Negative LA-Assignment : Resurrection, but no diamond here

[GreatWyrmGold]

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Oh my god, there's so much to unpack here, and it's all off-topic.

Let's start with the easy stuff!
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Human societies force wildly divergent environmental conditions on different segments of the population. {Scrubbed}

Suffice to say, there are tons of studies on how personal beliefs can be shaped by the media we consume. Not all studies demonstrate a link between media X and belief Y (for instance, Call of Duty and violence), but those studies should not be taken as evidence against the idea that media can affect people, especially when there are academic studies demonstrating that cultivation theory is, often, a thing.

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My understanding of the academic consensus is that media is bad at getting you to do specific actions, but good at shaping values and worldview. That's why morality tales have been a thing as long as humanity has told tales; stories are good at communicating worldviews and value systems.

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Tolkien didn't write The Lord of the Rings as an allegory for anything, but that doesn't mean he didn't inject his beliefs about how the world worked into his books. Even a superficial reading of the series reveals themes about the devastation of war and nature, pride and courage, and the nature of good and evil.

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And games have a unique power to portray this kind of stuff. TRPGs usually don't have preset characters or plotlines, but they do describe how the world works, in quite overt and literal ways. This is less true of narrativist games, whose mechanics are explicitly framed as being tools for collective story-telling, but D&D is definitely on the simulationist side of the curve. It portrays a fantasy world, yes, but one that implicitly functions like ours in many ways. In particular, while its people might have gray skin or pointy ears, they are still people. They look like people, they act like people, and you are encouraged to treat them like people (or at least like certain archetypes treat certain categories of people).

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TL;DR: It's more complicated than that, and those complications matter.

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Allegory is Fantasy Worldbuilding 101, and narrative experimentation with unreal basis is Fantasy Worldbuilding 102. It has been long held as intensely awful writing to insist on having no shred of support for disagreed with positions in literature, and archetypal fantasy is even more dependent on offering at least a toe-hold to the opposed opinion due to the extreme frequency of Literally Pure Evil as a physical force making terribly wrong things happen in thoroughly unnatural ways. Unless you also want to finish the annihilation of the entire Great Wheel cosmology and afterlife system for moral ambiguity... There's Ebberon for that, let the grogs keep Faerun!

I didn't say any of that!

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First off: I don't think this thread should try to fix WotC's mistakes, except the ones related to level adjustment. Duh. I just think WotC should fix WotC's mistakes.

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Third, I don't think D&D 6e should get rid of the concept of race. I just think it should be handled a bit differently. If I had to summarize what I'd want, I'd say to put less emphasis on it and more on background. I'd probably design it so that race set a few basic statistics about how you move in the world (like size and speed) and gave a few fun flavorful abilities, with backgrounds being where you get your build-defining stat boosts and powers, but I'd settle for the two being more equitable. Getting +1 Intelligence from being a high elf wouldn't stand out as much if you got +2 Intelligence from being a scholar.

The key word here is "framing". And I'm going to go outside the realm of gaming for a moment, because I have a really clear example that I just thought of and which only takes a couple minutes to experience. "Door-Fighter!!" and "Wigglesticks" are both short songs released by Gavin Dunne in 2012, both make fun of repetitive mechanics used by then-relevant games to spice up their action scenes. Yet they are not saying the same thing. One of them is actively criticizing the use of that mechanic, the other is playfully roasting it, and I don't think I need to tell you which is which. Why?

Well, one song focuses on what the player does, the other on what the player character does, indicating different levels of immersion or investment. One has a plodding, simplistic melody, indicating that the mechanic is boring and simple; the other has an energetic, fast-paced melody, indicating that the mechanic is exciting. And of course, there are the lyrics. The difference between calling the main character thick and calling him a door-fighter(!!) is a bit subtle; both are making fun of that character. But it's obvious that one line is laughing at the main character and one is laughing with him.

Now, you could argue that the difference between "I hate wooden ****!" and "His spatial awareness is that of a brick" rises to the level of text, rather than framing. {Scrubbed}

Fourth, I don't think D&D needs race, except insofar as it needs to look like previous editions of D&D, but that's an argument that can be levied against any change. The existence of the Race space is not a sacred cow. Some fantasy characters are defined by their race (Constable Carrot being a prominent example in my mind), but more are defined by their background—the proud prince, the humble farmer, the stoic hunter. Race is usually irrelevant.

I'd go so far as to argue that race is irrelevant for the non-human members of the Fellowship of the Ring—the hobbits uniquely suited to bear the One Ring, and the progenitor of every dwarf/elf rivalry in modern fantasy. The hobbits don't resist the allure of the Ring better than Gandalf because they are hobbits and he is a wizard; they resist it because they grew up in a humble rustic village and he grew up as an angel walking among mere mortals. It's not their genes that matter, but their backgrounds.
Likewise, Legolas and Gimli don't fight because elves and dwarves are incompatible the way cats and dogs are; the whole point of their rivalry is that they can grow past it. They fight at first because of how they were raised—because of the longstanding rivalry between elves and dwarves, because of their fathers' conflict, because they see the differences between them and not the similarities.

Not a single thing about D&D (except the art) would have to change if every humanoid race was replaced by humans. You have the warlike Plainsmen, the magocratic Thayans, the rustic Ffolk, and so on. I don't understand why anyone could consider race to be that important.

