We’ve never been sitting around Ye Olde Tavern and decided to go find some orcs and rough them up just because eff those guys. However given that game play isn’t in a vacuum, if we come across an orc in the game then he’s there for a reason. And, if the reason is because he’s a Very Special Orc, the DM will drop those hints pretty fast but it’s much more likely that he’s a bad orc doing bad orc things and it’s going to lead to rolling the d20. The DM rarely adds an orc just hanging out and enjoying the day.
All of this makes me think is that my husband is the best DM. We once ran a campaign where we manipulated a troupe of goblins into becoming our minions. We developed an attachment to them. One died by accident. We then descended into a Groundhog Day hell that resulted in unexpected and gruesome deaths only to “reset” the same day over and over. Turned out a Nilbog was exacting revenge for the death of her goblin son. “You never even asked his name!” (True. We just called him Stabby.) And that is how a DM got a bunch of warriors to feel guilty over the accidental death of a goblin.
It’s not clear from the OP what changes he is referring to. But if WotC are opening things up, I say good for them. I kinda like the idea of alignments but I don’t agree that certain races should always have a fixed alignment. I don’t see how that serves the stories, and it seems like flexible alignments would create more opportunities without shutting down others.
D&D hasn’t had strictly fixed alignments for monsters since at least 2nd edition. The Book Of Humanoids offers a long list of monster races as player characters. The alignments generally say something like ‘Most Bugbears are Neutral Evil. PC Bugbears can be of any alignment’
So what changed?
In the modern D&D games I’ve encountered (generally in podcasts), races seem to be chosen more as a part of backstory and roleplaying, and less for mechanical reasons.
If I’m understanding correctly from what you guys are saying in this thread, then it sounds like they’re just making that official.
And I agree with those who say making things an official part of the rules rather than just an exception afforded by Rule Zero us a good thing. It means new players or others who are more inclined to sticklers for the rules get exposed to these play options.
It seems they can always choose to play the way it was before if they want, so that seems acceptably more inclusive without leaving out anyone else.
The player base changed. I was born in '76 and started playing D&D and other role playing games in '87, and over the last thirty-four years or so I’ve seen a lot of changes. Let’s start with demographics. In the 80s and 90s, the overwhelming number of gamers were white males in their teens or early twenties and I rarely saw women at gaming events or at the local game store.
I first noticed a change in the mid-1990s when Vampire the Masquerade managed to attract a significant female audience. Whereas I never expected to meet a girl playing D&D, anywhere between a third or up to half of the people in a Vampire game were girls which was just great for teenage me. (I wasn’t a creepy kid hitting on them or anything. It’s just that I was closeted RPG enthusiast in those days and it was refreshing to meet girls who shared my hobby.) These days, when I step into a game store the customer base is still mostly white males from adolescence through their twenties. But seeing a young woman or a person of color is not particularly noteworthy like it was 30 years ago.
I think the average age of a D&D 5th edition player is rather young, something like early 20s. We’re talking about people born in the 1990s and they grew up being concerned about things like representation of LGBT people, people of color, other cultures, ableism, racism, etc., etc. that just wasn’t on the radar for most of us in the 80s and 90s. And the media they consumed in their formative years was different from mine. They grew up playing games where the default rules allowed for orc or dark elf characters. In the 80s and 90s, orcs were just for stabbing.
And while I don’t always agree with some of the complaints about old school games, I do agree with some of them and overall I think it’s better that players have pushed for the game to be more inclusive. And if companies want to remain relevant they’ve got to cater to their customers.
I’d assume podcast games lean more heavily into the role playing since it’s a podcast and they need to place story above mechanics. In real play, I’d say it’s very much often the opposite with race being chosen primarily to complement the class choice and try to get that 16 or 17 in the core stat from level one and whatever other perks the race affords (extra cantrip, resistances, etc). The moment the rules leaked, it was all buzz about making dwarven wizards; trade the +2 Strength to Intelligence and ride that racial ability to wear heavy armor without low strength bonuses for all it’s worth. Honestly, the people who seemed to be asking for this most (again, in my experience) were folks who said they wanted an orc wizard and, when you pointed out that they could play an orc wizard, just slap that 15 into INT, complained that they wanted to play an orc wizard with a 16 and a 15 INT was just crippling and no one could be expected to play like that. It wasn’t about inclusiveness and sure wasn’t about racist orc subtexts, it was all about the mechanics.
Obviously, it’s going to vary player to player and table to table and there’s always the “I’m a fighter with 6 Strength who can’t hit for shit… role playing!” types or people who only want to play gnomes. But I assume those people had made their peace with “Gnomes have these stat mods” long ago and view playing around those as a point of gnomish pride.
