Order of the Stick
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There are racial traits in elves and hobbits, they aren’t human and presumably have their own genetics.
Humans have no significant difference between our artificial category of race or nationality. You can find a short Dutchman and a tall Honduran, maybe unlikely in the population as a whole, there is a wide range of variation between individuals. And that dominates any so-called racial trait.
In older editions of D&D there was no special difference between humans other than natural (and supernatural) variation between individuals. You can be black in D&D, but hail from the Kingdom of Cruski, perhaps even speak the Cold Tongue as your native language. You would stand out among the fair skinned Suel, but it is not hard to justify that with a backstory. Perhaps you were picked up as a baby after your family was slaughted by the cruel raiders in the nearby Hold of Stonefist.
Nothing about your skin color gives you any advantage or disadvantage, but each culture in the world might treat you differently. I suspect the Cruski wouldn’t have a lot of preconceptions about outsiders and would be more likely to judge a person on their actions than on their skin color. While another nation might have some biases or even systemic racism that could get in the way, I generally wouldn’t bother with that in my games. I’d rather play a fantasy world that is different from the real world, not one that is exactly the same.
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The point here is that the game traits aren’t just based on being different species, but on culture as well - e.g. languages spoken. This is just about dividing the traits based on biology and those based on culture, the kinds of things that any reasonable DM would have allowed for specific instances, e.g. someone playing an orc raised by humans, only they’re providing a consistent set of rules for that, as well as for characters of multi-species ancestry.
At least some fantasy games already do that - and either assume the different culture’s contributions to “traits” aren’t significant (compared to species and class) or actually do have different traits/skills/etc. for different cultural backgrounds. I think Pathfinder, for example, now takes the latter approach.
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the drow?
I am just now getting around to playing Skyrim for the first time. Seeing the Falmer presented as a race of vile evil creatures, created by being enslaved underground… I sure wish more storytellers could be bothered to learn the difference between an antagonist and a villian.
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Or these guys: Eldreth Veluuthra | Forgotten Realms Wiki | Fandom
Murderous, anti-human (sun) elf supremacists. Definitely an evil bunch of elves.
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Both Drow and Orcs were a lazy shorthand for evil or villainous characters or peoples, over the years Orcs have somewhat been shifted away from that but Drow have usually remained as “evil elves”. Though i have played some PC games where the bias against Drow from other nations was pointed out, which i appreciated but did little to challenge the status quo.
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Check out the Edges and Hindrances in the Savage Worlds system. You might get some inspiration there…
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Sweet thanks, i’d been mulling over homebrewing something myself but would hate having to start from scratch. I’ll look it up
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Oh FFS. Seriously? Colonialist? Racist?
In fantasy games, there literally ARE different races. Call 'em species if you want, if that helps you get over the word “race.” As we use “race” in our modern world, it refers to culture. But scientifically we are all a single race: homo sapiens sapiens. (technically sub-species of homo sapiens, but ‘race’ is a scientifically applicable term there. Tho ‘sub-species’ is a better term, as it’s more precise)
In fantasy games, humans are the only homo- anything. Elves are not some sub-species of homo-sapiens. Nor are orcs, dwarves, hobbits … whatever. They are COMPLETELY different species. And, as such, YES! They have legit different physical traits and attributes. And cultures. Orcs ARE evil. They were created from elves TO BE EVIL. Specifically in Tolkein’s world. It’s not “racist” or “culturalist” or “species-ist” (?LMAO WHAT?) … They ARE literally evil.
Any good GM worth their salt will happily allow people to play any race raised in any culture amongst other races, as long as the player can come up with a good backstory to explain it. It makes for more engaging and enjoyable role playing.
This is PC white guilt culture gone to an extreme. Good grief.
Next up: Clouds are racist because they’re mostly white, but when they’re dark that indicates “bad” weather.
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Funnily enough, I think Paizo (the company that makes Pathfinder, noted upthread for having made this change official in their core rulebook a few years ago) actually runs workshops to this effect at Paizocon? I’ve never been though. I’m pretty sure I remember them giving talks about what they do to try and prevent cultural appropriation, etc.
