released with the Word Species, it will become the new battle ground in media. If they made Race an Ancestry choice, just a part of your background, and all the features and skills associated with these backgrounds choices things players could freely choose, it would be ignored, much like it was in Pathfinder 2.
Part of the fundamental appeal of D&D is that you can pick it up and play a game and story with everyone. There are some universal elements, such as species everyone knows and loves. There are not just a mess of mutated creatures with traits chosen for optimization - which is the endgame your “solution” creates. The current system works fine - it gives players dozens of options to customize what they want to be (bot to mention an intensive homebrew system to go further than that) and a solid baseline upon which everyone can build their D&D experiences
Wizards is tackling the real racism head-on by removing defined ASI and defined moralities. Those are the actual elements of racism Gary Gygax intentionally injected into the game; it makes sense to get rid of them. They do not need to rock the boat and attack the issues you are raising - they simply are not real issues (as evidenced by the fact their experts are clearly not concerned and not requesting Wizards fundamentally rework species as a concept). Wizards is not going to risk a 4e-style massive change to a fundamental game system because some one made up a problem online.
If you want to homebrew a different system, feel free to do that. If you want to play a different game, you can do that also. But, please, do not make Wizards’ job harder by continuing to pretend a non-issue is a problem, and thus give bigots ammunition to support their quest to convert more sensible people to their cause.
Oh good lord. You know what gives bigots ammunition? Constantly hand-wringing over what they'll think if you take a principled stand on something. "Sensible people" do not suddenly adopt racist ideas because of changes to media properties. That's a thing bigots tell you so that they can exercise control over media properties.
I recommend you think hard about what comes of telling people who are passionate about inclusion to play a different game, while at the same time taking pains to ensure you don't upset the bigots. One day you might wake up and realize you're in a nazi bar, so to speak.
And I think we’ve now officially hit Godwin’s Law territory in this discussion.
This is the one and only reminder that will be given; keep things civil, respectful, and within the bounds of the sites rules. Those who fail to adhere to this very low bar of expected behaviour may find themselves bereft of the freedom to post in the forums while they take a time out to think about how best to conduct themselves.
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Bonus response! You bring up a good point here: I agree that WotC is trying to remove racist ideas from D&D, and though I don't think they're prepared to go far enough, we also can't ignore the effect that racist ideas held by players and DMs have on the game as it is actually played.
WotC removed much of the worst lore from its race descriptions in Monsters of the Multiverse, but the problem is that they replaced that lore with nothing. Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes might be out of print, but it has pages and pages of lore about Goblinoid and Orc societies, where MotM has, what, a couple of paragraphs? Established stories are not so easily deleted from the culture, particularly if there is no compelling replacement story. As such, I think WotC's new laissez faire approach to lore is going to make the problem worse, rather than better.
This leaves it to us as players (and DMs, who are also players) to push back against these ideas where we find them, at our tables and elsewhere. I appreciate you for engaging in this conversation in good faith; if things are going to get better, this is how it will have to start.
Hyperbolic posts like this are almost as nonproductive as those actively trying to preserve the problematic aspects of the game.
The real problems are things like “this race can never be as smart as another” or “this race is always evil.” Other, common sense mechanical elements are obviously sensible. A rabbit-folk should be better at jumping than a human; a sea elf should be able to swim better. Subterranean or nocturnal creatures should be better at seeing in the dark.
That is what Wizards is doing - rather than focus on penalties (“always worse at X” “always such and such morality”), they are focusing on giving everyone additive bonuses unique to their identity. That is the key difference between the Gygax system (which should be removed) and what Wizards is doing - these are things that add to the creatures, and not take away. Crossing the line to “let us also remove the additives also” is when you start moving away from the ultimate goal of positive representations of different species, and end up with a situation where your choice of species is little more than a coat of meaningless paint.
Do those traits need to be nature over nurture though? (Especially in a magical fantasy world...)
More of them being related to physiology is a better look, but you still get stuff like Dwarves having prof with smithing or brewing tools or a race having a bonus skill prof based on theming like Tabaxi getting Perception and Stealth or Lizardfolk being able to choose from a small pool of options. They haven’t dropped it completely, just dialed back a little.
My experience with games that don't assign any mechanical traits to species is that people will immediately turn around and try to build towards whatever they think the theme of that species is, so you still wind up with a lot of fairly stereotypical PCs, it's just by choice rather than the game system forcing them.
Sometimes, we do need the equivalent of "born with X." Tortle / warforged natural armor, winged species ability to fly, having a vampire's biological needs.
