Dungeons and Dragons rolls the dice with new rules about identity
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
Changing race to species has not been a concern for myself, my players, or those I know. We're more concerned with improving the mechanics and speed of gameplay, balancing martials and casters, improvements to the core books, backgrounds, bastions, and impactful changes.
We want more variety at the table, not just everyone choosing the same optimized builds from RPGBOT. I think Crawford in the article puts it well: “People really wanted to be able to mix and match their species choice with their character-class choice. They didn’t want choosing a dwarf to make them a lesser wizard.”
Back in the day when I was playing tabletop RPGs, the standard GM approach was that meaningful advantages must be balanced with meaningful disadvantages. Encounters where the characters had to face their weaknesses were supposed to be common. It didn't really matter if your characters were optimized as not.
Character builds as a concept were just some video game nonsense that had no place in actual role-playing games. At least among the people I used to play with.
It takes a good DM to balance a campaign, especially for years. And I suspect most DMs are pretty bad (I'm guessing, haven't played in over a decade now).
I haven't played D&D in, like 30 years, but I don't ever remember those types of game mechanics being involved. If they are now it would make for some great potential combinations. If a dwarf gets -1 INT and +1 CON, but certain types of spells use CON as a modifier then it creates an interesting combination.
Largely the same, I acknowledge it's not being done for me and definitely doesn't impact me. Shrug (or eyeroll if so inclined) and move on.
> “People really wanted to be able to mix and match their species choice with their character-class choice. They didn’t want choosing a dwarf to make them a lesser wizard.”
Ok, but IMO nobody has more fun by doing 13 damage a round instead of 10. The consequence of chasing optimality is it simply leads a DM to tune encounters appropriately.
> We want more variety at the table, not just everyone choosing the same optimized builds from RPGBOT.
So instead everyone is using the same optimised builds but with more species variety? Does that really improve the state of games in your experience?
I sort of want disparate builds, playing to aptitudes. Balancing spell lists and feats etc to make lots of viable builds is a hard problem to solve though (I've not played the 2024 rules so have no idea how well they've done?).
Who is it being done “for” if not for the people who play this game? Don’t you have the same stake in changes to the game as anyone else?
For the changes people care about, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) publishes "Unearthed Arcana" or pre-release versions of content (e.g., bastions, the Monk class, a new Druid subclass). People will playtest the new content and WotC surveys players to get feedback. Based on the feedback, they may make additional changes or even scrap some things entirely.
Everyone is represented by the same race by the rules, just like the left wants, humans are just one race all with the same abilities. Even all genders have the same stats, so dungeons and dragons was the progressive utopia from the start where every human has no biological differences stat wise.
The only ones who see an issue are those who thinks that black people are orcs, but black people aren't orcs black people are humans just like white people.
Many changes to media franchises and games are being made in an effort to attract a new audience, or with the belief that it increases appeal to the "modern audience". Emphasis because this is the buzzword phrase that gets used quite a lot to justify changes that are generating some amount of controversy or negative attention. The problem is that "modern audiences" may not actually exist
There's the age old role play vs. roll play argument. With a good DM it shouldn't matter but if you're running some prebuilt campaign then it might lead to unexpected struggles.
At 7 int are you smart enough to even have learnt to cast cantrips?
I do think that there is a difference between playing a suboptimal combination and dumping your classes primary stats such that you're largely incapable of doing things...
There's a line between suboptimal and non-viable.
For example, a fighter which maxed charisma with appropriate feats for being admired/respected etc. Just a super stand up lovely guy. Super personable, gorgeous smile, good form, rarely seen him fight I admit - but he looks the part! But I do put some points in Str (Dex if finesse) and Con. Otherwise you probably can't actually be a fighter, you won't match the class descriptor (imo)
Now, a good DM can house-rule around a lot of these things, but designing rules for balance is quite hard, as is learning new rules, which is why these systems are a thing in the first place, so ideally the rules should by default allow this kind of creativity and flexibility without creating large power imbalances, both between players and between players and monsters (also something that's more difficult than it looks, hence things like challenge ratings and pre-built adventures).
(I'd argue the fairly high variance of D&D combat also causes problems here, both for fun and balance, because it's no fun when a powerful character completely bricks in a fight against a lesser opponent because of cursed dice, and it also makes it harder for the DM to get useful feedback to balance encounters)
I don't see anything innately wrong with a human who can breathe fire, or has wings, or a dwarf with four arms, so long as you're willing to RP it. It does seem silly to say that no, it's actually against the rules, your dwarf can't learn magic.
Are they archetypes for builds? Why are they archetypes for builds? Is it problematic if they are archetypes for builds? Are they just flavor for settings and character backgrounds and other storytelling needs? Should they be? Why have "races" at all and not just "backgrounds"?
It's an interesting ongoing debate.
It shouldn't limit you from using magic, and it doesn't, and that is good.
But, sometimes you will want to do things other than just casting spells (especially if you have run out of spells or if there is anti-magic preventing casting spells), so you can decide if you want to be good at one thing, or good at other things too but perhaps not as much.
