"Customizing your Origin in D&D"

[Boci]

For any of the other fantasy races/species/heritages that are not humans, I've ceased to care about the argument of the perceived problem.
They are not human, humans are humans, the rest are make believe.
The people arguing they are human allegories are not interested in a discussion unless the response is "you are right and every person that disagrees has some deep rooted internalised <blank>-ist attitude"

Do you mind people highlighting the racist origins of these races in modern fantasy? Mostly Tolkien, talking about how orcs were mongrels and dwarves were greedy as the jews were imagined?

[ProsecutorGodot]

The Vistani thing I see as the only point that is relevant to the whole "let's avoid negative race based stereotypes"

For any of the other fantasy races/species/heritages that are not humans, I've ceased to care about the argument of the perceived problem.
They are not human, humans are humans, the rest are make believe.
The people arguing they are human allegories are not interested in a discussion unless the response is "you are right and every person that disagrees has some deep rooted internalised <blank>-ist attitude"

just no

The people enjoying this game are not bad people for enjoying fantasy tropes

Take you activism and leave it in the real world where it belongs.

People are equally not wrong/bad for wanting to be recognized for not enjoying those fantasy tropes. Lets not assume the worst of each side, some people are genuinely uncomfortable with these premises and just don't want to use them personally.

[jas61292]

Do you mind people highlighting the racist origins of these races in modern fantasy? Mostly Tolkien, talking about how orcs were mongrels and dwarves were greedy as the jews were imagined?

While I think it is important to look at the origins, it is also important not to misconstrue them. While it is absolutely true, for instance, that Tolkien based some dwarf traits on Jews, his writings do little to suggest that he viewed the traits as negative ones. In fact, many were either positive or factually neutral. And of course, a lot of the inspiration for the links was just that Tolkien was a massive linguistics nerd and wanted a race with a Semitic language. I'm not going to say there is absolutely nothing problematic about them, but I think a lot of people, perhaps due to their own biases, see more negative connotations than were intended. And I think that the fact that these origins were not as clearly negative in nature is one of the main reasons that the races as a whole are not seen as as problematic as Orcs.

Also, for what its worth, while Tolkien Orcs may have been quite problematic, I think that is a separate issue from D&D orcs, as Tolkien orcs are really more like D&D goblins.

[Amechra]

I can sort of sea that, but I was going with the definition: "very basic or unsophisticated in terms of comfort, convenience, or efficiency."

Isn't that still true? I don't think hunting is as comfortable, convienient or efficient as other methods of getting food. I apreciate it can often be more complicated than that, but that just life, you can right books and books on the smallest aspect of it.

Sure, it's true... but I thought I'd just bring up that that definition comes from a society that values comfort, convenience, and efficiency very highly. We're the ones making the definitions, so of course we're the more advanced ones!

And also because there's some really interesting stuff that you can learn if you look into anthropology. You'd be amazed at how many possible answers there are to the basic questions of "how do we feed ourselves?", "where do we live?", "how do we tell each-other apart?", and "who am I allowed to have sex with?" It's a topic that gets sadly overlooked in a lot of geeky stuff, in favor of easy stereotypes and worldbling.

[Zhorn]

If you don't like a setting, play a different setting.

If you don't like Forgotten Realms as a setting, instead of trying to tear it down and villainise the people that enjoy it as is, promote and play in the one you like. Build up a following in your preferred setting enough and more of THAT content will be published.

It is all make believe, not everyone has to play the same game.

[tsuyoshikentsu]

While I think it is important to look at the origins, it is also important not to misconstrue them. While it is absolutely true, for instance, that Tolkien based some dwarf traits on Jews, his writings do little to suggest that he viewed the traits as negative ones.

Speaking as a Jewish person, his protestations that the comparison is meant to be positive when he includes traits around long noses and greed ring absolutely hollow. Actions speak louder than words--or perhaps, in this case, words speak louder than speaking.

If you don't like a setting, play a different setting.

If you don't like Forgotten Realms as a setting, instead of trying to tear it down and villainise the people that enjoy it as is, promote and play in the one you like.

