DnD addresses racism.

[Eacaraxe]

Are they really? A race's alignment -- such that it is -- being a reflection of that race's dominant culture and the extrasocietal factors that influence it has been the norm in D&D since 2nd edition. If people aren't informed about the game settings and the lore, can't understand the difference between biological determinism and a culture being influenced by its circumstances, and/or can't help but apply real-world racial stereotypes to fantasy settings while sustaining the ability to tell reality from fantasy, that's on them.

The drow as a race being trapped in a self-perpetuating cycle of abuse, caught between the triple threat of living in an incredibly hostile ecosystem, open and continuing hostilities with other races, and being perpetually enslaved to one of the most sadistic and unrepentantly evil deities of any published pantheon, and having an unsustainable and unstable society perpetually on the verge of complete collapse, has been the established lore since the first edition of Drow of the Underdark.

Orcs have a fractious, violent, tribal society because their gods literally won't stop fucking with them, and force upon them an instinctual drive to raid, pillage, kill, and destroy that precludes their ability to largely organize beyond extended familial units, create divisions of labor, and build the foundations for a society beyond hunter/gatherer levels...and even if they could, in most cases they inhabit nonarable and inhospitable land that precludes sustainable agriculture. And despite all this, when left to their own devices by their pantheon, they do organize and start building the foundations of organized and sedentary societies.

 

[Eacaraxe]

...a Ventrue that had feeding restrictions that allowed him to only feed on children...

People who took issue with this clearly haven't seen Jan Pieterzoon's feeding restriction. Because holy shit.

...how clan Brujah had "Neo-Nazi" as a character archetype drew criticism for both dog whistling and open racism...

This one's a stickier wicket. The Brujah archetypal image has always been outlaw bikers, and there's a whole lot of cultural baggage there to unpack from which people today are completely divorced, before you can even begin to understand how and why Nazi iconography emerged so prevalently in outlaw biker culture. Little of which matters today, granted, because later generations lost the script it was a statement of protest by returning WWII vets as to the state of the post-war government, and they started unironically buying into the neo-Nazi shit.

Even that said, this is by and large people unironically believing Brujah are designated good guys, as opposed to ultraviolent bullies who simply latch onto whatever extremist politics fit the day to rationalize their own excessive behavior. Nazi and neo-Nazi Brujah aren't just outside the norm, they're to be expected, and if this bothers people it's almost certainly because they don't understand what the Brujah are and what they represent as a clan. To me as someone who's played VtM for nearly thirty years, what someone thinks about the Brujah says more about them than it does the damn Brujah.

...It didn't really help that...

No, what didn't help were a handful of Onyx Path employees and serial tea-sippers, pissed at White Wolf's hiring choices (which, surprise, didn't include them), who went through the books and the personal histories of employees with a fine-tooth comb to find any and every little example of something that could be construed as wrongthink. Using that body of "evidence", they manufactured a defamation, harassment, and doxxing campaign born exclusively from personal animus, among whom victimized were new hires and highly-valued community members who had nothing to do with the controversy and were voices for progress inside White Wolf.

The broken clock being right once in the day by tripping and falling over Zak Smith's sexual abuses, only came long after the shitstorm was well underway and had nothing to do with its origins (the addition of a trans woman character they didn't like to a video game).

The final nail in the coffin was the release of the Camarilla sourcebook, in which they pushed the story that the current Chechen persecution (which includes midnight raids and concentration camps) of GLBTQ+ persons is in fact a smoke screen created by the powerful Vampires that run Chechnya as a way to hide the fact that they are creating blood farms by abducting people.

That one was a complete pooch-screw, I'll give you that.

 

[Hawki]

This approach is admittedly trickier if you play in a setting where these orcs or orc analogues can interbreed with humans, because that has some serious implications that orcs and humans are branches of the same species.

Not really. Fantasy tends to operate on its own rules, and humans being able to screw anything around them and produce offspring tends to be one of those rules. Even sci-fi isn't immune to this (e.g. Vulcans and humans can produce offpsinrg despite evolving on different planets).