But it does limit how good you can be at magic since you can't get as high magic stat, hence lesser wizard.
They did some work to balance it, but really species have never been the biggest balance issue, it's always been class stuff, or magical vs. martial issues, or the fact that ranger is thematically cool if you like LOTR, but sucks mechanically compared to other classes.
But this is D&D in the end it's all up to the DM.
What they're really saying, as always, is 'why does inclusivity have to be opt-out instead of opt-in?'
Maybe people are angry over all this judgmental crap? Orcs are so dumb that they weren't a PC class before, you just fought them as monsters, its like saying its racism to call bears dumber than humans.
If you judge people like this, expect them to judge you back and call you names as well.
> What they're really saying, as always, is 'why does inclusivity have to be opt-out instead of opt-in?'
The game is still not inclusive, the people who wanna play as a bugbear or a mindflayer still have to do opt-in etc. There will always be monsters that the players cannot play unless you change the entire game to the core.
There is no reason Orcs should be a player race, them doing that is just because they see Orcs as black people, so who is the racist here?
While technically, the player race is "half orcs", in practice I haven't seen virtually anyone differentiate between the two. It's just "the stats for players who want to be orc" and "the stats for orcs as enemies".
It's quite common for people to play as races like bugbears or mindflayers. It's more a limitation of being able to create player stats for every humanoid monster.
I've never seen a critic of how D&D handles race argue that orcs are meant to represent black people. I think you might be reading into things.
Suggesting that grizzy bears as a category are bigger and stronger than humans isn't controversial, Neither is a hulking half orc, until now apparently?
Racial stat bonuses were never a thing anyone cared about. It’s the easiest thing in the world to change if a DM’s setting called for really smart orcs, or strong lumbering elves.
Spending so much time thinking about the political implications of racial bonuses in a game where the DM gets final say anyway is just some sort of advertising.
We’re talking about it on the front page of HN after all.
I agree that you should be able to make suboptimal choices if you wish, but I think that shouldn't be the issue.
Your character will be more than just a dwarf and a wizard (otherwise the game will be too simple), in addition to those things, so if a dwarf will be more likely to have an advantage at something else that is independent of classes, then you can have that, and still be a wizard, even if a "greater wizard" lacks what your character will have.
(There might also be the possibility, that if dwarf wizards are not very common (for whatever reason; there are many possibilities, depending on the story), then someone might not expect you to be a wizard so might be possible for some surprise if you are disguised by mundane means.)
Previously a Dwarven wizard was just a really bad choice, and you'd be noticeably less powerful than say an Elven wizard so no-one ever played one.
Now an Elven Wizard for instance has a few bits and pieces that might make them a bit better, but still leave a Dwarven Wizard as a viable choice.
This makes the game far more interesting in every way: players have more interesting builds, more character choices, and can play whatever combinations that they want.
If you can manage to forget about the answer key lurking on every forum, the core experience of finding synergy, figuring out a build, balancing resistances is surprisingly fun.
> Why interview solely the grognards?
And, I know it's a rhetorical question, but the answer is:
> So the article can serve double duty as a Nat Geo-style jungle expedition, providing glimpses of unwashed tribespeople to intrigued middle Americans.
When D&D players are described as grogs, Eurotrash has won.
That being said, I don't really understand the push to remove species benefits from games (not just D&D) and instead just do a name change? It makes sense that in a fictional world that different species would have their strengths and weaknesses just for biological reasons.
Or story reasons like in Mass Effect where the Asari live to around 1000 or more (I don't remember exactly) and have a very natural benefit for biotic abilities.
I understand the concern that some of these traits were originally racially fueled, but it makes sense for there to be differences of some sort.
For example, a Barbarian gnome or Half-orc wizard can be fun choices from a role playing perspective, but suboptimal in combat or gameplay. Removing species-specific ability score increases lets players create non-standard combinations without weakening the party.
Not to mention that D&D rules aren't carved in stone. I've never encountered a DM or D&D group that wouldn't allow players the leeway to create a barbarian gnome or half-orc wizard with their desired stats, if that was important to them.
The changes WoTC made are bad, and make everything less fun and more generic. Their intentions were good, but what they've done really isn't helpful or good at all.
> The changes WoTC made are bad, and make everything less fun and more generic. Their intentions were good, but what they've done really isn't helpful or good at all.
As you said above, the DM and table can agree to whatever constraints they want for the game, including using the old ability scores.
However, I don't like class-based systems so much, and I prefer skill-based systems. Instead of selecting a character class, you can select which skills you want (including narrower skills; I think the skills in GURPS are not narrow enough) and how much of each one.
But see also my other comment for other details.
> The rules should not prohibit from making such selections.
The new rules give you _more_ freedom to choose a suboptimal build. You can even play a Gnome with low intelligence under the new rules, something that was impossible before.
Such things seems excessive; a suboptimal choice probably would not mean that you cannot cast spells at all if your character is a spell caster, but you shouldn't need to be a spell caster if you do not want to.
