If we kept things just because they were normal nothing would ever improve, a while ago there was actually a big discussion about the latest D&D edition where plenty of people saw the issue, because "this race has inherently bad traits" is a concept that's led to a lot of awful things in the world, is a kind of lazy way to develop personalities and is arbitrarily limiting.
I think that the sort of person who looks at something like DF's goblins and analogizes them with a real ethnic group is probably quite prejudiced to begin with. Assuming that the existence of monstrous humanoids in a fantasy world is tantamount to racists caricaturing other people as monsters strikes me as ceding ground to bigots. Of course, optics are a legitimate concern, but I resent the notion that DF, as it exists, might be inculcating hatred in its players.
That said, the obvious out with goblins is to make their evil a result of their demon master's corrupting influence, such that those who spend prolonged amounts of time out its reach become more benign.
Even Tolkien regretted making orcs predisposed to evil in his later writings.
Wasn't this because of the theological implications? An innately evil race would seem to lack the opportunity for salvation, for one. Dwarf Fortress, however, is not made with an eye towards conforming with Christian beliefs.
At any rate, it's unpleasingly simplistic from a literary perspective, though I'm not sure how much that concern applies to this game.
I feel like it would be appropriate to give radically different personalities to creatures which clearly aren't just reskinned humans. Dwarves, elves, and goblins could plausibly be seen as being different races of human, or closely related species. But animal people or demons or whatever kind of generated sapient we wind up getting could think drastically differently from humans. IMO it would be a wasted opportunity if solitary carnivore cat people had exactly the same outlook as humans, and demons aren't really even animals, so it would be expected for them to have different priorities from anything living.
It does have to be approached mindfully, but "truly alien beings" are some of my favorite things in fiction.
But would a solitaire carnivore cat creature who was born and raised in a human town really have a completely different personality and outlook on life than the humans around him?
And would a human raised by a (nearly) solitaire carnivore cat creature have the same personality as those in the town?
The system needs to be flexible enough to deal with those cases. Assigning a "cat creature" personality in a world as complex as a typical Dwarf Fortress world seems way too simple.
I would expect the human-raised cat-creature to be culturally human, but still to have feline inclinations, and vice-versa. This is consistent with how the game works at present, with civilization-raws defining cultural values and creature-raws defining personality parameters. Having a uniform felinid-personality would obviously be silly, but DF is at no risk of being that simplistic.
I feel like it would be appropriate to give radically different personalities to creatures which clearly aren't just reskinned humans. Dwarves, elves, and goblins could plausibly be seen as being different races of human, or closely related species.
Right, and once interbreeding is introduced (as I believe is planned) they will be, in effect, members of the same species.
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Topic: Future of the Fortress (Read 3125582 times)