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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   38193 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 12, 2022

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How We Talk Past Each Other: understanding how the war over the future of Dungeons and Dragons is the entirety of the culture war in a nutshell

In a thread on Reddit Motte at least six months ago, I became enlightened to the fundamental difference between drag and crossdressing. The latter is fundamentally serious, a personal choice of expressing something important about one’s inner self. The former is a form of playing, specifically, performing a role meant to be absorbed as part of a fiction. It is part of the larger genre of performance known as clowning, which can be described as colorful character archetypes performing bold actions with obvious consequences for an audience. Clowning also includes professional wrestling, F/SF cosplay, Muppets-style puppetry, and political ads.

The same split is seen elsewhere in fiction; genre fiction is considered non-literary because it typically involves stereotyped archetypical characters walking a well-trod path in a specific type of world: Hopalong Cassidy, Zorro, Sam Spade, Batman, Spider-Man, Elric of Melniboné, and so on. I used words containing the root “typ” three times in that sentence because typing is the core of genre: any individual is an instance of a type.

By contrast, novels focus on individuals as beings-in-themselves, and might use types as something they struggle against. So do graphic novels, explorations and deconstructions of characters in a more realistic or nuanced way, even if they have types. They are more akin to the arthouse spirit of crossdressing than the clowning spirit of drag: the sitcom without the laugh track, the invisible and silent audience who appreciates instead of enjoys. And these two spirits cannot exist in the same world.

That brings us to D&D. Gizmodo/io9 published an article about taking biodiversity typing out of the stats of D&D playable species.

D&D is an RPG which is built on the clowning spirit of types and power levels, using fantastic biodiversity to tell adventure game stories. It is a core nerd culture property, enjoyed historically by oppressed people with autism to imagine being powerful people who don’t just fit into their milieu but who thrive as adventurers and heroes.

This little corner of the culture war turns RPGs from Fun With Action Figures to Serious Representation.

There are two separate issues with fantasy races here:

  • biodiversity of stats, which I won't discuss in this comment

  • biodiversity of alignment, which I will

Since most campaigns are technically about a bunch of murderhobos slaughtering their way to the BBG the DM needs a way to give mass murder an acceptable coating. Aggressive fauna and animated corpses can only take you so far, at some point you might want to start killing sapient opponents. And how do you justify the killing of sapient opponents? Making them evil is the simplest choice.

Most realistic "evil" opponents exist somewhere on the scale of "voluntary choice <--> victim of circumstances". The further an opponent is to the left, the easier it is to justify killing them. The further it's to the right, the more hoops you have to jump through: making them attack you first, turning them into faceless mooks, even letting the players derail the story by trying to redeem them.

D&D tried to avoid this whole conundrum by making whole races "inherently evil". Not even just "culturally evil", which would place them firmly in the "victim of circumstances" corner. Kobolds steal, orcs raid and mindflayers enslave simply because it's in their blood. You can't fix them or reason with them, extermination is the only solution.

Of course this leads back to the classical decoupling vs contextualizing problem.

Contextualizers say, "can't you see how this kind of portraial of races as inherently flawed is problematic? Would you play a game where you are a SWAT team gunning down Blacks because Blacks are criminals?"

Decoupling grogrnards reply, "But we aren't playing that! We're deliberately playing a group of fictional heroes in a fictional world killing fictional sapient creatures that are inherently evil to avoid any unfortunate implications and have fun without worrying about the ethical side of the game!"

Contextualizers say, "But you can't avoid unfortunate implications! By repeating the same claim about the nature of evil in every fictional world you play in you demonstrate that you are comfortable with this claim, that it you've internalized it, that you wouldn't mind if the real world worked that way."

Decoupling grognards reply, "What do you want us to do? Play campaigns where we have to investigate the violations of tribal land rights of orcish clans that caused their raids on human settlers?"

Contextualizers reply, "Well, this still sounds kinda problematic, with you transforming indigenous humans into non-humans. I bet you have some offensive stereotypes about feather headdresses and peace pipes in your DM notes"

Decoupling grodnards say, "You know what, why don't you fuck off and let us play the games we want in peace?"

Contextualizers say, "That's it, I'm outing you on Twitter. Prepare to get cancelled!"

Umm... They give experience and have loot. That justifies killing them enough. Why complicate things.

Thank you, Belkar Bitterleaf.

Now that Order of the Stick has entered the CW thread, I'll say that I always think of Xykon's legendary "power equals power" monologue to V whenever someone on here discusses conflict theory or institutional capture.

Weirdly enough, it was the invasion of my hobby-space by these kind of contextualizers that made me way more sympathetic to complaints about cultural appropriation. People with absolutely no connection to "nerd culture" suddenly decided D&D et al were cool but that I was playing the game the wrong way and my fun was problematic. Or, more to the point, that I was problematic and that they would keep my game but I could fuck right off and wasn't welcome any more.

