Okay, I want to start by saying that I do appreciate that WotC is trying really hard to treat the playable races as people. However, they haven’t been sticking the landing well. For example, i do understand why they changed all instances of the word Race with Species, but making all the playable races canonically separate species just trades one yikes for a new yikes. As a player, sometimes I want to settle down with an Orc and make a bunch of Half-Orc Babies, but seeing the word “species” gives me pause. I know in real life cross-breeding different species of animals rarely goes well and the children are as a rule sterile, so can i ethically bring a baby into the world that I know is going to be sterile and is probably doing to have serious health problems?
Anyway, most people aren’t mad about that anymore, and decent people aren’t generally mad about the Mexican orcs or whatever. What has been a problem is that they are trying to get rid of the concept of Monsterous Races, which would make the average D&D setting a generally more pleasant place to live in. Here’s the game-design issue with this: D&D is fundamentally about combat, and 5.5’s design leans into the more crunchy aspect of that. A game about combat needs a world full of things for the players to mow down but also not feel bad about killing, and sometimes you need a bunch of Violent Dungeon Fodder that can think and plan and make tactical decisions and potentially be negotiated with. Goblins and orcs and the like fill this role of being sentient pincushions. In addition, rp-wise players often like being special, and an easy way to do this is being a Good Drow or a Forgiving Kobold or a Pacifist Orc.
The specific way they are going about this is retconning the lore to make the societies of the Monsterous Races less Evil or outright just normal human-ish societies. Personally, as a DM I do not like this. I like to make my orcs and goblins distinct from mainstream D&D by doing pretty much exactly this, because it’s a low-effort way to make my setting look Nuanced or Morally Grey. The point is more to do something that pops out of the wider dnd culture more than to actually say anything about, say, how indigenous people tend to be treated as speed-bumps to “progress” throughout history, because I dont usually run games where colonialism happens anywhere near the players. So not only does this make WotC’s writers look incredibly lazy (and more importantly, spineless) to me, but now the laziest way to make a DnD setting pop is to have goblins and orcs be non-persons that are there to be treated as Rome treated the Gauls or sent to Oklahoma.
And what’s sad is that if they had just put in any amount of effort into the worldbuilding, we could have the nice pleasant world full of non-evil cannon fodder without this problem. Unfortunately, in order to do that the setting has to actually make a statement about something. Here, I’ll do some right here:
Let’s start with the obvious. Goblins specifically parallel Native Americans in the way that from the perspective of “civilized” races they seem to just exist out there in the land we want. Let’s lean into that. Maybe the reason Maglubiyet is their only God isn’t that he killed all the others but that when left alone Goblin religion is more like hero-worship. Each tribe has their own little pantheon on local saints and heroes, and Maglubiyet is distinct in that he is recognized globally.
Drow are pretty clearly fascist. I am sure they don’t see themselves as evil, though. However, most of their lore doesn’t go much into how their society functions day-to-day. Fleshing them out would allow them to point out how just existing in a fascist country does in fact mean that you almost certainly have blood on your hands. We could see drow that try to oppose their regime by running a literal underground railroad or by just passively not complying with obviously evil laws, and we could see drow that are completely oblivious to how a seemingly harmless beaurocratic rule can result in people being enslaved or killed.
Orcs in fiction stem from a long line of faceless evil raiders inspired by the Mongols invasion of Europe. People alive at that time had wild ideas about why the Mongols were here and where they came from, and the general consensus was that they came from some lifeless wasteland like Mordor where crops couldn’t grow, so they had to pillage and plunder to get basic food and water. This is obviously not true, but it makes sense. All they had to do is make the orcs frigging steppe people! Actual Caucausians! Just copy and blend Mongolian and Georgian culture and traditions, give them cloth with colorful beading to wear instead of scraps of untanned leather, and let them be people in their homeland while the rest of the world cowers in fear of these incomprehensible alien raiders who like horsies and dressing up nice.
