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I was writing an email to a friend trying to explain some aspects of D&D as a game-based franchise, particularly with reference to WotC's current darling the Forgotten Realms, when I kind of stumbled across just how strange it might sound to someone not used to its tropes. Thought I would share and ask if other had realized the same.

This is from one of the most famous and best-selling of the D&D novel series:

"Drizzt was a ranger, dedicated to defending the good races, and he despised spindly-armed, foul-smelling goblins above all the other evil races in the world."

Drizzt is himself a member of an evil race: the drow, black-skinned elves who live deep underground in a ruthless, matriarchal tyranny called Menzoberranzan. Wanting no part of that life, Drizzt escaped to the surface and -- as you can see -- devoted himself to the "good races," who in turn treat him with fear, distrust, and contempt because he's a black-skinned drow.

Now, I could give this a pass, reasoning that Drizzt's outlook is generally correct, that generally speaking drow and goblins are evil while humans and dwarves and white-skinned elves are generally good, that is, that in his world stereotypes are a matter of fact rather than perspective. BUT Drizzt's own arch-nemesis, a human assassin, is described like this just a few pages before the quotation above:

"Drizzt had seen himself in the assassin, had seen what he might have become in Menzoberranzan."

By the way, to explain the first quotation a bit, "ranger" is a term of art. Specifically, it is a class in the game. One of the class features is getting bonuses in combat against a certain race the ranger especially hates. In Drizzt's case, that is apparently goblins. I bring it up because the setting of the novel uncritically imports the game concept of class. Race is also a game concept but given the main themes of the character as described above, I am trying to decide if this approach is better understood as critical or uncritical.

If anything, Drizzt should probably have the special enemy of Drow, although that would take some DM fiat. However your premise is correct, if a bit focused on one series of one specific setting when the core concepts have some weirdness worth exploring.

D&D as a whole really breaks down if you overthink it. The best I've seen is to consider D&D by RAW more like a Transhumanist setting:

* Magic is common.
* Death is cheap (raise dead being available, if not common)
* Alignment is often a 'team jersey' more than anything else. Easily detected ('Good' towns should really invest in magic items to detect evil and put them on the gates. Maybe sponsor Paladin academies?) Don't get me started on Dragonlance, where too much good is... evil.
* Many settings use castles and such designed after real-world castles... in a setting where Dragons exist and have the potential to make a WWII bombing run look subtle and restrained.
* The economy is perpetually broken. A 1st level wizard should be able to at least eat well off casting Continual Light one or twice a day on useful stuff to make lanterns for towns. That's maybe 20 minutes of the day, the remainder being free time to work on researching other spells or spending that not-so-hard-earned gold.

This is not to say it isn't fun or that specific gaming groups can't make something more sane out of it, but D&D's always been a little weird.

The Drizzt stuff is weird because race is such a big issue but ... I mean, come on, it's a bit on the nose.

Really excellent point about alignment as team affiliation. That is the best explanation of it I have ever heard.

The best way to understand D&D is to read The Order of the Stick.

http://www.giantitp.com/comics/oots0001.html

I like D&D, but I totally admit that RAW it's become it's own special genre instead of emulating any other genre. Partially the kitchen sink issue, compounded by a lot of early rules being added based on game value, then kept even after their usefulness was exceeded.

I still love all the weirdness of 1st/2nd edition AD&D, even if it isn't my go-to for a game much of the time.

Good and Evil are real, measurable things, not just philosophical concepts. There is no question of the afterlife. A high level spell caster can take you there to visit and the gods are available to answer questions.

D&D does a good job simulating a high fantasy magic heavy world. But if you break out the microscope and look at it too closely, there are a lot of flaws. And if you use it to try to make some other game world, things can get wonky, fast.

I feel like D&D has always focused on simulating the PCs with everything else being various levels of cheats.

Think of computer games where the AI 'Cheats' because it has perfect knowledge while the player deals with fog of war and limited knowledge. That tends to be D&D... And it works as long as you don't look for the crack too much. A lot of stuff (Raise Dead) was put in to fill a need for dungeon-crawling characters with no real plan for exploring a world with that kind of ability in it. Some editions have dabbled with making monsters work more like PCs (3rd, for example) which had good and bad effects. 4th pulled back from this hard with a design concept that monsters exist only to interact with PCs... Anything that happens when they're "off camera" is there for the DM to fudge as needed. So monsters don't get dailies (they're only in one scene of combat, generally) and work ona different 'economy' than the players. It works in practice, even if it sounds ugly.

A favorite hack of mine for D&D is changing Detect spells to make 'investigation' more interesting. The core of the idea was borrowed from a White Wolf World of Darkness book, but this is adapted for D&D. Basically, Detect Evil only shows evil on innately evil things (Demons and Devils) but does leave a lingering 'sense' of evil in an area where evil acts were committed, even on a victim of an evil act.

So if someone is beat up by an evil character, they'll show as 'evil' for a while. The sense of evil would linger longer the more unpleasant the evil is: severe emotional abuse is going to leave scars that'll take a while to heal. Obviously, players would need to understand this change. Paladins wouldn't be able to pick the evil guy out of a lineup so easily, but would still know they're needed here as something evil is happening. They might be able to travel around a keep and find the room where the evil guy hangs out, especially if he does bad things there, but it's not as cut & dried as standard Detect Evil.