Wizards of the Coast disagrees. FR has inherently problematic depictions from which they are retreating. If you do not like that fact, you may wish to examine whether your own preconceptions are problematic as well.

[cutlery]

If you don't like a setting, play a different setting.

If you don't like Forgotten Realms as a setting, instead of trying to tear it down and villainise the people that enjoy it as is, promote and play in the one you like. Build up a following in your preferred setting enough and more of THAT content will be published.

It is all make believe, not everyone has to play the same game.

Which works great until folks at WotC decide that not making the change costs them more sales than it gains. Which is a conclusion they may well be approaching, based on recent events.

One tyranny of the majority is easily replaced with another, as it happens.

[Boci]

While I think it is important to look at the origins, it is also important not to misconstrue them. While it is absolutely true, for instance, that Tolkien based some dwarf traits on Jews, his writings do little to suggest that he viewed the traits as negative ones. In fact, many were either positive or factually neutral. And of course, a lot of the inspiration for the links was just that Tolkien was a massive linguistics nerd and wanted a race with a Semitic language. I'm not going to say there is absolutely nothing problematic about them, but I think a lot of people, perhaps due to their own biases, see more negative connotations than were intended. And I think that the fact that these origins were not as clearly negative in nature is one of the main reasons that the races as a whole are not seen as as problematic as Orcs.

Also, for what its worth, while Tolkien Orcs may have been quite problematic, I think that is a separate issue from D&D orcs, as Tolkien orcs are really more like D&D goblins.

This is pretty much my opinion too. Be aware of the history, don't try to whitewash it, but if you still want to play with them, then move closer to a hostile creature as a bonus action.

Sure, it's true... but I thought I'd just bring up that that definition comes from a society that values comfort, convenience, and efficiency very highly. We're the ones making the definitions, so of course we're the more advanced ones!

Sure, I get society will often imagine its own methods to be suprior, but the fact that we value comfort, convenience and efficiency doesn't change the fact that hunting doesn't score highly on those. Primitive doesn't neccissarily mean bad, it typically means requires less technology and/or knowledge, and those things tend to improve methods in terms of comfort, convenience and efficiency.

And also because there's some really interesting stuff that you can learn if you look into anthropology. You'd be amazed at how many possible answers there are to the basic questions of "how do we feed ourselves?", "where do we live?", "how do we tell each-other apart?", and "who am I allowed to have sex with?" It's a topic that gets sadly overlooked in a lot of geeky stuff, in favor of easy stereotypes and worldbling.

When I imagine mideval society, one thing I repeatedly find myself wondering is, how did peasants survive. You have to eat basically once a day, and harvest happens once, maybe twice a year. That sounds like a maths problem to me.

[ProsecutorGodot]

If you don't like a setting, play a different setting.

If you don't like Forgotten Realms as a setting, instead of trying to tear it down and villainise the people that enjoy it as is, promote and play in the one you like. Build up a following in your preferred setting enough and more of THAT content will be published.

It is all make believe, not everyone has to play the same game.

Right, so if I want to play in the Forgotten Realms and my friend wants to play Brock the Rock Gnome, smasher of many dragons, more muscle than gnome, he doesn't mess around with those gundam sets like all the other gnomes then I have to play a different setting for him to have a bonus to strength and no proficiency with tinkers tools?

What exactly does the setting have to do with this? I know I'm perfectly capable of accepting that Brock could exist in FR. Brock existing doesn't mean that every Rock Gnome is suddenly jacked wielding greataxes.

To put more simply with less hyperbole: Why are you right saying that someone should just accept things as they are but someone else is wrong for wanting to change it? Why shouldn't they be allowed to change things to better their enjoyment?

[Zhorn]

Which works great until folks at WotC decide that not making the change costs them more sales than it gains. Which is a conclusion they may well be approaching, based on recent events.

One tyranny of the majority is easily replaced with another, as it happens.

... because that's clearly been successful for the comic industry in recent years ...

[Boci]

To put more simply with less hyperbole: Why are you right saying that someone should just accept things as they are but someone else is wrong for wanting to change it? Why shouldn't they be allowed to change things to better their enjoyment?

