Why is workplace discrimination so commonplace in fantasy societies?

I kinda agree with this guy that the reason you want to include elves and dwarves in your setting is because their lore is already well-known and unneeded to be explain, freeing you, the DM/writer to put more time and effort on the actual adventure and NPCs than fleshing your settings with details the few autistic give a damn about.

Sure you can differentiate NPCs and specific nations given that's how you make them memorable but their lore should remain consistent so the players won't waste time to question everything.

I disagree. While elves in a lot of settings are pitched as perfect hippies who sing forests in to shape, the idea of Elves that aren't quite so magical and would prefer the use of hatchets in order to cut through brush makes sense.

Dwarves not using axes is also fine and logical. Living underground is not conducive to logging of any sort, and a thrusting weapon would be better for small tunnels anyway. Hammer dwarves are also cooler.

Changing the preferred racial weapons is hardly 'elves aren't elves, dwarfs aren't dwarfs'

It's just common sense, really. My marine people when battling underwater don't use swords much, but spears, for obvious reasons. A whole deal of poisons, as well

>in JRRT it's kinda odd, most of the dwarvish settlment were next to forests... but Erebor wasn't. I'm really not sure why Gimli would need an axe.

They do permaculture of the forests, more or less like south american tribes (on a greater scale, actually, think more of the terra preta cultures).

And they live ON the trees, most of the time at least. Gonna cut those branches.

Their agricolture is sparser than humans' and generally they don't strip the forests off, even when they use not-arboreal crops, they need to cut undergrowth tough. Cutting actual trees is done, but point is, the small axe is a basically a tool that every household needs, like a broom.

Worth mentioning that they have means to make trees grow pretty quickly, ten times quickly or even more.

I call them sylphs and gnomes, actually. The archetypes are partially the same (especially with the dwarves/gnomes, way less with the woodpeople) but different enough.
>gnome isn't the best, but we all agreed that Paracelsus was probably the only sane naming method

>the idea of Elves that aren't quite so magical and would prefer the use of hatchets in order to cut through brush makes sense.
No, it doesn't. The elf can jump in tree branches and mount elks and shit. No elf would ever need to cut down a brush.

And they aren't perfect hippies you mong. The forest is literally the elf's house. Why in the name of fuck would the elf cut down his own home. If there are no trees then they have no place to live.

Not only that, but brushes and trees are for the elf to camouflage, they aren't tree loving cucks. The forest serves the elf as much as the elf serves the forest.

If you want elves to behave like humans, then just put a fucking human in there.

I wasn't talking about the axes bit. But that's alright, this post is too long already to explain.

Really? You can't see any reason why an elf would ever need to cut a branch or a tree, because the forest is their 'home'?

I'm guessing humans also never invented hammers, since why would you want to ruin a perfectly good wall by putting a hole in it? Unless you wanted a window or a door or something, but that'd be crazy.

I'm not suggesting that Elves would practice extensive logging or anything, but if the forest is their home as you say, then it stands to reason that occasionally, they would need to do some 'renovating'.

>The elf can jump in tree branches

I don't remember elves having climb speeds.

>everything else
Unless your elves live in caves in the forest, then they're going to need protection from the elements. That means something's going to need to be cut or shaped into a form that can be used as additives to the trees to keep the rain of their heads and winter winds off their backs.

Here's an interesting question: Why do Dwarves have beards?

I mean, they're typically depicted as primarily a subterranean species, so they wouldn't have the same level of climate shift that humans would, and thus not need the extra body hair to help keep them warm during cold winter nights (because cave systems don't have winters).

>Why do Dwarves have beards?

Because Tolkien did it. Thus it is immutable law, now and forever.

So, apparently Tolkien is everything wrong with modern fantasy and is why people apparently aren't allowed to be creative in their use of Elves, Dwarves and Man anymore.

I'll add that specifically the sylphs/"elves" are the most down to earth race. Perhaps even more than the humans*. I mean, they do have magic, but they're absolutely not THE magical race, they don't cast spells to make fruit grow. They're amusingly enough perhaps the most anger-prone race, or -for a lack of better world- the most savage of the good guys.

Hell, they don't have longer lifespans. Actually, perhaps they're just a life-stage that is born as little fairy-things, at this point the "how much different from humans we want them" is up to consideration.

