This kind of crap has always been a thing; at least nobody’s burning witches anymore.
And DnD is likely to survive “orcs are racist” much better than “DnD is devil worship”.
Haters gonna hate…
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I’m not so sure. “DnD is devil worship” never had much support in the mainstream. The media never treated it as credible. “Orcs are racist” not only has a lot of support in the mainstream (or at least people are intimidated enough to remain silent), but “orcs are racist” emanates from the company itself.
Let me describe it this way. Imagine if, in the 1980s, a majority of the staff at TSR believed that D&D was devil worship, and this is ‘problematic’, and that they needed to remove the spells and other things in it. Imagine further that many (most?) of the players are believed to be warlocks, and this is the worst thing you can be in society, and TSR wants to fix this problem. That’s the situation we see now.
Your comparison is apt. Its witch hunting. The details are a bit different to witch hunting. In this witch hunt, you can stop being a witch by joining the witch hunters.
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Eh, you make fair points, but other than the “Strawman, Orcs are racist”, I’m ok with the other aspects of the change.
Half-Orcs haven’t been all evil or 100% rape-product in setting for a long time. And de-conveluting genetics from culture seems cool to me anyway.
Doing this stuff in response to social justice warrior-ing or whatever rankles me, but if they had just done these changes when 5e came out, I’d think they were cool, and just part of the natural ongoing attitudes towards humanoids in the hobby.
That makes this a compromise, everybody wins and nobody’s happy.
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In Dragonlance, half-elves are usually the product of r*pe. Non-evil, civilized orcs already exist. Grey Orcs.
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Kyle Brink literally said what I wrote here in July of 2020.
Dark Sun isn’t about slavery; it’s about powerful, wipey-characters that own PCs and NPCs.