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NancyLebovitz comments on LW Women- Minimizing the Inferential Distance - LessWrong
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How does this system handle having strong loyalty to a group but being neutral to negative towards outsiders who are themselves not especially evil?
That sounds like the True Neutral alignment (Neutral on both axes). Druids are quite fond of it, and, in some sourcebooks, it's compulsory for them. Depending on how loyal they are to the group, they could edge into Chaotic Neutral; they could also edge toward Lawful Neutral if they are more attached to the ideals of the group than the group itself.
Druids are loyal to trees and/or other Druids, but not to much of anyone else?
Is there much of what you might call ordinary nationalism or ordinary prejudice in D&D? I'm not asking about aspects of D&D where the rules map onto real world group loyalties, I'm talking about, for example, inhabitants in a region having a preference for other inhabitants of the region.
They are also quite fond of squirrels. Can't forget the squirrels. Heh. But speaking more accurately, Druids are dedicated to nature, and nature is quite Neutral. At the same time, most Druids do realize that sentient beings (such as Humans or Elves or whomever) are part of Nature. Thus, the Druids seek to uphold some sort of a balance between civilization and wilderness, as opposed to, say, flooding the entire world with squirrels.
Is there ever ! Traditionally, Elves hate Dwarves with a passion, which is quite mutual. Underground races such as the Drow, Svirfneblin and Druegar hate surface-dwellers, as well as the regular Dwarves. Human kingdoms quite often all hate each other. Clerics of one god often hate those who follow some other god, especially if their god's alignment is in opposition to their own.
That said, the specific hatreds depend greatly on the setting, unlike the rules about Druids, which are a lot more uniform. For example, in Iron Kingdoms, Humans are pretty much the dominant race, and their political situation is... quite complicated. In Eberron, on the other hand, there is a state of lukewarm war between a relatively progressive multiracial kingdom (Khorvaine) on the one hand, and a ruthless dictatorship of wannabe mind-controlling transhumanists (Riedra) on the other. The more traditional inhabitants of Khorvaine also struggle with a multitude of internal tensions.
Pejudices can also develope out of a particular party's experiences. For example, I've seen a party adopt a "persecute all halflings that we encounter" policy after getting mugged by a gang of halflings. That same campaign featured the human nation going to war with elves, and an (admittedly evil) PC inciting mob violence against a community of elves living in a human city. This lead to "elven Ann Frank" jokes.
Good point. In addition, Rangers get a "Favored Enemy" class feature built-in, which means that they hate some specific species (which may include, say, Goblins or Elves) so much that they get combat bonuses against them.
Interesting to note though, if I'm not mistaken, that only Evil Rangers can pick their own race as a favored enemy, so there is something else going on there as well...
Depends on the setting. Most commonly that's a trait of Evil groups and a few isolationist cultures (wouldn't be cookie-cutter high fantasy without elves sneering down from their wooded fastnesses, after all), but not so much of people in general, or at least it's not emphasized much.