There is the things you can do regardless of race/species/class/etc, anyways. In my experience, many of these things are significant to the story (I had done such things more often than class powers, actually).
Illogical. Without racial differences there's not such thing as a non-standard combination anymore. The entire flavour of a wizard gnome was that it was not an expected combination because it was suboptimal.
This change removes variety and is thus bad.
In 1978, TSR produced "Advanced Dungeons & Dragons", the first of many attempts to clean-up and rationalize the game's basic system. It appears to me that this is where they first factored out race (i.e., [human, half-elf, elf,...]) as a separate PC characteristic.
From my cursory search, Tolkien seems to have often referred to dwarves, elves, and whatnot as "peoples" and used the word "race" for different subgroups of those. He at some point wrote (in a letter, not in the stories) that that at least elves & men were able to interbreed on ocassion, and thus were technically the same species. But he was mainly interested in the drama around half-elves, and left open questions about dwarf/elf and hobbit/ent pairings for later explorers...
The character creator does not let you roleplay as a tree, bacterium, moss, fish, vole, etc.
It lets you roleplay as an anthropomorphised, sentient, sapient, language-using creature, with minor visual differences - a human, an almost-human that looks like a lizard, an almost-human that looks like a cat, an almost-human that looks like a bird, an almost-human with hooves and horns, a short human, a very short human, a tall human with pointy ears, a dark-skinned human, a blue-skinned human, a green-skinned human, a purple-skinned human, and so on.
If you're Commander Shepard, you're going to have sex with all of them. I suspect the progeny, if any, would be fertile. Claims that these are distinct species that all colonised different parts of the galaxy are a thin veneer. True "alien" life would be hyperintelligent shades of blue like in HHGTTG, hiveminds like in Ender's Game, or the amazing fauna in Scavengers Reign. They would not be a human actor wearing a Cornish pasty, even if you say they're Klingons.
I put it to you that your character creator choices are all the same SPECIES, and their differences are minor genetic and cultural groupings driven by geographical isolation, which we call "ethnicity" or "RACE". And all the stories you make up playing RPGs are, in fact, human dramas. You're pretending that the story tensions aren't just ethnic tensions, but that's what they are. And when you kill orcs, drow, revenants or other "baddies", you're actually just killing stand-ins for humans. Humans that your ethnicity/tribe of humans looks down on (if you fight non-sentient monsters or plants, I'll let you off with that)
Species, like race and all other human created categorical systems have edge cases, exceptions and oddities and mostly importantly different definitions!
There are many examples where species definitions get thrown out because biology does crazy things. From the all female salamander species which interviewed with other species, to the multi organism man-of-war jelly thing floating in the ocean, biology does crazy stuff that will forever confuse us humans.
Nowadays, in my line of work I now think of nucleotide distance between individuals... But even that metric is troublesome.
In D&D is there a history of how the different races came to be? Did they have some sort of diverging point from a single ancestor?
Races can interbreed, at least in most European languages. You can't have half elves if they were separate species.
Like dogs for example, the dog breeds are called races in many languages for obvious reasons. So race is something that is less different than species but still noticably different genetically.
Really jogs the noggin.
WotC is good at churning out paper but it's certainly in the interest of that particular entity's continued existence. Debatable if it is for anyone else but I'm sure that anyone consistently playing simply gets dragged along with the trend of "the new shiny".
This got a lot of flak. But I can see why they did it. Many such cases of DMs, especially the game store kind, using DnD as their own sexual assault simulator. RPGHorrorStories has a lot.
Wouldn't any potion, including potions of healing, be considered "drug use"? Howabout excessive drinking by dwarves at a tavern in the canonical DM party formation ritual?
And in any case, yeah! This is why you talk things out in a session zero! If a player at a table is an alcoholic, they might not want to play in a campaign where other PCs regularly binge-drink. It doesn't necessarily mean the other players aren't allowed to do this, it might just mean that this isn't the right table for the player, or it might mean that the DM has to scratch out "alcoholic" as a trait for an NPC and replace it with something else.
And how would I find a group of people whose playstyle is compatible with what I'm looking for without actually talking to them?
Because they're so incapable of considering other people's feelings that they think the only time anyone ever does so is because someone cried to HR about something and HR is making you sit through a meeting to cover the company's ass legally, and not because anyone actually cares about how they make other people feel.
It's good to be able to explain these things, and IMO a lot of D&D players aren't comfortable being the first one to say that stuff without an "HR" exercise to give them permission.
If I say something and that scene plays out, things are understandably ugly.
If I don't and find myself uncomfortable, that is on me to manage, nobody else at the table.
How are these things so damn hard for people to understand?
All that was true when I played years ago. People would intro the game, have chat about stuff and then get into it. I recall having tough conversations, and I recall just being a good human to the other humans as a given.
I don't get the discussion today.
Maybe being pre cell phone has something to do with it all.
Where and when I came from, the idea of having to do a "might trigger" rundown did not need to happen because of the dynamics I put into my prior comment.
