RPG Evolution: Do We Still Need "Race" in D&D?

Myrdin Potter · Apr 5, 2018

pemerton said:
I'll restate my principal reasons, then:

I think those reasons are pretty clear. I don't see how you can say they're bad reasons. At best you can say they're reasons you don't care about because they don't affect you.

The last quoted sentence I'll ignore, as it's inanity speaks for itself.

Otherwise, "common sense" = "your own intuition". So this is another case of there being more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in your philosophy.

Your reasons are logically unsound and based on your emotions and your explanations are an example of leaps of logic intertwined with what seems to me attempts to claim the high ground.

Let me address HPL and REH. I am of the opinion that both were racists and that HPL was much more and that REH was more a product of his times. The danger of dividing the actual single human race into races can be clearly seen in REH stories where his characters discuss the white race. Conan, for example, has many non-white friends and acquaintances but there are frequent emotional appeals to the reader when he reacts the the potential danger of a white woman being raped by a non-white person and there is casual mention of the superior white race he belongs to. His stories are pretty even-handed except for the occasional jarring references to race. There is pretty good evidence that he was not well travelled and his county had few to no blacks in it, so most of his opinion was formed from reading books and absorbed from the Jim Crow South (Texas) he lived in. His stories are also excellent adventure stories and he solidly set the foundation for American Sword and Sorcery tales that lives even today.

I don’t want to go too much deeper into into HPL. Some of his personal letters are quite vile. His stories are nowhere near the level of his personal beliefs (and I find that true of REH as well), but I think that is a reflection of the pulps being very commercial and, although quite base and titilatimg, still a mass market for of literature and needed to be more mainstream in beliefs being manifested, so the editors tones down most of the worst stories.

So you and I are in agreement that those two men were racist and that we do not want that type of racism in our RPG books. However, humans were pretty much the only race addressed in their stories. If you are looking for the non-humans, there is maybe serpent folk. There are no D&D style races at all. No elves and dwarfs and hobbits and thieflngs, etc. Every single race in D&D gets a bonus. It is against the design principle of D&D to assign stat drawbacks based on race. Sexes are treated as equal and the human race in D&D is treated as one race regardless of skin color and culture.

So, again, you are confusing the evil use of race as a concept in our world with the accurate use of a word as a rule in D&D. The word race is not bad at all, it is the theory that humans have races and that some or one is better than the others is the evil. To say that elves and humans are different races is not the same and to claim they are is confused logic. I don’t accept that emotional and confused logic is a good basis for change. It actually is harmful to act based on that. Although you reject intuition and common sense, intuition in particular is often logic being worked in the background.

Your conclusion that race in D&D is the same as the bad use of race when looking at humans is terrible logic, it is the same as wanting to ban race as in a contest of speed because it is used poorly in another context.

Is that clear enough?

pemerton · Apr 5, 2018

Myrdin Potter said:
you are confusing the evil use of race as a concept in our world with the accurate use of a word as a rule in D&D. The word race is not bad at all, it is the theory that humans have races and that some or one is better than the others is the evil. To say that elves and humans are different races is not the same and to claim they are is confused logic.

I don't think you read my reasons closely at all. I didn't say anything about elves. And I offered no complaint about the word "race" - in fact I said that it is a crucial but challenging concept in social explanation.

But when you refer to the accurate use of the word "race", what do you mean? Clearly not that.

I'm pretty sure I know what you mean: and that's why I would like some sort of change along the lines described by [MENTION=3285]talien[/MENTION] in the OP. Because I would like my family and friends to be able to engage with my hobby without having to wade their way through all this . . . residue . . . that I have to explain away, or apologise for, as legacy baggage of the fantasy tradition.

Aldarc · Apr 5, 2018

Myrdin Potter said:
So, again, you are confusing the evil use of race as a concept in our world with the accurate use of a word as a rule in D&D. The word race is not bad at all, it is the theory that humans have races and that some or one is better than the others is the evil. To say that elves and humans are different races is not the same and to claim they are is confused logic. I don’t accept that emotional and confused logic is a good basis for change. It actually is harmful to act based on that. Although you reject intuition and common sense, intuition in particular is often logic being worked in the background.