See, it’s not hard! But saying something, anything at all, might offend some customers and make their profits go down. So they go with the safe, bland option of “everyone is basically a normal human like you, the player, so you can plop yourself into any race and not have too much cultural dissonace.”
Anyway. That was a wall of text. I’m going to log off now.
A game about combat needs a world full of things for the players to mow down but also not feel bad about killing, and sometimes you need a bunch of Violent Dungeon Fodder that can think and plan and make tactical decisions and potentially be negotiated with.
I’m a bit confused by this. Why not have them be any other species, or combination of them? If they’re capable of being negotiated with shouldn’t the players feel as bad about killing them as anyone else? I feel like “self-defense” can do a lot of heavy lifting in dungeon crawls, I’ve never really noticed my players feeling bad about killing bandit dwarves or whatnot.
Oh, that’s actually a pretty interesting question! Here’s the thing: your players probably already think killing people is bad! The thing is, the word “people” is carrying a lot of weight there. For example, in shmup videogames (where the point is the excessive violence) usually the target of your killing spree is some caricature of a group the devs don’t count as people, such as the KKK or WW2-era Nazis. This is also why modern shmups take place in the middle east and have you gunning down Al-Qaeda or ISIS or some other dehumanized boogeyman. It’s not generally a distinction made consciously, and everyone sets the line differently. Lots of people I’ve met on Hexbear or Lemmygrad don’t think cops and alt-right nazis are people, which I disagree with. And most people I know IRL definitely believe their pets count as people, which I understand is controversial.
My point here is to point out that we all at some point decided what counts as a person, and it’s a touchy opinion that rarely gets examined. A less touchy equivalent is how many people have very different opinions on what counts as cheating, but are convinced that their opinion is objectively and inarguably correct. I think it’s worth examining what is a person to you and why you decided that.
However, as a gamemaster you have to allow your players to make two choices:
Are the monsters we are fighting people or not?
Does my character agree with me?
Taking these choices away from them is not fun. However, if you want to encourage a particular outcome, you can put a finger on the scales through game design.
Old-school dungeon crawls dealt with this by making combat Not The Thing We Are Here For, since the players are playing as professional graverobbers who are here to hoover up anything that isn’t nailed down and get the hell out, since you only gain xp for the gp value of the treasure you loot. If you have limited time and resources, Combat is a needless risk to be avoided. This usually results in players actively trying to negotiate with the sentient denizens of the dungeon for mutual profit.
A more narrative approach is to have the players be a part of a society that has opinions of orcs and goblins that mirror colonial-era America. If the players notice that their fellow citizens talk about dealing with goblins in terms of extermination and population control, they’re probably going to have a “Are we the baddies?” moment unless they are either very dense or racist (and having played at a table with both, the difference between stupidity and racism is very obvious). It’s also pretty cool to play as a freedom fighter, and a lot of groups will gravitate towards fighting against colonial oppression—but only if they feel if that choice is non-obvious and therefore they made the choice themselves; if fighting the power means opposing YOU, then thats what they will do, and we dont want an adversarial table, right?
Honestly, I’m a bit more confused now. I definitely agree that humans have a tendency to dehumanize others, but I wouldn’t consider this a good or healthy thing that we should just accept. So having a ruleset that says, canonically, “this group of sentient creatures is inherently evil” and not “this group of sentient creatures is believedtobe evil by this other group” you are encouraging the players to take an unnuanced view of the world.
However, as a gamemaster you have to allow your players to make two choices:
Are the monsters we are fighting people or not?
Does my character agree with me?
Isn’t this what the lore changes encourage, by not making a factual statement about the groups, so the players should ask themselves this question on a case-by-case basis and not simply based on what type of creature they are? And I’m not sure how the changes would prevent the narrative approach you describe. Saying that goblins and orcs live in human-like societies doesn’t prevent you from telling a story that’s analogous to what has happened between human societies.
Maybe we’re working off of different data points, what WotC material are specifically referring to for the changes?