How about this mess:
Say one chooses to not talk about a dead father confident the game will play out fine. Basically omit the father in the pre-game rundown of potential triggers.
Then the scene happens, and major trigger!
Now what?
Seems to me one falls back on the very basic rules above and acts accordingly.
Nobody else would be blamed. How could they?
The result is the talk didn't solve anything, which us my point and lack of understanding.
Another POV:
DM runs a scene that is a major trigger for someone. Bummer.
Pause game, help that person, right? Take a bit and figure it out? Do they want to end play? Is there something any of us can do? Etc...
Blame and shame aren't the answers. Being a good human is the answer.
Seems like someone is trying to write be a good human rules. Ah well. They tried I guess.
Or perhaps you say "I don't like it if X" when you really meant "I am going to have a full blown trauma flashback if you surprise me with X", and they think that you meant what you said, and it's something they would do with all the maliciousness of hanging a "boo!" sign on your front door one day.
The goal is, I think, to recognize that a lot of people are bad at being the first one to bring things up, as well as a lot of people being bad at "reading the room", and set up an explicit normal structure to reduce the friction of doing so.
(Whether they succeeded or not is a different question, but I think that was the goal - to try and make it feel more normal and part of the structure and expectations, and thus have lower friction to bring things up a priori and in the moment, rather than people feeling like "I'm the problem" if there's no explicit moment for it and they have to ask.)
Yes, you can't make people be good people, but you can try to provide tools to make it feel more like the normal part of setting up and running your game to leave explicit room for them to say something. More or less the difference between saying "you can call us after filling out the paperwork and have us add manual edits to what you filled out" and "you can just include a form 412 and check the boxes for which things apply, and fill out an other box at the bottom if it's not covered".
In the case of someone being malicious, many just would no longer choose to play in their campaigns. Incentives to NOT fuck with people seemed plenty high enough.
Apparently that is no longer the case.
I try to be a member of group (d): "I suspect that might be a problem, so why don't we talk about that?". This behaviour is very annoying, but it's clearly better than groups a, b or c. (In practice, though, I'm usually a member of group a, occasionally a member of c, and probably group b about loads of stuff I've never thought about.)
I'm not the type of person who wouldn't say something in the moment, but I've had a lot of friends who were in longstanding campaigns well past the point of the people involved dreading going to sessions because some interactions had turned the group dynamic into a shitshow, and some conjunction of the social ramifications of being the one to blow it up and sunk cost fallacy meant that they kept going even as it poisoned their friendships.
Neither am I. Perhaps the game value is different these days.
No game is worth my friendships. Would have to speak up, then follow it through and adhere to the golden rules to treat people right while it all gets sorted out.
Anyone not on board with sniffing something that toxic out is just going to have to go their way, best of luck, etc...
Maybe these things help people. Hope so though I do feel it all is a sort of dodge around people both being more direct in their interactions, which absolutely do include benefit of the doubt being given where necessary. And having just a bit thicker skin, that being derived from "we are as offended as we think we are" basically mandating everyone managing how they respond to potential offenses.
There just are a whole bunch of ways to do that which leave others the outs needed to bring the conversation to a reasonable place and more of us need to use them more of the time.
Put another way, the people burning an hour trying to figure out who is the biggest asshole deserve to have that conversation.
Maybe that just isn't so important?
Thanks for an interesting exchange everyone. I will read final responses on my way out.
Do you skip this step when it's your closest pals who can handle a gory mature story? sure!
Is it good to have a system for others to use or in public settings? Definitely.
You're suggesting that the person in that scenario should either suffer those feelings in silence or should just keep trying new groups until they find one that just coincidentally doesn't bring up those topics?
Or someone who was sexually assaulted should keep that to themselves, and if discussion of the topic comes up in the game and makes them uncomfortable they should just leave and go find a new group without telling anyone why?
Are you suggesting that you could just say "hey, these are things that bother me so I'd rather not be part of the game if these topics are going to come up", and either the DM can exclude those topics, or they can refuse and the player can go somewhere else? Because that's exactly what is being discussed.
Lay out your ground rules. If there's no way to reconcile, go elsewhere, but it saves people getting blindsided halfway through the game and then having to deal with it while surrounded by other people and potentially feeling very vulnerable.
This is why these types of initiatives do far more harm than good. They hide problems rather than address them.
How do these initiatives hide these problems?
D&D is supposed to be a collaborative effort, "My way or the highway" isn't how a table should be run.
"Don't play with them" strikes me as impractical advice compared to communicating. If you're 6 months into a campaign as opposed to establishing a protocol to be able to say "hey this is kinda much for me, could we take the gruesome details of this offline?"
Communicating a tone for the setting early would have also helped.
May be your only social group. Usually people who are this far down in the nerd / geek hierarchy don't have that many friends anyways. It usually implies you already failed most of the ideas human society prioritizes anyways. Often means the only people to hang out with are other nerds and rejects. NY Times (frankly really mean) chart on the subject from 2008 [1]. Course, what do you expect from the company that wrote this article being discussed?