 

[Agema]

Not really. Fantasy tends to operate on its own rules, and humans being able to screw anything around them and produce offspring tends to be one of those rules. Even sci-fi isn't immune to this (e.g. Vulcans and humans can produce offpsinrg despite evolving on different planets).

Star Trek species interbreeding was a convenient fiction because the writers/creators were too afraid to have genuine alien as a major character. Better to soften it and make him more relatable to the audience by making him half-human. Step forwards a few decades and great popularity, they didn't need to be afraid of the idea anymore, but by then what was done was done.

Fantasy can have its own rules. But it still at base relies on an understanding of the real world, whether that be gravity, people dying when they bleed out, psychology, etc. I'm not sure anyone thinks orcs and humans have some weird magic thing going on such that interspecies reproduction occurs without normal sex, or that baseline humans/orcs have inherently magic gametes that encounter the other species' gametes, cast themselves a little spell and "make it work". Why not fuck a tree and make an ent whilst we're at it? Not that it really matters: whether we want to suspend real-life biology or not, the principle of orcs and humans mating suggest orcs are at least sort of human.

 

[lil devils x]

Those playing pen and paper, it really changes nothing as people usually play by their own rules anyways. As for online, I doubt this will change anything as it is doubtful that the Drow would suddenly not be killed on sight because changing things now does not suddenly erase their history or that they are supposed to sacrifice living souls for their goddess. It isn't like it suddenly changes how people will respond to the Drow, and like willingly invite them to their cities or into their home or something. So what, are they going to make it somehow not evil to sacrifice everyone else to their deities?

 

[Tireseas]

D&D isn't really a single setting. Forgotten Realms is the most famous D&D campaign setting, but there are other official campaign settings. In the Eberron setting, for example, drow exist but have a completely different origin, society and religion (I don't know much about Eberron, so I'll leave it at that). On top that, D&D has an ethos that your game should be whatever you want it to be. While the game's rules are built around certain assumptions (one of which is that Gods are real and influence the world) the DM's guide literally tells you you can change this if you want to.

As with all things where they intentionally keep things vague so that DMs and future creatives can have maximum narrative flexibility, it's a bit of yes and no on that.

Currently, 5.0 definitely primarily revolves around the Forgotten Realms, essentially a planet where most of the action revolves around the sword coast and some adjacent areas. What is less talked about is that D&D has a form of space that means that that particular world is one of thousands (not to be confused with the planes, which are one more thing). This was most notably explored in the AD&D Spelljammer run, though how canon anything is is ultimately up to interpretation. What this means is that you can have an entire separate planet and still have the same gods while still sharing in the lore of D&D.

Regardless, I do think this is a step in the right direction as I suspect the broad racial strokes that were in the past, notably the Drow, my personal favorite race to play after Teiflings, are likely going to be shifted to "civilizations" or "kingdoms," whereby you can still have xenophobic evil empires and the like without saying "the vast majority of this race is like that."

I suspect other elements are going to be phased out, though I imagine that is going to be difficult as cultural shorthands that are often based on racist tropes (such s the one you pointed out earlier) are likely going to need a lot of working on not because you need to get everyone to not be racist, though that is something that needs to be done, but because creating fiction often means engaging in tropes and shorthand in order to relay to the reader/viewer/player what they're actually seeing. And a lot of these can be unintended racism. An excellent case in point are accents, whereby simply how a character talks relays a lot of information about their education, social status, and origin to the listener.

 

[Eacaraxe]

Regardless, I do think this is a step in the right direction as I suspect the broad racial strokes that were in the past, notably the Drow, my personal favorite race to play after Teiflings, are likely going to be shifted to "civilizations" or "kingdoms," whereby you can still have xenophobic evil empires and the like without saying "the vast majority of this race is like that."

