From the original AD&D Player's Handbook:

Half-elves;

"Half-elves do not form a race unto themselves, but rather they can be found amongst both elvenkind and men."

Half-orcs:

"Orcs are fecund and create many half-breeds, most of their offspring of such being typically orcish. However, about one-tenth of orc-human mongrels are sufficiently non-orcish to pass as human. Complete details of orcs and orc cross-breeds will be found under the heading of Orc in ADVANCED DUNGEONS AND DRAGONS MONSTER MANUAL.

As it is assumed that player characters which are of the half-orc race are within the superior 10%, they have certain advantages."

I think is safe to assume under each heading that when it comes to half-breeds, half-elves are the product of mostly consensual sex, while half-orcs are primarily the result of rape.

It's sad and pathetic that the Cult of Woke has penetrated into D&D. their efforts make D&D insular, where nothing bad happens to anybody. The world is in it's neat and tidy space and we can go off on safe and tidy adventures where nothing bad happens and there's no risk but great reward. There's not even any risk of death.

How incredibly fucking BORING.

D&D is not even the McDonalds of RPGs, or even vanilla. D&D has NO FLAVOR AT ALL. It's bland. Like a stale cracker with no salt.

D&D Human & Elf PCs: "uh Daddy - weeez in luuuv and gittin hitched!"

WOTC: "Hunh?!? WTF is that ELF doin on my porch!?!?!? GTF back to yer GLITTER-CAGE in the forest, FREAK!!!"

GM: In a desperate attempt to escape himself, Meathead becomes Archie Bunker. Pick initiative colors, brethren.

If I were to play devil's advocate, I'd say that what they want is to eliminate the names half-whatever, and give them a dedicated name (like how tieflings aren't called half-devils) because calling someone half-something implies they aren't a full person, or their other half isn't important, blah blah-CRT nonsense .
But based on my experience that the progress train has no brakes, I'd say this is the opening move in an effort to eliminate the concept of race in fantasy role-play entirely. They'll use the established trope of wizards and gods creating hybrid species, but turn it up to 11. Players will choose physical traits and cosmetic features at character creation, but none of it will be tied to any particular culture or race. Your PC can resemble a typical dwarf, but with metallic skin and antlers, your father is a seven foot tall purple three eyed man, and your other father is rabbit headed four armed xe/xir. But you're all a part of the same quirky fantasy species, and the same inclusive progressive mono-culture.

Quote from: Slipshot762 on April 06, 2023, 03:54:17 AM
no half races...so...no centaurs?

Horst Draper is going to be crushed.

Quote from: tenbones on April 06, 2023, 10:05:38 AM

Quote from: Slipshot762 on April 06, 2023, 03:54:17 AM
no half races...so...no centaurs?

Horst Draper is going to be crushed.

Not as much as Catherine the Great.

Quote from: Grognard GM on April 06, 2023, 10:12:29 AM

Quote from: tenbones on April 06, 2023, 10:05:38 AM

Quote from: Slipshot762 on April 06, 2023, 03:54:17 AM
no half races...so...no centaurs?

Horst Draper is going to be crushed.

Not as much as Catherine the Great.

Too soon!

Quote from: jhkim on April 05, 2023, 01:38:42 PM
It's funny. I'd just been pondering and resolved my issues with half-races in my own D&D setting. I have a thread on it still active:

https://www.therpgsite.com/pen-paper-roleplaying-games-rpgs-discussion/half-races-and-tolkien/

The stated reason is "they're racist" -- but I think the real reason is that half-elves and half-orcs open up a bunch of inter-racial relation questions that are tricky to answer.

I can make a really solid case that you are incorrect here. 
First, lets recall what Paizo did when faced with this same question.  Paizo is smaller and more social justice chatty than Hasbro, and they handled their twitter leftists by renaming 'race' and 'subrace' to 'ancestry' and 'heritage', and then making Half-Elf and Half-Orc into 'heritages' you can pick if your 'ancestry' is human.  Then they made it so that:

By default, half-elves and half-orcs descend from humans, but your GM might allow you to be the offspring of an elf, orc, or different ancestry. In these cases, the GM will let you select the half-elf or half-orc heritage as the heritage for this other
ancestry.

This means that your "half-orc" could be descended from a golbin and an orc, and you would be a goblin (ancestry) with a half-orc (heritage).

Now, Paizo almost assuredly did much of this for woke or woke-adjacent reasoning, but here they simply answered the question mechanically, allowing a GM to optionally include such things.  It also made it pretty trivial to ban half-anythings, because as they were no longer at the level of elf, human, dwarf, goblin, gnome, etc., they had far fewer half-elf or half-orc specific rules.