That is kinda what Pathfinder does. Unfortunately they’ve kept a lot of the bad stuff too. Your ancestry (race) determines basically a set of feats you can take. It also provides a suggested alignment “xes are often chaotic neutral” and possibly some skills like low light vision. They’ve fixed the specific problem of half orcs, but troublingly they’ve kept the skills-determined-by-race thing. Goblins are inherently stupider. Gnomes are inherently weaklings, etc.
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Paizo has been doing this for years already.
Pathfinder 2e has quickly become my favorite system for a number of reasons unrelated to this article, but their team of creators has made a point of being all inclusive for quite some time now and are light years ahead of WotC.
5e was great and I love that it brought simplicity and role playing back to the table. PF2e has taken the great things from a number of systems and added quite a few innovations of their own to make what I feel is by far the greatest RPG system I have ever seen.
Now if Paizo could just get their editing team to the same level of greatness…
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Um. No.
Drow ARE evil. They are extremely racist against anyone but Drow, except perhaps they’ll tolerate wood elves a bit. Murderously racist even. Arguably worse than white supremacists in our real world.
Good grief.
Orcs are, classically, created from elves. Created by whom? EVIL. Specifically Morgoth in Tolkein’s world. They were created to be evil. They are evil abominations. Morgoth is evil. I don’t think anyone would dispute that. EVERYTHING he created was to be in service to evil, and to him.
That’s just how it is. Trying to “erase” that for PC white guilt reasons is just ridiculous.
A couple of things with this:
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D&D and the many other systems are not connected to middle earth. In fact if you know your tabletop history you’ll know that halflings are named halflings specifically because Tolkien’s estate sued TSR over this. They’re heavily inspired by them but they needn’t be tied to his origin story.
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Whatever their origins are that doesn’t change the fact that in an awful lot of works orcs culturally often take on the role of murderous mongol hordes or uncivilized african savages. Hell even if we bring it back to Tolkien, are his especially bad and evil orcs black, or was that just an invention of the movie?
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Thing is, neither drow nor orcs are real. They’re fictional creatures, so they way they are is because some human decided so. Entirely apart from whether they are problematic or not*, you can’t use their in-fiction characteristics to argue for their out-of-fiction qualities.
*) My personal attitude is basically “It depends; they don’t bother me, but I can see why others would be bothered,” combined with “If they change this, it won’t hurt me or take away my RPing options, and it might make things more comfortable to others, so why not?”.
Orc skin color seems varied, like many things about them; IIRC, they’re variously described as sallow or (especially the Uruk-hai) black-skinned. That’s implied to be more corpse-black or “scorched black”, though, when you compare it to the descriptions of the Haradrim who are described as having skin tones in various shades of brown. I think the movies got it pretty right, with different orcs going from extremely pale (Azog, the Great Goblin, Gothmog the Lieutenant of Minas Morgul) to extremely dark (most of Saruman’s Uruk-hai, many Mordor orcs), but generally looking rather inhuman and gruesome.
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Just because it is doesn’t mean it should be.
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Drow were written to be that way, they aren’t real you know. Having the only version of black Elves be a default boogeyman/stand-in for murderous evil mustache twirling villains is lazy writing and racist. Wizards of the Coast themselves said that the material is racist and outdated so they are changing it. Arguing with me about it doesn’t change the reality that the game maker knows what they created is problematic.
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In Tolkein, orcs were created from elves by Morgoth to be his evil servants.
So yes. Orcs are evil. They are twisted mockeries of elves.
D&D (and other system) are pretty directly related to Tolkein’s work. At the least VERY heavily inspired by it. It’s arguable that fantasy RPGs wouldn’t exist without Tolkein’s work.
First off, Wizards of the Coast has changed D&D so much that it barely resembles the original TSR games. In no way, shape, or form did WotC “create” D&D. They bought it.
Secondly, DROW ARE EVIL. Period. In the same way that white supremacists are evil. They hate all other creatures (except wood elves, as I mentioned)
There are certainly SOME drow that don’t feel this way. Fine. But, as a culture and race, that’s simply the way they are. Ditto with orcs.
BUT HEY! Let’s just water everything down into some bland recipe of PC white guilt culture.
It’s interesting and telling that the vast majority of the complaints about this are coming from white folks. Hmmm.
