Slightly unpopular opinion: **All** official lore is crap and should be generally ignored. (Even the stuff I kind of like) If I want to play in a world where what I can do is limited by the generic, inoffensive, middle-of-the-road, crowd-pleasing writers at some corporation I'll just play a AAA video game. The ability to be participatory in the creation and evolution of the in-game world is what makes TTRPGs different from consumer media. Why would you give that part up, but still leave yourself with all the cognitive load?

Okay, I want to start by saying that I do appreciate that WotC is trying really hard to treat the playable races as people. However, they haven't been sticking the landing well. For example, i do understand why they changed all instances of the word Race with Species, but making all the playable races canonically separate species just trades one yikes for a new yikes. As a player, sometimes I want to settle down with an Orc and make a bunch of Half-Orc Babies, but seeing the word "species" gives me pause. I know in real life cross-breeding different species of animals rarely goes well and the children are as a rule sterile, so can i ethically bring a baby into the world that I *know* is going to be sterile and is probably doing to have serious health problems? Anyway, most people aren't mad about that anymore, and decent people aren't generally mad about the Mexican orcs or whatever. What has been a problem is that they are trying to get rid of the concept of Monsterous Races, which would make the average D&D setting a generally more pleasant place to live in. Here's the game-design issue with this: D&D is fundamentally about combat, and 5.5's design leans into the more crunchy aspect of that. A game about combat needs a world full of things for the players to mow down but also not feel bad about killing, and sometimes you need a bunch of Violent Dungeon Fodder that can think and plan and make tactical decisions and potentially be negotiated with. Goblins and orcs and the like fill this role of being sentient pincushions. In addition, rp-wise players often like being special, and an easy way to do this is being a Good Drow or a Forgiving Kobold or a Pacifist Orc. The specific way they are going about this is retconning the lore to make the societies of the Monsterous Races less Evil or outright just normal human-ish societies. Personally, as a DM I do not like this. I like to make my orcs and goblins distinct from mainstream D&D by doing pretty much exactly this, because it's a low-effort way to make my setting look Nuanced or Morally Grey. The point is more to do something that pops out of the wider dnd culture more than to actually say anything about, say, how indigenous people tend to be treated as speed-bumps to "progress" throughout history, because I dont usually run games where colonialism happens anywhere near the players. So not only does this make WotC's writers look incredibly lazy (and more importantly, spineless) to me, but now the laziest way to make a DnD setting pop is to have goblins and orcs be non-persons that are there to be treated as Rome treated the Gauls or sent to Oklahoma. And what's sad is that if they had just put in any amount of effort into the worldbuilding, we could have the nice pleasant world full of non-evil cannon fodder without this problem. Unfortunately, in order to do that the setting has to actually make a statement about something. Here, I'll do some right here: - Let's start with the obvious. Goblins specifically parallel Native Americans in the way that from the perspective of "civilized" races they seem to just exist out there in the land we want. Let's lean into that. Maybe the reason Maglubiyet is their only God isn't that he killed all the others but that when left alone Goblin religion is more like hero-worship. Each tribe has their own little pantheon on local saints and heroes, and Maglubiyet is distinct in that he is recognized globally. - Drow are pretty clearly fascist. I am sure they don't see themselves as evil, though. However, most of their lore doesn't go much into how their society functions day-to-day. Fleshing them out would allow them to point out how just existing in a fascist country does in fact mean that you almost certainly have blood on your hands. We could see drow that try to oppose their regime by running a literal underground railroad or by just passively not complying with obviously evil laws, and we could see drow that are completely oblivious to how a seemingly harmless beaurocratic rule can result in people being enslaved or killed. - Orcs in fiction stem from a long line of faceless evil raiders inspired by the Mongols invasion of Europe. People alive at that time had wild ideas about why the Mongols were here and where they came from, and the general consensus was that they came from some lifeless wasteland like Mordor where crops couldn't grow, so they had to pillage and plunder to get basic food and water. This is obviously not true, but it makes sense. All they had to do is make the orcs frigging steppe people! Actual Caucausians! Just copy and blend Mongolian and Georgian culture and traditions, give them cloth with colorful beading to wear instead of scraps of untanned leather, and let them be people in their homeland while the rest of the world cowers in fear of these incomprehensible alien raiders who like horsies and dressing up nice. See, it's not hard! But saying something, anything at all, might offend some customers and make their profits go down. So they go with the safe, bland option of "everyone is basically a normal human like you, the player, so you can plop yourself into any race and not have too much cultural dissonace." Anyway. That was a wall of text. I'm going to log off now.