If all Hasbro wanted to do was address which races can mongrelize each other, they could do so as easily as Paizo did, and with a mild terminology change.  I would probably assume it was for political purposes, but if I said as such any corporate bootlicker could simply say "oh look here's their reasoning, stop with the conspiracies!"

Instead, they explicitly told us that they believe the existing thing is racist.  Note that the existing thing- which is arbitrary, of course- has included arbitrary race choices, such as elf, dwarf, gnome, and halfling- in every edition of the books, even though not every setting even really includes them in a meaningful way, and many settings add their own races.  Having half-elves is just as arbitrary as having elves.

So they have some mild motivation to, if their reason was politics, claim it was verisimilitude.  They have NO reason to claim it was politics if in fact it was verisimilitude.  That's why I'm pretty sure your assessment is incorrect.

Meanwhile, they'll probably end up giving you something that you want in your games anyway- an easy way to strip out half-elves and half-orcs, or an easy way to have all of the races be able to intermix if that's how you want to tell the story.  The fact that they've never printed a half-gnome/half-halfling is just as arbitrary as to why they've never printed Thri-keen in the PHB, and certainly such mixed races could become an entire subsystem if desired- or you could simply do what much many-raced fantasy does, and assume that outside of races well-defined, the mother's form is by far the most dominant one.

QuoteI think of it like how adaptations often deal with non-white characters in older works -- by cutting out the character. i.e. cut Esmeralda from Tarzan, or cut Ebony from The Spirit, cut Sunflower from Fantasia, etc. They eliminate racism by eliminating the non-white characters so the question is less visible.

Maybe, but I actually bet they'll offer something more similar to what Paizo has done.  If they want.  The other main piece of PF2E is to dramatically shrink what being a given race even means.  Picking elf compared to human means you start with 2 less hit points, gain Elven as a bonus language, have the "Elf" trait instead of the "Human" trait, and have Low-Light Vision.  Differences actually grow as you level because you select "Ancestry Feats" that supply just the racial picks you need to optimize your character.  Does your character have a class that might benefit from elven weapon familiarity?  Then you take that ancestry feat.  If not, you take a different one, like one that helps with casting or something.  If 5.5 D&D drops the "half" entirely, I'd actually bet it because they aren't willing to turn the species pick into something that goes on for twenty levels as PF2E has done.

QuoteEDITED TO ADD: To clarify, the tricky question raised by half-elf and half-orc is why are those the only two combinations allowed? If such interrelations are possible, why aren't there all sorts of other half races?

Hasbro doesn't care, their reason was because it's "inherently racist", and they were fine to raise this question and let the DM answer it for forty+ years.  It's not suddenly new, nor did it just occur to people today.  People were making jokes about how a "Quarterling" would be bigger than a "Halfling" and we need the metric system or whatever in the 90s, and possibly before.  It came up today because of politics, and they've told us that, not because everyone just noticed an inconsistency.

I suppose this guy ain't canon anymore. It is Tanis Full-Human now. When do we get the revised DragonLance novels, rewritten after a "sensibility pass"?

Sincerely, at this point I want Perkins and Crawford to run Dungeons & Dragons into the ground, so either some other company buys it for cheap or it becomes Hasbro "abandonware".

I'm gonna start calling them Grand Wizards of the Coast.

Quote from: zer0th on April 06, 2023, 05:10:30 PM


I suppose this guy ain't canon anymore. It is Tanis Full-Human now. When do we get the revised DragonLance novels, rewritten after a "sensibility pass"?

Sincerely, at this point I want Perkins and Crawford to run Dungeons & Dragons into the ground, so either some other company buys it for cheap or it becomes Hasbro "abandonware".

Yeah but with the 5e SRD and the OSR you can play D&D using the older version of the system and not give WOTC a dime.

I don't think it's completely nessecary to play the newest version because it's the latest and greatest.

Quote from: GhostNinja on April 07, 2023, 09:01:15 AM
Yeah but with the 5e SRD and the OSR you can play D&D using the older version of the system and not give WOTC a dime.

I don't think it's completely nessecary to play the newest version because it's the latest and greatest.

5e is a good version, but it's way more popular because it's popular- the network effect is very real.  Right now, people see the creative commons SRD and can easily type "wikidot" after any popular 5e thing and get what they want (I suspect that website is kinda abusing copyright somehow).  So it's easy to plug in and play, and a lot of games are on wizard's own VTT.  The group I play with suddenly all had accounts there one morning, and they use it to run their 5e character sheets at least.

