D&D General The Art and the Artist: Discussing Problematic Issues in D&D

[Scribe]

if I know 3 orcs personally and you know 7 orcs personally and another person knows 2 orcs personally (I am using orc as a stand in for race sex religion country of origin ext) and I say "All 3 orcs I know don't like this" and you say "6 of the 7 orcs I know like it" and that another person says "The 2 orcs I know don't care and think it's dumb to like it or not" how can anyone say what "orc" think.
also if you take these numbers and say you can't please the 6 and the 3+1 at the same time

Reasonable people can disagree, and as multiple people have pointed out it seems there is some agreement around that being a root issue in these discussions.

Not everyone agrees on the problems even existing, the severity of the problems, or any potential solutions to those potential problems.

Which isn't to say that there isn't stuff to fix! Volos Orcs, and the Vistani for example, but again there is plenty of scope for disagreement about other things, and very little tolerance, patience, and nuance in public discussion lately.

 

[Lyxen]

How are "significant harm" and "minor and easy fixes" contradictory?

I'm still waiting for a definition of what "significant harm" means, please let me know.

What percentage of gamers of color need to feel excluded before we're willing to admit there's a problem?

Please let me know your opinion, also taking into account where most of the "gamers of color" live on the planet.

 

[HammerMan]

Reasonable people can disagree, and as multiple people have pointed out it seems there is some agreement around that being a root issue in these discussions.

Not everyone agrees on the problems even existing, the severity of the problems, or any potential solutions to those potential problems.

Which isn't to say that there isn't stuff to fix! Volos Orcs, and the Vistani for example, but again there is plenty of scope for disagreement about other things, and very little tolerance, patience, and nuance in public discussion lately.

yeah... and it's hard to find if people are arguing in good faith or not. I try to assume everyone is. However I find that once people start saying I am not I find my ability see them (or others that agree with them) not to be in some bad faith...

 

[Bedrockgames]

Sure, and this being a D&D board, sometimes that's about something entirely ludicrous too. Like I've been called a "bad person" on here (repeatedly actually for a while many years ago) because I foolishly admitted that I used to... back in 2E... <whispers> sometimes fudge the dice so I didn't start a TPK and have to make us spend hours rolling new PCs and maybe re-writing the entire adventure and so on... <end whisper>

And this is one of the frustrating things about game forums I find. I certainly have my views on what i like to play and how I like to run games, but people have a right to play the game differently than me, without it being a moral issue

 

[HammerMan]

I'm still waiting for a definition of what "significant harm" means, please let me know.

yeah, if a book that an orc (again using this to avoid real world groups) reads makes some part of the orc population feel attacked, and some elves that have read that book use it as an excuse to persecutor the orcs?
How many Orcs need to feel bad for it to be significant? how many orcs need to be persecuted to be significant?

 

[Ruin Explorer]

This is a much larger topic, but I think people very much overestimate how much of an idea they can get about a person's experience with these things from the positions they take on a gaming forum, even when it veers into the political. I am often very surprised just how off my assumptions are about a person's background, experience with suffering, experience with racism, experience with poverty, is based on posting style a lone. I have also learned the hard way, when you think are absolutely right about a thing, it is very easy to veer into being judgmental and cruel (there are times I've called people racist for example, when it became clear to me that is actually not what was going on, and I was ashamed to have used that to justify my own bad behavior towards another person-----and but the same token, there are times when I've disagreed with posters like yourself about these issues, and used my own sense of righteous indignation to justify similar behavior......and both these things often stem from an over-confidence in one's own certainty).

In terms of wages, sure there are always going to be people who think they have it tough, who don't know what tough is. But I really don't find that people taking the positions I am taking, often align with being financially well off (I find in the US, it is the opposite---people taking your position are usually more likely to be financially secure and college educated, often with advanced degrees). But that is just an impression, based on my narrow experience. I shouldn't make assumptions about you for example, because I don't know you. I shouldn't make assumptions about other posters, because I don't know them. And I don't want people to make assumptions about me on this front either (I won't go into it, but I can say I am not well off at all and I know what it is like to struggle and have significant disadvantages).

Note that I confined my claim specifically to having been impacted by racism.

There are some attitudes that just don't roll out casually if you've been impacted by it, and/or are concerned about and the issues around it.

As I said, I agree that there's broader stuff that's harder to quantify. It is indeed hard to tell how wealthy people are, for example. So the rest of what you're saying? Sure.

Re: correlation with wealth/education, actually in the US this stuff correlates pretty much with race and gender and not much else, nowadays, as has been borne out by an awful lot of polling by all sides involved. It did used to correlate with wealth/education though, especially in the 1990s. Now often there's an inaccurate assumption but easy-to-make that people who speak well about social issues are likely "rich kids" as they tended to be in, say, 1990.

