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Hot take: Orcs and Kobolds can be and frequently are friends of Humans, Elves, Dorfs and the like
D&D is just racist
Still not a hot take.
They've been player character options in previous editions, have an int score comparable to humans, and are not outsiders. So rules as written, they are people.
@mawr i've read a book (John wick's "play dirty 2") that describes the monster manual and the ideas like "this race is chaotic evil by nature" as fascist elf propaganda :')
@mawr Sadly, yes. It requires a lot of emotional labor to clean off the biological determinism rife in the material.
a more unusual case is what about the monsters that are intelligent, and capable of speech, but have anatomies that are inherently dangerous to other creatures, such as the Otyugh.
@mawr This is pretty much always the case in our home games. Institutionalized, hard coded "badness" is racist as fuck.
Also very glad Paizo moved way from the term "race" in PF2 to Ancestry. Makes a lot more sense with how the game handles it and is waaaay less creepy.
@mawr I've been playing for a decade and a half and only recently reread the flavor text of the "races" section of D&D, and was shocked at default assumptions
I don't run games that way, none of the games I've been in have been run that way, none of the cool games I've seen streamed online have been that way...
@mawr I'm glad that most people seem to reject the official lore because what's the point of playing a fantasy game where you can do magic and go on all sorts of wacky adventures if I can't be friends with the little dragon people?
Fuck that all the races are get along and love each other and conflicts happen because some people suck and it has nothing to do with what they look like. There I created improved D&D!
@mawr "Volo is a racist asshole" is a common statement in the D&D circles I run in