The problem specifically with Drow is it's been the case since 1st edition D&D (specifically, module Q1), that there is only one Lolth and all drow civilizations across all worlds worship her. That's why she always has a divine rank on par with a singular setting's most powerful deities, despite on a per-setting basis being the chief deity of a single sub-race's civilization and only worshiped by that sub-race, usually having avatars capable of wiping the floor with a setting's weaker gods. One of the lingering through-lines of conversation about drow and Lolth, is the question of whether she's actually powerful enough to qualify as an Overgod given this.

They literally have a multi-planar and multi-world empire connected through the Demonweb Pits, and drow can and do colonize and invade other planes/worlds when they find them, and launch crusades against drow of other worlds if they "stray from the path" so to speak.

 

[Tireseas]

The problem specifically with Drow is it's been the case since 1st edition D&D (specifically, module Q1), that there is only one Lolth and all drow civilizations across all worlds worship her. That's why she always has a divine rank on par with a singular setting's most powerful deities, despite on a per-setting basis being the chief deity of a single sub-race's civilization and only worshiped by that sub-race, usually having avatars capable of wiping the floor with a setting's weaker gods. One of the lingering through-lines of conversation about drow and Lolth, is the question of whether she's actually powerful enough to qualify as an Overgod given this.

They literally have a multi-planar and multi-world empire connected through the Demonweb Pits, and drow can and do colonize and invade other planes/worlds when they find them, and launch crusades against drow of other worlds if they "stray from the path" so to speak.

And there's nothing that theoretically prevents that from still existing while groups of Drow splinter off because of a change of opinion/refugees/tunnel collapse/etc. Empires are complex things and they collapse and splinter all the time in our history due to internal and external factors. There's nothing that prevents a bunch of humans, dwarves, orcs, elves, etc from coming to a splintering faction's aid to hold off a crusade or make the losses too great to proceed or making a particular settlement succeeding due to the ability to be able to defend its territory.

You can have Drow, Drow settlements, and Drow kingdoms all separate from this evil Drow Empire without discarding the Drow as established. You're just tweaking them to give them the individual agency to do so.

 

[Eacaraxe]

And there's nothing that theoretically prevents that from still existing while groups of Drow splinter off because of a change of opinion/refugees/tunnel collapse/etc.

Frankly, this already happens. It's already part of established lore. It's part and parcel of why drow are so internally suspicious and have a perpetually inquisitorial mindset. One doesn't have to read further than the lore write-up of gods like Eilistraee to understand this. And, the overbearing influence of Lolth and her priestesses is only one facet (albeit the largest) of why and how drow preserve an overwhelming and monolithic culture.

This is the root problem in a nutshell. People who haven't read the damn lore, and likely wouldn't if given opportunity, have cut a "biological essentialism is racism" argument out of whole cloth and misapplied it to a circumstance that doesn't fit the facts. Because the established lore, much of which going back thirty-plus years, directly contradicts their conclusions.

 

[Kae]

Frankly, this already happens. It's already part of established lore. It's part and parcel of why drow are so internally suspicious and have a perpetually inquisitorial mindset. One doesn't have to read further than the lore write-up of gods like Eilistraee to understand this. And, the overbearing influence of Lolth and her priestesses is only one facet (albeit the largest) of why and how drow preserve an overwhelming and monolithic culture.

This is the root problem in a nutshell. People who haven't read the damn lore, and likely wouldn't if given opportunity, have cut a "biological essentialism is racism" argument out of whole cloth and misapplied it to a circumstance that doesn't fit the facts. Because the established lore, much of which going back thirty-plus years, directly contradicts their conclusions.

Why does it matter though, I don't particularly care how other people play, and hey if someone doesn't want to read the lore to get into the game I don't see how that's wrong.

I did you know, I read a lot of lore to play, only to find out that when I'm actually running the game using that is boring as hell to me, is it because it's bad?
Not really I enjoyed reading it, but everyone has their own styles of play and I don't see why we should care that other GMs aren't using the lore as written.
Hell the really old GM I play with often uses really out-dated lore because he doesn't like some of the new-er changes, I don't think that's wrong, that's what he enjoys and that's the framework in which he actually enjoys GM-ing.

