Alright I'll bite. What did they do to it?
this post was submitted on 09 Mar 2025
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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.
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.
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.
or homo sapiens and homo neanderthalensis
the species thing isn't exactly what you said. there are 3 things that can happen that i remember:
1: most cross-species breeding results in nothing.
2: some, like horses and donkeys, or tigers and lions, results in babies that will grow up normally except that they can't breed themselves.
3: and rarely, like in grizzlies and polar bears, the result is a baby that will grow up perfectly and still be fertile
interbreeding in DnD would be the 3rd option.
@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
bro basically everyone outside of africa has neanderthal and denisovan heritage, our ancestors had TONS of kids with other human species.
Good ol' reliable undead. Trusty skeleton-to-lich scale of complexity fits every scenario. Can be evil, good, or mindless as needed.
The best lore is lore made at the table with the players. The rest is just gm inspiration.
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?
I disagree. I think having a base to work from is helpful, both to players and DMs.
For example I don't want to create a pantheon of gods. I might want to create a few unique gods within my setting, and if they conflict I'll change some rules accordingly, but I want something to build off of. Similarly if a player wants to create a paladin or cleric they can just pull from the standard list.
Also if the official lore is fun, it's more fun to build off of. I'll enjoy reading it more and I'll enjoy using it.
Absolutely agree. I set a game in the real(ish) world once, so it was a setting where everyone knew the base "lore." It was so nice! I could reference things, name-drop countries, and introduce old grudges without having to exposition it all. People just got things. We've since done enough games on the sword coast that that works too, now.
Slightly surprised I didn't get more disagreement.
A prebuilt system has one benefit: the players and DM come to the table with a shared set of expectations. This is crucial for things like adventurer's league, where the players are all strangers, more or less engaging in a tournament without winners, each using the others to get their RPG rocks off, and can be useful to skip the mechanical design level of play-making. It also makes sense for a corporation to try to hit that lowest common denominator to maximise their audience.
However, I maintain, if no one at the table is creative enough to want to world-build beyond that, they might as well all just stick with consumer media. Those who don't feel the drive to create aren't suited to DMing, and a table without a DM is a hetero orgy without a woman.
I'm also surprised and disagree again.
I'm running a campaign now and jmit takes place in the Underdark. Guess what, they worship Lolth and are pretty evil. I've got some Duergar down there too. I took ideas of the Drow city straight from the Into the Abyss module. I didn't use the exact city, but it was my base of ideas.
Additionally I've taken ideas from the Acquisitions Incorporated book and made the item "Orrery of the Wanderer" a key part of my story. The reason I did that was because I found it to be an interesting item with interesting lore.
Look at it like Legos. If someone handed you a big crate full of Legos you could build something really cool. In fact you could build anything.
However if, instead of a big crate, someone handed me three medieval sets and a ninja set. If I build them exactly as instructed, I still get a cool set. Sure I would have a hard time making a WW2 fighter out of the medieval and ninja sets, but that's ok. And if I tweak the sets a little I still get something that is my own.
Sounds like you have a table where the worldbuilding has a big place. That's awesome but I really feel that worldbuilding is only one, arguably secondary, aspect of RPGs and not even the only one where creativity expresses itself.
Even if we stay focused on the world building aspect of the game, when playing in a pre-defined setting, you can still find plenty of uses for your creativity to fill the gaps that will present themselves as your game unfolds (that is if you're not playing at a table full of FR nerds that read every single novel and campaign setting out there several times over).
Plus, many come to a point in life where it's complicated to spend more than a few hours each week on TTRPGs. I'd rather spend time fleshing out characters, scenes and encounters than coming up with a pantheon of gods, most of whom will never come up in game. Sure, worldbuilding doesn't have to imply heaps of prep ; you can improvise a lot on the spot. But I've already got enough shit to track and remember before/during/after game time.
Personally, I also feel much more confortable GMing in a world that's well fleshed out. Sure, I can do it myself but it will simply take me down way too many rabbit holes and will proabably end up with me delaying sessions because I was too busy writing the grand history of that neighborhing kingdom the PCs probably won't visit rather than doing proper prep.
Not to mention that there is a lot of creativity to be expressed when you have actual constraints, constraints like an existing world for example. And if that world is too bland or consensual to my taste I'm always free to spice it up as I please, because you know, creativity.
Certainly, RPGs are first and foremost a game of creativity and imagination but I don't think that the want to worldbuild is, on its own, a really good metric of how creative you are, nor that prefering pre-defined settings makes people wholly unworthy of the hobby.
