They didn’t exist when i was running that game.
I’d be interested in joining a 5e game, but the opportunity hasn’t arisen. I was working towards that with a group of people i know on another chat site when that site imploded, in fact. 
Even rolled up a character and was debating which deity to worship.
And I’d been thinking i might ask in this thread if anyone was looking for a new player. I’m not 100% sure i have time to commit to it, though. I’m sure i don’t have time to DM right now.
We did. We rolled in front of each other. But then picked which roll went to each stat. So… It wasn’t that hard to get a potential paladin. You’re rolling 4 dice and taking the top three numbers six times. It’s common to get one 17. But to play the paladin you had to “waste” that 17 on charisma, so the other stats were lower than typical.
The funny thing is, Charisma is probably the most important ability in 5E. It has some of the most useful skills, and it has the most character classes that use it as their primary ability score.
Sure, some did. The potential for “Cheating”–and the easy rationale for doing so (“I’m just going to keep rolling until I get a character I like”)–is way higher when a very small set of dice rolls determines so much about your character.
The move away from this, toward point-buy systems and standardized hit points, is IMO a huge step forward in later editions.
I know? I talked about the difference between always evil, Always Evil as defined by MM, and Usually Evil which is what most of the humanoid races are, a few posts ago. I’m using Always Evil as a shorthand for the concept.
The point isn’t whether that matches up to humans or not; the point is that being able to decide if you should slay a given dragon based on whether its scales are all shiny or not, rather then whether it is burning burninating the countryside, is pretty dumb and makes the game more shallow.
Sure. But Drow are especially problematic because their story is literally “They used to be fair-skinned happy top elves but the evil spider lady twisted them into dark-skinned evil Nega-elves” with the same implications as the misread Biblical story of Noah’s son being cursed with black skin and justification it’s okay to enslave Black people.
There’s also a bit to be said about there being some lip service to a skin tone spectrum for demihumans but the artwork in the PHB and across D&D in general has always been a bunch of white dudes, whether the dudes are elves or dwarves or halflings. You might get your token African-looking human smith but the other “good” races are a bunch of white dudes from all the evidence. So, when that’s your baseline and then they give you a canonically dark-skinned race or two, it’s not exactly inclusive to have them be the stereotypical bad guys. While I have no issue with the concept of an “Always Evil” bunch of elves, I do think that how those Always Evil Eves are represented makes its own problem.
I do think that one simple fix any DM can do is say that High Elves have Black skin because they live in the sunshine for 1000+ years, and Drow Elves have White skin because they live underground. In fact, when Lolth cursed the Drow and removed their melanin, they were pretty much forced to move underground because of sunburn and skin cancers.
Deciding to just go slay a dragon just because it’s not shiny is dumb regardless of alignment. Dragons are a pretty big deal-- If you’re fighting one, you should be prepared in detail for that fight, because if you don’t, then you’re likely to get your butts handed to you. And in the course of that preparation, you’re almost certainly going to learn about that individual dragon’s proclivities.
Cool. It really is an exciting and well-crafted story.
Just know that it is unquestioningly retrograde in its imagining of male/female social roles/status.
Yeah–I read it and loved it when I was a teenager. I haven’t read it since, and so my admiration for it should be taken with a grain of adolescent salt.
I pretty much only seriously played D&D, AD&D 1st Ed and now 5e. To me everything in-between was never as good as 1st with some house rule changes. I started with D&D as there wasn’t anything else back then.
5e is the first really well constructed version of the game. It isn’t perfect, but it is carefully thought out and well balanced. The only place it loses to 1e is on big battles. 5e is a lot slower than 1e was for large combats. But the actual Role Playing aspects of 5e are really great.
I agree. I think it’s the best version of the game yet. It’s been more than 30 years since I played 1st edition so I can’t really comment on how quick combat is.
Forgive me for not responding earlier, and I admit I did not read all of the 273 previous posts. So I may have missed or am repeating a point somebody else made. However, there’s no real change here. This is literally how it started.