As for myself I discarded everything and decided to do my own thing, because I don't enjoy telling stories in Forgotten Realms, Greyhawk or whatever, because it's really hard to run a game that you don't enjoy. wrong

 

[Eacaraxe]

Why does it matter though, I don't particularly care how other people play, and hey if someone doesn't want to read the lore to get into the game I don't see how that's wrong.

The problem is specifically that people who don't read the lore are demanding the lore be changed to suit their political sensibilities, when the reality is the lore already supports the position(s) they demand it be changed to. Hell the game mechanics too, for that "racial" alignment is already specifically, unambiguously, stated to be the majority-held position of that race as reflected by dominant culture and traditions.

This is like buying a chair from IKEA, throwing the directions in the trash and doing whatever, and demanding directions be rewritten after you've tried to sit in it and it falls apart.

 

[Kae]

The problem is specifically that people who don't read the lore are demanding the lore be changed to suit their political sensibilities, when the reality is the lore already supports the position(s) they demand it be changed to. Hell the game mechanics too, for that "racial" alignment is already specifically, unambiguously, stated to be the majority-held position of that race as reflected by dominant culture and traditions.

This is like buying a chair from IKEA, throwing the directions in the trash and doing whatever, and demanding directions be rewritten after you've tried to sit in it and it falls apart.

Are they though?

In this case it seems like D&D has been making the change towards being more progressive on their own, it's just that this time they announced it openly, likely because D&D is a much bigger commercial product than ever, and considering what's currently going on it would bring them a ton of publicity for a relatively low cost, if you ask me this seems more like a marketing decision than subservience to supposed people pushing for this that I've never seen despite being very active in the online D&D community, not to mention the lead-designer for 5th edition is an openly gay man that's generally very progressive.

 

[Asita]

Fantasy can have its own rules. But it still at base relies on an understanding of the real world, whether that be gravity, people dying when they bleed out, psychology, etc. I'm not sure anyone thinks orcs and humans have some weird magic thing going on such that interspecies reproduction occurs without normal sex, or that baseline humans/orcs have inherently magic gametes that encounter the other species' gametes, cast themselves a little spell and "make it work". Why not fuck a tree and make an ent whilst we're at it? Not that it really matters: whether we want to suspend real-life biology or not, the principle of orcs and humans mating suggest orcs are at least sort of human.

Err...Actually that's about the size of it. The simple existence of magic in a setting means that it's operating off a different set of rules than our non-magical world, especially when the gods are interventionist (as they so often are). The fact that real world breeding mechanics don't necessarily apply to fantasy settings is seen in everything from implication in the case of things like chimera and centaurs (which, depending on the story, may have been magicked into existence or actually be the result of different species schtooping each other) to the explicit in various major characters being things like half-demon, half-djinn/genie, and even half-dragon. Are we really going to try to argue that this means that dragons being a subset of homo sapian is more probable than "the writer wasn't sticking to ordinary genetic rules"? Let's not delude ourselves here, the idea that ordinary rules about reproduction apply to fantastical stories has been laughable at least since Loki mothered Slepnir, Bai Shuzen (the titular Madame White Snake) had a son with the very human Xu Xian, and Isis conceived Horus by copulating with the reconstructed corpse of the dead and dismembered Osiris.

These are myths, legends, and fantastical tales. They are not retellings of historical events and tend to play fast and loose with the laws that govern real life. That's what makes them fantastical. They don't have a carte blanche to rewrite everything in for the story, but when it comes to technical details like genetics, the MST3K Mantra is in full effect.

 

[Hawki]

Star Trek species interbreeding was a convenient fiction because the writers/creators were too afraid to have genuine alien as a major character. Better to soften it and make him more relatable to the audience by making him half-human. Step forwards a few decades and great popularity, they didn't need to be afraid of the idea anymore, but by then what was done was done.

When exactly did it stop? TNG had Troi, she's half betazoid. Voyager had Torres, she's half klingon.

