Dude, I live in the real world, I can only suspend my disbelief so much! I can't just forget how mules are made! The brain keeps thinking and it doesn't stop when I tell it to lol

Play Pathfinder, like an adult.

I swear if this is more whining about the Orcs....

...are you calling first person shooters "shmups"?

Sorry if my answer was off-topic. I thought you were asking about personhood in your personal games, because you made the statement that if a critter acts like a person that indicates you should treat it as a person. I personally agree, but I wanted to point out the fuzziness of personhood.

Looking back over my comment, I think I ended up rambling and only mostly saying anything. These are the points I wanted to express:

1. Personhood isn't objective fact, and every person at your gaming table has a different idea of what a person is.
2. Since only people count when making moral decisions, personhood is a bit of a touchy subject and doesn't get examined much. As a result, pretty much everyone thinks all the good people they know agree with their personal definition of personhood because disagreeing on that means you are Evil and Bad.
3. Because this is such a touchy subject, people are really sensitive to it. It's hard to make a work that interrogate personhood without it coming across as preachy, so if you want to interrogate it it's best to present them with a nuanced situation and let them make up their own mind without non-diagetic criticism nudging them in a direction
4. i also wanted to repeatedly emphasize that our fantasy tropes can be traced back to colonialist, imperialist, and often very racist tropes that were common in the 19th century, and a lot of more modernized fantasy tropes stemming from those old tropes can still be pretty yikes if you think about it for any period of time. Not something most players think about, but I think trying to improve on them is worthwhile.

Also, I should point out that in 2e, 1e, and ODnD, the phrasing was usually "Orcs tend towards chaotic evil due to the Rage of Gruumsh inclining them to solve all problems with violence" or "Elves are generally chaotic and will react to a party with suspicion or hostility". Back then, alignment was more about external relationships than your character, but this wasn't communicated well. The widespread misconception that alignment was about your internal character got enshrined in 3rd edition and then just got carried forward from then into later editions, which is really unfortunate. The point of alignment was supposed to be that good characters and evil characters don't get along, and the same with Lawful and Chaotic characters, even if their individual ethics don't actually overlap much. But that's not how most players see it, so now WotC has reacted to this with a full walkback on creature alignment in a way that kinda erases the little nuance that was left.

Yeah, I thought that was standard? Maybe I'm in a bubble IRL.

Slightly unpopular opinion: All official lore is crap and should be generally ignored. (Even the stuff I kind of like) If I want to play in a world where what I can do is limited by the generic, inoffensive, middle-of-the-road, crowd-pleasing writers at some corporation I'll just play a AAA video game. The ability to be participatory in the creation and evolution of the in-game world is what makes TTRPGs different from consumer media. Why would you give that part up, but still leave yourself with all the cognitive load?

Slightly unpopular opinion: All official lore is crap and should be generally ignored. (Even the stuff I kind of like) If I want to play in a world where what I can do is limited by the generic, inoffensive, middle-of-the-road, crowd-pleasing writers at some corporation I'll just play a AAA video game. The ability to be participatory in the creation and evolution of the in-game world is what makes TTRPGs different from consumer media. Why would you give that part up, but still leave yourself with all the cognitive load?

Okay, I want to start by saying that I do appreciate that WotC is trying really hard to treat the playable races as people. However, they haven't been sticking the landing well. For example, i do understand why they changed all instances of the word Race with Species, but making all the playable races canonically separate species just trades one yikes for a new yikes. As a player, sometimes I want to settle down with an Orc and make a bunch of Half-Orc Babies, but seeing the word "species" gives me pause. I know in real life cross-breeding different species of animals rarely goes well and the children are as a rule sterile, so can i ethically bring a baby into the world that I know is going to be sterile and is probably doing to have serious health problems?

Anyway, most people aren't mad about that anymore, and decent people aren't generally mad about the Mexican orcs or whatever. What has been a problem is that they are trying to get rid of the concept of Monsterous Races, which would make the average D&D setting a generally more pleasant place to live in. Here's the game-design issue with this: D&D is fundamentally about combat, and 5.5's design leans into the more crunchy aspect of that. 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. Goblins and orcs and the like fill this role of being sentient pincushions. In addition, rp-wise players often like being special, and an easy way to do this is being a Good Drow or a Forgiving Kobold or a Pacifist Orc.