This (somewhat) less mean (although still about the same) chart [2] has approximately the same view on the situation. You're already down with people who watch children's shows and go to Ren Faires. Probably the type that sit around on New Years Day arguing about Dungeons and Dragons annoying PC rule changes rather than having friends to party with.
[1] http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/03/09/opinion/09opa...
[2] https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi...
Listen, your game, your rules 100%
But I will say, the Free Parking house rule is why most games of Monopoly take so freaking long. (And if you're fine with that, then that's fine too!). The fees and fines are meant to take money out of the player's pockets and drive them closer to bankruptcy so the dang game CAN end.
Unfortunately, it's a game that just feels bad. You either play as-is and it feels bad to go broke. or you house-rule and the money keeps circulating until someone builds all Hotels and completely obliterates someone when they land on the third and fourth-edge properties
Another way to interpret this would be that people are becoming increasingly comfortable with telling people they're not comfortable with something, and leaving when others at the table are refusing to take the feelings of others into consideration.
> We're talking about playing a boardgame with friends, do we really need to have a trigger-warning session?
D&D isn't always played with friends. Not that many of my friends play D&D, or are interested in; most of the people I've played with were strangers to me when we first began playing.
> Every time I hang out with my friends should we update our daily list of no-no words first?
You likely have this list in your head already for your friends; it's not necessary to explicitly rehash it because you've built a relationship with these people, and you know not to brag about your awesome trip with your dad in front of someone who's dad died last week.
But when you're meeting new people, you don't know what they've gone through. That's why it's better to be explicit at the start of this.
Yet another way to interpret this is we’re increasingly catering to narcissists who think that their personal feelings and sensitivities should override the norms and conventions of the group. Your example highlights the problem. You don’t need to tell people to tip toe around someone’s dad having died because that’s a generally recognized social norm.
That’s what it comes down to. People want to just be able to target their behavior to a general, objective social norm, without customizing it for myriad individual sensitivities. That’s a good approach. Don’t do anything that transgresses the social norm. Don’t be offended by anything that complies with the social norm.
No, but I do need to tell them that my dad died in order for them to know. Otherwise, the GM just might bring my PC's dad up out of the past, and kill him in front of my PC again.
That's all that "the form" or Session Zero is. It's explicitly laying out things that you may be sensitive to, so that the rest of the group can continue to behave in that general, objective social norm you're talking about. It's a way for them to let me know that their dog died last week, so that I know that the first combat of the first session shouldn't be fighting a bunch of guard hounds.
But herein lies the problem. There is no general, objective social norm that covers the range of topics necessary.
Social norms are regional, cultural, familial, situational, etc. If you were to optimize for some universal standard, the result would be pretty boring. Think: “what would be appropriate in a corporate workplace?”.
Learning to navigate this as a group seems like a rather reasonable and necessary social skill for everyone involved. People who bristle at those with certain sensitivities seem to be masking sensitivities of their own and would prefer to just avoid a potentially uncomfortable conversation.
And I’ve gotta be blunt: many gamers (tabletop and otherwise) are often all too eager to blow right past norms or are unaware of them completely, which leads to recommendations like the above being helpful/necessary.
I’m pretty sure people happily played board games together in the recent past without these conversations.
Now that we're laying out these kinds of guidelines, maybe the people who legitimately don't understand why that's bad will stop and listen to what others have to say, and the ones who don't will be showing that they're deliberately ignoring how they make other people feel.
Personally I find it useful when I first meet someone because I can mark them as someone to avoid. Life is far too short to voluntarily walk on eggshells all the with emotionally crippled people who are constantly looking for things to be offended about. This goes double for when it comes to playing long sessions of D&D or any other sort of free-form game.
Not only did new management make these ridiculous changes to the core structure of the game, they recently threw Gary Gygax (who had more creativity and talent in his pinkie finger than any of them) and other founders under the bus. Fortunately nobody is prevented from getting old editions of D&D and playing a worthwhile game, or simply moving to GURPS or Runequest.
Personally I find it useful when I first meet someone like this because I can mark them as someone to avoid. Life is far too short to voluntarily walk on eggshells all the with emotionally crippled people who are constantly looking for things to be offended about. This goes double for when it comes to playing long sessions of D&D or any other sort of free-form game.
Not only did new management make these ridiculous changes to the core structure of the game, they recently threw Gary Gygax (who had more creativity and talent in his pinkie finger than any of them) and other founders under the bus. Fortunately nobody is prevented from getting old editions of D&D and playing a worthwhile game, or simply moving to GURPS or Runequest.
First, it's not a "boardgame." It's a Role Playing Game. It's much more unbounded than a board game and you are actually playing. Not just rolling dice but acting and imagining and adding to the experience. You play your character and you decide how that character acts.
> do we really need to have a trigger-warning session?
You could have one. Generally cover strong NOs and decide on hot-topics that often make people uncomfortable:
racism/slavery, romance/sex, phobias, etc.
Then setup a system to halt if anything new comes up.