The gnomes are more similar to dwarves, but way less uber-manly. Pretty sofisticated, worldly even, but prone to melancholy. A tiny bit brainy. Relatively buff (yep, even the women), height varies, not too slender in proportions (that's for the most statuary people, the sky people), have retractable claws.

*=dont' ever know if we'll use them, actually.

Tolkien consciounsly did them like this because muh jew patriarchs and muh traditionaly fairytale portraits, and unconsciously because manly man doing manly things (or to be more precise, manly because smithing is a man's work).

Maybe they're primarily sensory appendages like a cat's whiskers.

Because it gets cold, deep underground. It's also damp as shit.

Depends on how deep, or rather where the hole is. Geothermal heat and all that.

Well yeah, but when I went to Mammoth cave it was cold, and when I went to the Consolidated Gold Mines, it was damp AND cold

Speaking from personal experience.

Yeah, but as you go deeper underground it gets hotter no matter where you are. It's mostly for caverns and things at higher elevations where it gets chilly.

Granted, that might still work for dwarves, since they usually prefer to build their underground strongholds inside of mountains. That would give them a ton of space before even having to go undernreath ground level and risking it getting too hot.

Plus one has to consider that at some point dwarves might not have been as adept at digging and engineering, and so any caves in the sides of mountains would have been more crude and drafty with the outside weather.

Should white dragons be allowed to insult the intelligence of other races?

>modern
>anymore
The Hobbit was published on the 30s, user. Tolkien's work is a key reason for the high fantasy genre as we know it even existing. The only issue is that you think, consciously or not, that you're constrained to use a bunch of shit Tolkien either popularized in a specific incarnation or made up

buddy if people in modern society don't trust gay and ethnic people there's no way a medieval society would tolerate literal demon horns.

>you think, consciously or not, that you're constrained

Try to run a game without tolkien tropes. A majority of the time, players will bolt because you're using snowflake races or trying to redefine tropes which exist for the reason of identifiability.

How about not using races altogether?

>Why in the name of fuck would the elf cut down his own home. If there are no trees then they have no place to live.

You're going too far off the deep end here, user. No one is saying Elves do human level deforestation, just that an axe would the the tool to shape the environment they live in.

Furthermore

>Muh elves have to live in the forest and never ever hurt it

Even Tolkien didn't do this. Rivendell was in a valley and Elves still built things.

That makes you one of those "HUMAN FIGHTER" people and players bolt.

Some hentai where a dude bangs a centaur

Find different groups? You're not alone in not liking Tolkienesque cliches. Even if you don't avoid the use of demihumans entirely you can at least play on a setting where they are beyond recognition, e.g Dark Sun

Or maybe I'm just playing, I dunno, Exalted?

Really, Tolkien elves are associated with the sea more closely than to forests or any other kind of environment

And yet we never see them sail in the fiction. Not even in the Silmarillion.

Because feudal societies worked on the apprenticeship/guild system, and hiring someone outside of a guild is already a big risk unto itself. How do you know that mangy stranger who claims to be a master smith with no name for himself isn't going to just steal your materials and run off to the next town to peddle them?

It depends on the edition, but Adult white dragons at least are depicted as being above average human intelligence. Not godly smart like other breeds, but on par with low-level wizards.

Nope, because no one REALLY does Elves like Tolkien. At the very least, tabletop doesn't.

Can your Elves die by age? Not Tolkien, unless you count the Elf retirement home.

Are you Elves competent fighters? Not Tolkien, Elves are total badasses.

Do your Elves only live in the forest? Some of Tolkien's did, but not all.

The modern fantasy Elf is a bastardized version of Tolkien's that only took a few elements mainly in personality and beauty, whereas Dwarves are probably the closest when it comes to staying true to Tolkien from setting to setting.

I don't know what the fuss about Tolkien's stuff being prevalent in fantasy is all about. If it's so influential, doesn't it mean that it's good?

That seems like a matter of just using a different established setting that doesn't have tolkeinesque races.

Like, just go for Ivalice from Final Fantasy 12/tactics and have the closest thing to an Elf be the amazon bunny girls.

>feudal societies worked on the apprenticeship/guild system
Burghers were as far removed from feudal as you could get back then.

