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I’m reminded of the story of Garg and Moonslicer, and I wish more publishers would lean in to this approach to good and evil. A purely lore approach would be enough to frame the conflict around, some races are naturally social creatures, and some races are naturally antisocial. Both have hierarches, but not all races have the same natural concepts of fairness and justice. Any individual can embrace either world view or a mix, but one comes more naturally to each race. Even if humanity is naturally a good race (debatable, but whatever), members can obviously deviate significantly.
Ultimately it doesn’t mater what race the slavers are, I’m not going to worry about the ethics of self-defensing a party of slavers to death as PC or GM.
Slightly unpopular opinion: All official lore is crap and should be generally ignored. (Even the stuff I kind of like) If I want to play in a world where what I can do is limited by the generic, inoffensive, middle-of-the-road, crowd-pleasing writers at some corporation I’ll just play a AAA video game. The ability to be participatory in the creation and evolution of the in-game world is what makes TTRPGs different from consumer media. Why would you give that part up, but still leave yourself with all the cognitive load?
Very strong agree on this.
I have the same reaction with the gameplay as well.
They somehow managed to add more crunch and complexity without improving neither the balance nor the turn-to-turn variety. I’m honestly impressed by their sheer incompetence.
Them: “We’ll be taking advice from the community!!!”
Me: Oh no. Oh well, Pathfinder it is!
Alright I’ll bite. What did they do to it?
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.
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
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
The best lore is lore made at the table with the players. The rest is just gm inspiration.
Play Pathfinder, like an adult.
Pathfinder is superior to D&D ethically, morally and mechanically. Fight me.
I’ll fight you! In a game of Pathfinder of course.
Roll Lore: Gaming for initiative!
I got two wizards and a skull. What the fuck is up with these dice
I’m over here enjoying Changeling: the Dreaming.
Let people play what they want to play.
Sure, but every time someone’s like “I’m going to do a game of secret modern day vampires doing political intrigue in DND” I’m going to judge them.
Sorry, wanted it to come off as a joke. I think Pathfinder is better, but I love dnd too.
Branch out and play all kinds of systems!
Would love to, but I don’t have that amount of time or money.
Ergh, I always ignore the lore anyway.
I sometimes steal pieces of it, if only for inspiration, but I love worldbuilding and making up my own settings.
I’m currently running an adventure in a Spelljammer setting where most of the previous D&D campaigns I’ve run over the years exist on different planets, with elements of all of them now able to make cameos or interact with each other. It’s wild.
I’m gonna need some context
Does D&D finally come with a lore?
Finally a playable game? (still the cost of 3?)
What do you mean, finally? Even 5e, the edition with the smallest amount of lore so far, has some.
Previous editions had a lot. The Forgotten Realms wiki is a pretty good place to go read through. And there’s other settings too, even if they have less content. Greyhawk, Eberron, to only name those I have in my library.