Doesn't mean people can't give and receive recommendations!

Right, but I don't think calling people children for playing one game over another is the way to do it.

Old world of darkness lore slapped though

I disagree. I think having a base to work from is helpful, both to players and DMs. For example I don't want to create a pantheon of gods. I might want to create a few unique gods within my setting, and if they conflict I'll change some rules accordingly, but I want something to build off of. Similarly if a player wants to create a paladin or cleric they can just pull from the standard list. Also if the official lore is fun, it's more fun to build off of. I'll enjoy reading it more and I'll enjoy using it.

Slightly surprised I didn't get more disagreement. A prebuilt system has one benefit: the players and DM come to the table with a shared set of expectations. This is crucial for things like adventurer's league, where the players are all strangers, more or less engaging in a tournament without winners, each using the others to get their RPG rocks off, and can be useful to skip the mechanical design level of play-making. It also makes sense for a corporation to try to hit that lowest common denominator to maximise their audience. However, I maintain, if no one at the table is creative enough to want to world-build beyond that, they might as well all just stick with consumer media. Those who don't feel the drive to create aren't suited to DMing, and a table without a DM is a hetero orgy without a woman.

I disagree. I think having a base to work from is helpful, both to players and DMs. For example I don't want to create a pantheon of gods. I might want to create a few unique gods within my setting, and if they conflict I'll change some rules accordingly, but I want something to build off of. Similarly if a player wants to create a paladin or cleric they can just pull from the standard list. Also if the official lore is fun, it's more fun to build off of. I'll enjoy reading it more and I'll enjoy using it.

Slightly surprised I didn't get more disagreement. A prebuilt system has one benefit: the players and DM come to the table with a shared set of expectations. This is crucial for things like adventurer's league, where the players are all strangers, more or less engaging in a tournament without winners, each using the others to get their RPG rocks off, and can be useful to skip the mechanical design level of play-making. It also makes sense for a corporation to try to hit that lowest common denominator to maximise their audience. However, I maintain, if no one at the table is creative enough to want to world-build beyond that, they might as well all just stick with consumer media. Those who don't feel the drive to create aren't suited to DMing, and a table without a DM is a hetero orgy without a woman.

Sounds like you have a table where the worldbuilding has a big place. That's awesome but I really feel that worldbuilding is only one, arguably secondary, aspect of RPGs and not even the only one where creativity expresses itself. Even if we stay focused on the world building aspect of the game, when playing in a pre-defined setting, you can still find plenty of uses for your creativity to fill the gaps that will present themselves as your game unfolds (that is if you're not playing at a table full of FR nerds that read every single novel and campaign setting out there several times over). Plus, many come to a point in life where it's complicated to spend more than a few hours each week on TTRPGs. I'd rather spend time fleshing out characters, scenes and encounters than coming up with a pantheon of gods, most of whom will never come up in game. Sure, worldbuilding doesn't have to imply heaps of prep ; you can improvise a lot on the spot. But I've already got enough shit to track and remember before/during/after game time. Personally, I also feel much more confortable GMing in a world that's well fleshed out. Sure, I can do it myself but it will simply take me down way too many rabbit holes and will proabably end up with me delaying sessions because I was too busy writing the grand history of that neighborhing kingdom the PCs probably won't visit rather than doing proper prep. Not to mention that there is a lot of creativity to be expressed when you have actual constraints, constraints like an existing world for example. And if that world is too bland or consensual to my taste I'm always free to spice it up as I please, because you know, creativity. Certainly, RPGs are first and foremost a game of creativity and imagination but I don't think that the want to worldbuild is, on its own, a really good metric of how creative you are, nor that prefering pre-defined settings makes people wholly unworthy of the hobby. And I want to add that if the fact that no women showed up at your hetero orgy ruined it for you, I think it's because you clearly haven't been creative enough.

