Thread by @AlexandraErin

So much of what I'm seeing about this #OneDND attempt to remix race and background in D&D amounts to the difference between trying really hard to demonstrate that one is Aware Of A Problem and trying to understand the problem and address it.

The steps in recent 5E books of replacing race-specific ability score adjustments with a freeform "Increase one score by +2 and another one by +1, or three different scores by +1" and letting players pick their languages were steps in a better direction...

...and it's dispiriting to see that they're apparently going from de-emphasizing/de-mechanizing race to re-emphasizing it but in a slightly different way. They seem to be rebuilding what they were dismantling.

And while some of the first text I saw in screenshots seemed to have eschewed the word "race" in favor of speaking of various humanoid kinds, which seemed promising even if other language in the excerpts was decidedly exoticizing. But they are apparently still using the term.

And tying languages to backgrounds... when the languages are named after fantasy races... is a bizarre step diagonally backwards from the "one additional language of your choice" in recent books.

"Characters speak the lingua franca of the setting and one language that makes sense to the player that the character would know." makes more sense than "Rich people speak dragon, gladiators speak orc, and homeless people speak Fantasy Sign Language."

Whenever I run D&D, the base rule at my table is going to be: everybody speaks two languages that make sense to the players that their characters would speak. The common language is recommended but not required.

"Play better games."

I don't know that I will ever run or play D&D again. There's a pandemic. I don't know what the future holds.

But even if I was 100% sure I'd never play it again, I'd still want it to be better than it is.

I have observed many times that D&D is not a great vehicle for the kind of adventure story that it inspires or is inspired by.

But neither is Chicken Slots, the one page microRPG with two stats (chicken and slot) where you are a chicken who thinks it is a slot machine.

D&D is closer to what I want in a high fantasy action-adventure game than anything else.

A game with a more unique high concept might be better at delivering said concept than D&D delivers high fantasy action-adventure, but if I'm not looking for Chicken Slots or Mouse Buffet...

...or Most Of Us Are Cars Here (Except For Bruce), then it doesn't matter to me how good they do their job. Experiences aren't fungible.

I appreciate that there are games without the racist baggage of D&D.

I would also like to see D&D become less racist.