avoid prejudice in D&D!

• just because someone is a half-orc, doesn’t mean that they’re aggressive or dangerous
• just because someone is an elf, doesn’t mean that they’re wise or spiritual
• not all rogues lie or steal
• not all barbarians are angry, violent, or unintelligent

remember that a person’s class and race are social constructs - labels that they’ve been given by society - and tell you nothing about them, except for the types of prejudice that they face

so instead of asking for someone’s race and class, try asking them about their hobbies or ambitions in life. and remember that race and class tell you nothing about them

when most D&D players ask you about your character, they don’t actually want to hear about your character. what they care about is race and class, and if you tell them anything else they’ll just act confused. it’s like they want to stereotype the character first, and then learn about them later. I don’t understand this mentality at all but I find it pretty gross

D&D in general has a tendency to pigeonhole everything into neat little reductive categories and then add game mechanics to those categories. and I feel like so much is lost when doing this - not to mention that it forces players to follow mechanically-enforced stereotypes in order to play the game

@kasdeya that reductive emphasis on mechanics and mechanical thinking is probably the biggest reason I never really gelled with D&D with any of my friends. they all play it more like a video game than a role playing game

@kit yes omgg - that is such a good way to put it. it feels like they took a turn-based tactics RPG and then tried to retroactively turn it into a tabletop game (not even necessarily one where you roleplay)

I don’t get the appeal at all, but then again I don’t like RPGs or turn-based tactics games. and what excites me most about TTRPGs is being able to do anything that I can imagine - which D&D limits by necessity because its first priority is to be a turn-based tactics RPG

@kasdeya it’s even more annoying when you DO get the appeal, I think. I love RPGs and tactics games, they’re often among my favorites… but the thing is, if I wanted that experience, I’d be playing a video game, not a TTRPG, and that is a concept that is apparently too alien for certain people to understand

the ability to do anything you can imagine is literally the entire point of a TTRPG in my mind, because that is quite literally what a Role Playing Game is. video game genres have stupid names that make no sense unless you speak their language, so when people who mostly play video games then get into TTRPGs, that’s the definition they carry with them, not knowing that it could be more than that

video games are interactive play, role playing games are imaginative play, and imagination is apparently in short supply

someone tried to get me into a pokemon TTRPG session with them once and the first thing I asked was “do my pokemon have a maximum of four moves” because I figured that would be the best way to ask “are we just pretending to play a video game or not” without upsetting them, and yeah, it was literally just pokemon, the video game, but on a virtual table instead. that was especially annoying because I like just about everything about the pokemon universe except the video games

@kasdeya that will depend on the table. personally, i want to talk about the story of the characters and we adapt to the mechanics afterwards but some people take the elements already in the system to build their ideas from. there isn't really a problem with that.
I really like that 2024 reduced a bit the emphasis on certain elements like the ethnicity/specie of your character. there are species that have certain perks that are interesting for certain builds, if you want to min-max. but, you can now make combos that were otherwise very odd choices before.
one player at a table i run, his character idea is a survivor from a native community/tribe of dragonborns. He survived the pillage of his village as a teen and tried to get by surviving, sometimes dealing with criminals or otherwise resorting to various skills to get out of situations. he is on a quest to find other survivors of his clan, if any, and a spiritual relic that was stolen from his people.

@kasdeya also, we have a half-goblin barbarian. he has a low INT stat and he does play his character with simpler thought patterns but not totally stupid either. but he plays his character rather jovial and unconcerned as well.

i'm really looking forward to the beginning of their story as we've only done sesh 0 and an introduction roleplay. sesh 1 is coming up. all 5 players at the table brought very interesting ideas to develop into quests later on that could be super interesting and dramatic to play.

any system describes mechanics to play. it's the choice of the table to foster the story telling and depart from rigid stereotypes.

@kit that’s a really interesting point - I wonder if it really is because people are bringing their expectations of video games into the TTRPG world

I try to be generous sometimes and assume that D&D is trying to do something that I don’t understand - like it has goals and is filling a niche that I just don’t have a good grasp on. but yeah from the outside it really does look that way to me too

and I wonder if there’s a feedback loop where:

• folks who want to try TTRPGs try D&D, because of its cultural dominance, and if they bounce off of it they assume that all TTRPGs are like D&D and therefore that they won’t like any of them
• D&D players bounce off of other systems because they treat them like video games and get confused by the unspoken cultural assumptions that come from more imagination-focused systems

@kasdeya @kit I was typing something up but that last bit is pretty much it I think. D&D's roleplaying parts and it's tactics parts get in the way of each other a lot and it ends up doing neither very well.
In my experience it turns off people who don't want roleplaying and people who don't want tactics games, but if you can at least tolerate them then it's essentially the default or only option with a lot of GMs and players just out of marketing & inertia.