I believe the FR comment was more in response to the idea that all drow societies being evil is problematic. That can't really be fixed in FR, not for the official setting at home you can change it however you like, but for the official FR setting, if 99% of drow being sadistic, slave taking demon worshipping psychopaths bothers you, leaving the setting is probably better.

Wizards may however feel that they can rip the drow out, plus a few more problematic elements and keep the setting, but I personally would rather they didn't.

[cutlery]

... because that's clearly been successful for the comic industry in recent years ...

Which would only make sense if you ignore the entire history of comic books.

DND has changed markedly since it came into being; the rules and the settings. They will both change further, but you can always play old editions and sourcebooks.

[jas61292]

Speaking as a Jewish person, his protestations that the comparison is meant to be positive when he includes traits around long noses and greed ring absolutely hollow. Actions speak louder than words--or perhaps, in this case, words speak louder than speaking.l.

And as a fellow Jewish person, I would disagree. Tolkien absolutely stated without a doubt that Dwarves were inspired by Jews, but most of the actual comparisons, beyond the whole language thing, were things like being largely in diaspora and making beautiful works. The only aspect I find even somewhat problematic is the greed thing, but even that is not actually a big deal to me, as it was rather explicitly the result of the influence of evil magic rings, and not the innate nature of Dwarves. And as for the nose thing, maybe I'm not remembering something, but don't actually remember them ever being described as such, and a quick google search does nothing to show me that they actually had large noses, despite many talks about the comparison.

Again, I'm not going to say there is absolutely nothing problematic, but I also just don't think there is that much there. If you set out to be offended, it will usually work, even if it means misconstruing the reality of things in order to achieve your goal.

[ProsecutorGodot]

... because that's clearly been successful for the comic industry in recent years ...

Don't know if I'd really compare this to, say, Safespace and Snowflake (the most recent example to come to mind) when this is simply giving written permission to change things you could have already changed.

I won't argue that these changes weren't spurred by current events, but just because current events spurred them doesn't mean they can't have happened regardless of them, I'd almost be willing to bet that a lot of the criticism is because of the timing and not the content of the changes.

I believe the FR comment was more in response to the idea that all drow societies being evil is problematic. That can't really be fixed in FR, not for the official setting at home you can change it however you like, but for the official FR setting, if 99% of drow being sadistic, slave taking demon worshipping psychopaths bothers you, leaving the setting is probably better.

Wizards may however feel that they can rip the drow out, plus a few more problematic elements and keep the setting, but I personally would rather they didn't.

Well, I may be new to DND since 5e came out but I'm fairly sure there have been equally substantial changes to the status quo.

Truthfully, I'd be a bit put off by it if it's done lazily, but if there's enough work done with plausible reasoning I can get behind it. Unfortunately, like I said very early on, it looks like WotC is ready to take the simple routes here. I'm not bothered by the destination but I'd prefer if we got there more smoothly.

[Boci]

And as a fellow Jewish person, I would disagree. Tolkien absolutely stated without a doubt that Dwarves were inspired by Jews, but most of the actual comparisons, beyond the whole language thing, were things like being largely in diaspora and making beautiful works. The only aspect I find even somewhat problematic is the greed thing, but even that is not actually a big deal to me, as it was rather explicitly the result of the influence of evil magic rings, and not the innate nature of Dwarves.

I don't want to tell you what should and shouldn't offend you, but I don't think "The jewish standins are only greedy because evil magic effected basically the entire race" is good writing.

I'm sure you don't feel that acceptable writing today, I just think its important to highlight that as a good a job as tolkien did basically founding the genre we currently enjoy, that was one of the weaker moments of his writing.

[RossN]

Damn, I was pretty excited about Tasha's... but I have to say I hate this idea. Guess I'll have to skip this one.

[Boci]

Damn, I was pretty excited about Tasha's... but I have to say I hate this idea. Guess I'll have to skip this one.

Isn't this like one page in the whole book? You'll have to skip the page. Did you see the thread about the wildmagic barbarian and genie warlock preview?

https://forums.giantitp.com/showthre...-Genie-Warlock

[Segev]

Isn't this like one page in the whole book? You'll have to skip the page. Did you see the thread about the wildmagic barbarian and genie warlock preview?