Some of these can very well be represented in class abilitiles (dragon sorcerer granting scale-based AC, for instance). But it does very much shift the narrative to "build your species via class choices" and makes it so that class is both nature and nurture. I'm actually not a huge fan of this approach, to be honest, simply because then it suggests that there's only one way to play a dragon-being. Or one way to be a fairy. Which is just as race-essentialism problematic as going back to 1e with Elf or Dwarf as your PC's class.
Othertimes, I wouldn't mind everything being just... feats. Level 0 feats, level 4+ feats, epic feats. Letting you build individual species via feats is actually my preferred option, because you can have as much or as little matter to your character as you need. They can be cultural or biological as necessary, because its all optional.
Which, honestly, is probably the main question of all this. Like, elves, humans, dwarves, dragons, fiends and angels... all have been having kids for how long now? The D&D speicies are probably so intermixed by now that its impossible to not find a human without a touch of elf and dragon inside their genome.
I'm kinda babbling and forgot what I was saying.
I am not being hyperbolic. I believe the correct path is to remove all fixed racial features from the game, including bonuses. Any of those features which are desirable can be moved to background and freely assigned to any species as feats. I acknowledge this will likely require a more in-depth feat system to maintain game balance.
It is not only pernicious to say that a given race is worse than others; it is equally pernicious to say that a given race is better than others. In real life, racialized oppression has often been justified based on alleged benefits the oppressed people supposedly had. Removing racial penalties is good, but racial bonuses are not an ideologically distinct phenomenon from penalties. They are the same thing. Both need to go.
"Positive representations of different species" is not a value-neutral goal, and biological "realism" is not a value-neutral method to achieve it. An alternative is that a rabbit person is not necessarily better at jumping than average, a nocturnal person is not necessarily better at seeing in the dark than average, and a dragon person is not necessarily more durable than average. We can easily imagine a world where some Harengon are good swimmers, some sea elves are good jumpers, some dwarves can breathe fire and some humans can fly, because it's all fantasy and it's absurd to base our ideas of what's reasonable on 19th century race science. If you feel that makes your choice of species meaningless, I'm sorry you think RP is meaningless.
Other systems and products are already rethinking "race" from the ground up. I suggest you try one (ICON is free) and see what you think before determining that it can't be done a better way.
And again we’re hitting the false equivalence of race/species dynamics in spec fic with race as it works in the irl paradigm. The races in D&D are not all the same genus and species with relatively minor genetic variations influencing things like pigmentation or skull structure. These are creatures with wholly separate origin points and many radically different physiologies. If you compare all the different canines in the world you will, as I previously pointed out, find some breeds that are better equipped for certain environments, some that are better scent trackers, etc. And that has absolutely no bearing in comparing groups of humans to one another because those are objectively two completely different paradigms. All this before we even bring in one of the cornerstones of spec fic, magic and deities. When magic is incorporated and a factor in racial/species traits, then I fail to see how an attempt to draw correlation between the material and reality can represent anything but such a specious position that anyone with half a brain will reject it out of hand unless they’re simply looking for an excuse to justify a position they already intend to hold, at which point the absence of material they can twist from any particular source is rather unlikely to alter their attitude.
TLDR: The only way someone can look at race traits as they are currently being applied in 5e/UA and consider them applicable IRL is if they are already approaching the topic with that intent. Everyone else can recognize that the differences between orcs and elves in a game has no corollary to differences between humans in real life.
This is where your entire position enters the realm of hyperbole - and a clear misunderstanding of both the game’s goals and basic game design. It also is a clear misreading of what I said - you’ll find at no point did I say Wizards was trying to say anyone was “better” than anyone else.
Under the new design, there is no “better” species or “worse” species; just different species, each exhibiting their own traits. Gone are the days when star blocks made one group objectively better or objectively worse - everyone now gets different traits suited for different situations. No one is really better or worse - they are just all different peoples who evolved slightly differently.
In a well designed game, choices have meaning—both in terms of the flavor and the mechanics. If you want to play a sea folk species, you should not have to choose a sea-based species… then jump through other hoops just to get the basic traits your chosen creature would have evolved to have. Once you start breaking down those lines and moving pretty basic elements elsewhere, you start losing sight of some pretty basic aspects of how RPGs function.