If they try to make you fuck off, and esp. if they had the actual power to kick you out of the activity, then that might better be called cultural appropriation than what often gets attacked under that label.

If some white American wears traditional Chinese clothes or makes tacos or learns traditional African dances, or teaches yoga, or whatever they aren't *appropriating *from anyone else. The do what they want to do, and anyone who did it before is still free to do so.

But to the extent they could take over a campaign or a gaming venue, and then effectively kick the people that where there before them out of it, that could be considered appropriation.

It is strange how the the author glosses over the diversity of opinion among those quoted. Someone who thinks that changing the word “race” to “species” will do the trick has a very different critique from someone who thinks that neither the character’s species nor its culture should impact character creation. When Paizo¹ published Pathfinder 2 it used the term “ancestry” instead of race, but the article is wrong to say that it dropped racial ability modifiers altogether. It did change them to make playing against type less disadvantageous.

Over the years I have come to a particular view on the purpose of RPG rules: their primary function is for the gamemaster to communicate to the players how things work and what is possible within the game world; they establish a shared understanding. The GM is free to violate the rules, but he should do so selectively to preserve that shared understanding.

So if someone separates race from culture, I want to ask, “How does that fit your setting?” If it communicates the world better to the players and lets them situate their characters better within it, that’s great! Maybe your elves have several very different cultures, or your capital city has a cosmopolitan culture shared by the men, elves, and dwarves who live there. But if your elves are a reclusive people clinging tightly to their shared traditions, rules that let the player create an elf character from a dwarven culture are going to lead to confusion and frustration.

I think the article fundamentally objects to the givenness of these game mechanics for the character. That explains why the author is concerned not only with race (in either sense of the word) but also with multicultural characters or a 1976 Dragon magazine piece (!) trying to model sexual dimorphism. The player chooses the character’s race, sex, culture, background, and class, but the character only chooses the last one² or two. If you believe that real-world people are fully self-defined beings, I can see how that would rub you the wrong way.

[1] For non-gamers, Paizo is the company which publishes Pathfinder, another branch of the D&D family and a competitor to Wizards of the Coast’s current, fifth edition of D&D.

[2] I wonder how the author feels about sorcerers who inherit their powers through a bloodline, though D&D 5e leans into this less than D&D 3e did and far less than either edition of Pathfinder does.

My view is the rules developed to cover that one smartarse in every session who argues about doing something that shouldn't be permissible for the character on grounds of "Well, the rules don't say I can't do it!"

Having only skimmed the article, is the problem with the alignment for races, or the inherent statline stuff? Shadowrun also has traits and statline differences for each of the different races you can play as, even as recently as 5th Edition (dunno about 6th), but I've never heard anyone complain about that. It can't be because Shadowrun's playerbase isn't big enough to contain the same kinds of players as those who make up D&D's modern audience; I've seen 6th Edition talked about in the official Discord server for Lancer (an RPG by a developer whose politics are very much in line with modern SJ) and in far from any negative tone, IIRC.

Shadowrun has so much math and crunch that it effectively gatekeeps the worst of the complainer type. But Shadowrun also confronts that issue directly. Orks aren't just slightly dumber - they give birth in litters of 6-8, physically mature faster, and have shorter lifespans than humans, much less dwarves or elves. They're a Doyalist-designed underclass race, and it sucks and isn't fair, just like the rest of the dystopia. What are you going to do about it, chummer?

It also helps that Shadowrunners are mercenary terrorists who treat corporate security forces like D&D adventurers treat ogres. The average player is probably more likely to get along with the ork street gangers.

Shadowrun also has traits and statline differences for each of the different races you can play as, even as recently as 5th Edition (dunno about 6th), but I've never heard anyone complain about that.

Unfortunately people do complain about this. I've witnessed more than one thread on /r/shadowrun where people debate whether it's racist to have orks and trolls get a penalty to mental stats (because supposedly, those races are supposed to be a stand-in for black people).. It's Reddit, so perhaps to be expected given the general demographics of the site. But I think the only reason more pressure hasn't been brought to bear on Shadowrun is its relative obscurity compared to D&D.

The thing is, with Shadowrun, any person of any ethnic background could be a Troll or a Dwarf.

Sure. And in D&D, none of the non-human races are human and thus don't map onto human races. That doesn't stop people from inventing excuses to take offense where there is none.

The problem is that DnD has not accepted the modern progressive line on race - that it's completely arbitrary and has no impact or meaning in any way that might possibly be contorted into looking like something in the real world.

Kimchi said he was disappointed to see the word ‘race’ used, especially since it’s something that a lot of people have complained about and sought to remedy. “It seemed like the most basic change they could have done so that everyone could move on, but they didn’t go that far,” he said, describing the shift from ‘race’ to ‘species’ as “low-hanging fruit.”

