What are your favorite ways to deal with race and alignment in DnD and DnD-inspired RPGs in ways that add nuance and conversation to the flawed starter texts.
I play 5e (ew, I know), so that’s my entry point to the conversation.

One of the things I like to do is with languages. We’re going to have Shakespeare-like plays in Old Elvish translated to Middle Common. You speak Goblin but you learned a different dialect from this goblin whose family has lived on an isolated island for ten generations.

Maybe if you roll well you’ll be able to get by based on the root words and cognates you recognize and use gestures and facial expressions to make up a lot of the difference. Also I made Common Sign Language (CSL) fairly ubiquitous for a nonspeaking PC to have an easier time.

My campaign is set in a sprawling archipelago, so lots of NPCs you meet will have a strong connection to their island or region’s culture along with their race. It gets fun from there. Halflings from different islands have entirely different ways of going at the world.

I think of gods and alignments as a package deal, because worship and alignment say similar things about who you are. For my campaign I made up a big list of gods from scratch and ignored the Player’s Handbook ones. One reason why is that I hate the idea of evil gods.

No one’s going to worship The God of Baby Eating whose whole gimmick is that he’ll eat your baby and maybe have you for dessert, and he’ll do all that because he’s evil and so are you.
I like a controlling god whose followers want to control others. It makes sense to follow him.

Or if your god is controlling but they’ll do a whole string of miracles in exchange, that makes sense especially if the place where you live is fairly inhospitable and you need the help.
I don’t want gods (or people) who are evil and we leave it at that, because that isn’t evil.

It reminds me of this. People playing “evil” races reminds you that those people think and have reasons for what they do. Real-life evil always does have reasons that make sense to whoever is doing the evil. That’s one reason lawyers have jobs.
https://twitter.com/jessfromonline/status/1332056088032792585?s=21 https://twitter.com/jessfromonline/status/1332056088032792585

Lawyers have jobs to help try to interpret scenarios in light of laws we have decided are true so that we have some way of distilling complicated real life scenarios into easier decisions we can make. Should we kill murderers?
I’m for abolishing prisons, so you know what I think.

And I hate DnD, which I play all the time, because the handbook wants you to be all like “Ooh a drow with evil eyes jumps out of a bush. Make an attack roll.”
There’s so much nonsense baked into the crust of this game. +X to Int for Race A, -X to Int for Race B. What?

It sets you up to where you want “objectively smarter” Race A to have a “smart” culture and Race B, whose associated character art is usually racist as hell, to have an “ignorant” culture.
Because we have all lived on Earth our whole lives...

...we can only construct these imaginary cultures from things we have seen on Earth. It gets terrible fast. I let my father, a white man in his fifties who played ADND when he was young, DM for our family of four once. He literally had an orc jump out of the bushes and wanted...

...my elf to attack on sight.
That’s no good.
I could write a whole separate essay about how every trans person I’ve played DnD with has a drow, tiefling, or orc they’ve projected onto so hard they can’t let go of the character. Well, one has a kenku.

All my DnD threads spiral out of control in this way.

My partner makes the point that for an ostensibly Tolkien inspired verse, it’s weird that Common exists in the way that it does and that there is no Old Elvish, Old Common, no dialects of Goblin or Orc or Infernal.
There’s no linguistic history there.

Ubiquitous Common in a world set up how the Player’s Handbook wants to set it up means a history of colonization. There’s nothing written about it that I’ve seen, officially. You explore bizarre, nonsensically structured ruins full of traps that never belonged to anyone.

Real traditions started for reasons that makes sense now, when we look back. You don’t get that if you have a +2 strength race and a +2 dex race and they each speak a language that has always existed in the same form and also Common, which has always existed in the same form.

I listened to Dr. Lucius T. Outlaw Jr. lecture once. He was talking about colonization and establishing culture on stolen land. He talked about the aftershocks you see in indigenous and settler cultures that come from having your culture paved over vs. doing the paving.

And then whoever lives in that scraped-clean parking lot land is cut off from the people they came from.
I want to see the aftershocks of that in Common and Common dialects. I want it in the gods that are worshipped and forgotten. I want that context bled into the ruined halls.

And when my player kills someone, I want that to be a choice with a consequence on a physical and moral level. I want to know who will mourn and why.

Stagnant is exactly it. Unimaginative. And where the gaps are is telling. This is the same community that struggled to see where the Combat Wheelchair could fit in. DMs were yelling that they’d crush it and make narrow doorways.
https://twitter.com/blattodean/status/1332498704138448901?s=21 https://twitter.com/blattodean/status/1332498704138448901

You’re telling me that in a world with magic, there’s never been a Druid with a prosthetic leg made of living wood? Never a barbarian whose walking cane doubles as a battering ram if she’s in a certain mood with a door in the way?
Making up our own isn’t good enough.

Making up our own isn’t good enough because we see where the gaps are and it isn’t welcoming. Other players and DMs see where the gaps are too and the easiest thing to do is not to include the people in the gaps.

I’m trans and autistic. So are plenty of my players. We have an overstimulation mechanic and homebrewed magic transition lore and stats that change depending on who is fronting in a system. The creativity is there. But that energy and excitement should be there in the source.

The holes undermine the entire structure.
https://twitter.com/blattodean/status/1332499213658312706?s=21 https://twitter.com/blattodean/status/1332499213658312706

Without the why behind the traditions and the ruins and the worship and the language and the stories, there’s nothing of substance to them at all. It’s like exploring a manor built on a foundation of salt and sand.

Good world building for something with this large a scale takes empathy.