Fuchs wrote:One thing I don't get: Why wouldn't humans be racist xenophobes in D&D? They are in real life, and we know racism is wrong.
I think having humans act so decidely unhuman would stretch my suspense of disbelief.
I don't think that anyone is saying that racism doesn't happen. Although the kinds of prejudice you'd get in a village that happened to live under the protection of a Storm Giant and an Abeil Hive while being menaced by Thri-Kreen and Frost Giant raiders would be pretty...
interesting. Getting the rant from god old boys about how the
yellow bugs were dedicated workers but those
green bugs never worked an honest day in their life would be probably the most surreal thing about going from one town to another in D&D land.
If you thought it was weird how as you go West in Yugoslavia you see people talking about Orthodox Christians exactly the way they would talk about Catholics a few kilometers back... you ain't seen nothing yet. Try going from valley to valley where the local Gnomes are Rock Gnomes, Forest Gnomes, Whisper Gnomes, Svirfneblin, and Chaos Gnomes and watch the crazy racist shit the locals say about the party Deep Halfling.
Racialism has a tendency to be reductionist. If you have time to spare with a Neonazi sometime, ask them whether Dravidians are mongoloids, australoids, or negroids, and how they can tell. Obviously differet racists will give you different scema, because those categories aren't
real. And fitting some system like that onto a world where there are literally hundreds of
species of sapientpeople would be quite a sight. These guys don't have PCR, so honestly I don't see why they would assume that Ghostwise, Tallfellow, and Deep Halflings were the same species. The only reason why people think that Hobgoblins, Goblins, Bugbears, Nilbogs, Forestkith, and Varags are all related is because they have Maglubiyet,
an actual living god, telling people that in so many words. If you just lined them up, you'd assume that Forestkith were closer related to Meazels and Hobgoblins closer related to Orcs.
So yeah. People are going to be racist, and that racism is going to be
fucking bizarre. Dwarves can't interbreed with humans, so in some areas you're genuinely going to find people who think that anyone with a thick beard is "not human." Gnomes can't interbreed with halflings, or with pixies, so if you're a halfling subtype from far away, the halfling girls of the village will simply assume that you are another species.
But that simply opens up a new question: what the hell does anyone do when their own species is a minority of less than 5% in wherever they happen to be? According to Gygax, a number of people simply make racially segregated communities where they rely upon cousin-fucking to make the next generation and attempt to murder anyone who shows up. That's certainly a Darwinistically justifiable plan, but I remind you: That
is the Kuo-Toa plan and it apparently has not worked out well for them.
Of course, the discussion of human ignorance crossed with a world in which
every tavern and marketplace is a Cantina scene and you could meet a new species every day for a year and still not meet all the true breeding and distinct races of the kingdom, while interesting, is not really the point. The point is that FatR and RC were and are arguing that racism against species you cannot identify is "logical" in such a scenario. Not "inevitable" (a stand that requires mere cynicism), but
logical.
And that, of course, is bullshit. As has been exhaustively shown from outcome analysis, harshing on someone because they happen to be unfamiliar and blue is even more fucking stupid in D&D-land than it is in our world.
Although interestingly, I
did, in scouring the monster manual for this discussion find a piece of prejudice that would actually work: Smell. There are a number of races that smell like rotting meat, and almost all of them are totally fucking evil. Guardian Nagas seriously smell like flowers and candy, Spirit Nagas smell like carrion, and the seemingly unobjectionable Dark and Water Nagas don't smell like a god damned thing. Looks are completely useless, since of course to most humans the most hideous creatures of all would be
elves - since they live almost entirely in the uncanny valley. But the stench of rotting meat is a shockingly good giveaway.
-Username17