And even if WotC did change from the word race to the word species, Isa said, that would still be a problem, “because there would still be a lot of racial coding.”

The people pushing for this change are not inherently wrong. Changing the term "race" to "species" would probably fit better with modern usage of those terms. But their goal is not to see DnD modernize its vocabulary, it's to effectively see their own beliefs reflected in the media they consume.

But their goal is not to see DnD modernize its vocabulary, it's to effectively see their own beliefs reflected in the media they consume.

...And to ensure that people with other beliefs can't do likewise.

Oh, what a fun article. Really digging deep to explain why orcs are still Problematic.

I was reading, yesterday, about the origins of races and classes in old-school D&D. Not First Edition: I'm talking about BECMI, the weird parallel branch that emphasized different parts of the game and would eventually inspire the "Old School Renaissance" in tabletop roleplaying.

Ability scores in this game were rolled 3d6 in order without such conveniences as point-buy. Then the player picked a class from the following list:

  • Fighter

  • Thief

  • Cleric

  • Magic-user

  • Elf

  • Dwarf

  • Halfling

There's no strict limitation on which class you want to play, but there is a soft one: the Prime Requisite. Characters with a low Strength advance slower in the Fighter class. Critically, this turns out to be the main way in which stats affect gameplay! No scaling skill ranks (because skills don't exist yet). No suboptimal damage-per-round between characters of the same level. No influence of race on ability! Your character has merely chosen a job which for which they may or may not, by the vagaries of fate, have the natural aptitude. Insofar as players wanted to optimize their advancement, sure, you'd see strong fighters and clever magic-users. But it was a different time, and that character was liable to die by level 3 anyway, so why not play what you want?

Fast forward 40 years and there are reams of rules and oceans of options. In real life, people train in skills, so we've got to have those. And in Tolkien, the Orcs are strong and cruel, but the Hobbits are nimble and good-hearted, so lets....ah, hell. Racial essentialism snuck in like a kender in a curio shop. God forbid Wizards actually make any changes while trying to preserve game elements, since that's apparently an invitation. Suddenly the time is right to pen heartfelt thinkpieces and complain that the changes aren't good enough.

Perhaps the author needs to play some OSR and get back to those roots of unrestricted dungeon-delving potential. I hear Lamentations is pretty fun.

Then the player picked a class from the following list:

I wonder if the classes in South Park: The Stick of Truth were a shout-out to this.

Meanwhile in the 1974 pre-AD&D Volume 1: Men & Magic races were class restricted and had hard level caps on those classes with special abilities to compensate in odd ways like Dwarf magical resistance. Basic introduced races as classes to simplify some of the awkward book keeping, especially with things like Elf multiclassing. "Hobbits are nimble and good-hearted" isn't some add-on, halflings are restricted to only the law alignment while men can take law, neutral or even chaos which none of the demihumans can take. It's a pretty quick read, 36 pages for what would become the Player Handbook. Volumes 2: Monsters & Treasure and 3: The underworld & Wilderness Adventures are essentially the Monster Manual and Dungeon Masters Guide and equally short.

Perhaps the author needs to play some OSR and get back to those roots of unrestricted dungeon-delving potential. I hear Lamentations is pretty fun.

Or play a proper point-buy system like GURPS or Hero.

(I remember - I might even still have it lying around somewhere - an issue of Steve Jackson Games' Pyramid magazine from the 90s that had an article proposing variant human races, with stat packages to reflect their diversity. As in, yes, humans who all have a built-in -1 IQ or Disadvantage: Impulsive, for example... The article was about hypothetical fantasy human tribes on a fantasy world, not trying to map them onto modern Earth humans, but still, I think Steve should be glad no one has dug out that old issue and dragged him on Twitter and RPGNet for it yet.)

That reminds me of when GOG released the Gold Box games, based pretty strictly on AD&D 1e. An annoying facet of this edition, is that elves, dwarves and halflings had some pretty annoying level caps in most classes. I think thief was the only class they could advance in unlimited.

Of course, this is an obnoxious rule, and it's the modern age. So hacks exist which remove those caps. Except somehow, this weird little quirk of Gygax's couldn't be left alone. Some fucking lunatic was, and probably still is, spamming the GOG communities forums about how racist it is. With a moralizing passion.

Naturally, this was put in play for game balance reason, and it's hard for me to say Gygax's predictions didn't come true. At least in the last few groups I played it.

Players must weigh advantages and disadvantages carefully before opting for character race, human or otherwise. It is in vogue in some campaigns to remove restrictions on demi-humans — or at least relax them somewhat. While this might make the DM popular for a time with those participants with dwarven fighters of high level, or eleven wizards of vast power, it will eventually consign the campaign as a whole to one in which the only races will be non-human. Dwarves, elves, et al will have all the advantages and no real disadvantages, so the majority of players will select those races, and humankind will disappear from the realm of player character types. This bears upon the various hybrid racial types, as well.