People throw around "trigger" and "safe-space" like they're above feeling anything but sometimes it's just being considerate. It's not just about language but situations.
We play D&D to have fun. For some, that means "leaving politics out of it" but for others, those "politics" impact our actual daily lives. To pretend they don't exist or to have to interact with them in a game can be just as un-fun.
> And when does that end? Every time I hang out with my friends should we update our daily list of no-no words first?
Now you're being facetious. You communicate like people. That's it.
If someone was recently mugged in real-life, you probably wouldn't have their character get attacked by a rogue. If someone had arachnophobia, you probably wouldn't drop down the RPG-cliche giant spider. If someone has to deal with real-life racism, you could probably understand why "knife-ears" wouldn't feel fun. OR maybe they're all okay. It's all about opt: opt-in and opt-out.
> oupled with that we are increasingly unable to fluidly deal with differences this creates as they arise.
I think that's a YOU-issue. My friend group is a complex group of people, and yet we find a way to have fun every week with D&D while also respecting all members of the game.
(Also, it's far more common that you will be doing this with a group of people you've only just met, but in general I think such games should lean more towards the lighter side)
Monsterhearts deals with unhealthy sexual relationships at its core. Night Witches deals with sexism at its core. Bluebeard's Bride deals with straight up sexual violence at its core. These topics are heavy and its worth having some systems in place to help people navigate them.
This is especially true with con culture, where people are likely to play ttrpgs with total strangers.
There have been a kind of gross number of threads I've seen where women join a group, make their character, and then spend the entire first session having their character abused, belittled, sexually assaulted, impregnated, etc.
Worth noting that not all D&D groups are among close friends; sometimes you get invited to a group because you're looking for people to play with and your friend group (if you have one) doesn't play. No different than joining a frisbee golf team, except with a much greater chance of a bottom-tier caliber of people.
Players do the same. Try to run a somewhat normal game, and your players will purposely try to act in some of the most reprehensible ways imaginable just to try to force you to run their disgusting fantasies.
But I'm having a hard time imagining this specific example. What would be an example of political ideology from the GM that you'd want to block?
Examples elsewhere in this comment section like eg sexual assault I can easily see how that would both come up in a game and interact with player experience to make them uncomfortable in a way they may not want to have to explain in the middle of a session.
I’m sure the player in question wouldn’t have minded an old timey theater production of all men playing women. Drag shows are pretty modern and I’m sure entirely took them out of the setting, just as if the DM had the bad guys have Uzis and AK-47s.
I wouldn't say I find it triggering when someone says something about men, just annoying, but I can imagine someone who is more easily upset feeling that way.
That being said, if you have friends willing to say things that they know upset you, you probably need better friends, not a card.
That's like, not true at all. The X card is exactly for that purpose, the GM doesn't get a special exception from the effect of the X card.
As a GM, if a player reaches for the X card for any reason I'm obliged to stop and listen.
I'm curious what exactly you mean by "political ideology" in this context. Can you give a concrete example of the kind of thing that makes you uncomfortable?
But the big thing is this: it's not your fantasy game. It's the shared fantasy game of you, the other players, and the DM.
In the context of an X-card discussion, that's hilarious.
"Touch the X-card, but only if the group agrees on why the X-card was touched. Otherwise, find new group"
turns out the real x-card was the group itself :)
I’m glad they fixed that obvious shortcoming of the game. I’m sure too buy the new edition materials now.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/30/arts/dungeons-and-dragons...
Eventually, as more and more players quit the game the gender differences were dropped. Before that I used to play some female characters to get access to the op mage bonuses. But damn, there were so many creeps who thought i was a "real" girl.
The insistence that acknowledging that women are weaker than men is some sort of bigotry is deeply misogynistic. If fantasy women are just as strong as men, then real women just need to work harder to live up to the standards of men. If women in fantasy are as strong as men, then women in reality aren't being allowed to see themselves in fantasy.
The repeated justification that women in a fantasy world shouldn't resemble women, or "...in a game where you can shoot fireballs, travel through dimensions, go back in time, and resurrect the dead..." is silly. Women in a game can also get magic powers that make them stronger. Erasing female physicality is erasing women, and replacing them with men playing women.
Preventing someone from playing as a strong warrior woman based on incorrect assumptions about female physicality would erase women who actually exist.
The parent I was replying to suggested that someone wanting to play a character modeled after her would somehow be erasing women. But denying people the right to play a character modeled after a real, live woman would erase the real, live woman who actually exists in the world we live in, and all the other women like her.
Gina, and any female bodybuilder for that matter, are of course stronger than your average man, but they are again, "nerfed" by biology, if they had the testosterone production of a man due to being male, they would be considerably stronger, maintain better muscle mass relative to the hours they have put in bodybuilding.
In the in game implementation, a high strength female charcter would be an impressive rarity, demonstrating great strength, despite biological hinderances. This correctly acknowledges their uniqueness, and brings their other traits to the table (considerably higher in int or "smarter" than other strong characters)
The OP was suggesting that a role-playing fantasy game should not allow strong warrior women characters because that would somehow not allow women to fantasize about being the character because women are weaker at the very extremes of strength so a strong female character is really somehow just a man.