For some reason, the Genielock ... bothers me. I can't really articulate why, though. I wish I could, because then I could either put aside my botherment as irrational, or come up with a personal "fix" for it to make me like it. Or at least know why I don't so that I can state WHY and make a rational judgment based on that.

[cutlery]

Isn't this like one page in the whole book? You'll have to skip the page. Did you see the thread about the wildmagic barbarian and genie warlock preview?

https://forums.giantitp.com/showthre...-Genie-Warlock

I wonder if there is more in the book that didn’t make it into AL, like some other race/culture background options. I hope so, really, because the change as we see it here is pretty thin, but that would spiral to many pages.

[Dienekes]

When I imagine mideval society, one thing I repeatedly find myself wondering is, how did peasants survive. You have to eat basically once a day, and harvest happens once, maybe twice a year. That sounds like a maths problem to me.

So weird thing. Medieval peasantry tended to have better healthier diets than say an early industrial era worker, or Roman citizens at the height of the empire that were not the ruling class.

A lot of how that was possible was 1) fewer people per mile of land. Without fast transportation having just fewer mouths to feed in an area of food growth is very important. 2) Communal stockpiles. Farming communities tended to grow a lot of long lasting vegetables and stored them year round. It’s important to note a lot of food we modern people throw away for going bad is still technically edible. And you better believe the peasantry ate it. 3) Living with animals. It’s not universal around the medieval world but a lot of the most calorie rich areas had swarms of communal pigs. Pigs eat actual trash, and whatever other scraps you have laying around. You get hungry, find one of the communal pigs slaughter it. Feed your family for a few days. But even if you don’t have pigs, you have other animals. Horses, cows, oxen, dogs. They’re around. When they die, there’s days or even weeks worth of food for you and maybe your neighbors.

Now all that said. A bad harvest can royally mess everything up. Even if you have enough for the winter, you might not have enough for those animals. If you don’t have enough for the animals more will die, faster. Perhaps more than you can eat before the meat goes bad. Then you’ve wasted food and with a smaller herd for next year, means that you’re getting less work out of your animals. Which could lead to a spiral of food shortages. This was bad.

And even if that didn’t happen, come spring the food stored up was often looking pretty lean.

But for a thousand years people muddled through. So it worked.

[ProsecutorGodot]

I wonder if there is more in the book that didn’t make it into AL, like some other race/culture background options. I hope so, really, because the change as we see it here is pretty thin, but that would spiral to many pages.

I've had the secret (and probably straight up tinfoil hat) idea in my head that AL wrote their own simple rules and Tasha's will have a much more detailed and less ham fisted version. The only real reason I haven't agreed to use this in my upcoming campaign is because I want to be sure this is actually the final version we'll see in print first.

If it does turn out to be, I'll probably introduce it and Ludic's version for them to choose between, see which they prefer.

[tsuyoshikentsu]

And as a fellow Jewish person, I would disagree. Tolkien absolutely stated without a doubt that Dwarves were inspired by Jews, but most of the actual comparisons, beyond the whole language thing, were things like being largely in diaspora and making beautiful works. The only aspect I find even somewhat problematic is the greed thing, but even that is not actually a big deal to me, as it was rather explicitly the result of the influence of evil magic rings, and not the innate nature of Dwarves.

They literally sing a song in The Hobbit about how much they want all their money back.

And as for the nose thing, maybe I'm not remembering something, but don't actually remember them ever being described as such, and a quick google search does nothing to show me that they actually had large noses, despite many talks about the comparison.

Bilbo literally identifies which spiderweb-wrapped figures are the dwarves because Fili's nose is so long.

Again, I'm not going to say there is absolutely nothing problematic, but I also just don't think there is that much there. If you set out to be offended, it will usually work, even if it means misconstruing the reality of things in order to achieve your goal.

Either you are misremembering the subject matter or you are misconstruing reality. I am doing neither.

And even so, You Are A Credit To Your Race is still racist. Positive caricatures--which I am in no way convinced the dwarves are--are still caricatures.