Perhaps it's me being reactionary, but I always just pick human, and get creative with my play to make it work.

More digital ink should be spilled on the effect of the show Critical Role on the overall hobby. For those who don't know, Critical Role is a show run by voice actor Matt Mercer about him running D&D with a group of players who are all themselves actors. It is wildly popular, with each 4-hour episode pulling in an average of a million views, and has brought countless people into D&D. It is one of the big contributors to the game becoming as mainstream as it is.

The politics of the creators and its fanbase are easily identifiable. At risk of sounding low-effort, Matt Mercer's twitter bio contains both his preferred pronouns and a BLM hashtag. I say this because those things are symbols of commitment to specific ideas, and this is generally reflected by the show's fans. To see a very quick and simple example: look at this article, where the writer expresses her disappointment that a group of white players would publicly play in a fantasy setting based off of nonwhite cultures for their upcoming adventure. This line emphasizes both the lengths the creator goes to be racially sensitive, and the feelings of his audience.

Regardless of Mercer’s assurances that he and his team would be working with “professional cultural & sensitivity consultants” throughout the campaign, and that he would attempt to present certain aspects of languages and cultures “without appropriating them”, many were still concerned that it would still come across as a group of people engaging with cultural touchstones that they aren’t a part of.

This is not to say that Matt Mercer isn't liked by his audience, far from it. I'm simply trying to illustrate the general social and political leaning of him and his audience. If you want more examples, I can produce them.

I mentioned how the show has brought droves of fans to play D&D and join its comunity. To put it simply, you can't bring in such a huge number of people without it vastly changing the culture of the hobby. Like it or not, people who think like the writer make up a substantial amount of the playerbase for Dungeons and Dragons now, possibly the majority. This culture is endorsed and amplified by the creators of the game, Wizards of the Coast, who have the same politics. The racial controversy you bring up is a very natural and obvious result of this cultural shift coming into tension with the old culture of the game. If you're feeling like the hobby isn't as much for you anymore, that's because it probably isn't.

Many players are fleeing to stuff like OSR, where the gameplay tries to emulate an older era and the culture is resistant to changes like this. I still play D&D, but I use my own setting, add my own homebrew, use my own races, and most importantly run my own game. I use D&D for its rules, but since 5E is basically a combat simulator, so you have to do a lot of work to make the exploration and interaction robust.

But that's the fun of D&D and tabletop. You can do your own thing with your own people. It doesn't affect me what WOTC does with their races and published adventures, since I don't use those. If you don't know people or don't DM, the outlook is less rosy.

Independently, I concluded a few months ago that gender (the way activists use it) is itself an artsy-fartsy thing for artsy-fartsy people, which is to say, a Serious Thing.

I have definitely encountered the hyper-individualistic idea of gender as a unique creation or performance that every person makes. It never made much sense to me, since I feel like it's a category mismatch. I wouldn't call something that has as many manifestations as there are people "gender" - I would call it something like personality, personal style, or something similar.

I think the other issue I have is that gender must play with the existing stereotypical sex roles in society.

If you can truly convince everyone that pink isn't a girls color, or that particular clothes aren't just for one sex or the other, you haven't created a world full of radical self-expression. Sure, boys will wear dresses and pink, and girls will wear boyfriend jeans and suits, but the meaning, the context of these things will have completely changed. It won't mean anything, because there will be no backdrop or framework to interpret these acts as subversive or unusual. It will just be one of many normal things for people to do, and when that is the case there is no point in actually doing it.

If AOC's "Tax the Rich" dress was something you could buy at Walmart before the Met Gala, she wouldn't have worn it, because the context would have been completely different. She would have gone with some other, completely different form of self expression as a form of protest instead.

I think one issue I see is that the critics will never be satisfied. There have been tribes of neutral orcs since 2nd Edition, and Planescape allowed them to explore concepts like non-evil succubi (even demons can sometimes not be evil!), while 3rd edition gave us Eberron, which was designed from the ground up with the idea that traditional alignments not being relevant - with evil metallic dragons, broadly good orc cultures, evil halfling tribes, etc.

By the time we get to the 5th edition core books, race was already almost a non-issue. Alignment was a vestigial structure that barely mattered mechanically anymore.

Is anyone really offended by the idea that orcs might be stronger on average than humans? Is anyone really offended by the idea that a dwarf might be able to drink you under the table because they're built a little tougher? I kind of doubt it.

But once ability bonuses are mental, then people have a big issue.

One D&D is moving away from making ability bonuses for player races baked in. Fair enough. But this isn't going to fix the issue. Are mind flayers going to exist in the next edition of D&D? Is the default mind flayer stat block going to have 19 Int? Is the mind flayer elder brain going to have 21 Int?

