AndrasKrigare

Ah gotcha, I was wondering where I might've lost the thread. I would agree with everything you said there. But, putting a pin in that and going back to your original post, what are the lore changes that you dislike? I understand what you said regarding inter-species complications, but feel like I might have lost what you were saying after that.

Honestly, I'm a bit more confused now. I definitely agree that humans have a tendency to dehumanize others, but I wouldn't consider this a good or healthy thing that we should just accept. So having a ruleset that says, canonically, "this group of sentient creatures is inherently evil" and not "this group of sentient creatures is believed to be evil by this other group" you are encouraging the players to take an unnuanced view of the world.

However, as a gamemaster you have to allow your players to make two choices:

1. Are the monsters we are fighting people or not?

2. Does my character agree with me?

Isn't this what the lore changes encourage, by not making a factual statement about the groups, so the players should ask themselves this question on a case-by-case basis and not simply based on what type of creature they are? And I'm not sure how the changes would prevent the narrative approach you describe. Saying that goblins and orcs live in human-like societies doesn't prevent you from telling a story that's analogous to what has happened between human societies.

Maybe we're working off of different data points, what WotC material are specifically referring to for the changes?

A game about combat needs a world full of things for the players to mow down but also not feel bad about killing, and sometimes you need a bunch of Violent Dungeon Fodder that can think and plan and make tactical decisions and potentially be negotiated with.

I'm a bit confused by this. Why not have them be any other species, or combination of them? If they're capable of being negotiated with shouldn't the players feel as bad about killing them as anyone else? I feel like "self-defense" can do a lot of heavy lifting in dungeon crawls, I've never really noticed my players feeling bad about killing bandit dwarves or whatnot.

Look into my eyes and it's easy to see One and one makes two, two and one makes three It was destiny

I disagree. DM's always have the ability to put in their own choices and, in this case, room descriptions, regardless of what a module says. But that is work, and one of the things you buy a module for.

To make an extreme example, imagine I sold a campaign module called Blank Slate, where every page just says "and then you decide what happens next" and "decide what rooms are in this dungeon and what monsters are there."

That's awesome, reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from the Bourne movies. Bourne knows some agents are coming after him to the building he's in, so he picks up a phone, calls the police and says "I heard gunshots, I think they're Americans" and then throws the phone against the wall, fires a few random shots, and leaves. The police then catch the agents sneaking up to the building and arrest them.

If it were me, I'd find it easier to change the lore so you can do planar exploration at lower levels than to deal with all the mechanics and balancing of level 20 characters

Just me or does something look wrong with that finger?