Sorry if my answer was off-topic. I thought you were asking about personhood in your personal games, because you made the statement that if a critter acts like a person that indicates you should treat it as a person. I personally agree, but I wanted to point out the fuzziness of personhood.
Looking back over my comment, I think I ended up rambling and only mostly saying anything. These are the points I wanted to express:
Personhood isn’t objective fact, and every person at your gaming table has a different idea of what a person is.
Since only people count when making moral decisions, personhood is a bit of a touchy subject and doesn’t get examined much. As a result, pretty much everyone thinks all the good people they know agree with their personal definition of personhood because disagreeing on that means you are Evil and Bad.
Because this is such a touchy subject, people are really sensitive to it. It’s hard to make a work that interrogate personhood without it coming across as preachy, so if you want to interrogate it it’s best to present them with a nuanced situation and let them make up their own mind without non-diagetic criticism nudging them in a direction
i also wanted to repeatedly emphasize that our fantasy tropes can be traced back to colonialist, imperialist, and often very racist tropes that were common in the 19th century, and a lot of more modernized fantasy tropes stemming from those old tropes can still be pretty yikes if you think about it for any period of time. Not something most players think about, but I think trying to improve on them is worthwhile.
Also, I should point out that in 2e, 1e, and ODnD, the phrasing was usually “Orcs tend towards chaotic evil due to the Rage of Gruumsh inclining them to solve all problems with violence” or “Elves are generally chaotic and will react to a party with suspicion or hostility”. Back then, alignment was more about external relationships than your character, but this wasn’t communicated well. The widespread misconception that alignment was about your internal character got enshrined in 3rd edition and then just got carried forward from then into later editions, which is really unfortunate. The point of alignment was supposed to be that good characters and evil characters don’t get along, and the same with Lawful and Chaotic characters, even if their individual ethics don’t actually overlap much. But that’s not how most players see it, so now WotC has reacted to this with a full walkback on creature alignment in a way that kinda erases the little nuance that was left.
As a player, sometimes I want to settle down with an Orc and make a bunch of Half-Orc Babies, but seeing the word “species” gives me pause. I know in real life cross-breeding different species of animals rarely goes well and the children are as a rule sterile, so can i ethically bring a baby into the world that I know is going to be sterile and is probably doing to have serious health problems?
I don’t get your problem here. Either the world that has half orcs declares if they are fine, or you are free to decide for yourself. Why bother yourself with some “knowledge” about the “real world”?
Dude, I live in the real world, I can only suspend my disbelief so much! I can’t just forget how mules are made! The brain keeps thinking and it doesn’t stop when I tell it to lol
I think I more or less agree with where you’re coming from. Part of the fun of roleplaying is getting to explore darkness in a safe way. Not everyone is looking for that and that’s fine, but I definitely find it weird to have the core setting lean into a more “disney-fied” setting. Seems like it should offer options.
It’s probably a symptom of DND becoming so much more mainstream. You can’t please everyone, so the best they can do is minimally bother everyone which can end up pretty… OK. Not great, not terrible, and mostly uninspiring.
Those are my thoughts based just on what you said. I haven’t heard about any of this before now so those are just off the cuff.
@ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling
Pretty sure this is already known but I’ll throw in the tidbit that in Ad&d 2nd Dark Sun, Muls were the progeny of humans and dwarves and were explicitly sterile so this is not exactly untrodden ground. Not saying it’s the way to go, just that it happened
Okay, I want to start by saying that I do appreciate that WotC is trying really hard to treat the playable races as people. However, they haven’t been sticking the landing well. For example, i do understand why they changed all instances of the word Race with Species, but making all the playable races canonically separate species just trades one yikes for a new yikes. As a player, sometimes I want to settle down with an Orc and make a bunch of Half-Orc Babies, but seeing the word “species” gives me pause. I know in real life cross-breeding different species of animals rarely goes well and the children are as a rule sterile, so can i ethically bring a baby into the world that I know is going to be sterile and is probably doing to have serious health problems?
