All this D&D racism talk just keeps confounding me. Like this is a fantasy world and we're talking about actual races here. This is Homo-Sapiens compared to Neanderthal, not dark skin color and light skin color.
I mean, I guess from IRL commercial optics POV, it makes a lot of sense to maaaaaaaaaybe backpedal a little on the "Your mom got raped by a literal anthropomorphic manifestation of evil and denizen of hell-equivalent, so biologically you're half evil from birth" aspects while normies are buying your overpriced and essentially uncopyrightable shit courtesy of the Stranger Things and the current zeitgeist.
But it is funny as fuck that someone posting about how transfigured and absorbed they are by the depth and breadth of the world building and mythology purely on the little details of the character create gets a "YEA BUT WHAT HAIR CUT CAN U GET?" response.
Those fuckers deserved forspoken.
here's the problem: by highlighting it as an issue instead of just ignoring it, they are now fucked either way because it's problematic no matter which way they do it
the way they're proposing to do it is to say if you are half-something, it's just cosmetic -- pick one of your two ancestries and that's where you get your stats and abilities, and for flavor you get to say you're also half-the-other-thing
but real life players who are actually half-something are like "uhh...so I'm half-Japanese half-white, and you're saying actually deep down I'm just one of those things? I can pretend to be half-white but really my stats are all Japanese? what the fuck is THAT about, what are you saying here"
and the answer is that D&D ancestries are really more like SPECIES than races, so none of it says ANYTHING about real-world racial makeup, but they've said it's the same thing so they've made their bed and have to lie in it
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/12hh45h/how_are_we_actually_feeling_about_the_removal_of/As someone of biracial descent I have always enjoyed the struggles of the half races not quite fitting into either parent race perfectly but also celebrating the creation of something new and identified with it. It has been this way since I was 11 and rolled up my second ever character, half-elf rogue. I know this is not a necessarily uncommon opinion but I also know the other side has some valid points. There still exists the option of simply choosing one parent race's racial features and going from there but I dont care for that.
What the fuck. As a person of mixed ethnicity the removal is offensive. What happened to being inclusive and representative to everyone? I'm Def still gonna use half races.
As always, the answer was more options, and they chose to remove options instead. I don't particularly CARE that half elves are gone, but I would've liked it replaced with rules for hybridizing.
And no "pick the stats of one parent" is not that system, that's just a statement that let you can fluff race a as race b, which is worthless because you could already do that.
I'm a bit disappointed about it.
I don't particularly care about any specific half-race being in it, but I want better rules for mixed heritage characters. In fantasy books and media half-elf characters have always represented a meeting point of the two groups, going back to Tolkien style "Nah just pick one, you can only be one or the other" feels a bit lame to me.
The dumb thing is that many of the "races" aren't races at all but different species. Dwarf/human hybrids existed before and were called Mules, and were sterile. Other races like Dragonborn were considered different species.
I assumed the lack of human/gnome hybrids meant they were different species as well.
Tieflings are already fiendish hybrids; why aren't they getting rid of those?
Because sexy demon girl fanart is free advertising. They're more popular than the catgirls and elves.
