D&D (2024) How did I miss this about the Half races/ancestries

AnotherGuy said:

I would say it depends on the setting. Something sadly the author in his "extensive" audit was not able to comprehend given his laser focus.

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I don't really think it depends on the setting. This sort of exoticism is the same sort of thing that fuels orientalism, trying to make things seem exotic and thus "not like us". That it is used with some races and not others is just kind of weird, but really more of a holdover from previous years and writing styles.

Bedrockgames said:

Again, I would go back to my point about the things being criticized are often fundamental to the D&D, even the RPG experience. Here we are taking away what I would call non-essential but still important elements (half orcs and half elves). The game functions without those so you don't have to have them, but I think they add a lot. However many of the critiques have been about colonialism and how killing things and taking their stuff, even just the act of exploring a dungeon or wilderness, echo colonialist tropes. Increasingly I think you also see an imposition of real world morality (around say violence) into the settings too, and it just seems the logical conclusion of this type of hyper criticism leads to taking important and essential elements away from the game, maybe even making the game itself untenable.

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"Exoticism" is not fundamental to D&D any more than Orientalism (which is, itself, a form of exoticizing and othering different cultures). It's just cheap writing and often gets in the way of good setting stuff. The Mwangi Expanse book that came out a few years ago had this sidebar:



That last line I think really nails it: exoticizing is more about making a person an "oddity" rather than an individual, and why people might not get why certain depictions of Asian cultures rankle so many Asians themselves: that their cultures are often made to look more like theme park versions of a culture and place than actual places that live and breath on their own.

Micah Sweet said:

Well, dragonborn are markedly different from every other PC species that has ever appeared in a D&D core book (all of which are on a mammalian base physically), so it's hard to look at a dragonborn and not see them as  very different.

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I mean, Elves have ancestry that is literally outside of our own plane. This feels like an incredibly artificial and arbitrary distinction.

Micah Sweet said:

Adding a lot more of them into a setting in an attempt to "normalize" them would likely change the feel of said setting quite a bit and may not be desired.

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You don't necessarily need to add "more" to not "exoticize" them. I think you're missing the usage of the term, but also this just feels like it's halfway to the Thermian Argument.

Micah Sweet said:

This is why I've been asking what people who have a problem with these things want D&D to be.

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I mean, I think they want D&D to be adaptable and not tied down to bad, old language simply because that's what came before. After that, it seems pretty open as to what D&D can be.

Justice and Rule said:

I don't really think it depends on the setting. This sort of exoticism is the same sort of thing that fuels orientalism, trying to make things seem exotic and thus "not like us". That it is used with some races and not others is just kind of weird, but really more of a holdover from previous years and writing styles.



"Exoticism" is not fundamental to D&D any more than Orientalism (which is, itself, a form of exoticizing and othering different cultures). It's just cheap writing and often gets in the way of good setting stuff. The Mwangi Expanse book that came out a few years ago had this sidebar:

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That last line I think really nails it: exoticizing is more about making a person an "oddity" rather than an individual, and why people might not get why certain depictions of Asian cultures rankle so many Asians themselves: that their cultures are often made to look more like theme park versions of a culture and place than actual places that live and breath on their own.



I mean, Elves have ancestry that is literally outside of our own plane. This feels like an incredibly artificial and arbitrary distinction.



You don't necessarily need to add "more" to not "exoticize" them. I think you're missing the usage of the term, but also this just feels like it's halfway to the Thermian Argument.



I mean, I think they want D&D to be adaptable and not tied down to bad, old language simply because that's what came before. After that, it seems pretty open as to what D&D can be.

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But what does that look like? All the talk is about what some people don't want, but very few can answer my question of what they want D&D to be like.

And dragon-people are always going to be more of a variance than anything that could be a human with make-up and maybe a couple of prosthetics. They just are. You can't ignore that without snapping some reality suspenders.

Micah Sweet said:

But what does that look like? All the talk is about what some people don't want, but very few can answer my question of what they want D&D to be like.

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It looks like not using old language but making new stuff. That new stuff could be just about anything, but it's removed from the problematic stuff of the past.

You are just very, very hung up on people describing what they want when they are probably okay with an expansive number of things, thus making it hard to pin down exactly what they might want. In this case, it's just a lot easier to think of what you don't want because it's easier to pin down and describe.