Anyway, most people aren’t mad about that anymore, and decent people aren’t generally mad about the Mexican orcs or whatever. What has been a problem is that they are trying to get rid of the concept of Monsterous Races, which would make the average D&D setting a generally more pleasant place to live in. Here’s the game-design issue with this: D&D is fundamentally about combat, and 5.5’s design leans into the more crunchy aspect of that. A game about combat needs a world full of things for the players to mow down but also not feel bad about killing, and sometimes you need a bunch of Violent Dungeon Fodder that can think and plan and make tactical decisions and potentially be negotiated with. Goblins and orcs and the like fill this role of being sentient pincushions. In addition, rp-wise players often like being special, and an easy way to do this is being a Good Drow or a Forgiving Kobold or a Pacifist Orc.
The specific way they are going about this is retconning the lore to make the societies of the Monsterous Races less Evil or outright just normal human-ish societies. Personally, as a DM I do not like this. I like to make my orcs and goblins distinct from mainstream D&D by doing pretty much exactly this, because it’s a low-effort way to make my setting look Nuanced or Morally Grey. The point is more to do something that pops out of the wider dnd culture more than to actually say anything about, say, how indigenous people tend to be treated as speed-bumps to “progress” throughout history, because I dont usually run games where colonialism happens anywhere near the players. So not only does this make WotC’s writers look incredibly lazy (and more importantly, spineless) to me, but now the laziest way to make a DnD setting pop is to have goblins and orcs be non-persons that are there to be treated as Rome treated the Gauls or sent to Oklahoma.
And what’s sad is that if they had just put in any amount of effort into the worldbuilding, we could have the nice pleasant world full of non-evil cannon fodder without this problem. Unfortunately, in order to do that the setting has to actually make a statement about something. Here, I’ll do some right here:
See, it’s not hard! But saying something, anything at all, might offend some customers and make their profits go down. So they go with the safe, bland option of “everyone is basically a normal human like you, the player, so you can plop yourself into any race and not have too much cultural dissonace.”
Anyway. That was a wall of text. I’m going to log off now.
I’m a bit confused by this. Why not have them be any other species, or combination of them? If they’re capable of being negotiated with shouldn’t the players feel as bad about killing them as anyone else? I feel like “self-defense” can do a lot of heavy lifting in dungeon crawls, I’ve never really noticed my players feeling bad about killing bandit dwarves or whatnot.
Oh, that’s actually a pretty interesting question! Here’s the thing: your players probably already think killing people is bad! The thing is, the word “people” is carrying a lot of weight there. For example, in shmup videogames (where the point is the excessive violence) usually the target of your killing spree is some caricature of a group the devs don’t count as people, such as the KKK or WW2-era Nazis. This is also why modern shmups take place in the middle east and have you gunning down Al-Qaeda or ISIS or some other dehumanized boogeyman. It’s not generally a distinction made consciously, and everyone sets the line differently. Lots of people I’ve met on Hexbear or Lemmygrad don’t think cops and alt-right nazis are people, which I disagree with. And most people I know IRL definitely believe their pets count as people, which I understand is controversial.
My point here is to point out that we all at some point decided what counts as a person, and it’s a touchy opinion that rarely gets examined. A less touchy equivalent is how many people have very different opinions on what counts as cheating, but are convinced that their opinion is objectively and inarguably correct. I think it’s worth examining what is a person to you and why you decided that.
However, as a gamemaster you have to allow your players to make two choices:
Taking these choices away from them is not fun. However, if you want to encourage a particular outcome, you can put a finger on the scales through game design.
Old-school dungeon crawls dealt with this by making combat Not The Thing We Are Here For, since the players are playing as professional graverobbers who are here to hoover up anything that isn’t nailed down and get the hell out, since you only gain xp for the gp value of the treasure you loot. If you have limited time and resources, Combat is a needless risk to be avoided. This usually results in players actively trying to negotiate with the sentient denizens of the dungeon for mutual profit.