TL;DR: I never said any of the things you say I said. Also, it's weird that you think races being fundamentally different is a central pillar of D&D.

Because a good chunk of the business model is saving on development costs by leaving stuff to older works, so actively overturning a huge pile of it finishes losing them the nostalgia-driven section of their audience not Incredibly Actively In Favor of having political shifts supersede the decades of convention said segment is here for going back to far more intricate work than WotC has ever done themselves. Any consideration of applying such to the Illithidae demands near-total decanonization of the Illithiad and massive changes to their iconic biology, for example, and good luck getting anywhere with the dragons

Additionally, the business' best interest is maintaining homogeneity so that the play groups, and thus market, are fungible for wide ranges of products. Screwing this up is a major contributor to what killed TSR, they kept releasing incompatible campaign settings with different basic rules, so past successes did not lead to future ones. Wizards of the Coast has no way to do this directly, they can only design products and make public statements, and consequently their best choice is "nothing". Just take a look at how hard people complain about the recent Spelljammer!

I'd like to start by reminding you that I never said anything about getting rid of intelligent monsters.
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(Plus, illithids and dragons are alien enough that the same rules don't apply. They have radically different natures and radically different nurtures; with the vague lore D&D tends towards, whether monsters seem dominated by nature or nurture has more to do with the context they're embedded in than it does the monsters themselves.)
{Scrubbed} I see two core arguments here. One is philosophical, the other economical.

The philosophical argument is, charitably, that D&D should avoid changing too much to avoid keep it like D&D. This is another one of those things where I agree with the principle but not the conclusion. D&D should take care to keep itself like D&D. But in that form, that argument is an argument against ever changing anything about D&D, which is obviously absurd. For all my 3.5 nostalgia, I have to admit that both 5e and PF2 made big improvements on it, albeit in very different directions. (And that's not getting into the editions that came before the first one I played, which I think are as needlessly obtuse as everyone thinks the editions of D&D before their first are.)

So while this argument has merit, it needs to be refined. We need to establish what things make D&D feel like D&D, and avoid changing those. For instance: I despise Vancian magic with every fiber of my being, from both a worldbuilding and mechanical perspective, but I acknowledge that it's part of what makes D&D feel like D&D. A rigid class/level system is core to D&D feeling like D&D. {Scrubbed} The importance of d20's is core to D&D feeling like D&D. The importance of race is not.

And yeah, that's ultimately subjective. But I could make solid arguments for the first four things being core to D&D, arguments that I don't think anyone would have an issue with (beyond "Why are you arguing this point?") But I don't think there's any solid argument for why race needs to be the second-most-important line on your character sheet—ahead of alignment, of traits and flaws, of bonds, of background. Only "Race has always been important".

It's also worth pointing out that race has gotten dramatically less important over time. Originally, Dwarf and Elf were classes. (And classes were a lot more rigid in AD&D than they are in 5e.) Then the class/race system was implemented, but the classes each (non-human) race could select from were sharply limited. Then any race could pick any class, but some had ability penalties or negative racial features that made certain classes nonviable. Then ability penalties were removed; while some races are better wizards, none are incompetent wizards. At no point did devaluing the importance of race make D&D stop feeling like D&D, the way removing Vancian casting did.

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I imagine your next argument would be that removing or reducing the bioessentialism of D&D wouldn't attract that many players. First off, I don't think that's true; 5e's PHB made some really basic moves towards trans acceptance, and now trans people playing D&D is...a thing? I don't want to be more specific than that because I'm too cis to understand how significant of a thing it is, but in terms of player volume, it's a good number.

More importantly, though? Almost nobody would be driven out. {Scrubbed} The overwhelming majority of WotC's customers would react to this sort of change somewhere between "Huh, that's nice" and "Huh, that's weird," before continuing to play D&D anyways. But even if I'm wrong, if hundreds of thousands of grognards flee the hobby {Scrubbed}, that is a good thing! I would rather welcome one La'Ron Readus into the community than a dozen Sargons of Akkad.

TL;DR: One argument is insufficient to demonstrate what you need it to demonstrate. The other is focused on business rather than ethics, and also based on faulty assumptions. Finally: Stop putting words in my mouth! Illithids are rad!

The second thing is the fact that, by magic, you can combine characteristics of various species. That is something upon which the D&D universe is based from the start. From owlbears to half-dragons and all the "wizard did it" in-between, changing that would require reworking the whole universe, and as Morphic Tide said, that would make a lot of players turn tail (honestly, including myself. I despised the upending of most of the lore in 4e and much prefer how 5e mostly came back to something consistent with earlier editions). It would also greatly reduce the design possibilities from WotC that would have to make a lot of monsters independant from each other and delete most templates.

If I said the things Morphic tide said I said, this would be a good argument. But I don't think wizards shouldn't combine different creatures in magical experiments. In fact, I supported the idea of wizards doing experiments in the very post! I just think the emphasis should be on the "wizard experiment" part, not the "crossbreed" part.

Also, the skullcrusher ogre isn't even the result of sinister magical experiments. It's not half-ogre, half-rhino or something. It's just the result of mundane eugenics. I feel like that's enough reason for me not to have mentioned other kinds of magical experiment in my previous post.