Your conclusion that race in D&D is the same as the bad use of race when looking at humans is terrible logic, it is the same as wanting to ban race as in a contest of speed because it is used poorly in another context.

Is that clear enough?

Again, I would disagree that it is this a clear cut issue or that D&D uses this term accurately because while "races" in D&D and other FRPGs may be biologically/magically distinct from each other, D&D often draws inspiration from the culture of real life human peoples for flavoring the culture of these different FRPG "races." And that is a fairly major part of the problem, IMO.

Let's take World of Warcraft as an example, because it's a bit more transparent. If I understand your argument correctly, you would likely perceive the term "race" as the appropriate term for distinguishing between, for example, humans and trolls. But humans in Warcraft's world of Azeroth are not only predominately depicted as "white" - and probably 90-95 percent so in terms of its in-game NPCs - but also the predominate culture(s) for humans therein is positively pseudo-Medieval Western Europe. There are minimal human cultures depicted outside of the Pseudo-European "Seven Kingdoms" that comprise humanity. They are furthermore depicted as the miniaturized descendants of a people called the vrykul, who are basically Nordic half-giant viking warriors.

In contrast, trolls in Warcraft are depicted as primitive and barbaric savages. Their culture(s), themes, and aesthetics draw heavily upon Afro-Caribbean and Mesoamerican cultures. They practice voodoo, worship loas, ritual sacrifice of sentient humanoids, and are occasionally cannibals. They live in ruined ancient cities and straw huts. Their empires, kingdoms, tribes and people, etc. are depicted as in a state of constant decline, decadence, and degeneracy. And elves are treated as a more highly evolved form of troll that was "uplifted" by magic into a more civilized form. (And ancient elf society had a more Greco-Roman with sprinkling of Celto-Norse aesthetic.) And the history in Warcraft is often framed in terms of "Isn't it great that elves and humans defeated trolls in all these various points in history and took their lands?" Ouch.

I strongly suspect that you can see a lot of the red flags flying around how Warcraft presents "race." I know that Warcraft is not D&D, but Warcraft was a FRPG that grew out of the FRPG milieu that D&D established and built. (And you can even see points where Warcraft drew inspiration from various D&D settings and such.) The problem is not just an issue of whether the term "race" is accurate to describe distinct and significant biological differences between peoples or species. It's also how distinct human cultures - that were often historically relegated into a hierarchical racial schema of inferiority and superiority - are frequently mapped onto FRPG "races" to varying degrees in a wide assortment of FRPG settings. And you can most definitely see this in a variety of stereotypes that people impose on their "D&D races" and even the cultures of the "monster races" of D&D. I would say that it is the racist legacy we have inherited - that we are still trying to disassociate ourselves from - that ties race to culture and culture to race that forms the core problem of "race" in D&D. Not whether distinct species exist in D&D, but, rather, how often inadvertant racism plays out through the various "races" of D&D in terms of how real human cultures are mapped onto D&D races where those distinct biological differences exist. This is a much larger problem than the issue of using the term "race" or not, but the terminology nevertheless plays a role in this larger issue that I thankfully believe that the FRPG, on the whole, is increasingly recognizing and slowly working to correct to varying degrees of success.

Myrdin Potter · Apr 5, 2018

pemerton said:
I don't think you read my reasons closely at all. I didn't say anything about elves. And I offered no complaint about the word "race" - in fact I said that it is a crucial but challenging concept in social explanation.

But when you refer to the accurate use of the word "race", what do you mean? Clearly not that.

I'm pretty sure I know what you mean: and that's why I would like some sort of change along the lines described by @talien in the OP. Because I would like my family and friends to be able to engage with my hobby without having to wade their way through all this . . . residue . . . that I have to explain away, or apologise for, as legacy baggage of the fantasy tradition.