Also, very few aliens in Star Trek are truly alien, in as much that they're humanoid, and have human foliables. If we discover alien life, even multicellular alien life, it's very unlikely it'll be humanoid, let alone having a human mindset.

Fantasy can have its own rules. But it still at base relies on an understanding of the real world, whether that be gravity, people dying when they bleed out, psychology, etc. I'm not sure anyone thinks orcs and humans have some weird magic thing going on such that interspecies reproduction occurs without normal sex, or that baseline humans/orcs have inherently magic gametes that encounter the other species' gametes, cast themselves a little spell and "make it work". Why not fuck a tree and make an ent whilst we're at it? Not that it really matters: whether we want to suspend real-life biology or not, the principle of orcs and humans mating suggest orcs are at least sort of human.

Fantasy will generally adhere to those rules you described, but apart from that? Not so much.

Lord of the Rings seems to be the primary analogy here, so let's look at how the world functions. It's created by deities, and has an Age of Lamps, then an Age of Stars, then the Age of the Sun, where humans awaken. There's magic, immortality, etc. The world is originally flat, but with the Breaking of the World, Arda is converted into a round world. And all of this is obstensibly taking place in our world's mythological past.

I could go on, but LotR's rules are different from everything we understand about evolution, geology, etc. So in that context, different species being able to breed with each other isn't farfetched.

 

[Eacaraxe]

Are they though?

Yes, that's literally the point. All WotC really needed to do is make a statement, "this lore already exists, look to these books (list) from previous editions for expanded lore which we'll make available in e-reader form on sale, and look forward to updated and reprinted versions of these books which we're currently working on". Done.

...if you ask me this seems more like a marketing decision than subservience to supposed people pushing for this that I've never seen despite being very active in the online D&D community...

Might I suggest that, like in many other cases we've seen in the past half decade, these are individuals who aren't really a part of the community and don't consume the products, but are rather attaching themselves to a politicized issue for self-aggrandizement and who aren't going to consume the product even if it's completely re-engineered to a form that suits them. The growing success of D&D as a consumer entertainment line can be much better attributed to Big Bang Theory, Stranger Things, and HarmonQuest than the quality of the product itself; that is to say, it's geek chic consoomer shit, and by and large a fad that is damaging the brand's long-term longevity for short-term gains.

So of course it's marketing. The best case scenario is updates and reprints of older material veteran players have long seen and been familiar with, except marketed as the bold face of a progressive and inclusive game company when the reality is furthest from.

 

[Kae]

Yes, that's literally the point. All WotC really needed to do is make a statement, "this lore already exists, look to these books (list) from previous editions for expanded lore which we'll make available in e-reader form on sale, and look forward to updated and reprinted versions of these books which we're currently working on". Done.

So you haven't seen them either?

Why is it wrong that they've decided to go further?
I personally find it exiting that they said they're going to do more research in the future and have consultants, that means the game will have more lore and more detail about each of the races cultures, with more focus in the culture instead of "Are these people good or bad?", which really it was obvious this change was coming, they have been make alignment less relevant since 4E to the point that it practically does nothing in 5E, if anything if they are stepping away from alignment (Which they have been for over a decade), it only make sense that they'll start using the terminology less and less, I mean it's not even important for Paladins & Clerics in this edition, so why should it be important to define a culture, when it doesn't even matter for the channelers of Divine Energy?

All I'm saying is that it's a change that fits perfectly with 5E's design Philosophy.

Might I suggest that, like in many other cases we've seen in the past half decade, these are individuals who aren't really a part of the community and don't consume the products, but are rather attaching themselves to a politicized issue for self-aggrandizement and who aren't going to consume the product even if it's completely re-engineered to a form that suits them. The growing success of D&D as a consumer entertainment line can be much better attributed to Big Bang Theory, Stranger Things, and HarmonQuest than the quality of the product itself; that is to say, it's geek chic consoomer shit, and by and large a fad that is damaging the brand's long-term longevity for short-term gains.

So of course it's marketing. The best case scenario is updates and reprints of older material veteran players have long seen and been familiar with, except marketed as the bold face of a progressive and inclusive game company when the reality is furthest from.