If that's even sort of true, we're back at bioessentialism. Mind flayers and their elder brains are just naturally smarter than the average human peasant. Unless WotC wants to do something stupid like say "actually mind flayers have the same Intelligence range as playable humanoid races, and it's just the really, really smart ones who become psionic and start attacking people to eat their brains, but all mind flayers have free will and can choose to be vegans if they want" then mind flayers as a concept are going to remain problematic going forward, no matter how many steps they make to "clean up" the game.

Sometimes fantasy might call for nuance, or deeper understanding. And sometimes you just want to mow through a horde of orcs and not think too hard about whether they're inherently evil, or whether you could have talked them out of it under the right circumstances.

The mental stats in DnD have always been in this weird place. How does your 100IQ player or GM portray an INT 25 Psychic super genius? The answer is badly in my experience. All it usually comes down to is a stat that impacts your skill rolls, spells modifiers and so on most often. Do your spells key off Intelligence, Wisdom or Charisma? What are you adding to your skill checks? It very rarely comes down to anything beyond that. Dumping INT as a Half-Orc Barbarian and then playing it with your own level of intelligence outside of stat modifiers is pretty common. And having an Int 20 Wizard played by someone who doesn't even themselves know what their spells do, or how many they get.

Should the player whose bard has 22 Charisma have to roleplay making a speech to convince the king to spare you or is their nigh supernatural charisma and a single die role the way to go?

How does your 100IQ player or GM portray an INT 25 Psychic super genius?

Hah. That's easy. You cheat (within the rules of the game). The DM might not be able to predict the actions the players are going to take... But the genius villain would have, so the DM makes up some bullshit and throws in an extra trap or minions or defensive spell or escape route or whatever.

That can come across a little cheaply however. If the players come up with a clever tactic should the villain have precited it by virtue of being so much smarter? So now you have to gauge how smart is that 25 INT wizard compared to the players. Which then brings us back to the first issue with trying to emulate how a super genius would think in the first place.

I do feel like "being on another plane of existence" is the number one advantage for players or writers who are trying to design the actions of characters smarter than they are. Take advantage of what extra time you have that they don't; do research that they can't, and that can help you with their snap decisions-

-More considered actions, though, probably remain tricky.

Absolutely, if I am deciding the BBEG's lair I might have a few weeks to think about what counter-measures he would take to ward off wandering bands of murder-hobos. On the other hand in universe he might well have had years or centuries. Eventually you just have to shrug and say good enough. or take advantage of knowing what the players or planning to ward against it, but do that too often and it starts to discourage players from planning. if it always fails might as well just kick down the front door and murder your way in room by room.

You can also change reality (with agreement), which makes it easier to fake genius.

There's also the option to go, "yes, I obviously noticed the conclusion of this intricate riddle/web of deceit, but couldn't be bothered to care because I assumed everyone else did as well, and was busy focused on 'insert esoteric topic/grand unifying theory here'.

Should the player whose bard has 22 Charisma have to roleplay making a speech to convince the king to spare you or is their nigh supernatural charisma and a single die role the way to go?

I mean, the latter mechanic works for everything else in the game. I don't really understand why people want to ditch the game mechanics for this scenario, but are ok with players rolling a die instead of getting out blunted swords to fight the battles.

It is a tricky one. But consider this, the fighter picked his tactic, which square he was going to move into before he attacked, which weapon he was going to use, etc. In social combat, that might translate into which avenue are you taking to persuade the king. Appeal to his honor? his empathy? his pride? Are you portraying yourself as his equal or his subject? Appealing to the time you saved his daughter from orcs?

And that's normally how I run it when I am GM, I won't necessarily require a full speech, but I will want to know what weapon you are using and where you are metaphorically planting your feet. However someone who struggles with social skills, may even struggle with identifying those options. and that can be a bit of a quandary.

Depending on the group, there definitely can be expectations that you roleplay your character when you speak which helps with the shared fantasy.

It is a tricky one. But consider this, the fighter picked his tactic, which square he was going to move into before he attacked, which weapon he was going to use, etc. In social combat, that might translate into which avenue are you taking to persuade the king. Appeal to his honor? his empathy? his pride? Are you portraying yourself as his equal or his subject? Appealing to the time you saved his daughter from orcs?

In "Storming the Wizard's Tower" D. Vincent Baker came up with a neat mechanic for this. I can't find my copy of the manuscript, but in "Apocalypse World" the mechanics are similar:

READ A SITCH

When you read a charged situation, roll+sharp. On a hit, you can ask the MC

questions. Whenever you act on one of the MC’s answers, take +1. On a 10+, ask 3.

On a 7–9, ask 1:

  • Where’s my best escape route / way in / way past?

  • Which enemy is most vulnerable to me?

  • Which enemy is the biggest threat?