Another thing to consider is just how fragmented game enthusiast were back in the pre-internet dark age. I thought Tracy Hickman, most famous for Dragonlance but has a place in my heart for his work on Ravenloft, was a woman just because his name was Tracy. I was playing Cyberpunk for a few years before learning that it’s creator Michael Pondsmith was an African American. Today we can just go to a website to learn about game creators or read articles. I don’t recall anyone having a problem with the Vistani in the 80s or 90s, but, where would I have heard those voices? The internet has provided people with a voice they didn’t have many years ago.
I do not think podcasts are an accurate representation of the typical role playing game experience. You will find plenty of people who say they chose their race as part of a backstory and for role playing purposes. Personally, I’ve found that race in a game like D&D typically has very little impact on the game. If someone is playing a Fighter it doesn’t matter whether they’re a Dragonborn, Dwarf, or a Halfling.
First time I was at DragonCon, 20 years or so ago, I didn’t quite understand etiquette, so I went into the big gaming room and saw a likely table and asked if it was a pickup game that I could hop in on. The players, nonplussed, said, “Sure!”
It was a dungeon crawl, fighting goblins (I think). At some point we encountered the nursery full of sleeping goblin kids. The paladin went through, slitting throats: clearly SOP for these guys.
I bounced.
That style of play definitely happens. Not my bag.
While I don’t remember anything about those -isms in the 80s, I do think a substantial part of the base was more enlightened regarding sexism than those other ones. If there were stat penalties for female characters, I don’t remember ever playing with it and it was probably one of those rules that no one actually used like Armor Class Types. And there were definitely multiple letters to the editor in Dragon decrying rules and players who were sexist. So at least it was on the radar.
Just for strength and it was less a penalty (“take -1 off your score”) and more a cap (“can’t have over a 17”). It honestly didn’t mean nearly as much because 1e wasn’t stat driven the same way as 5e is where damn near everything you do is base don your attribute scores. That said, I never saw it come up since female human fighters who rolled a 17+ plus during character creation weren’t something that came around much. Like the oft-mentioned Harlot Tables, it was less something that impacted game play in 1983 and more something to point at forty years later and talk about how much we’ve all grown.
We has 4 or 5 female players off & on since around 1975, and most of them were pretty bloodthirsty too.
Ah the old goblin baby thing. Sometimes called a “Paladin trap”- if you dont kill them, they will either starve or grow up to become a menace. But killing babies is wrong. If you let them live- also wrong.
I just dont put stuff like that in my dungeons/games, but I do put Monsters that talk and deal with the PCs. Sometimes they are conning the players, sometimes helping sometimes just there as a diversion.
Now I did briefly play with real “murderhobo” platers, we had two guys, maybe seniors, maybe college, the rest of us were all ages. Those two just killed everything. DM “You come upon an old man, dressed in rags at the crossroads, he is leaning on a stick, and gesturing to the players”. Dickheads “We kill him and loot the body”. A merchant wont give a discount- “we kill him”. ete etc.
I wont play with that.
While I try not to look at the past through a rose colored lens, I don’t recall a lot of complaints about characters like Ellen Ripley, Princess Leia, Sarah Connor, Captain Janeway,* or even Princess Amidala in the 80s and the 90s. While there are certainly many valid complaints about the latest Star Wars trilogy, even when it comes to Rey, I feel a lot of the criticism directed at the character were predicated on her being a woman.
What do movies have to do with games? In recent years I’ve seen similar vitriol directed at non-white male characters in games. For Warhammer 40k in particular, there’s a fairly popular Youtuber who heavily criticized their line of children’s books and seemed quite perturbed because the main protagonist is both a girl and her skin has an abundance of melanin. He has a whole video dedicated to whether or not Ultramarines can be black, and while he begrudgingly admits they could he emphasizes that they would not have African features. And like I said, he’s a fairly popular Youtuber when it comes to Warhammer though I think his star has fallen in recent months. I don’t know if this is just a reaction to a more visible contingent of women and people of color in gaming or to cultural changes in general.
But we certainly had our own problems back in the day. Some of the depictions of women in the art of D&D weren’t all that great. But then I find that there were plenty of depictions of women in fantasy art that wasn’t all that bad. But I don’t think it was all chainmail bikinis like some people remember it.
*The complaints about Janeway I heard revolved around her helming what was the worst Star Trek series at the time and not related to her sex.
I played a paladin, long ago, and my DM did exactly that to our party - except it was kobolds, I think. After some hemming and hawing I decided we ought to kill them all as our least-bad option, but I didn’t feel happy about it.
