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

There is something which just feels weird right now... asian characters appear in the game, hispanic characters appear in the game, even irrealistic people with purple (or other unrealistic color) eyes appear in the game... but black characters are extremely rare. Why?

Click to expand...

1) We are only there to show the seriousness of the situation.

2) Afros & greathelms are a poor mix

3) We are "hiding in shadows"

4) Drow & Tieflings kill us & take our stuff.

There were lovely books about random-rolling character history. The first two had a lovely disclaimer about how the male pronoun is the correct default, and that just because it is the default pronoun doesn't mean that the players or characters necessarily have to be male--it is just that the book is following the rules of English Grammar. Then in the third book, they abandoned that for using the female default, in some weird Political Correctness counter.
They also completely changed their stances on sex perversions and insanity. Yes, the random tables had some strange results.
3rd Ed, on the other hand, did a very good job simply by alternating male/female in the examples. That worked very effectively.
As for race, I believe Grumpy Kelt/Grumpy RPG had a nice one when he challenged Hasbro/WotC to include a better demographic variety (with specific %s) in the art.
But then again, 4e did a pretty good job of balancing Elves with Dwarves with Halflings with etc.

I cannot agree that your average RPG writer has the chops to write what he doesn't know though. I'd rather have no gay characters than caricatures of gay characters.
And I have no hope that the oversexualization of the female body will stop in D&D. I mean the number one rule of drawing females for all of D&D has been, "if it's female, it has massive jugs". Look at 4E, they put boobs on stones!

Should D&D go out of its way to promote equality? No. But...

There seems to have been an historical under-representation of female characters, and also those of ethnic minorities. I think WotC would do well to improve in this regard. And since it seems that their artists will default to white male characters unless explicitly told otherwise, WotC do need to make sure that they explicitly tell their artists otherwise.

I also think there's an issue with the type of female characters represented - in short, the chainmail bikini has to go. Basically, female adventurers should be depicted as what they are - highly trained specialists doing dangerous jobs in often hostile environments. That doesn't mean that they can't be sexy... but it means that they should very definitely be adventurers first.

Li Shenron said:

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)?

Click to expand...

There's probably no place for this in the rulebooks, since I'm not sure how you'd use artwork to signal that Tordek is gay without resorting to stereotypes that are probably offensive anyway.

However, in the "storybooks" - the settings and adventures - I think they should do as Paizo does, and as you've said here: include the occasional gay or trans-sexual character in the text without particular comment and without making a big deal out of it.

And they shouldn't be afraid of the reaction from it - those who might condemn them for including gay characters would most likely condemn them anyway for including magic, non-Christian religions, etc. And for the rest of us... we're big boys and girls; we can handle it.

YMMV, of course.

Obryn said:

You will not put in random sketches from Picasso, and there will be no Jackson Pollock prints on the leaves.

Click to expand...

....I would absolutely love the D&D book that was ballsy enough to try something like this, though.

Full splash page of a single silvery dot in a glossy black field entitled "A Paladin In Hell."

Some cubist nightmare of orcs attacking a city.

Man, that'd be awesome....

shidaku said:

Isn't that um, kinda the point of D&D?

Click to expand...

Imagining a world that has never existed is kind of the point of playing a game of D&D.

However, it's not the point of being an art director for D&D.

I don't think WotC should confuse the two.

Obryn said:

I don't really see anything false about it here. We're in a 2-year public playtest, with a large team of people who are looking into marketing, art direction, etc. Any choices made going into it are conscious ones.

Click to expand...

The issues of who is working on it and for how long aren't relevant to point I'm making, which is that the results can be more than "moral" or "immoral."

They're not writing fiction, they're writing an instruction manual on how to play a game so that players can create their own fiction. Insofar as there's a setting involved, it's a barebones, broad, implied one.

Click to expand...

They're producing artistic media for the purposes of entertainment. While I suppose one could posit that the sections of the book that constitute the game rules aren't "fiction" per se, that's largely a semantic difference.

They're making an RPG, with a lot of full-color artwork and examples of play. The content of that art, examples, and iconic characters (if any) are what the conversation's about. Let's not dilute it.

Click to expand...

On the contrary, this is the heart of what the discussion's about. The OP asked what "should" the next edition do; that's a query of what the "right" (e.g. moral) decision is.

Kamikaze Mudget said:

The reason there's no real "neutral" here is because no work is independent of the people and society in which it is generated. The artwork is chosen within a context that includes the race, class, age, gender, sexual orientation, education level, etc., of the person who selects it. There is never any possibility to isolate oneself from that context. We cannot help but be products of our genetics and environment.