 

[payn]

yeah the borg are the bad version and the federation is the goodish version... so now again, where do you draw the line? are we the borg or are we the federration?

Stop worrying about yourself and think about them. Your melting pot challenge assumes you have some right to their culture, but in the past that is not something that has been reciprocated (not by you, but by culture in general). The numbers and percentages are immaterial, if you can adjust you behavior in a minor inconvenient way, the locals will appreciate it. If they dont meet you half way, thats on them. Just put your best foot forward and be genuine and understand that its a constant process of review and not an endgame.

 

[Vaalingrade]

"Melting pot" has come to be seen as an assimilation culture theme like the borg. That might be how locals see that comment.

And that's because that's how it's been weaponized.

It originally meant 'everyone brings something to create a stronger whole' and now it's used to say 'How dare you be black when you should be 'Merican! I'm still going to make it a point to treat you how I feel black people should be treated though.'.

 

[Charlaquin]

And then, there are some people trying - despite the obvious problem of them being a cis-white 50+ years old, which I understand is sort of a capital offense to some these days - to walk a middle ground, of both trying to be understanding of the past and supporting changes, but being baffled and annoyed by the aggressivity on particular topics, and the way they snowball in negativism and condamnation of the past.

Being a 50+ year old cis white male is not an offense (capitol or otherwise) to anyone, save perhaps a small handful of overeager and mostly very young want-to-be activists, who will likely learn with time and patience that the issue of privilege is far more nuanced than “old white cishet men bad.” If you wonder at the fervor with which some people engage with these sorts of discussions, it’s often because we’re exhausted with constantly having to fend off accusations such as these. As I said before, I think we would all do well to try to focus more on the content of each other’s arguments, rather than the (yes, often grating) ways they’re being made.

Simply, thanks for this. I might start a thread on these topics.

 

[BookTenTiger]

But the intention and the person do illuminate the work. I am fine separating artist from art in the sense that, a terrible person might make beautiful art (and I can divide those two things in my mind, even appreciate that perhaps there is a connection between how chaotic this person's soul was and how that enabled them to achieve something compelling artistically). Just think of someone like Beethoven. When you realize the state of his hearing when he wrote his 9th Symphony, that adds a whole other layer to it for me. And I think the same is true for intentions. Ideally the text itself gives us enough information to thoroughly assess and figure out what a person was trying to say without misunderstanding them. But I think when we stop at our own immediate reaction to a work of art, that is very simplistic. It feels like an act of bad faith to just stop there without trying to gauge what the actual purpose of it was. And part of gauging that can be learning more about a person and what they thought. Just contrast how people have discussed Tolkien and Lovecraft. Much of that is about what those men wrote in letters, journals and what we knew about their lives. Knowing that Tolkien was a veteran of WWI for example, makes Lord of the Rings read a bit differently. Knowing what he had to say about Jewish people, that he was concerned about how Orcs were portrayed, reveals something about his intentions in the work. And the same is true of Lovecraft. I love Lovecraft's stories and I think they are much bigger than the man's flaws (you can't escape his influence and there is a reason for that). But his views on race were always pretty clear to me being from New England, and when I see things he wrote in letters and when I read about his life, it very much makes sense (the kind racism Lovecraft had I think is of a much different character than say the kind of racism we associate with the segregated south: it is more about a bloodlines, distrust of any ethnic group outside of Yankees (in New England terms, those who can trace their ancestry to early English settlers)---his attitude towards Italians for example didn't exactly sit well with me (and it is an attitude that used to be around in New England even when I was kid...though it was fading quite a bit by that point). But like a lot of people have also pointed out, Lovecraft was a very unsuccessful person in many respects, a fairly powerless person in his actual life, his views also did change over time (though not to the degree of Howards), and he died of a horribly painful illness quite young, so it can be useful to examine his personal life and intentions and try to put them into the context of their time. I think we get a more accurate and nuanced understanding of these things when we examine the author's more thoroughly. You still might come away feeling the same, but I think it pays to give a work and to give a writer their day in court and a fair hearing.

I think you have a good point that an artist's intentions can add a lot to an audience's experience and critique.

However, I would note that we don't always have access to an artist's intentions. And even when we do have access to their letters, journals, discussions, etc., that's still only a small glimpse into a complex mind and experience.

But let's imagine we could magically know exactly what an artist's intentions were. An audience member's perspective, even when it differs from an artist's intention, is still valid. Art lives in that strange space between an artist's intention and the audience experience.

This means that the same piece of art can mean vastly different things to you and me. And neither of our experiences are invalid.

We can then say, "You think A, and I think B. Based on what we know about the artist, does that change our perspectives at all?"

To me, that's where the richest discussions come in.

But none of that can happen if we waste our time saying, "Your perspective is not valid."