But as demonstrated, strong females actually exist in the real world, and the sex-based strength differences are irrelevant unless the GM deliberately creates a scenario in which those differences matter, which would mean a scenario requiring a character to bench more than 450 pounds, squat more than 600 pounds, or deadlift more than 700 pounds (all of which are under the women's world records).
The argument about protecting "female physicality" is just a MRA argument that was soundly rejected by D&D because it has no basis in the real world, and thus no basis in a fantasy world filled with dragons and magic.
I've said multiple times that strong females exist in the real world, and that players should be allowed to role play as such in D&D if they want. The D&D team, and the community as a whole agrees with that. It's only a small portion of the internet that seems to be upset with allowing this sort of freedom to role play.
But she is still weaker than the strongest men. In the game she can put points into strength and be stronger than almost all men, but a person who plays a man and also dumps everything into strength will be even stronger.
So she is still represented in such a system.
A tired argument in gaming and fiction in general.
Whatever your fictional world, it needs to have an internally consistent ruleset. Typically these worlds are modelled after our own and only the differences are highlighted, so the assumption is that unless explicitly mentioned, the rules are the same as on Earth.
For example, you can't use the existence of magic in a fictional world to argue there may as well be aircraft flying around too.
The strength of women vs men is no different, it's not like some Earth deity has arbitrarily decided that females are to be weaker. There are a lot of biological reasons why that is so. If these are not changed in the fictional world to be able to support the existence of equally strong females, then your world becomes less internally consistent.
And yes there are actual aircraft flying around in many fantasy worlds.
Usually everyone forgets until vision and sight matter (boss fight, in a fog, or down to the wire).
I should really start running more sessions in a dark place, where stealth matters.
Clearly a lot of people like this change—and it's a great change! Yet the authors didn't feel like talking to any of those people, instead repeatedly coming back to Musk's whining. Great journalism 10/10 no notes.
Unless you have evidence, you could argue anything. The evidence is that it's selling really well with these rules.
Sales data is objective evidence. 'It could be' are just some bytes on the Internet.
I'm fully in agreement with this statement. This is like human group dynamics 101, which underlies all social interaction. You figure out what sort of people you are playing with, how familiar you are with each other, and what sort of fun you want to have together. If unsure, err on the side of tameness. This has many-many dimensions besides the ones about taboo topics mentioned in the article.
Handling this through a form feels incredibly insincere and performative, and insinuates that people (including me) are not to be trusted. If you don't trust the people you're playing with, you shouldn't be playing in the first place.
That being said, this is 100% manufactured controversy. It's virtue signaling from Hasbro (possibly ESG dollar sign motivated) as well as pearl clutching from right wingers. How tabletop works is you ignore all the stuff you don't like or don't care about. I have played with quite a few parties, some of them consisting of people who were complete strangers at first, and also quite socially heterogenous.
I have never seen such a form in my life, and yet despite that, none of our campaigns turned into the pen-and-paper version of Blood Meridian.
Yes. And you figure this out with a new group by using the new tools during a session zero :)
If you're playing a long campaign, you're playing with friends and you probably already know each other well enough to know what flies and what doesn't.
I just don't see how it's a good solution for anyone, but all human interaction is messy, and the problem they are trying to solve definitely exists, so they couldn't have just ignored the problem, so they offered a one size fits all solution that's ideal for probably no one.
Thankfully individual DMs and players are free to keep WOTC's "liberal" politics trend out of their own gaming experiences if they wish. Everyone is free to use their own terms and house rules to tailor the base game to taste.
But it came with stat hits. Half-elves were more like humans than elves, etc.
And from what it seems, they're separating stats from race/species. Which is probably an overall good. I'm going to use the older terminology as this was the issue with the older game. If you wanted to be a wizard, you should be an elf. If you wanted to be an elf, you should be a wizard. And things like that. Certain classes just worked better with certain races.
But now, if I want to be an elf barbarian, that's better supported. I'm not fighting the game rules to play the role I want to.
I do like how they’ve opened up the species in general. I have a character in a campaign that is essentially based on my cat, a tabaxi rogue with impulse control issues.
There's a part of me that understands where the pushback on these changes is coming from (some people are narcissistic and could abuse these tools), but ultimately it seems like a good thing to have in the book for groups that aren't already friends. If you don't need em, just don't use em.
As an aside, I would encourage anyone that's just getting into the hobby now, not to give WotC any money. There's a ton of other RPGs out there that are just as good if not better and aren't accompanied by grotesque profit maximizing. But either way, just make sure everyone is having fun.
> “Races” are now “species.”
I think neither word is really "proper", but "race" is shorter. (I am not really either for or against this change, and I don't really mind this, much.)
They mention that Paizo preferred "ancestry", and that does seem better to me than iehter "race" or "species". (However, I think it is not really that much of a significant issue, anyways.)