In What Exit’s SDMB LOTR AD&D campaign, we actually persuaded some orcs to stop being evil and to move away from settlements of Men. Much better outcome.
Exactly how good roleplayers should handle it. Excellent RPing there. Discuss the pros & cons.
Yeah, same. I play to have a few hours of heroic high fantasy escapism and throwing in a room of goblin babies isn’t edgy or mature or deep or whatever, it’s just the GM jerking you around. Or, at the very least, it would be obvious that you’re in a full encampment/settlement well before you get to the “lol last room is goblin babies what do you do? What do you do??” gotcha.
I don’t doubt that there’s a million terrible players, a quick dip into r/RPGHorrorStories will teach you that, but I’ve led a charmed life where my own horror stories from the game are fairly mundane and don’t involve the usual “horror player” tropes.
Right! Exactly! And there are real-life people who have that literal worldview about certain groups. “If you see a __________, there is a possibility that they’re a Very Special _______, but it’s much more likely that they’re a bad ______ doing bad ______ things.” Nobody is saying that D&D is racist or that it makes people racist - at least nobody that I would take seriously. Just that the game contains problematic narratives that are disturbingly similar to actual problematic narratives, and that it’s bad for those narratives to be reinforced anywhere - even as subtext.
So you take more concrete steps towards removing that narrative from the game. Maybe you’re right and the new guidelines still leave some problematic stuff; but that’s also okay, so long as the conversation continues.
I hope you don’t feel like I’m attacking you personally or even the hobby in general. D&D is a beloved pastime and I still have a d20 once used by my father, which I save for Very Important Rolls. Nobody is a bad person just because some aspect of their life intersects with institutional problems, because those problems are everywhere and in everything. The conversation is just about recognizing it, pointing it out, and acknowledging when small steps are taken.
It’s kind of like a single family deciding to stop throwing trash out the car window on the highway. The proportional impact of the change has no bearing on the value of the decision itself.
And now I’m done, I promise. 
Funnily enough… in the game I’m running tonight (stupid online D&D just barely scratches the itch but it’s better than nothing), the players have been tasked with getting a McGuffin from what was described as an abandoned frost giant outpost. They are in no way equipped to fight frost giants and the NPC questgivers warned them to avoid engagement at all costs. So they head to this place and see that it’s definitely abandoned. The doors are forty feet high and scrawled with various versions of “keep out” and “death for all who enter,” but the place is obviously long abandoned. They walk in, hear booming voices arguing about an evil ceremony of some kind, whether traps and wards have been properly laid, and so on. The party wisely goes into sneak mode and eventually finds the source of the noise - a bunch of blue-skinned creatures sitting around a table. After some initial description on my part the following (truncated) conversation happens.
Player A: Wait a minute - how big are these guys?
Me: About ten feet tall.
Player A: The frost giants were described as how big?
Me: 25 or 30 feet tall.
Player B: does some sneaky stuff to get a better vantage point What exactly are they doing?
Me: They’re rolling big stones with runes on them and arguing about the wording in a book of some kind. One of them appears to be eating entire beehives stored in a dirty bag.
Player C: …are they playing D&D?
Player D: …guys, we just crashed a middle school sleepover.
One NPC to another: HOLD ON I HAVE TO UPDATE MY CHARACTER SCROLL BUT I STILL DISAGREE WITH THIS RULING.
So the last session ended with them coming up with a plan to scare the shit out of the kids by making the abandoned building seem haunted. My vague expectation was that they’d talk to them and I had a plan for that, but plans never survive contact with the party. I also had an idea of what would happen if the party shot first and asked questions later, but I didn’t seriously expect them to go that route. They’re a good crew.
Right. And they are objectively wrong. On the other hand, saying it about orcs or goblins or gnolls or hill giants or red dragons or vampires may well be objectively correct. Because none of those things are real and they only exist however you decide they exist in your game. If someone can’t separate [real life group] from goblins and vampires, the issue isn’t with D&D, it’s with them being an idiot (or just using it as an excuse).
Not at all. Yours isn’t a unique position, it’s just one I disagree with.
However, there’s a couple things being conflated here. Whether or not orcs are jerks is one topic and whether or not orcs get +1 Strength scores is another. While I disagree with “Saying ‘Orcs are Jerks’ is bad”, I find “Orcs get +1 Strength is problematic” to be more eye-rolly and, as much as I object to anything (again, relatively speaking), it’s the homogenization of the various fantasy races into “Humans with Hats” that I find lamer. The former is fluff and the latter mechanics and, if I’ll spend mental calories worrying about anything, I’ll commit them to mechanics since each game fluffs differently anyway and “Well, in MY world, halflings are actually evil and goblins are misunderstood!” is as old as the game itself.