nausicaaharris:

sineadstarwatcher:

nausicaaharris:

nausicaaharris:

god so much of Wizards of the Coast’s writing for D&D is screwed over by the fact that they use the same creature type for “person” and “low-level intelligent enemy”

@bit-by-a-dead-bee essentially the thing is that orcs and kuo-toa and gnolls and stuff are intended to be tutelary monsters – orcs are gruumsh’s revenge for not being included with the other gods, kuo-toa are religious fanaticism gone off the deep end, gnolls are primal unchecked savagery, etc.

in game terms they’re humanoid solely because low-level spells only affect humanoids and those are the low-level enemies, but that type is also shared by low-level enemies who are meant to be monsters in the real-world sense – people, like elves and dwarves and humans, who’ve simply chosen evil on a personal level.

so the implication is that these tutelary monsters are as natural and as “people” as elves and dwarves and humans are, because they share the humanoid type, and since there isn’t a distinction in creature type, what the books end up saying is “certain kinds of people are monsters”

granted D&D says that you should make your own lore but it’s still fucked-up that this gets in the actual books

Hi. I reblogged this earlier (I’m not sure if the notification showed up since I deleted it, but I didn’t want to seem like I was trying to start something then run away when that isn’t the case). I deleted that post because I think I misunderstood what your point was in the original post I made and I apologize for that. Basically I thought your entire point was the classification was wrong because they were more monstrous than humanoid.

I’m a bit confused as to what your explanation is trying to convey. Is it that these creatures shouldn’t be classified as humanoid but rather something like goblinoid so that there’s a distinction between a “person” and a “monster?”

Something like that, yeah. The fifth edition Monster Manual says the following, emphasis mine:

Humanoids are the main peoples of the D&D world, both civilized and savage, including humans and a tremendous variety of other species. They have language and culture, few if any innate magical abilities (though most humanoids can learn spellcasting), and a bipedal form. The most common humanoid races are the ones most suitable as player characters: humans, dwarves, elves, and halflings. Almost as numerous but far more savage and brutal, and almost uniformly evil, are the races of goblinoids (goblins, hobgoblins, and bugbears), orcs, gnolls, lizardfolk, and kobolds.

The idea that there’s creatures that have culture yet are somehow almost uniformly evil has some very nasty real-world implications, especially when they’re the same type of creature as those that have culture and human capacity for good and evil. If you want goblins and orcs to be another kind of people (as I do, and the Eberron setting does), then it’s fine for them to have the same creature type as the standard PC peoples, but their cultures can’t be uniformly evil; if you want goblins and orcs to be uniformly evil, because they’re not people, they’re monsters that look like people, then I think we need to create a new creature type to distinguish “that’s a thinking person” and “that’s a person-shaped monster that reflects our fears about ourselves, but is weaker than a fiend or fey”.

Because: the intent behind evil fantasy humanoids is that they’re reflections of our worse side, like I said before, and that’s a fine trope. It’s just not fine if that reflection is itself a person, because then the trope shifts from “destroy this monster as metaphor for the evil within” to “destroy this other civilization because everyone knows they’re evil”.