Oriental Adventures, was it really that racist?

[Bedrockgames]

. In short, you don't need all of those extra opportunities. Note that poverty is a disadvantage that works against privilege, but doesn't erase it.

Not weighing in on college admissions or privilege, but I have seen a lot of comments in these discussions that seem to downplay poverty in the US, and it really is probably the single biggest disadvantage a person can have in this country. It isn't a minor inconvenience. It is a matter of putting food on the table, keeping a roof over your head and being able to control your own life.

 

[Mordhau]

I think it's inevitable that people are going to be reluctant to explore other cultures in the current climate. It's not just the need to do research and be resepectful, but the mere fact that one's identity can immediately make one's attempts to explore cultures not one's own suspect.

Yes one should do one's research and be respectful, but critics aren't always very well informed and often come from a place of poor understanding of good critique, and abundant confirmation bias, themselves.

 

[Dire Bare]

I think it's inevitable that people are going to be reluctant to explore other cultures in the current climate. It's not just the need to do research and be resepectful, but the mere fact that one's identity can immediately make one's attempts to explore cultures not one's own suspect.

Yes one should do one's research and be respectful, but critics aren't always very well informed and often come from a place of poor understanding of good critique and abundant confirmation bias themselves.

Eh. Ignorant and unfair criticism of art is something all artists must face, regardless of where they are taking their inspiration from.

If and when you are criticized, as a creator, how you react to the criticism speak volumes. Think hard on the criticism and ask yourself, "Is it really unfair?" It could be, or it could be spot on. And apologize for any harm, do your best to make amends and do better. It's not that hard.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Eh. Ignorant and unfair criticism of art is something all artists must face, regardless of where they are taking their inspiration from.

If and when you are criticized, as a creator, how you react to the criticism speak volumes. Think hard on the criticism and ask yourself, "Is it really unfair?" It could be, or it could be spot on. And apologize for any harm, do your best to make amends and do better. It's not that hard.

It can be if you don't think you did harm but get brigaded anyway. Sometimes its justified; sometimes its not (Requires Hate anyone?). But you're still setting yourself up for it when you swing into this area at all.

(And even apologizing is no assurance other people will consider it sufficient; nonpologies are a thing, but where people draw the line there varies considerably).

 

[FrogReaver]

Eh. Ignorant and unfair criticism of art is something all artists must face, regardless of where they are taking their inspiration from.

If and when you are criticized, as a creator, how you react to the criticism speak volumes. Think hard on the criticism and ask yourself, "Is it really unfair?" It could be, or it could be spot on. And apologize for any harm, do your best to make amends and do better. It's not that hard.

I’ve seen too many examples of that not working.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

The problem is that history (AFAICT) just does not support the claim that publicly-traded corporations, especially not in the last three decades or so, actually do things that amount to significant or meaningful censorship, rather than mere caution and frankly laughable gestures like "Parental Warning- Explicit Content" (which was basically marketing, not censorship).

I'd like specific examples of real censorship, not gestures or distractions, that happened because of groups like BADD. With The Last Temptation of Christ, it's extremely hard to get any clear information on who refused to show it, and for how long (and some of the information I've seen is contradictory), and that's despite highly organised protests backed by people who stood to financially benefit from those protests happening. Clearly some significant proportion of US cinemas wouldn't show it, but one suspects had it been a movie there was massive demand to see, rather than Scorsese going quasi-arthouse, things might have been different.

This is a huge claim particularly re: larger retailers and doubly-so re: publicly-traded ones, and more than anything else in this thread, it's a [CITATION NEEDED] claim.

I see absolutely no evidence that this "invoking principles" point is really true, both within my lifetime and personal experience, and in the historical record. Particularly re: "free speech". Sometimes a company rolls out that as a half-hearted defense, but they do what they were going to do anyway - I don't see the "Oh we were going to ban it but then people said "FREE SPEECH!!!!" to us enough times and we decided not to".

There could be real examples, maybe I'm just not aware of them or I am but I'm not thinking about it correctly so am missing them, so what are actual examples of specific things which were genuinely likely to get banned (or under threat of such) being protected merely by "invoking principles"? I mean one thing that strikes me is that nothing popular even needs to get to that stage - which is point re: the dollar - Harry Potter, for example, stirred absolutely gigantic idiocy up, but was there any chance at all it would be banned or big stores wouldn't carry it, when it was making that kind of money?

My suggestion (opinion not a claim of fact, to be clear) is that this is largely an illusion, or a belief this not rooted in historical fact but personal experience and desire for something to be the case.

Why?

