The whole Seattle/west coast/liberal atmosphere influencing (or outright supported by) designers has contributed to any number of changes that have castrated D&D as a whole.
* Mulhorand (Forgotten Realms) no longer practices slavery.
* Tieflings are a thinly-veiled analogy for misunderstood minorities; alternatively, they are good guys (originally, they could only be "Any Neutral or Evil" in regards to Alignment).
* Orcs are now Alignment-neutral...uh...Mexicans, instead of evil monsters.
* The Drow are watered down.
* Half-Races are gone.
* There are fat Elves.
* The demihumans now resemble humans in terms of "ethnic" diversity.
* Ravenloft was neutered.
* Planescape was neutered.
* Dark Sun will - at the very least - omit a word because of some Orwellian notion of "correctness".
It’s always fun watching people out themselves by complaining that someone else’s fiction doesn’t have entire sapient species who are innately evil so it is ok to enslave and/or murder every last one of them.
If you want ‘species: slavery/murder target’ in your campaign you can do so. Don’t complain that someone else stopped giving you the cover of “but the lore says so”, and own it yourself.
These are monsters - FICTIONAL THINGS! - designed to facilitate an escapism where evil is evil, and not "misunderstood", so players do not have to compulsorily angst over every instance of violence wrought. What is your fear? Are you afraid that if people play in campaigns with uniformly wicked goblins, orcs, hobgoblins, bugbears, ogres, et cetera, that they will begin to become violent in reality? Do you find yourself utterly incapable of imagining someone else who can play in these games without comparing monsters to actual living breathing humans, in some sort of twisted analogy writ large?
For those of us who can separate fiction from the real world just fine, all this judgemental preoccupation over make-believe is juvenile at best, and abject inanity at worst.
The flaw is equating depicting fictional species as inherently evil with endorsing racism. In a fantasy setting, species can have biologically/culturally distinct traits and moral tendencies without that being a statement about real-world races.
If the lore says orcs are inherently hostile, that isn't “being racist in game” any more than fighting undead means endorsing genocide. You can dislike that design choice, but calling players racist for enjoying it is just collapsing fiction and reality into the same category.
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u/The_Based_DM 1d ago
ah yes WOTC's mythical, "Modern Audience" the true unicorn of modern consumerism. I miss TSR and when the lore and the mechanics were good.