D&D 5E Should the next edition of D&D promote more equality?

I think D&D is doing a (fairly) good job at promoting equality of men and women. There are no discrimination of sorts in the rules, and men and women characters are "roughly" equally featured both in the text and the artwork (with the exception of the chainmail bikini sacred cow, of course).

But how about characters of different ethnicity? I don't know in 4e books, but in 3e books there were occasionally some asian-looking characters, but there were almost no black human characters. Notice that I'm not talking about necessarily having black dwarves, elves and halflings, but why not humans?

How about gender-bending characters? Can we have some occasional man NPC with man consort, or woman NPC with woman consort in the game (just presented as such, with no attached comment)? Or is the topic still too sensitive?

What's your take?

The only real problem I can see for human ethnicity is that you'd then have to explain why these people are different in appearance, which really isn't a hurdle because the game doesn't need to explain it, the DM does. Even then, the DM doesn't really have to. It can just be a superficial thing that doesn't matter at all. Frankly, I have nothing against different races of humans in the game, and I think this might be more on the artists than the game designers.

When it comes to the gender of NPC consorts, though, I don't know why that has to be part of the rules at all. If you want your NPC King to have male consorts, then that. Just do it. I don't think sexuality has to be part of the game's rulebooks at all. Sexuality and Homophobia alter from person to person, and are also part of the gaming crowd for better or worse. No reason to advocate, even seemingly, any particular thing, instead of allowing each group to include sexuality in their game to whatever degree they're comfortable with.

Frankly, I always wanted to play a gay character who fell in love with another character in the group, just for the hell of it, maybe to see if I could pull it off, but there's no reason to tell people that their campaign must involve homosexuality just for the sake of fairness or verisimilitude or whatever. It's not the game's job to advance gay rights or ethnic problems, it's the games job to be a game.

Ethnicity is sometimes hard to tell based on the way many of the 3E iconics are painted (due mainly to art style and color palette chosen)... but I never got the impression that any were necessarily lacking. Ember the monk I always assumed to be black, Alhandra the paladin's PHI image could be considered one of several ethnicities, and Sorra the favored soul could be one of several as well.

I always got from the 3E inconics that a point was made to be as varied as possible, across all gender and racial lines (both human and demi-human).

Li Shenron said:

But how about characters of different ethnicity? I don't know in 4e books, but in 3e books there were occasionally some asian-looking characters, but there were almost no black human characters.

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Most games take place in a fantasy medieval western Europe setting. The end result are most NPCs look European. It's not realistic to have lots of "different" looking people, unless the setting makes that possible. (A fantasy setting with lots of immigration, or tourism, due to cheap long-range transport, would certainly support this.) The end result is 3rd Edition iconic PCs (the humans, anyway) are more diverse than the NPCs that you see in adventures.

Athas actually does this a lot, at least in 2e. Each city-state is loosely based on a real-world culture, and the city-states are much closer to each other than said cultures in real life were. People traveling from one to the other and intermarrying is common. The end result is a "black" Urikite NPC (Urik is based on Mesopotamia) in a party where most of the human NPCs are "white" draws no comment at all. On Athas, travel is difficult and dangerous, but the distances aren't.

I would be leery of a directive that says X% of characters need to look "European" in setting X, and Y% need to look "insert ethnic group here". As long as there aren't racist depictions, I don't care.

How about gender-bending characters? Can we have some occasional man NPC with man consort, or woman NPC with woman consort in the game (just presented as such, with no attached comment)? Or is the topic still too sensitive?

What's your take?

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I don't see how that's "gender-bending", but a discussion about homosexual characters instead. There's a thread that is (or was) discussing this on the Paizo boards a while back.

It's probably a little too sensitive. It's not cool, but someone is going to complain, especially since it's a product that kids can play with, and I'd rather WotC (or whoever) pick its battles.

No.

Everything you describe is a campaign-centric decision that should be left up to individual DMs. D&D has no good reason to provoke discussion of such issues. Wading into politics is usually a bad idea for a company that just wants to sell some games.

Hmm, a difficult topic to discuss in depth on the forum, but here are some thoughts.

I do think it is a good thing for the core D&D books to have art that shows diverse human ethnicities represented among the player characters and NPCs. After all, people of all ethnicities play D&D and why not have the game serve the needs of all ethnicities of gamers by showing character art that reflects different ethnicities? Whether you like to play characters of your own ethnicity or that of a different ethnicity to your own, it would be odd if the game did not reflect the same diversity found among the players of the game, just as it would be odd if the art showed only male characters and no female characters, for example.

The more complex challenge is in designing a default campaign world for the game that provides a logical way to implicitly or explicitly explain the ethnic diversity of the art. Probably the best solution is to make sure the default world has at least as much ethnic diversity as the real world. And even better, to have a cosmopolitan city (or more than one) in the heart of the campaign world where people from all over the world can be found in great diversity and number to explain why you can find people of every ethnicity in the art. However, I would also prefer that the campaign world, other than for such cosmopolitan centers, have different regions with different ethnicities and/or mixes of ethnicities or have a very good explanation for why this is not the case. It seems quite natural to have a variety of different-looking ethnicities among humans in a fantasy world, but it's odd to think the variety will pop up randomly and evenly-distributed among each town, village and dungeon throughout the world, as opposed to as a result of separation of various peoples, tribes, clans and nations over the ages of history due to geographical boundries, national boundries, major historic events, etc.

The different ethnicities in the default campaign world, just as the different religions, different cultures, different political groupings and different geographic regions, should ideally provide an opportunity to tell the story of the default world and to help generate stories and tell the stories of the game in that world, but should do so with care not to drag into the game any prejudices, conscious or otherwise, from the real world, so as to avoid being offensive to real world D&D players who want to play the game.

One thing I've seen sometimes in campaign worlds which I find silly is to have caucasians as the standard race and to have all other ethnicities in the fantasy world be fantasy-only ethnicities. I doubt it is a satisfying solution for most non-caucasian players to have the implied options be to either play 1) a caucasian player character, or 2) a fantasy ethnicity.

Maybe one solution to this issue would be to include more art that doesn't automatically look like it's based from the Forgotten Realms (or equivalent). If the world in a given picture doesn't look like it's from Fantasy-Medieval-Europeburg, there will be fewer complaints about "realism".

It does have the drawback of making me picture the dusky-skinned silk-clad Queens of Barsoom or some such, which is probably going to far for a core book.

As for the part of the OP, regarding sexuality, I think the wise choice there for the game is for the art to stay away from depicting explicit sexuality in the core game, whether that be hetero- or homo- or bisexuality or any other form of sexuality. Sexuality (and I mean any form of sexuality) will play a role in some games and campaigns, maybe even many or most games, but I doubt it belongs in the core rules or the art of the core rules in any overt form. That seems better suited for third party supplements that can treat more mature content such as human sexuality and how the game interacts with it, rather than in the core rules which are aimed at a broader starting age of players. Now if in describing NPCs in a campaign world, a campaign world supplement is going to dive into details of various romantic relationships among NPCs, then sure, I think there may be room to include some diversity in sexual orientation, romantic inclination, etc. to reflect the real diversity in real humans, but I don't think that level of detail is needed in the core rules or even in a core campaign world product.

Like this?

http://sp6.fotolog.com/photo/54/20/58/randanell/1197870283_f.jpg