Well, so are Michael Bay's movies.

And yet the dwarves are too stereotypical for their own good in RPGs.

>equating something from a literal Gentleman and a Scholar to a Michael Bay 'splosionthon

c'mon, man

I don't mind Tolkien, what I was attacking is the popular=good equation.

>well, actually I DO kinda mind sticking mindlessly to JRRT, but you get my point

The Teleri do, The entire point of the Kin-slaying is the Noldor stealing their sacred ships, too, and we see Earendil's journey to the Undying Lands even if by that point he's still in the half-elf gray area

>elves making use of axes is common enough in the world, but it was cemented in the minds of men as their stereotypical weapon with the spread of the elvish idiom "Axehandles come from the forest" which has a similar meaning to "hoist on your own petard" or "reap what you sow"
>other idioms have dwarves and elves assume all humans speak all languages. This is because of a common human idiom "two mares, an heir, a wife and a dog" to mean "a man who has everything" and why would you want that many companions if you couldn't communicate with them? Mostly this just results in frustrated elves and dwarves who assume humans who don't understand them are being deliberately obtuse or are refusing to use their languages as a deliberate act of racist pride.
>other common idioms are "goblin pork belly" meaning something of little monetary value that is still greatly treasured by the owner and "elvish generosity" which is returning a favor or keeping a promise despite the person you're keeping it to having forgotten the debt and possibly never even knowing about it

Chauvanistic anachronism.

>citing obscure shit that pretty much any moviegoer knows nothing about in an attempt to defend the idea most people associate elves with the sea

Boy real convincing argument

he didn't say people associate them with the sea. He said Tolkien's elves are associated. As in that's how Tolkien wrote it.
has nothing to do with what readers or movie watchers think. The part of the world tolkien most connected his elves to, by names, acts, relics, history etc is the sea.

Which seems fair enough to me. Tolkien elves sail across the sea to "die." if he wanted them to be forest spirits, they'd turn into trees like David the Gnome.

Would it be taboo to say that different races have different characteristics (such as intelligence) in a fantasy setting, or would it be common knowledge?

thank you

>moviegoer
It's not his fault you're a know nothing faggot

Since races in fantasy are actually different species, there's nothing wrong with it.

I've yet to see anyone complain about saying that a koala is less intelligent than a crow or that a gorilla is stronger than a raccoon.

>Why in the name of fuck would the elf cut down his own home.

Renovations and adding on to existing structures?

In this example, the elf may need to remove a few specific trees to create a better living space/defensive position.

It's like you have no idea how construction works.

He thinks elves grow homes out of trees or something.

It depends. You would have to make the fantasy race actually dumber, not just living in a simple tribal culture. They can be shaped like humans, but should be shown to be incapable of human-like thought.

I wouldn't call Africans living in huts unintelligent because they're Africans. They're limited by their culture.

I feel like your post is /pol/ bait but I was compelled to do my best to give you a serious reply

Yeah I mean fantasy settings without dwarves and elves like GoT and Harry Potter were unlikable flops.

She's a really good character design though. The horns go really well with the maid uniform. and the blonde hair.

Because its interesting narratively. One day i wanna play with a DM who can do a good job of this shit so i can play a really fucked looking character. I tried a while ago, but my hexscarred halforc witch couldn't compare to the tiefling in the party who didn't disguise her nature. Also, my character considered herself a doctor, and when i denied being a wotch he made me role bluff. Because the words on my character sheet are more important than my character's background, apparently.

What a shit tier Tiefling! I mean c'mon! Just cutesy horns and big boobs? Where's the tail? Scary eyes? Significantly taller height? (Since I believe a tiefling and or half-demon's bound to be taller than average humans.) Dont tell me Nips give the same kawaii treatment to Tieflings/half-demons just as much as they do to female elves and having very little mention of the male versions?

The races are not equal.

In my setting, it's cause of old grudges.

Hard to make friends when a close family member only maybe a generation back was shanked by another race.

That's doubly done because the various races in my setting can't interbreed with any level of success; so it really is a zero-sum game in terms of resources.