The specific way they are going about this is retconning the lore to make the societies of the Monsterous Races less Evil or outright just normal human-ish societies. Personally, as a DM I do not like this. I like to make my orcs and goblins distinct from mainstream D&D by doing pretty much exactly this, because it's a low-effort way to make my setting look Nuanced or Morally Grey. The point is more to do something that pops out of the wider dnd culture more than to actually say anything about, say, how indigenous people tend to be treated as speed-bumps to "progress" throughout history, because I dont usually run games where colonialism happens anywhere near the players. So not only does this make WotC's writers look incredibly lazy (and more importantly, spineless) to me, but now the laziest way to make a DnD setting pop is to have goblins and orcs be non-persons that are there to be treated as Rome treated the Gauls or sent to Oklahoma.

And what's sad is that if they had just put in any amount of effort into the worldbuilding, we could have the nice pleasant world full of non-evil cannon fodder without this problem. Unfortunately, in order to do that the setting has to actually make a statement about something. Here, I'll do some right here:

• Let's start with the obvious. Goblins specifically parallel Native Americans in the way that from the perspective of "civilized" races they seem to just exist out there in the land we want. Let's lean into that. Maybe the reason Maglubiyet is their only God isn't that he killed all the others but that when left alone Goblin religion is more like hero-worship. Each tribe has their own little pantheon on local saints and heroes, and Maglubiyet is distinct in that he is recognized globally.
• Drow are pretty clearly fascist. I am sure they don't see themselves as evil, though. However, most of their lore doesn't go much into how their society functions day-to-day. Fleshing them out would allow them to point out how just existing in a fascist country does in fact mean that you almost certainly have blood on your hands. We could see drow that try to oppose their regime by running a literal underground railroad or by just passively not complying with obviously evil laws, and we could see drow that are completely oblivious to how a seemingly harmless beaurocratic rule can result in people being enslaved or killed.
• Orcs in fiction stem from a long line of faceless evil raiders inspired by the Mongols invasion of Europe. People alive at that time had wild ideas about why the Mongols were here and where they came from, and the general consensus was that they came from some lifeless wasteland like Mordor where crops couldn't grow, so they had to pillage and plunder to get basic food and water. This is obviously not true, but it makes sense. All they had to do is make the orcs frigging steppe people! Actual Caucausians! Just copy and blend Mongolian and Georgian culture and traditions, give them cloth with colorful beading to wear instead of scraps of untanned leather, and let them be people in their homeland while the rest of the world cowers in fear of these incomprehensible alien raiders who like horsies and dressing up nice.

See, it's not hard! But saying something, anything at all, might offend some customers and make their profits go down. So they go with the safe, bland option of "everyone is basically a normal human like you, the player, so you can plop yourself into any race and not have too much cultural dissonace."

Anyway. That was a wall of text. I'm going to log off now.

Doesn't mean people can't give and receive recommendations!

Right, but I don't think calling people children for playing one game over another is the way to do it.

Old world of darkness lore slapped though

I disagree. I think having a base to work from is helpful, both to players and DMs.

For example I don't want to create a pantheon of gods. I might want to create a few unique gods within my setting, and if they conflict I'll change some rules accordingly, but I want something to build off of. Similarly if a player wants to create a paladin or cleric they can just pull from the standard list.

Also if the official lore is fun, it's more fun to build off of. I'll enjoy reading it more and I'll enjoy using it.

I disagree. I think having a base to work from is helpful, both to players and DMs.

For example I don't want to create a pantheon of gods. I might want to create a few unique gods within my setting, and if they conflict I'll change some rules accordingly, but I want something to build off of. Similarly if a player wants to create a paladin or cleric they can just pull from the standard list.

Also if the official lore is fun, it's more fun to build off of. I'll enjoy reading it more and I'll enjoy using it.