Playing "without giving wotc a dime" is possible now, but simply being in their network encourages others to buy it, etc.  If you have a hard time finding a group of people who are interested in playing a specific OSR game, you'll have just as hard a time finding a group where everyone has some hate-boner for wotc and doesn't want to pay them.  This is before considering that there are just generally considerations against piracy.

When 5.5 comes out, Hasbro will either decide to release some new stuff with a variant OGL, or perhaps they'll take the SRD and a small amount of content and push it into creative commons.  Whatever they decide will be whatever most aligns with their business strategy.

Anyway, this is pre-coffee this morning for me, so it's not my most focused post.  But I'll end with these three points:
1- You can't play full 5.0 D&D right now for free legally.
2- For most players, it's easier to have stuff presented digitally, and moving things around in a properly designed editor is a gamified experience similar to allocating talent points in WoW, and much easier than dragging across laggy PDFs or opening up the third book.
3- People will do whatever others are doing in a hobby like this.  If you think this doesn't apply to you personally, then it doesn't- but if that's the case, know that you aren't in the majority, there aren't that many people like that about important things, and there's even fewer willing to draw a line in the sand over a hobby.

Rewritten sensitive Dragon Lance could be hilarious.

I always think it's funny that the people who are supposedly feminist want to eliminate discussion of rape because covering it up is exactly what the rapists want, a return to the days where you aren't allowed to talk about or prosecute it.

Quote from: Venka on April 06, 2023, 02:24:08 PM

Quote from: jhkim on April 05, 2023, 01:38:42 PMEDITED TO ADD: To clarify, the tricky question raised by half-elf and half-orc is why are those the only two combinations allowed? If such interrelations are possible, why aren't there all sorts of other half races?

Hasbro doesn't care, their reason was because it's "inherently racist", and they were fine to raise this question and let the DM answer it for forty+ years.  It's not suddenly new, nor did it just occur to people today.  People were making jokes about how a "Quarterling" would be bigger than a "Halfling" and we need the metric system or whatever in the 90s, and possibly before.  It came up today because of politics, and they've told us that, not because everyone just noticed an inconsistency.

Sorry if I didn't convey this correctly. I agree about this. What I was trying to say is that Hasbro doesn't want discussion of race-related issues -- because in the current environment, discussion will lead to controversy. So they want to minimize any questions as well as similarities between fantasy races and real races. What they would like is for human/elf/dwarf to be a character type, but not comparable to race. So specifically -

Quote from: Venka on April 06, 2023, 02:24:08 PM
If all Hasbro wanted to do was address which races can mongrelize each other, they could do so as easily as Paizo did, and with a mild terminology change.  I would probably assume it was for political purposes, but if I said as such any corporate bootlicker could simply say "oh look here's their reasoning, stop with the conspiracies!"

Instead, they explicitly told us that they believe the existing thing is racist.

What I was trying to say was that they don't want to answer about which races can mongrelize each other. Rather, they want no talk about mongrelization, or breeding, or any such -- because that invites comparison to real-world races and racism, and more discussion of such. Surely it is pretty obvious that they want none of "orcs can mongrelize humans but not mongrelize elves" or any other answer, because all of them are difficult.

Similarly, they don't want modules about race-based hatred like conflict between the dwarf-hating people of a town and a good but abused dwarf trying to make a life there. That's because they don't want messages about race -- even if the intended message is anti-racist.

I don't agree that half-elves are racist. Half-elves can be a device for a pro-racist message ("half-elves are an abomination of race mixing who should be rejected by both elves and humans") or an anti-racist message ("half-elves show that the lines drawn between the races are arbitrary and love should conquer all").

More broadly, fantasy and fantasy races can have different messages about the real world, depending on the specifics.

The chances against of all these people at WOTC having been dropped on their heads too many times as youths must be astronomical.  Somehow they've apparently defied the odds...

Quote from: Wheetaye on April 06, 2023, 09:21:35 AM
If I were to play devil's advocate, I'd say that what they want is to eliminate the names half-whatever, and give them a dedicated name (like how tieflings aren't called half-devils) because calling someone half-something implies they aren't a full person, or their other half isn't important, blah blah-CRT nonsense .
But based on my experience that the progress train has no brakes, I'd say this is the opening move in an effort to eliminate the concept of race in fantasy role-play entirely. They'll use the established trope of wizards and gods creating hybrid species, but turn it up to 11. Players will choose physical traits and cosmetic features at character creation, but none of it will be tied to any particular culture or race. Your PC can resemble a typical dwarf, but with metallic skin and antlers, your father is a seven foot tall purple three eyed man, and your other father is rabbit headed four armed xe/xir. But you're all a part of the same quirky fantasy species, and the same inclusive progressive mono-culture.

Ha! Gamma World conquers all!