And I want to add that if the fact that no women showed up at your hetero orgy ruined it for you, I think it's because you clearly haven't been creative enough.
Succinctly, I would say any GM who says 'I don't want to spend my time thinking about the in-game world' is just someone who would be happier as a player but is taking one for the team. In the metaphor, he's the guy at the orgy squeezing a fleshlight between his thighs and wearing a wig so his buddies can pretend. He's trying to be creative with what's lying around. However, everyone would be happier if he wasn't in that position. They're all just too desperate to go elsewhere. I mean, it's really nice of the guy to do that for his friends, but it's not really what they showed up for.
You seem to be implying that I said or meant to say that. No way have I advocated that GMs should not think about the in-game world or that a GM that doesn't think or want to think about the in-game world wouldn't possibly be better off as a player.
Please don't move the posts too much. There is a huge difference between simply thinking about the in-game world and building your own from scratch. Using a pre-defined setting does not mean that you cannot mull over it or adapt it to your tastes and needs, possibly investing significant time and creativity, possibly more than what some GMs invest into their homebrew worlds.
Is world-building a worthy endeavor to undertake or advocate for? Certainly. Does world-building generally demonstrate significant investment on behalf of the GM (and of the players if they participate)? Certainly.
Does world-building from scratch automatically make your game better? I've seen enough people coming in with their rather bland and boring homebrew world that just rehash plenty of overdone tropes to seriously doubt that (tough I'm certainly not arguing that pre-defined settings are automatically better either). And even if it did, one of my points is that there is a lot of others things, arguably more important, that contribute to the overall quality of a given campaign.
Are you a 'bad' GM unworthy of the title and of your friends time if you don't build your own world? This is just a form of patronizing gate-keeping. You are certainly entitled to prefer homebrew worlds, to express no interest in playing a campaign in a pre-defined setting, to have beef with any or all existing settings, or generally finding that world-building is the only thing you really like about ttrpgs. But not only is the diversity of approaches, foci, and overall nature of tables a wonderful thing about ttrpgs, I strongly believe we can leave players decide for themselves whether or not their GM is 'suitable' as you put it, and this based on their own criteria. In a world where GMs only have a finite prep time during sessions, I find it rather unfair and a little rude to imply that they are running shitty games if they choose to rely on preexisting material to help them run their game.
Besides, GMing relies on a huge skill-set that extends far beyond the ability or desire to world-build and far beyond what most human beings can master. Like I said, you can certainly decide which skills a GM needs to have to be 'suitable' to run a game for you. In practice, it is just not tenable to expect any GM to master all of them, so while you can certainly argue that worldbuilding is a fundamental part of ttrpgs, I find it unbeckoning to automatically dismiss any GM that choose to focus their efforts on other aspects.
For one, designing NPCs, encounters, etc. is worldbuilding. You wouldn't say a painter had stopped painting because they switched from a 3" brush to a 000. This part is just a semantic misunderstanding.
It's not really a matter of good or bad. I'm not saying 'good DMs worldbuild and bad DMs steal others' creations.' I'm saying 'Why buy an expensive kit just to make a dorodango?'
You can clearly recognise how much work it is to play/run a TTRPG. (scheduling, planning, worldbuilding, session prep level worldbuilding, player counseling and conflict resolution, game mechanism/in-world effect translation in both directions, mechanical balancing, other things I'm not thinking of just now) The whole point of doing all that work is that it grants freedom.
'Worth' is absolutely a subjective concept but I say it's pretty silly to do all the work it takes to play, only to play something locked into preconceived notions, and especially notions that are designed to be lowest-common-denominator to the general population by someone who isn't even at the table. You can disagree if you like, of course, but it's not a matter of right/wrong.
Very strong agree on this.
Old world of darkness lore slapped though
There was a bit too much of it, but that actually was the reason I included the 'even the ones I like' part. Old WoD didn't pull its punches, and generally was not middle-of-the-road.
This is probably why Greg Stafford, the guy most responsible for Runequest and Glorantha's deep and wide lore came up with his sort of prime directive: "Your Glorantha Will Vary". He presented his version of the lore but wanted people to re-write it to their hearts' content.
I'm gonna need some context
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!
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
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.
Doesn't mean people can't give and receive recommendations!
Right, but I don't think calling people children for playing one game over another is the way to do it.
No, that's true.
I'm over here enjoying Changeling: the Dreaming.
Branch out and play all kinds of systems!
Would love to, but I don't have that amount of time or money.
Play GURPS, like a real adult.
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 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.
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