  • What should I be on the lookout for?

  • What’s my enemy’s true position?

  • Who’s in control here?

On a miss, ask 1 anyway, but be prepared for the worst.

READ A PERSON

When you read a person in a charged interaction, roll+sharp. On a 10+, hold 3.

On a 7–9, hold 1. While you’re interacting with them, spend your hold to ask their

player questions, 1 for 1:

  • Is your character telling the truth?

  • What’s your character really feeling?

  • What does your character intend to do?

  • What does your character wish I’d do?

  • How could I get your character to —?

On a miss, ask 1 anyway, but be prepared for the worst.

I agree with that. When I GM, I'm looking for a general approach to the situation. You need to tell me are you trying flattery, or a bribe, and so on. And I then let you roll your social skill, with me determining how easy or hard it is to succeed using the stated approach. Depending on the situation I might nudge a player if they pick an inappropriate approach (e.g. a player trained in an insight sort of skill might get a note "with your practice in reading people, you think bribery may not work on this guard").

What I object to here is the GMs who just throw the rules out the window and want to hear you say exactly what your character says, and then judge by that. I've had GMs do that to me and it's bullshit. I'm not a persuasive person, don't ask me to actually persuade unless you're asking the fighter to actually win a sword fight.

Yeah it's a continuum I guess. If you just reduce everything to dice rolls then it's a board game not a roleplaying game almost, but if you base it on actual performance, then you are basically doing improv with not much of the game part. You have to balance those (and every group and individuals preferred balance will probably be somewhat different).

Agreed. Mental stats are the unfortunate place where the fantasy of "you can be anyone" runs up against the reality of your real life "mental stats." It's not something you scream from the rooftops, but d&d is a cooperative roleplaying game, and your ability to depict the character you're playing matters. It's easy to abstract away swinging an axe or doing a fearsome war cry to the dice if you can't do those things but your character can. Coming up with a cunning plan or smooth-talking through an encounter... not as much.

The unfortunate result is that someone who freezes up when put on the spot simply cannot roleplay a suave rogue or bard as well as someone who can. Same goes for someone who, like you said, plays a 20 INT Wizard but can't memorize their spells. It's not like you need to be Bond or Einstein to play these characters — you just need to be able to approximate it well enough out of character that the other players can let their imaginations do the rest.

You could abstract things away to rolls like you said, but I find campaigns where that is the norm to be less engaged. If I have a bard as a player, I expect the player to be cracking wise and making rousing speeches instead of saying "I make a joke" or "I make a speech."

A lot of DMs expect players to actually come up with a motivational speech (or whatever) for their character to say, rather than rolling a die. But I think that's unreasonable. I don't ask the fighter to tell me in detail what sword form he uses to counter the enemy's defenses. I also don't ask the CHA character to actually have a silver tongue.

So yeah, I don't personally think there's a problem with abstracting mental stats behind die rolls. You use the same abstraction as for everything else, and don't impose harsh "your character can't do anything you can't" rules on only one aspect of the game.

A lot of DMs expect players to actually come up with a motivational speech (or whatever) for their character to say, rather than rolling a die. But I think that's unreasonable.

How about "prior to rolling a die"? The role-playing is what makes TTRPGs better than computer games! If I'm DMing for my 10 year old, I'm not expecting a soliloquy that would sway royalty, but an argument that's especially good for a 10 year old might be worth a bonus to the subsequent Charisma roll, and one that's clearly just phoned in might be worth a penalty.

For young kids (this happened when one was 6, IIRC?) I've even gone so far as to say "make a Wisdom check" upon hearing a course of action that was likely to get the party killed, and when it passed I took that as an excuse to recount every line of reasoning that character would understand about why they're endangering themselves, though the final decision was out of my hands still. A bit of a cheat, I admit, since even a failure would have raised the question of "wait, why did daddy just ask for that" and so would have been a huge clue itself...

Nobody's yet given me the opposite problem. It turns out that the same sort of player who will min-max a low-Wis barbarian is also the same sort of player who will happily charge recklessly into danger rather than try to employ higher player wisdom. Not sure if that was intentional role-playing or a lack of higher player wisdom, but it was at least consistent and fun!

The reason you ask for the player to roleplay his speech but not to describe his sword swing technique is because D&D is a game that exists in our heads. It is a real as the group believes it to be. That is to say, it can be very real, but this requires collective suspension of disbelief, engagement, buy-in, and yes — roleplaying. You aren't taken out of the collective fantasy by your fighter's player not knowing how to swing a sword, but you are by the player who is supposedly the high Charisma party face clamming up whenever an NPC speaks to him.

I don't have an issue with such players being at my table, and in my experience they tend to avoid those kinds of characters anyway. You don't need a silver tongue to be able to play a charismatic character, but you need to have some degree of wit and charm. If a player wants to give a speech, I'm not exactly expecting St. Crispin's Day, but he should have something to say.

