D&D General Two underlying truths: D&D heritage and inclusivity

[Oofta]

I hope your week gets better!

So, what downside would you see in this being the change?

I gave you a thumbs up.

The MM already has a side-bar about the Many-Arrows. They could expand on the paragraph buried in the intro. But at a certain point you do get to an issue with page count and relevance to the base assumptions.

 

[Cadence]

I gave you a thumbs up.

I saw. . Thank you.

I was just looking to see if I missed anything in trying to f find a good balance between inclusivity and heritage.

 

[Oofta]

I saw. . Thank you.

I was just looking to see if I missed anything in trying to f find a good balance between inclusivity and heritage.

Parts of the heritage of D&D can be problematic. In some ways it feels like we almost kind of regressed a bit in 5E because they were mining old ideas and versions. Too much reliance/correlation on "tribal" and "savage" for example.

I think some of what you suggest could probably be section in the DMG on "the role of monsters".

 

[Chaosmancer]

I'm still catching up on this thread (I'm on page 3 out of 32) but there was one thing I wanted to jot down before I forgot it.

Playing the game to fight evil is great, and wonderful, but it can also lead to some weird moments for the players.

I'm playing a post-apocalyptic game right now, and the DM has made a lot of our main villains Neo-Nazis who have sided with the forces of the Abyss. Which is a ton of fun, but we recently ran into a problem that caused us to stop the game and talk about the themes we wanted.

See, we'd just destroyed and crushed a gnoll army, and some of the gnolls had surrendered. So, I asked the DM, what kind of gnolls we were dealing with, and he said they were the default Gnolls. Which, led to a problem.

Default gnolls are a race of beings that have no good within them, they are blight upon the world whose only answer is to kill every last one of them to make the world a better place. And, I'll reiterate. Our main antagonists for this campaign are a group of Neo-Nazis whom we are opposing.

So, the realization that we were about to okay Genocide of a race of people, even explicitly evil, practically demon people, while telling Nazi's that their rhetoric was wrong, seemed to be at cross purposes to each other.

We discussed it, and came to a solution we were happy with, but this is something that we have to think about and address sometimes. Because, when you are playing heroes, but turn around and say "those people over there aren't really people, they are monsters in the skin of people, so we can kill them without remorse" there is usually one or two people at the table who realize, "um, isn't that the same justification for atrocities that people always give?" so you have to be aware and stop and discuss and figure out where the lines are, why they are there, and make sure you aren't sending mixed messages.

 

[TaranTheWanderer]

I'm still catching up on this thread (I'm on page 3 out of 32)

Great post. Also, welcome to the rabbit hole.

 

[Catulle]

Not that Americans have a monopoly on racism either, but how long it took us to end slavery, and how much longer after that did we have a cultural movement to dehumanize African-Americans, which included the awful minstrel shows, was very American (and of course, this movement isn't really over).

US slavery has not ended. 13th amendment, disproportionate targeting of black men. Literally the vieille regime.

 

[Doug McCrae]

If I was advising WotC I'd say the first thing they ought to do is change the 5e Monster Manual art for the goblin and hobgoblin. They are caricatures of East Asian people.

 

[Hussar]

It's been a long week.

I'm not being clear. This thread was supposed to be to explore if there are any compromises, ideas or thoughts on what could be changed to have both inclusion and heritage. Is there any way to have both? What needs to change to the latter to enable the former without throwing it all out?

Yes, bad things are said about orcs in the MM. Because they're evil. If you are going to have evil monsters, you are probably going to say bad things about those evil monsters.

So how do we make it clear when we say bad things about those evil monsters that we're clear we're talking about imaginary evil monsters and not people?

Some people have made suggestions and I appreciate it even if I don't always agree.

We do so fairly simply. Which is the answer that you keep getting even though you keep ignoring it and asking the question over and over and over again.

STOP USING THAT LANGUAGE.

Full stop. End of discussion. We remove the offensive language. Orcs are no longer stupid, ravaging slaves to their emotions. They become more nuanced. They become shown in not only the antagonist role in official WotC publications. That's how it's done. It's really not hard.

Y'know, it's funny. Lizard folk got brought up. I've just finished running a Ghosts of Saltmarsh campaign and in that campaign, U2 Danger at Dunwater prominently features dealing with lizard folk. But, guess what? Despite lizard folk being an "antagonist species", in this module, you are supposed to talk to them, get them on your side and, in the process, learn about lizard folk. To the point where if you openly attack the lizard folk, you will fail the adventure.

THAT'S how you change the connection between orcs and racist rhetoric. Not every time, of course, but, once in a while, present orcs that aren't just sword fodder bags of XP. Make them the good guys from time to time. Show that yes, while you have raiding orcs, you also have artist orcs, and thinking orcs and farming orcs and orcs of every other type of thing that you would expect orcs to be.

It's not rocket science. But, I'm sure this will get ignored just like every other solution so we can chase yet another pointless rabbit down another pointless hole in order to obfuscate the conversation and derail it yet again.

 

[Ovinomancer]

The fundamental problem here is not leaning into whichever set of tropes you choose.

If you pick evil orcs, and then oresent them in any orher way than irredeemably evil, you run into the problems in this thread. If you don't and instead present them doing evil, you don't.

Crosswise, if you pick orcs as people, don't protray them as monsters.

I do both, depending on the game I'm running. Having orcs as monsters is useful if the focus is on aspects of story that require a monolithic evil as foil. Sure, you could swap, but that changes the tone of tge story. Sometimes you need a non-supernatural evil.

Usually, though, I use Orcs as people. This ranges from Grummsh influenced orcs, with depth, to orcs wrestling with their nature as engineered people (dwarves made them), to Eberron style free peoples.

Each of these stories is different, and uses the differences in orcs to reinforce campaign themes. The issue isn't using always evil orcs, it's making sure that you aren't telling a different story when you do.

 

[Helldritch]

To make things easier on people why not follow Oofta's idea. But instead of simply adding it to orcs, let's make a section about Humanoids.

Humanoids: Humanoids presented herein are the base default but in many worlds and campaigns, they can be of any alignments and can be a force for good or evil just as humans or elves can be.

Something around the above should be appeasing for every body.