And, perhaps worse - arguments like this, which go far afield of what both Wizards and players want, actively help the bigots get supporters to their cause. Bigotry loves a slippery slope argument - “they took away this [racist thing] now, but you should join our cause or they will go further and take away [non racist thing that has no real chance of going away].” Wizards and their team of actual racial experts seem pretty happy with their choice to have a diverse mix of species - so they are not providing fodder to support the bigoted trolls’ slippery slope arguments. But posts like yours? Posts which suggest Wizards should go further than their actual experts think is necessary? Some random, non-expert on the internet might not be a good source; but the bigots do not care about the quality of their sources. They just want to point to someone’s ramblings to justify “see! That is part of the conversation!”
I think we can have "born with X" and still not have fixed racial features because of all that free love stuff you bring up. If everyone can have kids with everyone, why should we say that a human can't be born with a shell, wings, or eyes that see in the dark? Plenty of games assign that kind of thing to a flexible "traits" system; you get points to spend at character creation, and you buy things like thick skin, keen vision, etc. D&D could get there pretty easily by just restructuring the features it currently assigns to race as selectable traits instead. Plus, you know... We're talking about magic here. It's not outrageous for a human to develop wings or gills or something in adulthood if they come in contact with the right kind of glowing goo.
I've seen that happen, sure. It's maybe not ideal, but it's definitely better than the game forcing the issue, right? Addressing stereotypes at a table level is preferable in my opinion to having them normalized at a book level.
You're arguing in favor of race essentialism, I hope you know. Don't be surprised when people reject that way of thinking.
Its fantasy. The writers get to choose how to represent fae-like beings, or dragon -adjacent beings, or whatever. There are plenty of speculative fictions where becoming like a dragon is very much a practice of absorbing the appropriate energy / alchemical reagents and transforming your body under controlled situations.
Including real world racist tropes in any body of fiction is a choice made by the writers. Any in character excuses are just that - excuses for a decision the writer(s) wanted to make. Take... Dofus / Wakfu, a game-turned-cartoon by a French company. With only three or so exceptions (Dragony people from another world, demons from a parallel dimension, blue skinned folk), the vast majority of folk are humans transformed from worship of a god of choice.
Want to be a catboy? Worship the cat god of luck. An elf? There's a god for that. Two or three, I'd say, though there's overlap with fairy- and dryad-like humans.
Its even worse in D&D, because all the PC options can intermix. There shouldn't be a single human or elf in all the Forgotten Realms that doesn't have at least one or the other in their family tree. And that's before we start adding in dwarves, halflings, tieflings and more.
The idea of distinct, pure-blooded species is nothing more than a fiction within a fiction at this point in time.
Your first solution about better recognizing hybrid species is already part of the rules update, so they are already taking care of that.
Your second suggestion is not a particularly good one - it might work in other, newer games, but it is not necessary and would almost certainly fail in D&D.
Part of the fundamental appeal of D&D is that you can pick it up and play a game and story with everyone. There are some universal elements, such as species everyone knows and loves. There are not just a mess of mutated creatures with traits chosen for optimization - which is the endgame your “solution” creates. The current system works fine - it gives players dozens of options to customize what they want to be (bot to mention an intensive homebrew system to go further than that) and a solid baseline upon which everyone can build their D&D experiences
Wizards is tackling the real racism head-on by removing defined ASI and defined moralities. Those are the actual elements of racism Gary Gygax intentionally injected into the game; it makes sense to get rid of them. They do not need to rock the boat and attack the issues you are raising - they simply are not real issues (as evidenced by the fact their experts are clearly not concerned and not requesting Wizards fundamentally rework species as a concept). Wizards is not going to risk a 4e-style massive change to a fundamental game system because some one made up a problem online.
If you want to homebrew a different system, feel free to do that. If you want to play a different game, you can do that also. But, please, do not make Wizards’ job harder by continuing to pretend a non-issue is a problem, and thus give bigots ammunition to support their quest to convert more sensible people to their cause.
My sibling in Mystara, how do you think they keep the dog breeds like that. Hint: it's not by allowing them to live full happy lives and have puppies with whoever they want. If you put a bunch of different breeds of dogs together on an island and leave them alone for, say, 236 years, you are not going to see greyhounds, mastiffs, and schnauzers when you come back. You're going to see dingoes.
"Oh, but the gods!" Man, I don't care about the gods. These kinds of Watsonian arguments are pointless. It doesn't matter what the magic does. The magic isn't real; it does whatever we say it does. Why is it so important to you that, when the magic could do absolutely anything, what the magic does is replicate the world view of bigots? That is the connection to real life: real life players are sitting down to play in this game world which relies on outdated race science to define its people. And that sucks.
