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Goblin Slayer prompts smug DM to talk about how he'd punish players for not killing baby goblins
(hexbear.net)
The only naive mistake on any players' part would be playing with this guy in the first place
Pinging @UlyssesT@hexbear.net because I know you hate this stuff too
I mean they’re monsters. They’re not originally intended to be people, they’re meant to be like the troll from Three Billy Goats Gruff or the witch from Hansel and Gretel or the dragon from the paper bag princess. You know, antagonists.
The use of this word in DnD is extremely sus and always has been. If you want something to be fundamentally different from humans, that's a different species. I've always found the DnD "races" as social stand-ins for IRL races suspect because uhh black people are human beings
I've always used "species" or "people". Pathfinder using "ancestry" for species and "heritage" for the subspecies/ethnicity is cool too.
I always found it weird when I'd get online comments about how using "species" is supposedly too scifi and I honestly don't get it.
That's not even getting into the extremely tired rhetoric of "if you think the orcs/goblins/kobolds/etc are stand-ins for black/indigenous/etc people I think that makes you the real racist huh"
This is true but in a different way. I side-eye at using things that are definitely physiologically and anatomically different from human beings as a stand in for marginalized humans.
That too - same reason why racism allegories like
don't work so well. When you try to write a story as 1:1 parallel to real life using species with vast inherent physical disparities, things tend to get messy.
That's not to say you can't draw upon the history of racism, colonialism, etc., for your scifi or fantasy ofc, but it requires a little more effort and consideration than that to make a compelling story
yeh but murdering babies of a race of """monsters""" that can talk because theyre evil has real world implications in how people view others, see every liberal calling russian's "orcs", and especially with israel and its ongoing genocide of the palestianians, where they frequently call palestianian children and civilians vermin that need to be wiped out before they become a problem
fiction is a mirror for reality, when a writer writes something like this, it indicates their biases in the real world. When a writer writes in a demi human race who you need to kill the babies of, thats because the writer wants that race to exist
here's the thing though, remember that part of the story where hansel and gretel brutally murdered the witch's baby
whoever introduced that (the DM) chose to humanize the monsters. if they expect you to kill the babies nonetheless, then they are fucked up.