I see, so you're telling me that these people, who don't play D&D and know it only from media know specifically what a Yuan-Ti and a Vistani are, in which adventure modules (The least consumed books, because books about lore and about mechanics sell more for obvious reasons) and that their portrayals in such books could be considered racially insensitive towards Romani and Latinos respectively and specifically told WotC to change that, despite there being no outrage campaigns about this?

I think you're making a leap in logic here, I think what is more likely is that the team got expanded due to the success of the game, and a new lead designer was appointed (Jeremy Crawford, since Mike Mearls used to be the lead designer but moved to work on Magic which is the biggest WotC division) and probably with an openly more progressive team lead and new-er younger staff they used their new perspective to decide what changes they wanted to make to the game.

Admittedly I'm guessing too, but I highly doubt this is some weird conspiracy, also they haven't said absolutely anything about changing any lore, all they said was that they were going to be more careful in the depictions of their races and that they would no longer use alignment to describe cultures, again I don't feel like any of those are particularly drastic changes and the latter is perfectly consistent with how all of 5E has been going since the Handbook.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Wouldn't they actually be sub-elven?

That is true, but they are also subhuman.

Although human is a rather nebulous category in lord of the rings, which is also a big part of the problem.

Currently, 5.0 definitely primarily revolves around the Forgotten Realms, essentially a planet where most of the action revolves around the sword coast and some adjacent areas. What is less talked about is that D&D has a form of space that means that that particular world is one of thousands (not to be confused with the planes, which are one more thing). This was most notably explored in the AD&D Spelljammer run, though how canon anything is is ultimately up to interpretation. What this means is that you can have an entire separate planet and still have the same gods while still sharing in the lore of D&D.

I knew this, but I feel like 5e is a stand alone thing for a lot of players now, and I feel like the canon of the D&D multiverse is less important than the explicit thematic guidance given in the 5e DM's guide, which is very much in the mentality that you can do whatever you want in your setting. Heck, there's another chapter dedicated to rewriting/changing the planar multiverse, which is far more fundamental to D&D than spelljammer.

The growing success of D&D as a consumer entertainment line can be much better attributed to Big Bang Theory, Stranger Things, and HarmonQuest than the quality of the product itself; that is to say, it's geek chic consoomer shit, and by and large a fad that is damaging the brand's long-term longevity for short-term gains.

Now, I don't know a whole lot about the marketing side of D&D, but I would guess that, unless they're all totally incompetent, whoever is running that marketing has a better idea of who is buying their products and why than you do. That's not an insult, I don't know who is buying D&D (although I can make an educated guess based on statistics and statements given out by WotC) but I'm merely questioning your ability to make that determination.

We do know that 10 million hours of D&D content are streamed to twitch every year. 500,000 of those hours are produced by WotC themselves. According to the lead designer of 5th edition Jeremy Crawford, it was basically built from the ground up to be friendly to streaming. It has no miniatures. It has relatively simple rules and getting a new player to the point where they're able to play takes a few minutes with an experienced DM. This means you can have D&D streams which are still highly social, or which incorporate elements of improv and theatre without interrupting the game or needing to stop and explain the rules to the audience. I would attribute that in large part to its success.

I don't think Big Bang Theory or Stranger Things are actually positive depictions of D&D, they both depict it as an arcane, exclusionary full of obsessives and hostile gatekeepers. It's basically one step off Mazes and Monsters (or Riverdale, a show which also definately didn't get people into D&D).

 

[Hawki]

Although human is a rather nebulous category in lord of the rings, which is also a big part of the problem.

Okay, first of all, how is it nebulous, and second of all, how's it a problem?

To the former, in LotR, humans are, well, humans. The term "human" is never used though, but rather "Men"/"Man." It's been suggested that he used "Men" for its Germanic roots rather than "human" which has Latin roots. I guess you could argue that hobbits are humans as well, since it's stated that hobbits are closer (in relation) to Men than elves, but again, not seeing the problem here. We've already got a setting where Men, elves, dwarves, and hobbits are all broadly humanoid. But since most, if not all sapient species in the setting are created by deities, we're not looking at this in evolutionary terms.