> Some character traits have been divorced from biological identity; a mountain dwarf is no longer inherently brawny and durable, a high elf no longer intelligent and dexterous by definition
I think that is not quite right. On average, a mountain dwarf might be brawny and durable, but individual characters should be allowed to be difference from averages in many ways; it should not require you to be average or above average according to your character's race/species/gender/etc, because you can have more diversity. But, "diversity" should not mean that such biological traits do not apply at all; that is the wrong way to do it.
Also, such things as "intelligence" is not so simply explained by a single number anyways; it is more complicated than that. Strength is less so, but still can be not so simple, too.
(An example which is separate from the ones mentioned above: If your character has hands like scorpion, then there are bonuses to some things and penalties to other things, and you might be able to grapple by hand as though it is bite, and some tasks that would normally only need one hand will now require two hands, etc. So, many traits will have advantages and disadvantages. And, if you have wings to fly then you can fly; if your character is small then can fit into smaller spaces but cannot easily reach the stuff in the high shelf (nor attack a taller character's head as easily); etc.)
> Robert J. Kuntz, an award-winning game designer who frequently collaborated with Gary Gygax, a co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, said he disliked Wizards of the Coast’s efforts to legislate from above rather than provide room for dungeon masters — the game’s ringleaders and referees — to tailor their individual campaigns.
I think they are right; the game should be individual. You can decide if you want to use any rule variants, etc; such a thing is common enough anyways. WotC cannot (and should not attempt to) control everything.
> In addition to its species, each character in Dungeons & Dragons is assigned a class such as bard, druid, rogue or wizard.
I would prefer a skill-based system, although D&D is a class-based system. (This is not a complaint; people who do like a class-based system might prefer D&D.)
> “People really wanted to be able to mix and match their species choice with their character-class choice,” Crawford said, adding, “They didn’t want choosing a dwarf to make them a lesser wizard.”
Even if it is not the best combination, it should still be a playable character. Sometimes you might want a suboptimal choice, but it is not only that. There should be other things that can be defined as well, such as skills, etc. You can have the advantages and disadvantages of each, in order to make up the character like you like to do it.
(Another example would be: A wizard that likes to carry a lot of spell books should have enough strength to carry them. Having good strength is also helpful in case you run out of spells and want to fight by hand, but then you should also need a skill in fighting by hand; this is why I like skill-based systems.)
> There was also a tabaxi, a creature with the feline appearance and night vision that one would expect of a species created by the Cat Lord. “He’s a tabaxi adopted into an elven family,” said Kyle Smith, who created the character, Uldreyin Alma Salamar Daelamin the Fifth, for this campaign. “He’s also a sorcerer — the magic is innate to that. He’s deciding between who he is and what he was raised in.”
This is something that you should be allowed to have. In this way, you will be tabaxi (and therefore, have night vision), but you had learned elven things (e.g. perhaps elven languages). And, is also a sorcerer (so you can cast spells). So, that is good that your character is not only one thing. However, you should not have to decide between them; you are all of them, isn't it?
> Smith added, “If being a tabaxi didn’t matter, then who cares?” “He’d just be a fuzzy elf,” Cutler chimed in.
It would seem that the rule changes would make that problem. I agree it is no good and I explained above.
The worst they did is the LoTR Magic The Gathering card series. They managed to create black Aragorn and asian Gandalf. And they turned Goldberry into a fat woman. I'm sorry but that's simply not what the book depicts.
It's not done to unite people. It's not done out of good intentions. It's done because there's a very woke political agenda behind this.
It's not harmless: it's history rewriting. It's propaganda at work.
Don’t forget, but this is all made up. None of this is real, buddy.
It came from a different time. If you want change, write something new, you know?
For witty comments, I suggest an observation on how the response to "we have invented highly-artificial racial categories so we can maintain a system of structural oppression" is "members of all racial categories are equal, so let's make sure we hit quota in our mass media!" – though you might prefer something about cultural appropriation, or reading comprehension (maybe a dig at the US literacy rate, if you're feeling edgy and snobbish). A good witty comment reminds you, and those around you, that our problems are not their problems: to look at the problems we actually have, and try to address those, rather than export (harmful) solutions that address (admittedly, worse) problems we don't have.
Racism in the UK is bad enough, without adding US-style racism to the mix as well – and most reactionary responses to US-style antiracism are US-style racism. Don't play the game.
Now, that spin may be good or bad, from your point of view, and that point of view may be affected by what resonated with you about the original work (I think it's often a bad idea for someone to be working with some source material they fundamentally dislike, which seems to be quite common in adaptations nowadays), but that's an opinion as opposed to an appeal to some sense of moral importance of preservation of some particular elements of the original.
The only people who seem to be bent about it are the basement-dwelling incels that fueled things like Gamergate.
Honestly, the "species" thing has bothered me for years. I'm not sure I'd agree with divorcing physical traits completely, but that's easy enough to house-rule, as is everything else about the game. I feel sure that anyone getting upset is doing so performatively, not because it's actually a problem.