Transcription:
A picture of a skinny female orc with the side of her head shaved. She wears an armless red dress and a black shawl, as well as matching red bracelets and a black choker with a gold heart at the front.
At the top of the image is the text "You may not like it, but this is what" in large bubble font
At the bottom of the image is a screenshot from the new D&D changelog, reading "• Orcs no longer have the Powerful Build feature."
And below that, the text "Peak 2024 D&D orc performance looks like" continues the bubble font from the top.
…well, no: sixth-edition core rules no longer support half-races, something-something-against-racism?..
The solution to racism is not to let them breed together? 😕
We will cure racism through genetic purity!
...to be explicitly clear: i believe that we're all sarcastically mocking WotC's editorial choice to eliminate half-breeds from the core rules in order to combat real-world racism...
(i wouldn't be surprised to see mixed races included as an advanced option in the new dungeon master's guide, though)
Iirc it's more of a lexical change: until now, half-something automatically assumed the other half was human, making the human race central in the setting. To allow for more liberty, most (all?) humanoid species will become interbreedable and you can choose the traits from one ancestry or the other.
That was how it worked in the playtest. The sidebar saying "pick a race you really are and pretend to be half the other race" is gone from the 2024 PHB. Rules as written, you can only be fully one race, this of course doesn't actually matter as the whole thing is imaginary bullshit but in organised play it'll sometimes come up.
I stand corrected, I didn't know they changed it that way. Thanks for the update :)
so what Pathfinder does?
In Pathfinder 2e I think Half-Elf, half-Orc, and their equivalent of Tiefling and Aasimar are variants you can apply to other species.
I haven't played enough pathfinder to be able to answer your question, sorry.
Also, I was wrong, see the other comment for correction.
We didn't have half-races in BECMI, despite having a guy who was going by the title "Half-Orc", he was just really ugly.