Would you accept it if the player spoke in abstract about the themes his character is talking about, the buttons he tries to press, etc. without actually reciting it in first person?

Sure, especially if the player is less comfortable speaking in first person, or is performing something like a song that would take a long time to devise. I have a preference to first person roleplaying, but in the kind of example you gave the player is clearly demonstrating engagement and knowledge of what's going on, so it's all good to me. I take umbrage more with doing away with all of that and just rolling the dice in social situations.

Think "my character sings a song" vs "my character sings this folk song with specific themes that he uses to subtly mock the hostile lord."

That's my preferred method. "I try to persuade the king to spare the captive by appealing to his sense of justice/diplomacy/humour/whatever." It's like how you don't just "attack", you attack with a weapon.

Is all this culture war crap basically because all the attribute names (STR, INT) can be interpreted to mean things like "Strong" and "Smart"?

Do people get all up in arms about Charisma? What do most people even think when they hear "Constitution?"

The cool thing about D&D is that if you want to play a vegan mind flayer and your DM wants to make it work, you totally can.

I agree with that. I'm not saying people are having badwrongfun if they decide to have vegan mind flayers. My issue is more that it will be a bad thing if every single fantasy race or species becomes interchangeable.

I think it will be a shame if 6th edition comes out, and instead of having a few paragraphs that flesh out the idea that mind flayers are a brain-eating, psionic, planes-spanning race, who once enslaved humanoids in a grand empire until they were overthrown and now live in pockets underground or in the stars, it says that mind flayers are not naturally different from other sapient species (except in their superficial appearance), but some of them (not all!) have a culture that encourages eating brains and developing psionic powers, and you're just as likely to find a mind flayer running a flower shop or having a nice cup of tea. Let the brain-eating alien abominations be evil!

Yes, as a DM, I can always add in whatever flavor from other editions or from my own head that I want. But I want the products I buy to provide some flavor and lore that I can chose to ignore, instead of saying, "here's a bunch of superficially physically different creatures, that are all fundamentally exactly the same, and we won't tell you anything in particular about how they 'usually are' because their culture is a contingent fact about them that will change from setting to setting, not something they have from birth."

If that's even sort of true, we're back at bioessentialism. Mind flayers and their elder brains are just naturally smarter than the average human peasant.

I haven't played D&D but unless it's really spelled out that they're smarter it seems like an easy way around it is to attribute their abilities to some special quality that doesn't intersect any culture war lines. Could a Mind Flayer exist in Harry Potter? If so, it doesn't seem like anyone has a problem with muggles not being born with that potential.

Of course changing the rules in response to CW pressure might still be a bad idea for other reasons, you do give up the defence of "it has always been like that and we're not changing it".

In D&D intelligence is a character attribute. The core attribute block is part of D&D's brand identity (Str/dex/con/int/cha/wis) so I don't think they'll change it.

They've changed core aspects before. THAC0 was probably the defining element of pre-third-edition D&D.

Only if you cast a narrow view of "pre-third edition D&D."

0e used Chainmail combat, until the Greyhawk supplement added the d20 based combat system as an alternative.

1e used combat tables, but you could derive the whole table if you knew a character's THAC0, so that caught on as a common house rule.

2e finally made THAC0 a core concept.

Is anyone really offended by the idea that orcs might be stronger on average than humans? Is anyone really offended by the idea that a dwarf might be able to drink you under the table because they're built a little tougher? I kind of doubt it.

There do exist ideologues actually offended by this. Their thesis is that the only way to end racism is to annihilate completely and totally any concept of racial differences. It needs to be extirpated from history, culture, even fiction. They don't want you even imagining it. If they put in place mental guard rails strong enough, they're confident they can keep people from even noticing first hand.

Sure, you get the people complaining that orcs are code for blacks. But mostly, the true believers want to make it impossible for you to even have the thought that different races might be different.

I think this is mostly true, and to elaborate: It's the idea that racial bonuses could be non-egalitarian on average.

I'm not a DnD player but I suspect that on average, all racial bonuses are the same like +1 to attribute or feats, or whatever it is that races get. If it wasn't so, some races would be at a numerical disadvantage. That the racial bonuses are comparable is only out of the kindness of the game designers' hearts (or game balance or whatever).

But it is not logically necessary. You could imagine the racial bonuses were not comparable. It's almost like dissolving a question. By removing all racial bonuses, it changes the entire shape of the world, and dissolves the notion of differences between groups on average. You can't even think of group differences, like you said.

If orcs are stronger than humans, that's a mere stereotype. Players are free to make their orcs high STR, but it will be at the cost of other attributes during character creation. It's driven by Just-World aspirations that all individuals are fundamentally equal, even if there are individual differences.

