Link on how to make generic trash:
Diversity means everyone is the same but they look different:
"Player characters, regardless of race, typically fall into the same ranges of height and weight that humans have in our world."
New character races don’t have the Ability Score Increase trait that Player’s Handbook races have. The new races instead rely on a special character-creation rule that allows a character to increase one ability score by 2 and another score by 1 or to increase three different ability scores by 1.
Generic Humanoids bear the words “Any Alignment,” reminding the DM that such people have vast moral range.
That one word—“typically”—reminds the DM that the alignment is a narrative suggestion; it isn’t an existential absolute.
Aka "please still buy our product even though we're telling you how to play for the most part"
The problem with modern dnd is that the game actually doesn't tell you how to play. Wotc has been comically negligent with regard to resources for dungeon masters. There are almost no detailed systems for running anything anymore, which puts insane amounts of work and pressure on the DM's shoulders. Now you have no racial or cultural archetypes to flesh out your gameworlds. Instead, you get to "create" everything yourself! So much freedom to do all the shit that the game used to take care of for you! Trying to run a good game is like a full time job these days, and a lot of DMs are noping out. Wotc is playing it off like "progressive change" and more creative freedom, but the truth is they're just giving you no content and acting like they've sold you your own imagination.
Want to play a giant or a halfling? Fuck you, player characters are all human height.
They're also human skin tone, human morals, human physicality and mental condition.
Isn't that so creative?
Before anyone mentions Gary Gygax and his legacy, the guy was a leftist. I was reading yesterday the preface from the AD&D player handbook (the part I never normally read) and this caught my eye:
Then what the fuck was to hit armor class zero.
THAC0 was pretty straightforward man. If you couldn't grok it then maybe TTRPGs weren't for you
If it was straightforward then it would be still with us today.
Y'know what has a straightforward system?
Iron Kingdoms RPG
That sounds just like something Marx would say /s
Yeah sounds like he was saying this is a game.
No being a game would have been: "no limits on female strength" leftist: no baseless limits arbitrarily placed on female strength
There is a reason for having a limit on strength for women characters and you can chose not to do that but it is neither baseless nor arbitrarily.
What a shit post. If you'd read the book you'd know female humans do in fact have a strength cap. He made fun of women's lib a bit in OD&D too.
If that is the case then I stand corrected.
Using that statement to back up the claim he is a leftist is a stretch. The fbi actually had a report on him and labeled him a libertarian. And he was a pretty outspoken gun collector, not a typical hobby of leftist. You can have reasons for placing a limit on female characters strength. You could also not have it and it not be anymore less than just a game. We have a world where dragons and mythical creatures exist, but we can’t have a female player character with abnormal strength for a woman.
It’s like saying chain mail bikinis are immersion breaking. That’s the line? Not the guy in a blue bath robe casting fire balls at a goblin?
Do I roll my eyes when I see female action heroes beat the crap out of men 3 times their size? Yes I do. But I’m not going to say Gygax was a leftist because he said we don’t have a rule that all female characters have to have a negative strength modifier.
Don’t they also say in the book if you don’t like a rule feel free to replace it with something that works for your group? That’s like the least left wing rule there can be.
Your overriding argument isn't wrong, but this part is easily one of the dumbest things people can say in this context.
I think it shouldn't be forgotten that part of his legacy was that rulings from the DM overrule any and all written rules. What this means is that everything written in the rulebook doesn't mean shit, you do what works best for your group. Subtext that people who play RAW (rules as written) are subhuman.
Regardless, I don't think it's bad to disconnect the person from the accomplishment. Dnd itself really isn't that important outside of being a stepping stone for the growth of gaming.
To address your OP:
I never read any of Gygax's direct lore/worldbuilding stuff, but even the books I read from 3/3.5e maintained that evil monsters were evil for cultural reasons. You can't expect a rational culture to develop from a monster with inhuman abilities like trolls or expect palatable morality from the slave-like kobolds. So I keep hearing about these ridiculous changes to modern dnd and being blown away by the worldbuilding implications and fanatic naivete it all reveals.
I like this part, they're creeping towards some dangerous wrongthink here. But it's same old same old for nu-dnd, we could highlight and banter about quotes from this article for hours.
I see you just don't get the very concept of fantasy.
Maybe I do not. My point was for fantasy we can remove limits placed on female strength or any limits, I mean the entire AC system, random stats and health per level fit in the same category of non-realistic rules, is the baseless and arbitrarily part I had a problem with. The phrasing, not the rule that bothered me.
Maybe I've not explained it properly or maybe I'm just wrong, I'm ok to concede that I am wrong.
Does this mean everyone has access to a breath weapon now?
IS funny as fuck already
What's the point of even having different races then? They've already removed all racial class restrictions, so with this there's no difference whatsoever.