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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.
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.
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.
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.
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