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Elves are just smexy humans now

At the start of Feist’s fantasy classic The Magician, Tomas is a young human fascinated by elves, those ageless demi-humans shrouded in fey mystery. Has that reverence ever existed in D&D? Writing from a 5th Edition perspective, I haven’t seen gameplay in any Dungeons & Dragons setting capture that feeling of otherness. Elves tend to integrate into human society totally, and even their own enclaves adopt the familiar shape of human-centric civilization. If elves weren’t a player option, and were instead relegated to the Monster Manual, I don’t think this would be the case.

It’s wild out there

You can play a cat person. You can play a demon person. You can play a robot. How are elves meant to get any respect? “Oh, you’ve got pointy ears? Real cool.” Coming from Tolkien-esque fantasy roots (which means halflings, elves and humans are kosher, but pretty much everything else is a Satan), I don’t know how to engage with the everything-soup of kitchen-sink fantasy worldbuilding. My instinct is to protect the exoticism of races like elves by banning or limiting other races as player options. A compromise I’d like to try in my next homebrew setting is this:

“Some racial options are rare or unique. If you choose these races, you are one of the only people of that race. Please consult the DM for roleplaying implications before finalizing your choice.”

But that still leaves us with the question: how do you decide which racial options aren’t permitted?

Vegans and #orcs

There’s a vegan meme which puts domesticated animals over here, farmland animals over there, and challenges the point in this spectrum where people draw the line of moral consideration. They want you to recognize the hypocrisy of eating any of these animals, but people get stuck quibbling about shifting that line one step and eating dogs. That’s where I see the #orcs controversy: traditional fans feel frustrated about the gentrification of orcs, and progressive fans feel frustrated about orcs being culturally regressive. But they’re just drawing that line in different spots! Oldschool says orcs are monsters; newschool says orcs are people.

Dungeons & Dragons, Monsters & People

Regardless of where you draw the line between monsters and people, my strong feeling is good fantasy needs a line to be drawn somewhere. Your story loses something (elves) by wholesale humanizing the inhuman. I don’t want any grey area in gameplay: if you’re not a person, you’re a monster, and if you’re not a monster, you’re a person. I landed on this opinion via my frustration with Storm King’s Thunder giving the Fire Giant warlord a Married With Children subplot. Giants are more interesting to me when they fall into the monster category of my imagination: unknowable, amoral, inhuman.