Justice and Rule said:

It looks like not using old language but making new stuff. That new stuff could be just about anything, but it's removed from the problematic stuff of the past.

You are just very, very hung up on people describing what they want when they are probably okay with an expansive number of things, thus making it hard to pin down exactly what they might want. In this case, it's just a lot easier to think of what you don't want because it's easier to pin down and describe.

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Oh, I know complaining is easier, believe me. But you can't remove the stuff people are complaining about without replacing it with something. What does  that language look like?

Micah Sweet said:

Oh, I know complaining is easier, believe me. But you can't remove the stuff people are complaining about without replacing it with something. What does  that language look like?

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What Pathfinder is currently doing, I suppose? The Mwangi Expanse and Impossible Lands were pretty well-lauded, have tons of style and flavor without having to resort to what you talk about.

Micah Sweet said:

Oh, I know complaining is easier, believe me. But you can't remove the stuff people are complaining about without replacing it with something. What does  that language look like?

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I already explicitly answered this.

Are you looking for some sort of universal consensus?

Incenjucar said:

I already explicitly answered this.

Are you looking for some sort of universal consensus?

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You're the "very few" I was referencing.

Justice and Rule said:

It's not really the opposite, since they only included one quote like that while the other is from an impartial narrator. Yours are just quotes from a person, even if they want to be ascribed more broadly. It's not quite the same, nor do the sentiments come close to the antipathy shown towards Orcs as a race.

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None of my quotes come from a person, unless you mean the game designer that wrote it. They are the descriptions about how the race views other races. Are they put in quotes? Yes. That's because that's the general view of the race and they are writing it out as a quote. It's not simply one person's view. The section opens up with a general statement and then those quotes back that general statement up.

Justice and Rule said:

Well, that's why I said that it would be a discussion on Tolkien's dwarves, not D&D dwarves (though they obviously took inspiration from both myth and JRR himself).

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It was a D&D dwarf quote I mentioned, though, not Tolkien and not Norse. The D&D dwarf is described as greedy and that language is just as attributable to Jews as the Orc language is to other real world peoples. I'm not sure there is a negative statement that you can make about a fantasy race that isn't easily connectable to some real world race or culture.

Bedrockgames said:

I think this is a lot of the problem. Fantasy races and fantasy cultures borrow from real world analogs and from cartoonish depictions in media all the time. I think while something like this could be used to make a genuinely racist setting with an actual racist message, most of the time, it is just taking what exists in the world, blending it and hopefully having something new and interesting. Sometimes it is handled in a disrespectful way, and I think designers should aim for treating things with respect. But the problem is the bar is so low now virtually any treatment that isn't exactly 100% what a group of people online say it should be, can get castigated. And I think that is a problem on a number of fronts. Not just for creative expression (which I think is extremely stifled when designers feel like they are walking on eggshells) but also for the actual exchange and learning about other cultures. What I have seen is more and more designs just say, well I am not even going to try doing anything outside my own culture and start sticking with their own culture (whatever that happens to be) and that to me seems like a recipe for people just locking themselves away from folks of other backgrounds. That doesn't mean offensive things don't happen and can't be called out, but it seems to me that we are really going over this stuff with fine toothed combs and we are all just a little more on edge with one another than is healthy for us to be.

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Exactly. I fully believe that the original Ravenloft Vistani were made as caricatures of the Romani people and supported the change that was made to them. There were just too many things that were too close to the Romani for it to be coincidence. Orcs and dwarves, though? No. The language is coincidental and because of that I'm not offended by the dwarven language that bears similarity to that used to describe Jews.

Justice and Rule said:

"Exoticism" is not fundamental to D&D any more than Orientalism (which is, itself, a form of exoticizing and othering different cultures). It's just cheap writing and often gets in the way of good setting stuff. The Mwangi Expanse book that came out a few years ago had this sidebar:

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I never said anything about exoticism. Just about borrowing elements from real world culture for flavor. The issue of exoticism and orientalist is I think a little complicated and nuanced gif this topic. I will say it is very easy to reduce ‘innacurate’ of ‘loosely based on’ to ‘exoticized’. But I don’t think they are the same thing. I would say we are very focused on authentic portrayals now, which makes sense if you are talking about a real world or historical setting. But there are no authentic orcs or authentic Red Wizards of Thay. These are fantasy cultural that draw on a range of real world influences