So, regardless of the choice they make, it is driven, in part, by who they are.

Click to expand...

You're discussing the intent of the creators in this regard, as a specific example of the idea that the morality of what's done is based around the intent of the one doing it. That's a perfectly valid method for judgment, but it runs into the problem of how you judge what the creator's intent is, particularly when it gets into the uncomfortable area of saying "I know what their intent was, because I'm cognizant of the subconscious factors that influenced them without their awareness."

That's also not how I prefer to view the question of the rightness of wrongness of an action. I believe, as stated above, that the morality of an action is defined by the nature of the act itself (divorced, at least somewhat, from the intent of the person performing it - and divorced completely from the consequences of it). In this regard, there is indeed a "neutral" in that there are good actions that, if you fail to perform them, are not bad (e.g. the aforementioned supererogatory acts).

To pretend that this can be decontextualized is to imagine a world that has never existed. There is no cultural neutral zone. We are all part of the world in which we live. And those who are creating cultural products in that world are going to reflect who they are in that world, regardless of if they want it to or not.

Click to expand...

The context doesn't matter, I believe. Even if you could concretely know why someone did something, that's less important than what it was that they did.

The choice to dress an elf in, I dunno, something inspired by ancient Mesopotamian clothing, and whether or not that elf "looks Mesopotamian" is going to speak about those who make the game, regardless of what the decisions are or why, from a creative perspective, they may have been made.

Click to expand...

Again, I don't think it's about that. Trying to interpret the intent of the artist based on their art is ultimately, I think, going to say more towards your (and I mean in a generalized "you") own biases rather than theirs.

The way to judge the morality of something is to look at what was done (in my opinion), not why they did it.

Alzurius said:

You're discussing the intent of the creators in this regard, as a specific example of the idea that the morality of what's done is based around the intent of the one doing it.

Click to expand...

I'm not discussing intent or morality, but only the consequences of any action. Unintended or intentional, moral or immoral, the person making the choices needs to be aware of the consequences of the choices they make. To make those choices as if the consequences don't exist or aren't your responsibility is basically a bad idea, whatever else it might be. That's why there is no neutral zone: any choice is going to have consequences, and they have to take those consequences into account when they make the choice.

Fortunately for WotC, I don't think they're under the impression that they can take an action and recuse themselves of responsibility for its effects.

Alzurius said:

The context doesn't matter, I believe. Even if you could concretely know why someone did something, that's less important than what it was that they did.

Click to expand...

It's actually kind of the other way around. Intent doesn't matter. Context -- the effects of your choice -- is often the only thing that DOES matter.

For D&D (I'd argue for most things), you can't make choices without considering the indented audience of your product.

Kamikaze Midget said:

I'm not discussing intent or morality, but only the consequences of any action. Unintended or intentional, moral or immoral, the person making the choices needs to be aware of the consequences of the choices they make. To make those choices as if the consequences don't exist or aren't your responsibility is basically a bad idea, whatever else it might be. That's why there is no neutral zone: any choice is going to have consequences, and they have to take those consequences into account when they make the choice.

Fortunately for WotC, I don't think they're under the impression that they can take an action and recuse themselves of responsibility for its effects.

Click to expand...

I disagree with you, on many levels.

For one thing, discussing the consequences of something is, in essence, a discussion of morality, insofar as we're trying to determine if the consequences are "good" or "bad."

Secondly, I think it's important to remember that the consequences to something are, in essence, unknown. You can make predictions with varying expectations of accuracy, but even that is something that I don't think really applies here - the consequences of something like the artwork or writing style of a tabletop RPG are so diffuse and difficult to positively determine that it is, at best, an educated guess (usually made without specifics).

Further, holding that the consequences are the most important part of a decision often (I think) leads to very bad places, as it typifies the "ends justify the means" method of making decisions. In this case, what you do is unimportant (as is the state of mind you're in when you do it), so long as it brings about the consequences you want. (This is without getting into the practical issues of determining and measuring what the consequences are).

For what it's worth, I did some checking and what you're talking about is the philosophy of consequentialism, which is different from virtue ethics (which is concerned with the intent of the person doing the deed), and the methodology I was espousing, which is deontological ethics.

As such, we're approaching the OP's question from entirely different perspectives.

. It seems to me that Wizards has tried very hard to depict lots of ethnicities, and based on my admittedly unscientific impression, the majority of the art actually skews female.

So...I think Wizards should continue doing what they're doing...depicting a variety of people of various races and sexes engaged in heroic activity. Fortunately that seems to be what they're doing, on the equality standpoint, I think they're 5 by 5.