Also helps all the various races in the setting are visually and culturally distinct in a variety of ways, some more subtle than others, so getting along is doubly hard.

because it happens in the real world too. Like how back in the "Ye Olded Days of Europe" the Ottomans were considered the sick men of Europe and were considered to be worse than trash.

Let's use the OP as an example. You live in some village in the middle of bumfuck nowhere and you also happen to run an inn. This village also happens to be very religious and superstitious when it comes to things such as old wives tales and folklore. While times are tough you tend to make enough to scrape by because your village lies on the path of a religious pilgrimage or adventurers and mercenaries happen to make their way to your village from time to time. Now let's say that a girl walks in your inn and asks to be hired. She's good looking and agrees to wear an outfit that's a tad bit more revealing than the other girls but she always wears a hat or fixes her hair in a way where its super puffy and covers her ears and so forth. One day that hat falls off while the two of you are alone or you catch her fixing her hair and discover she has the horns of a demon. What would you do knowing that the village would be up in arms if they find out? What would happen to you if they think you brought a demon to the village?

Becuase most fantasy societies are medieval or anticity analogues, and exteme tribalism and intolerance to outsiders is not just the norm in those societies but the very basis on which they are built.

That can work in very high fantasy settings but not all.

A more reasonable level of it is elves that practice a very reasonable level of resource management. Humans will cut down a forest in a few decades for a massive amount of wood. Elves will get wood slower but get it indefinitely.

Sorta like how some modern foresting companies go with that whole 'Cut a tree down, plant a tree' idea so that there will still be wood for later generations. For elves you ARE that later generation. You personally need to deal with the side effects of whatever you fuck up so you can't really afford to be short sighted.

Elves would (Once it's reasonably possible) likely be super into metal recycling. As you can't just have the earth produce more ore, so you want to avoid wasting it.

wtf

Is this a setting with complicated racial relationships that aren't inherently biased towards one race being objectively better?

What the fuck is this. Do you know where you are?

ilu

This isn't entirely true. Medieval societies were perfectly happy to accept outsiders as long as they properly assimilated, instead of trying to keep their own customs and cultures.

Check this article out, it sums it up pretty well: academia.edu/3496008/Why_Minorities_Were_Neither_Tolerated_nor_Discriminated_Against_in_the_Middle_Ages

Additionally, most of the hate was directed towards those groups who were only a little bit different rather than completely different outsiders. A Christian community would direct a lot more hate towards people of a different Christian community following a slightly different variety or towards Jews or Muslims than they would towards a complete outsider from far away with a completely different religion, mostly because complete outsiders were very rare and unfamiliar.

>Tolerance means accepting forms of behavior and thought of which the speaker does not approve.

This sentence right here explains so god damn much about the last fifteen years. Jesus christ. I hate people so fucking much.

>This sentence right here explains so god damn much about the last fifteen years. Jesus christ. I hate people so fucking much.

Huh?

i'm not sure if gimli was even born in erebor

That is the most asinine, divisive, patronizing, ridiculous, and straight up fucking useless definition of 'tolerance' I have ever read, and both sides believe in that definition *fervently* and it's fucking bullshit.

How would you define it?

I'd personally go with 'A willingness to understand and empathise with people you may not agree with'. You can disagree with someone and be tolerant as long as you are at least willing to understand why someone may hold that belief. Like how I understand why my sister doesn't eat meat, even if I don't hold that belief.

That's precisely why she moved out & tried to get a job in a human city--she was considered shit tier back home because her only distinctive feature were the horns.

If you keep in mind that "approve" and "agree" are the same thing, then your definition is the same as the one in , only yours is stated with softer words.

That, essentially.

You're an idiot and I hate you.

I'm not the one who has trouble with simple English.

You really, really are.

in the european middle age jews were forbidden many profession, except, guess what, banker ! (it was a badly considered job for obvious reasons)
racism/xenophobia is an old thing

It's not my fault that you don't know what the words "accept" and "approve" mean in this context, no need to get angry about it.

Which is it? Agree and approve, or accept and approve?

None of them are synonyms. Even in a vacuum, without the context that agreement, acceptance, or approval require, they mean very different things.

Eh, I tried to keep the 'accept' out of it. To allow for someone to disagree/oppose something without being inherently intolerant (As long as they are actually trying to understand/empathise with the individual). Like, I could understand why a person who feels disconnected from the world about him and without focus could be drawn to a particularly dangerous group like a gang, as it gives a sense of purpose and brotherhood they were lacking.