Yes, there’s the “hack-n-slash” game form and that’s fine. Nobody is going to change anything, notice, or even care that the monster’s alignment has changed as listed in an entry nobody notices, or even if it’s left off entirely. In that sense, alignment is sort of irrelevant.
The contrary scenario is this was always the case in broad strokes, but it was usually not a big concern for player characters. Even back in early modules, the actual facts on the ground were always a bit more uncertain, and you didn’t have to kill something solely because it was evil in any case. That was strongly discouraged unless the creature was actively hostile. For example, there were renegade Drow who might be neutral or even good back in the first modules featuring them. (I am not willing to point fingers, but I think some of the over-the-top Drow-Are-Insanely-Evil came from Salvatore’s stories which them got picked up by other authors. Basically Flanderization atop Flanderization.)
Concerning the idea that Drow are evil and have black skin : In another context I would agree except that Drow were never coded as African-American in any context as far as I can tell. They were always drawn from a mix of Celtic and Norse myths. In cultural and physical depictions they were never depicted in any identifiable sense as being remotely of African origin.
[While I’ve known some tabletop players to be, shall we say, less than culturally sensitive, I’ve also never known any of them who related Drow in any sense to real-world races. To be fair, anyone like that is not the kind of person I willingly have any relationship with, so it’s always possible others just wouldn’t share that with me. I have heard stories of some VERY unpleasant gamers though and, well, there’s always one guy who’ll agree with even the nastiest, stupidest racist idea.]
Yep, that’s the way I do it, and have done so since 1975. We are there to have fun. The DMs job is to facilitate a the fun, Ok, yes, some danger is good, heightens the funs parts, sure.
It’s just evolved a bit, if that is what you want to have fun. And sure it is fun. Just as kicking down doors, killing monsters and looting their treasure is fun. D&D is a game, it’s supposed to be fun.
However, you and your table have fun is the important part. Not being “woke” or not woke.
OP, do you play Monopoly and complain that it’s capitalistic and sexist? Chess in that it perpetuates a royalist stereotype and the pawns are only there to be sacrificed? Do you complain that a deck of cards has two male figures and only one?
Games, not reality.
Are the Fifty Shades of Grey books “woke”? Hell no, But they are a fantasy, and some people have fun reading that fantasy, and that’s Ok too.
Right. Drow are the dark Elves or Dökkálfar (wiki) In [Norse mythology](Norse mythology - Wikipedia), Dökkálfar (“Dark Elves”)[a] and Ljósálfar (“Light Elves”)[b] are two contrasting types of elves; the dark elves dwell within the earth and have a dark complexion, while the light elves live in Álfheimr, and are “fairer than the sun to look at”.
And since the ancient Norse had little to do with Black people back then, it wasnt being racist.
6e will be out as soon as 5e sales slow down.
Maybe i should buy a set of source manuals. 
You never know, i might find a chance to play again. 5e sounds like fun.
Sorry for the delay in replying, I had an issue with my wheelie bin.
Thanks so much to everyone who contributed but particularly to the always energetically eloquent Dorkness and the definitely, in this thread, good roleplayer Johnny_Bravo for fleshing out my intentions. This does not include all lovely contributions, those two just stand out as helpful elucidators of what I was getting at.
More ideas:
Paladins were always more Lawful Neutral, you could have Paladins fighting Paladins who had different ideas of what was right, just like the real world. That makes for great stories. Or even
“Almost always evil” is just like “always evil”, racists always had the idea of the good “one of them” dating back to the bible at least “Good Samaritan”
Yep from the earliest days some people used the rules to roleplay and others used the rules to kill, it’s nothing new to use the games to explore ideas.
My trans friend made some really interesting campaigns at a time when she didn’t realise she was trans and we all explored body modification / human identity ideas together without having to discuss ideas she wasn’t ready to reveal. We laughed years after about how obvious it is now but at the time it allowed us to express ideas otherwise unspeakable.
I personally love stories where different entities have different characteristics that result in different motivations and you go from there. The tensions that result. It’s more interesting when it isn’t definite baddies and goodies.
Character creation should be about background - who you are and why, what can you do, what do you know, how do you see the world, and what do you care about?