Ah but then how would you know they were evil?
Relevant OOTS: Dragons! Color coded for your convenience!
But to give a serious answer - that’s precisely why I think Always Evil humanoid races are bad for the game. Same with color coded dragons. I liked how Eberron threw out that idea.
Sverfneblin are not IIRC evil. The evil Gnomish race are Spriggans
What’s the latest with dragons? Are the metallic dragons still all good, and the chromatic dragons all evil?
Looking it up, you are correct. Of the Deep Elves, Deep Dwarves (two variants), Deep Gnomes, and Deep Halflings, only elves and both dwarves are evil.
As of 5e, I believe so
Out of the 5e PHB races, the two with dark skin as a default are dark elves (black) and half-orcs (grey or purple), both of which are stereotypically somewhere south of Neutral and both get shit in civilized society due to their race. Yeah, you can play an African-looking human or a heavily tanned gnome or whatever but it’s not a great look that the two default dark-skinned races are viewed with suspicion with one being usually straight up malicious evil and the other being commonly thugs and thieves and hired muscle.
For what it’s worth (i.e. nothing, sample size of one) the one Black woman I’ve known to try the game immediately gravitated to the dark elf in a “Hey, a beautiful black elf? Sign me up” sort of way. Obviously we left out all the “Oh, and everyone hates you” baggage from the race.
The point, and I’m sure you agree, is that she shouldn’t have to play a Drow in order to play a beautiful black elf. Elves - and Dwarves, and Halflings - should come in the same range of colors as humans; and it should be written in the rules that they do, in order to prevent certain players from saying things like, “Your character can’t be dark-skinned, she’s a High Elf!”
If Star Trek can have black Vulcans, D&D can have black High Elves.
I thought it did.
I remember an enormous chart of skin color matched to a roll of two D20. Maybe that was a home brew thing, as honestly, skin color seems like something the player should just pick and not have to roll for.
That sounds like a homebrew, although there were so many D&D 2&3E books published, so who knows?
Again, they didn’t remove Always Evil humanoid races from the game, because Always Evil humanoids have never, at any point in its history, been in the game.
And most of the deep-underground variants of races are described as gray, which in some cases makes them lighter than their surface-dwelling kin.
Dragons are color-coded, but it’s not by dark-light. Black dragons are evil, but so are white dragons. Dragons are color-coded by glossy-matte, which doesn’t correspond at all to humans.
The races and cultures, as a whole, are Always Evil. It has always been possible for Very Special Individuals to break the mold and, at the expense of being hated outcasts in their own society and distrusted outcasts everywhere else, be something different. This is a case where the exceptions prove the rule.
Is this a rule change in 5e? Was 6e announced?
Optional rules in Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything.
No hint of 6e.
No. 2 is an optional rule from D&D 5E’s latest supplement, Tasha’s Cauldron of Everything (Chapter 1: Customizing Your Origin).
No. 1 is something the game has been leaning towards recently. Its supplements Volo’s Guide to Monsters and Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes make a deep dive into the culture and psychology of various humanoid and monster races, including orcs and goblinoids, and try to provide explanations why they’re generally considered hostile beyond just saying that they’re “generally evil”.
Thanks.
I played some 3.5 with my kids, but my DMing was heavily influenced by my playing AD&D, and i ignored a lot of the more complicated rules. We actually started with a very simple systems and added rules as we got used to it.
Back in the day… My recollection of paladins is that they were basically a fighter-cleric in a day when it was hard to multiclass. And since that’s such a powerful combination, there were a lot of restrictions, including that you had to use a lot of your stats in charisma. And yeah, the Arthurian thing, from an in-game prospective. But from a balance of play perspective, it was that it was otherwise too powerful.
Yeah: in AD&D, “balance” was decided by “rarity.” You’d have these possibilities that were insanely powerful, but that were “balanced” by almost never showing up, in theory. So maybe you’d have only a 1 in 100 chance of gaining psionics. How many kids do you think rolled those percentile dice over and over and over again? You’d have a character class that could only be entered with a 17 Charisma. You think kids played fair with that? I guarantee that the number of PCs with an 18/00 strength exceeded the 1 in 21,600 that you’d expect if you played it fair.
The move since then has been away from “balance through rarity” and toward “balance through balance,” trying to set things up so that all characters are at least playing on the same field. There are still all kinds of argument about balance, but things are much better than they once were.
Having played every single version of D&D, I can tell you that 5E rules are much simpler than 3.5E rules. They’re worth checking out.
Which of course some people complain about.