[Boci]

For some reason, the Genielock ... bothers me. I can't really articulate why, though. I wish I could, because then I could either put aside my botherment as irrational, or come up with a personal "fix" for it to make me like it. Or at least know why I don't so that I can state WHY and make a rational judgment based on that.

Obvious ones:

Single patron yet you still choose 1 of 4
Wish as a patron spell, but only for 1 of the options, no 9th spell for the others
Only 1 patron spell per level, not 2
Two powerful 1st level abilities (One offensive, one utility)?

[ProsecutorGodot]

Obvious ones:

Single patron yet you still choose 1 of 4
Wish as a patron spell, but only for 1 of the options, no 9th spell for the others
Only 1 patron spell per level, not 2
Two powerful 1st level abilities (One offensive, one utility)?

It's another fairly powerful Warlock dip is about the only issue I have with it, it doesn't fail to stand on its own thematically like Hexblade does.

[tsuyoshikentsu]

Obvious ones:

Single patron yet you still choose 1 of 4
Wish as a patron spell, but only for 1 of the options, no 9th spell for the others
Only 1 patron spell per level, not 2
Two powerful 1st level abilities (One offensive, one utility)?

You are reading the chart incorrectly. Genie Warlocks get everything in the "Genie" column plus everything in the column related to the subtype of genie.

[Boci]

You are reading the chart incorrectly. Genie Warlocks get everything in the "Genie" column plus everything in the column related to the subtype of genie.

Ah I see now, thanks for pointing that out.

[cutlery]

Really, most of the other patrons should get a few more arcanum choices.

[Dienekes]

They literally sing a song in The Hobbit about how much they want all their money back.

Literally everyone we meet except Bilbo, Gandalf, Beorn, and Elrond want that money. The mayor of Laketown is the character that ends up suffering from “dragon sickness.” Thranduil, one of the oh so wise and noble elves, goes to war for some wealth that is 100% not his. Bard the hero refuses to listen to a rather reasonable request by Thorin for fear that the dwarf would be stingy with the money and so gets ready to kill for it.

Greed wasn’t really presented as a dwarven trait.

Now all that said. Yes. A man born in the 1800s was racist. Not as horrific as some seem to think. But neither completely innocent as others like to proclaim. I don’t really see that as surprising. He was born in the 1800s.

[RossN]

Isn't this like one page in the whole book? You'll have to skip the page. Did you see the thread about the wildmagic barbarian and genie warlock preview?

https://forums.giantitp.com/showthre...-Genie-Warlock

They both do indeed look very cool, and as an Al-Qadim fan the Genie Warlock makes me squee (Sha'ir!)

But I really hate these new rules and especially the fact that this seems to be the direction going forward. I like the fact that elves, tieflings and dragonborn all have different niches for both cultural and physical reasons (a tiefling's tail is probably longer than the average halfling is tall!) I appreciate the way going against the conventional feels like it has heft, making (say) a dwarf monk feel that much more unique.

So yeah, going to give this a miss.

[Boci]

Literally everyone we meet except Bilbo, Gandalf, Beorn, and Elrond want that money. The mayor of Laketown is the character that ends up suffering from “dragon sickness.” Thranduil, one of the oh so wise and noble elves, goes to war for some wealth that is 100% not his. Bard the hero refuses to listen to a rather reasonable request by Thorin for fear that the dwarf would be stingy with the money and so gets ready to kill for it.

Greed wasn’t really presented as a dwarven trait.

In the Hobbit maybe, but the in LotR they awoke a demon digging too deep, and Tolkien mentioned dwarven greed in letters discussing his work.

He was born in the 1800s.

I know this is technically true, but I feel its important to narrow down the decade of his birth.

They both do indeed look very cool, and as an Al-Qadim fan the Genie Warlock makes me squee (Sha'ir!)

Warlocks are my favorite class and this is a cool patron, so I'm happy with it too.

But I really hate these new rules and especially the fact that this seems to be the direction going forward.

Its just a gut feeling and I could be wrong, but my instinct is this is a one note varient rule that won't be touched again until later, possibly even 6ed. Might be wrong though.