Because other countries enjoyed more free media without American "principles". That in fact most of what has happened is simply gradual change of values across the generations, and the fact that it's occurred outside the US. Other countries often are both ahead of and behind the US, too, without any strong "1st amendment" or similar. Some are straight-up ahead, despite lacking such a foundational principle. How is that possible if it's all about "invoking principles" and not about gradual change and cash money?

I cannot see any real, negative impact that it had when all the numbers are calculated. If anything, like "Parental Advisory - Content Warning", it might have helped D&D in the longer term. Renaming Demons/Devils/Daemons was just not a big deal in real terms, and actually ended up making TSR be more creative with them. 2E was a little more child-friendly and less "edgy" than 1E, for sure, but did that actually hurt 2E, or did it merely change it?

This point very goes to your repeated use of "chilling effect", which I've questioned before, but you haven't responded on, apparently taking it entirely for granted. The art and subject did become less edgy and less sexist and sexualized. You sometimes see how OSR games try to go very hard on the edginess of 1E (going far past what 1E was actually like, of course, c.f. LotFP and to a lesser extent DCC). But was losing that bad for D&D, or good for it? Was that because of BADD, or was it actually because D&D is a business, and likes to make money, and regardless of whether BADD exists, people's moms are going to see it, and if there's a half-naked chick strapped to an altar on some page, and a table listing prostitutes, maybe they don't need BADD to tell them they're against that?

To be clear, I don't think the "chilling effect" here is much of a problem, if it's even a problem at all, at least for the success and profitability of the game.

I think the fact that D&D has never really "gone back" on any of this supports my point. Yeah, as a token gesture they renamed Demons/Devils back, but ultimately it was meaningless PR stuff that they could as easily done in 1993 (indeed Planescape the next year immediately started with cool and likeable demonic princes and so on, the Graz'zt fans were endless), and was because it was a "selling point" (c.f. the aforementioned dollar). It's not like they brought back 1E's giant pile of juvenile edgelord stuff, or the sexist/sexualized artwork, nor went back towards "edgy" subject matter in general. Why? Because there's more money to be made chasing the mainstream market.

That's literally the reason given for removing Maus (and other works) in most cases. Whether that is a good-faith reason is obviously a separate question and I think we all know the answer to that. So is the world very different?

Dude, D&D/AD&D was one of main ways any FLGS in the '80s was going to make money. This is exactly what I'm talking about. If they pulled D&D, they go under, or at least lose huge amounts of money. You seem to want to completely ignore the obvious massive financial benefit of ignoring people like BADD, and to say this was just solely down to "invoking principles". It was a totally principled stand and the fact that D&D was a massively successful brand that was making huge amounts of money for retailers (I mean, in very relative terms - selling books/games is never that profitable at the best of times!) was absolutely nothing to do with it. Please ignore the dollar bills sticking out of my pockets!

If D&D was some obscure little RPG that was attracting the same level of protest, the same level of hostility, you think FLGSes would have been so protective of it? You think Waldenbooks would have? It's always a calculation. Showing apparent "principle" or "spine" is, outside of non-profits and very unusual businesses (never publicly traded ones), always a calculation - "is it worth it?" and "how can we do this without losing anything"?

I strongly suspect it became very quickly obvious that there was absolutely no negative impact on the bottom line for FLGSes or presumably Waldenbooks, and possibly even a positive impact on sales, because when people try to ban something, that tends to happen (c.f. Maus selling insanely more copies lately).

So true. Honestly, the fact of the matter is that BADD and the whole 'Satanic Panic' thing was so preposterous, and so limited to a certain lunatic fringe that it was a total joke. As you say, TSR was likely much more motivated to tone certain things down (and it wasn't by much) by a more general perception that they had little to lose by doing so (I think they lost exactly zero game sales because devils were called 'baatezu', nobody used those names anyway, they were silly).

In the case of a Waldenbooks, the equation may have been a bit more strategic. They also knew that BADD represented about 1 500,000th of their possible customer base, but if they had caved on a D&D book, then the arsehats would have been back a week later with another list of things that they demanded be censored, and it would NEVER END. So, hey, why not just draw the line in the sand right at the start with something that was not ACTUALLY all that controversial. It was actually a pretty clever move on their part, as it cast all the book banning idiots into basically the worst light possible.

I was pretty good friends with a couple guys that ran an FLGS. It was a bit before the 'panic' reared its clownish head, but there were always 'concerned parents', and sure enough when they told off Bill now and then he just shrugged and kept selling his bread and butter, D&D stuff. Actually it was often OTHER things they objected to anyway, there are endless numbers of "I have to be annoyed at something else in the world besides my own bad parenting" people, lol. I'm sure Bill continued with the same policy throughout the 80's. Heck, I heard the poor guy got sick and that did for him, but for all I know that store is still selling D&D books, lol.