Guess the TL, DR version is that there's no real ambiguity as to what a human is, and what a human isn't. Heck, it's much clearer on the subject than some other fantasy settings.

 

[Agema]

Err...Actually that's about the size of it. The simple existence of magic in a setting means that it's operating off a different set of rules than our non-magical world, especially when the gods are interventionist (as they so often are)..

Fantasy will generally adhere to those rules you described, but apart from that? Not so much.

Firstly, in ancient myth, gods are gods. If a god wants to copulate with anything and make it work, that's the nice thing about being a god. The centaurs of Greek myth were not made by the everyday union of horse and man, but man and a goddess. The minotaur is created through human-bovine union plus the power of Poseidon. The chimera was the mating of two other monsters, which were themselves the product of divine intercourse. There's never any notion that a random human can pop into the woods and boff a wolf to make some sort of dog-man.

In modern fantasy, one overhwelmingly sees that griffons and so on are either "natural" beasts, or were made in the first place by gods or magic. Not at all by ordinary, boring, interspecies sex. There's usually nothing to suggest magical or divine spark inherent to orcs and humans, or other extrinsic intervention to make breeding work: it is presented as a "natural" occurence of mating, nothing at all like Fantabulomundus the Mighty melding a duck and a crocodile in his magical laboratory.

The point really being that if we want to say orcs, humans and elves can interbreed because they are sort of the same species or because of some implicit, light, magical "because reasons", there is still clearly a boundary where successful mating can occur: human + elf yes, human + cat no. What occurs within that boundary strongly implies a sort of commonality between those races. If we want to go back to the idea of whether it's okay to treat these other races as inherently evil and murder their babies without having to feel bad about it, that commonality poses a problem.

Tolkein of course is a big deal, as a great deal of subsequent fantasy creators effectively treated it as a baseline that they were reluctant to diverge from. I don't ever recall a human successfully procreating with a dwarf in fantasy, and I'm pretty sure that's just because of Tolkein's origin myths of elves, dwarves and humans, where dwarves were outside the divine plan. Also, perhaps, not overturned because the idea of shagging a graceful, beautiful, slender, refined forest-dweller is a thing of sexual fantasy where shagging a squat, bearded, grumpy miner is far less likely to be.

When exactly did it stop? TNG had Troi, she's half betazoid. Voyager had Torres, she's half klingon.

It didn't stop. It's just a clunky contrivance that served an extrinsic purpose and became canon. I mean more that later Star Trek was more open about having "pure" aliens as major characters later on because they had established them as safely relatable-to.

 

[Terminal Blue]

Okay, first of all, how is it nebulous, and second of all, how's it a problem?

For one, there's a hierarchy of human races.

"High men", like the Numenoreans and their descendent, are distinct from the lesser races of men. They live longer, they are more noble and wise, they are taller and more beautiful. Over time, as the blood of Numenor is diluted by race-mixing or corruption, these qualities diminish in most of the population, but are preserved in the royal lines of Gondor and Arnor, which is why Aragorn is the best human who lives for 200 years and is the only person fit to be king.

Conversely, the people of Far Harad have black skin and are described as "half-trolls".

I'm making this sound overtly racist again, aren't I? It's not that clear cut. The Numenoreans themselves are kind of a cautionary tale about hubris, they're people whose knowledge and power outstripped their goodness. The fact that they were slavers and colonisers who dominated much of the world and subjugated lesser races is not depicted in a wholly positive light.

There's also strong analogy with both the myth of Atlantis (in fact, it's kind of a literal retelling of thay myth), and the the way ancient Rome was narrativized by Victorian and early 20th century historians as a great society that declined after falling into decadence and moral weakness. However, they're still overtly depicted as racially superior, and their descendents are depicted as having an inherent right to rule on the basis of that racial superiority. It's still kind of problematic.