I am happy for you that you do not see anything hurtful in the way D&D presents its fantasy races, but I have at least one friend who will never play D&D "as long as the Goblins have noses like that", so I guess we're just not gonna agree on this.
Okay, setting aside the fact that dogs were clearly “kept” in multiple different forms by their environment well before humanity had the wherewithal to breed distinct lines, if I say “big cats” or “bears” instead of “dogs” my point remains; polar bears and lions aren’t gonna climb trees like black bears or jaguars, a tiger is unlikely to beat a cheetah at a 100 yd dash, etc. And again, that’s within the confines of reality, which is not inherently applicable to spec fic. These kind of fictional races you’re so worried are supposed to say something about humans represent at least one if not several orders of magnitude more diversity of physiology and origins. Drawing parallels between that and the comparably minor variants all covered under Homo sapiens is a fallaciously flawed analogy. D&D humanoids would not all be classified as one species; heck there’s enough variance that you probably couldn’t even group them under one family if you were scientifically classifying them. Ergo, again, their having some variance in capabilities that is almost always associated either with physiology or magic is more true to reality than the idea that somehow there is no unique or even less than universal trait among a pool of several dozen clearly disparate forms of life.
Not really here to comment, as I have many thoughts on this subject, but don't want to argue them.
But I want to address a few things. My Opening Arguments are not my opinions but the opinions I'm hearing as a DM. Some I agree with others I don't. "Sciency Words" being one of them. Yes I know DNA from two separate Species can mix, recent news on a Butterfly in South America is a great example. But for the Lay person their understanding of Science ends in High School, and the vast majority of people playing this game have a High School Education in the US Public School System. Which is amongst the worst in the "Western" world. So pointing out "Well Acktually" is being pedantic, and you know it.
On the honest real issue, Race/Species or other Birth Traits should be optional background and a listed out set of choices unrelated to the Race you choose. Which is why I bring up the quote above. Because it is objectively false.
Using MMO's as an example, specifically Final Fantasy 14, where the Race can be changed freely, and there is no real bonus to any race (Start stat is like a +2 in different spots, by level 90 when you have 10k+ in a stat that +2 means nothing.) Every Player Character can play as any Job (Class) in the game, and you can have all Jobs on one Character.
You have for Race Options:
Hyur: Humans (Small and Thick)
Elezen: Tall Elves (Dark and Sunny)
Miqo'te : Cat Boys and Cat Girls (Night and Day)
Lalafell: Gnomes/Dwarves (Greedy, and More Greedy)
Roegadyn: Orcs (Pirate and Volcano)
Viera: Bunny Girls and Bunny Boys
Hrothgar: Lion People
Look at this list, going on the logic that Racial assumptions means Roegadyn should be Tanks, and Lalafells should be casters. This is even something you see in the Early game. But the player base kind of bucks the sterotypes, Lala Warrior Tanks are very popular, and White Mage Roegadyns are in almost every group. The reality is, people will just play what they want, and ignore the Sterotypes. Even in D&D I see this all the FN time. I've had players go Orc Wizard, Elf Barbarian, and other combos that seem counter to stereotypes. And the thing is, we should embrace this mind set, not double down on the idea race means you have to be some sterotype. That is the hold over of the Racism of Gygax, and that is what needs to be changed.
“I think people are ignorant, therefore I want Wizards to cater to the ignorant” is not as compelling an argument as you seem to think it is.
Oh good lord. You know what gives bigots ammunition? Constantly hand-wringing over what they'll think if you take a principled stand on something. "Sensible people" do not suddenly adopt racist ideas because of changes to media properties. That's a thing bigots tell you so that they can exercise control over media properties.
I recommend you think hard about what comes of telling people who are passionate about inclusion to play a different game, while at the same time taking pains to ensure you don't upset the bigots. One day you might wake up and realize you're in a nazi bar, so to speak.
Stop putting words in other peoples mouths. No where did I say anyone was ignorant, nor do I want Wizards to cater to the ignorant. I want Wizards to sit back look at what was actually a racist design choice, make adjustments to that, and go with terminology that wont cause issues in the future. Because as soon as a book is released with the Word Species, it will become the new battle ground in media. If they made Race an Ancestry choice, just a part of your background, and all the features and skills associated with these backgrounds choices things players could freely choose, it would be ignored, much like it was in Pathfinder 2.
And I think we’ve now officially hit Godwin’s Law territory in this discussion.
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