Okay, I want to start by saying that I do appreciate that WotC is trying really hard to treat the playable races as people. However, they haven't been sticking the landing well. For example, i do understand why they changed all instances of the word Race with Species, but making all the playable races canonically separate species just trades one yikes for a new yikes. As a player, sometimes I want to settle down with an Orc and make a bunch of Half-Orc Babies, but seeing the word "species" gives me pause. I know in real life cross-breeding different species of animals rarely goes well and the children are as a rule sterile, so can i ethically bring a baby into the world that I *know* is going to be sterile and is probably doing to have serious health problems? Anyway, most people aren't mad about that anymore, and decent people aren't generally mad about the Mexican orcs or whatever. What has been a problem is that they are trying to get rid of the concept of Monsterous Races, which would make the average D&D setting a generally more pleasant place to live in. Here's the game-design issue with this: D&D is fundamentally about combat, and 5.5's design leans into the more crunchy aspect of that. A game about combat needs a world full of things for the players to mow down but also not feel bad about killing, and sometimes you need a bunch of Violent Dungeon Fodder that can think and plan and make tactical decisions and potentially be negotiated with. Goblins and orcs and the like fill this role of being sentient pincushions. In addition, rp-wise players often like being special, and an easy way to do this is being a Good Drow or a Forgiving Kobold or a Pacifist Orc. The specific way they are going about this is retconning the lore to make the societies of the Monsterous Races less Evil or outright just normal human-ish societies. Personally, as a DM I do not like this. I like to make my orcs and goblins distinct from mainstream D&D by doing pretty much exactly this, because it's a low-effort way to make my setting look Nuanced or Morally Grey. The point is more to do something that pops out of the wider dnd culture more than to actually say anything about, say, how indigenous people tend to be treated as speed-bumps to "progress" throughout history, because I dont usually run games where colonialism happens anywhere near the players. So not only does this make WotC's writers look incredibly lazy (and more importantly, spineless) to me, but now the laziest way to make a DnD setting pop is to have goblins and orcs be non-persons that are there to be treated as Rome treated the Gauls or sent to Oklahoma. And what's sad is that if they had just put in any amount of effort into the worldbuilding, we could have the nice pleasant world full of non-evil cannon fodder without this problem. Unfortunately, in order to do that the setting has to actually make a statement about something. Here, I'll do some right here: - Let's start with the obvious. Goblins specifically parallel Native Americans in the way that from the perspective of "civilized" races they seem to just exist out there in the land we want. Let's lean into that. Maybe the reason Maglubiyet is their only God isn't that he killed all the others but that when left alone Goblin religion is more like hero-worship. Each tribe has their own little pantheon on local saints and heroes, and Maglubiyet is distinct in that he is recognized globally. - Drow are pretty clearly fascist. I am sure they don't see themselves as evil, though. However, most of their lore doesn't go much into how their society functions day-to-day. Fleshing them out would allow them to point out how just existing in a fascist country does in fact mean that you almost certainly have blood on your hands. We could see drow that try to oppose their regime by running a literal underground railroad or by just passively not complying with obviously evil laws, and we could see drow that are completely oblivious to how a seemingly harmless beaurocratic rule can result in people being enslaved or killed. - Orcs in fiction stem from a long line of faceless evil raiders inspired by the Mongols invasion of Europe. People alive at that time had wild ideas about why the Mongols were here and where they came from, and the general consensus was that they came from some lifeless wasteland like Mordor where crops couldn't grow, so they had to pillage and plunder to get basic food and water. This is obviously not true, but it makes sense. All they had to do is make the orcs frigging steppe people! Actual Caucausians! Just copy and blend Mongolian and Georgian culture and traditions, give them cloth with colorful beading to wear instead of scraps of untanned leather, and let them be people in their homeland while the rest of the world cowers in fear of these incomprehensible alien raiders who like horsies and dressing up nice. See, it's not hard! But saying something, anything at all, might offend some customers and make their profits go down. So they go with the safe, bland option of "everyone is basically a normal human like you, the player, so you can plop yourself into any race and not have too much cultural dissonace." Anyway. That was a wall of text. I'm going to log off now.

There are cases where species can have a fecund offspring, like the axolotl and the tiger salamander.