If it wasn't so, some races would be at a numerical disadvantage.

Interestingly, I think the reason they're looking at this from a non-political perspective is because this kind of was the case for 5e: a great many races got passed over for serious character creation because there were better options. Optimizing characters in 5e often fell to one of:

  • Variant Human: got ability bonuses in whatever abilities you wanted, got a free feat at level 1. Worked for basically anything, and often got fighter builds relying on specific feats up and running up to 3 levels earlier than they normally would.

  • Half-Elf: got 4 extra ability points instead of most races that capped out at 3, 2 of which were in CHA (a useful spellcasting stat) and the other 2 could be in any. Had a grab bag of useful abilities like darkvision, access to a powerful racial feat, and save bonuses.

  • Aaracokra: could fly as long as they weren't using armor, which would make casters largely untargetable for much of the early levels (typically the most dangerous phase of a campaign for casters).

Part of the issue was that the balance was a little off, but part of the issue was that things often had to line up just right to make a race playable. Take Mountain Dwarf for example: +2 ability points in both STR and CON , free proficiency with some strong melee weapons, and free medium armor proficiency. But while this all lines up thematically, when you combine them with an actual class it starts falling apart. STR and CON bonuses say Fighter/Barbarian, but they don't care about the extra proficiencies, they get them already. Those would be better suited to a weaker class that doesn't get armor like Wizard, but now you're wasting the ability points that were a big reason you were choosing that race in the first place: a Wizard generally won't care about Strength. Or Bugbear, which got a neat ability (extra reach with melee attacks) but got a +2STR/+1DEX ability bonus, which was generally guaranteed to waste some points since a melee character will generally focus in STR or DEX but not both. It's no accident that the races that did well are very generically useful stats and bonuses.

In a late 5e book they basically got rid of racial bonuses: each race gets the same quantity of ability bonuses, but an optional rule now says you can swap them into other abilities: your Mountain Dwarf still gets +2/+2, but the STR becomes INT and now you have your heavily-armored wizard with all his traits working together well.

This helped a lot with opening up other races: tons of builds that weren't really going to come together now worked well, and even if they weren't as optimized as just running the old straight lines they worked, particularly good news for players that have played many campaigns and have run through all the cookie-cutter builds. But it was kind of a weird thing thematically, because now you're really inclined to play directly opposite tropes. A Goblin Rogue doesn't make any sense, because the Goblin's nimbleness overlaps with the Rogue's nimbleness and wastes space (they both get similar features that you wont' want of). Instead you want a Goblin Wizard, or even a Goblin Barbarian, because now the Goblin abilities are completely new to the class. And I think that kind of points at why people don't want classic racial bonuses, mechanically.

5e is a really condensed game, trying to simplify away from earlier editions' huge slew of bonuses. And in the process they've reduced how many levers they can pull to incentivize things: everything overlaps with everything else, it doesn't stack. This means there's a limit to how much you can optimize on any one axis: you can't build out in one direction, the game doesn't have any new bonuses to hand you other than deep in the class trees. So instead you build wide, trying to eliminate character weaknesses, and in the process run into an inherent conflict. A Gnome fighter works better than a Dwarf fighter, because they aren't giving a Dwarf things a fighter doesn't already have, but a Gnome can branch out into new things. The race-tied ability bonuses end up heavily reducing build space and promoting feel-bad decisions, because now you have to choose between good stats and good bonuses, and a lot of the time the less-exciting but very powerful stat bonuses win out.

Honestly, until the 5.5e controversy reared its head, I hadn't even considered the issues with making races feel thematic after the "swap abilities wherever you want" rules change: I was much more focused on having a lot more exciting build space, because 5e characters feel so shallow that any way to get more customization and interesting mechanical parts of a character was a big deal.

I wonder if that's part of the reason there's not more outcry against this, that established players are just excited to have more customization levers again. Because it's really easy to get through 5e and kind of be "done" with archetypes: you just don't have that many decision points to make in a lot of them. When you've played your third Variant Human Fighter (this time with a halberd!), getting to usefully play a Tiefling Fighter feels like a breath of fresh air.

I think the real thing a lot of these players want is a deeper system, where being "dwarf" doesn't mean you're doing the same thing every time: you can be a big tough mountain guy but play to different parts of that for different characters and thus "dwarf fighter" doesn't define most of your character. Pathfinder 2e's racial feats seem like they cover this, but mainstream D&D clearly wants to be a lot simpler.

It's the idea that racial bonuses could be non-egalitarian on average.

I honestly don't think that is their beef at all. I think even if racial bonuses could be shown to be perfectly egalitarian, and every race has gameplay pros and cons that perfectly even out, they'd have a problem. Because they want to remove the very concept of biological differences, period. They want Blank Slatism to be a core concept of the game. For all elements of it. PC, NPCs, mobs, you name it.

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