 

[zenfr0g]

Compared to modern games like Tenra Bansho Zero, OA deserves some praise. Any complaint about OA, TBZ is like, "Hold my beer." And the thing that is most hilarious is that TBZ was written by Japanese writers.

 

[Bedrockgames]

So true. Honestly, the fact of the matter is that BADD and the whole 'Satanic Panic' thing was so preposterous, and so limited to a certain lunatic fringe that it was a total joke. As you say, TSR was likely much more motivated to tone certain things down (and it wasn't by much) by a more general perception that they had little to lose by doing so (I think they lost exactly zero game sales because devils were called 'baatezu', nobody used those names anyway, they were silly).

I think it is fair to debate what the impact of the satanic panic was in terms of bottom line for D&D, but the satanic panic itself wasn't a joke and it wasn't limited to fringe. It was playing out regularly on the news, it was part of an overall panic in the country and led to a lot of very bad things for many people. It wasn't started by a fear of satanic imagery in stuff like D&D, it started over a panic about ritual satanic abuse (and things like D&D and heavy metal easily got folded into that panic). America is a very religious county, and at the time was even more religious, so it wasn't like this was only affecting a small portion of the population. Now obviously geography and local culture mattered too. But if you were in the orbit of a religious community there was a good chance you experienced some direct contact with it, and even if you weren't the fear extended beyond belief in the supernatural (because you don't have to believe in Satan or God, or magic, to believe there are people engaging in ritual satanic abuse; and you see this kind of thinking was playing out in other related areas: concern over the impact of media on people psychologically, concerns about subliminal messages, worries that people who played RPGs would have breaks from reality----it was a new medium and a lot of people didn't know what to make of it). What I found was, in the north east, it was a lot less prevalent. But I lived on both coasts at the time and out west its impact was palpable.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

It's kind of interesting that role playing games were largely relegated to the boutique stores like FLGS. In the early 80s, you could find D&D in more diverse places like Kaybee toys or even Sears at the local mall. At least in the Dallas/Ft. Worth area, by the late 80s and throughout most of the 90s, you weren't going to find D&D in the mall at Waldenbooks, B. Dalton Booksellers, or in any toy store. I do wonder if the controversy surrounding D&D in the 80s led to many retailers deciding carrying the game just wasn't worth it to them. Places like Sears, Waldenbooks, and Kaybee saw a lot more foot traffic than any of our FLGS ever did. Driving sales to boutique outlets likely limited the number of people who would have been exposed to D&D. If I didn't have friends who played D&D, odds are I never would have run across a D&D product at any of the stores I frequented.

I suspect it had a LOT more to do with the fact that many of these stores were stuck with large excess inventories of things like Red Box, which you could find on aging product displays in many places for a number of years after its release. It was pretty plain to see, after the initial rush, that they'd all drastically overstocked. Certainly in the period from 1981 through the mid 80's you could find these Red Boxes ALL OVER THE PLACE, along with some other products that I presume were probably a sort of package deal you got with the whole display stand. Nor did all these stores ditch TSR products entirely, as I recall seeing many copies of things like OA, DSG, WSG, and various 2e books (those softcover brown and green supplements in particular) sitting in various corners of many stores for years. I was in Vermont all through the 80s, basically, so I guess maybe things were different elsewhere, but I'd say it was definitely still possible to buy D&D stuff in B&N or the Mall into the 90's there. In fact I remember picking up various other RPGs in the discount box at B&N. Space 1999 being the one that instantly springs to mind, but several others as well. Obviously it didn't sell super well, lol, but equally obviously buyers were still willing to try stocking a few RPG products. Now, I recall that I started playing M:tG when that came out, and I'd say by around that time you MOSTLY had to go to the FLGS to get both D&D and Magic cards in one place, though the Kaybee in the mall in South Burlington, VT still carried some TSR titles at that time, as well as M:tG.

 

[Dire Bare]

It can be if you don't think you did harm but get brigaded anyway. Sometimes its justified; sometimes its not (Requires Hate anyone?). But you're still setting yourself up for it when you swing into this area at all.

(And even apologizing is no assurance other people will consider it sufficient; nonpologies are a thing, but where people draw the line there varies considerably).

I’ve seen too many examples of that not working.

Sure, there are people out there who will go onto the attack with little basis in fact or fairness. But what you are complaining about is "cancel culture" . . . . which exists, but not to the extent some folks seem to think.

So, in all honesty and curiosity . . . . give me some examples. Give me some examples of an RPG creator creating a truly non-problematic product, getting "brigaded", reacting in a positive manner to the criticism, and that apology having no effect. They are canceled.

Please try to avoid examples where the RPG creator actually did put out a problematic product. Or reacted negatively to the criticism. Or, while receiving some negative criticism from some corners, are doing just fine and have not been "canceled".