A more narrative approach is to have the players be a part of a society that has opinions of orcs and goblins that mirror colonial-era America. If the players notice that their fellow citizens talk about dealing with goblins in terms of extermination and population control, they’re probably going to have a “Are we the baddies?” moment unless they are either very dense or racist (and having played at a table with both, the difference between stupidity and racism is very obvious). It’s also pretty cool to play as a freedom fighter, and a lot of groups will gravitate towards fighting against colonial oppression—but only if they feel if that choice is non-obvious and therefore they made the choice themselves; if fighting the power means opposing YOU, then thats what they will do, and we dont want an adversarial table, right?
…are you calling first person shooters “shmups”?
Honestly, I’m a bit more confused now. I definitely agree that humans have a tendency to dehumanize others, but I wouldn’t consider this a good or healthy thing that we should just accept. So having a ruleset that says, canonically, “this group of sentient creatures is inherently evil” and not “this group of sentient creatures is believed to be evil by this other group” you are encouraging the players to take an unnuanced view of the world.
Isn’t this what the lore changes encourage, by not making a factual statement about the groups, so the players should ask themselves this question on a case-by-case basis and not simply based on what type of creature they are? And I’m not sure how the changes would prevent the narrative approach you describe. Saying that goblins and orcs live in human-like societies doesn’t prevent you from telling a story that’s analogous to what has happened between human societies.
Maybe we’re working off of different data points, what WotC material are specifically referring to for the changes?
Sorry if my answer was off-topic. I thought you were asking about personhood in your personal games, because you made the statement that if a critter acts like a person that indicates you should treat it as a person. I personally agree, but I wanted to point out the fuzziness of personhood.
Looking back over my comment, I think I ended up rambling and only mostly saying anything. These are the points I wanted to express:
Also, I should point out that in 2e, 1e, and ODnD, the phrasing was usually “Orcs tend towards chaotic evil due to the Rage of Gruumsh inclining them to solve all problems with violence” or “Elves are generally chaotic and will react to a party with suspicion or hostility”. Back then, alignment was more about external relationships than your character, but this wasn’t communicated well. The widespread misconception that alignment was about your internal character got enshrined in 3rd edition and then just got carried forward from then into later editions, which is really unfortunate. The point of alignment was supposed to be that good characters and evil characters don’t get along, and the same with Lawful and Chaotic characters, even if their individual ethics don’t actually overlap much. But that’s not how most players see it, so now WotC has reacted to this with a full walkback on creature alignment in a way that kinda erases the little nuance that was left.
I don’t get your problem here. Either the world that has half orcs declares if they are fine, or you are free to decide for yourself. Why bother yourself with some “knowledge” about the “real world”?
Dude, I live in the real world, I can only suspend my disbelief so much! I can’t just forget how mules are made! The brain keeps thinking and it doesn’t stop when I tell it to lol
There are cases where species can have a fecund offspring, like the axolotl and the tiger salamander.
Polar bears and grizzly bears too.
I enjoyed reading through that, thanks!
I think I more or less agree with where you’re coming from. Part of the fun of roleplaying is getting to explore darkness in a safe way. Not everyone is looking for that and that’s fine, but I definitely find it weird to have the core setting lean into a more “disney-fied” setting. Seems like it should offer options.
It’s probably a symptom of DND becoming so much more mainstream. You can’t please everyone, so the best they can do is minimally bother everyone which can end up pretty… OK. Not great, not terrible, and mostly uninspiring.
Those are my thoughts based just on what you said. I haven’t heard about any of this before now so those are just off the cuff.
@ThisIsAManWhoKnowsHowToGling
Pretty sure this is already known but I’ll throw in the tidbit that in Ad&d 2nd Dark Sun, Muls were the progeny of humans and dwarves and were explicitly sterile so this is not exactly untrodden ground. Not saying it’s the way to go, just that it happened