That doesn't mean I'll accept it but being tolerant is about trying to fix the issue (Getting counselling/treatment for the person, preventing them from hurting people) rather than just inherently considering them 'An evil person' or something like that.

Tolerance at least imo, is about empathy more than agreement.

Let's try to keep this polite, if it's ok?

And, of course, given a context, they mean very different things too. Acceptance requires no approval whatsoever. You don't approve of rain anymore than you approve of high taxes, and you don't agree with good rolls any more than you agree with temperate weather.

Even in the context of intersocial relationships, they don't mean the same thing, for the same reasons. You don't need to agree with someone to accept them, and you don't need to approve of someone to agree with them.

"Agree with" is synonymous with "approve" in this case, except that "approve" is slightly more formal sounding.

"Accept" in this case means "recognize a position as valid" and "allow something to happen."

In the case of , he does not approve of his sister not eating meat, but he is willing to accept that she does not eat meat and is not trying to force her to eat meat.

He does not approve of something, but is willing to accept it, which is equivalent to saying that he does not agree with something, but is not willing to stop it.

Fair. Venting is easy, especially here. I agree about the empathy.

The problem here is that you're using "approve" as "regard as good," however the definition of "approve" that is used in is "agree with, officially."

>In the case of (You) , he does not approve of his sister not eating meat, but he is willing to accept that she does not eat meat and is not trying to force her to eat meat.

Yeah, I tried to clarify that with a more extreme case

If someone got into a gang, and you're trying to change their behavior, either through counseling/treatment or jail, then you're not tolerating it. Tolerance is, fundamentally, about allowing to continue something to happen. Intolerance isn't "declaring that something is evil," it's trying to stop something from happening.

If your friend is drawn into a gang, you would be unwilling to tolerate that and do everything in your power to stop him from staying in that gang. You are intolerant of his membership in that gang, even if you can understand why it happened.

On the other hand, if your friend joined the gang and you thought "well, as long as he's happy" and didn't do anything to stop him, then you'd be tolerating his behavior.

Do take into account that being intolerant of some behavior is not an inherently bad thing, and it does not mean you hate the person. You may very well love someone but be unwilling to tolerate self destructive behavior as you pointed out.

You're not entirely wrong. The only sticking point is the inability of a lot of people to differentiate between the two, especially as relates to the sentence in question, from a lot of different angles.

Also the inability to be tolerant or intolerant of individual behaviors and separate those behaviors from the individual exhibiting them, or any other layer of nuance.

I think part of it is that 'Tolerate' and 'Tolerance' are used in rather different ways these days. It's a word with a rather evolving meaning.

How can you trust sick people?

The entire structure and framing of your sentence says more about you than any of the implications you're trying to make.

I always understood tolerance as allowing continual existence. You can tolerate the existence of an element of society by not taking legislative or violent action, but acceptance means that you empathize with them, even if you disagree with them.

Hurt ur feelings, lefty?

Well, depends on the setting pretty heavily. Some settings are much bigger on all sorts of races living together than others and some have tieflings as much more of an established thing than others (Points of Light wouldn't have them be super trustworthy but that's more due to a history of being imperialistic than demonic). I doubt a tiefling in say, Waterdeep, would really raise too many eyebrows when you can legitimately go to an inn run by fey or shapechangers or whatever fetish Greenwood wants to play with today.

As an aside: It's kinda funny but very few D&D demons/devils actually have horns like that. It's this 'It's demon horns!' thing but there are celestials with the same horns as well as fey (Who are mostly good aligned in D&D)

It's not a bad way to separate it. The issue there is that it runs into 'Acceptance means you must accept what they are doing'. Words are easily to twist all sorts of ways and English is rather a hydra of a language.

At this point tolerance feels like a term that's being used in half a dozen ways these days.

Genre runs on stereotypes and tropes because genre writers just want to tick the box and move on to the bits they consider interesting.

I wouldn't want a centaur maid, with her stinky horse ass hovering at table height

Constantly knocking stuff over because human places of bussiness aren't designed for all that bulk

Instantly dying just because she lay down or drank water too fast or some shit.