No, I read your comments and I simply reject your conclusion.

If there is residue (which I think is an imaginary emotional construct in your own mind) of the fantasy tradition, you will have to go back to pretty much the dawn of human history. There is no bright line where things written in the current centuries invented the base concepts and tropes.

Millions of people happily engage in the hobby using existing or previous rules and in my over 3 decades the only mainstream D&D rule I have ever had to apologize for (and which my group never used) was the old stat limits on women.

So consider that I have carefully considered the ideas you have put forth and I reject them. I don't say that you don't feel something, but I do suggest that you reexamine the source of this emotion as you are not applying your reason well to it. There is no modern day racism in 5e races or the use of the term race.

I have lived in several different countries in my life, including in one where there is actual government control and propaganda. I am slowly despairing at the way that people miss the warnings of 1984 and Animal Farm (or the movie Brazil to be more modern).

Myrdin Potter · Apr 5, 2018

Aldarc said:
Again, I would disagree that it is this a clear cut issue or that D&D uses this term accurately because while "races" in D&D and other FRPGs may be biologically/magically distinct from each other, D&D often draws inspiration from the culture of real life human peoples for flavoring the culture of these different FRPG "races." And that is a fairly major part of the problem, IMO.

Let's take World of Warcraft as an example, because it's a bit more transparent. If I understand your argument correctly, you would likely perceive the term "race" as the appropriate term for distinguishing between, for example, humans and trolls. But humans in Warcraft's world of Azeroth are not only predominately depicted as "white" - and probably 90-95 percent so in terms of its in-game NPCs - but also the predominate culture(s) for humans therein is positively pseudo-Medieval Western Europe. There are minimal human cultures depicted outside of the Pseudo-European "Seven Kingdoms" that comprise humanity. They are furthermore depicted as the miniaturized descendants of a people called the vrykul, who are basically Nordic half-giant viking warriors.

In contrast, trolls in Warcraft are depicted as primitive and barbaric savages. Their culture(s), themes, and aesthetics draw heavily upon Afro-Caribbean and Mesoamerican cultures. They practice voodoo, worship loas, ritual sacrifice of sentient humanoids, and are occasionally cannibals. They live in ruined ancient cities and straw huts. Their empires, kingdoms, tribes and people, etc. are depicted as in a state of constant decline, decadence, and degeneracy. And elves are treated as a more highly evolved form of troll that was "uplifted" by magic into a more civilized form. (And ancient elf society had a more Greco-Roman with sprinkling of Celto-Norse aesthetic.) And the history in Warcraft is often framed in terms of "Isn't it great that elves and humans defeated trolls in all these various points in history and took their lands?" Ouch.

I strongly suspect that you can see a lot of the red flags flying around how Warcraft presents "race." I know that Warcraft is not D&D, but Warcraft was a FRPG that grew out of the FRPG milieu that D&D established and built. (And you can even see points where Warcraft drew inspiration from various D&D settings and such.) The problem is not just an issue of whether the term "race" is accurate to describe distinct and significant biological differences between peoples or species. It's also how distinct human cultures - that were often historically relegated into a hierarchical racial schema of inferiority and superiority - are frequently mapped onto FRPG "races" to varying degrees in a wide assortment of FRPG settings. And you can most definitely see this in a variety of stereotypes that people impose on their "D&D races" and even the cultures of the "monster races" of D&D. I would say that it is the racist legacy we have inherited - that we are still trying to disassociate ourselves from - that ties race to culture and culture to race that forms the core problem of "race" in D&D. Not whether distinct species exist in D&D, but, rather, how often inadvertant racism plays out through the various "races" of D&D in terms of how real human cultures are mapped onto D&D races where those distinct biological differences exist. This is a much larger problem than the issue of using the term "race" or not, but the terminology nevertheless plays a role in this larger issue that I thankfully believe that the FRPG, on the whole, is increasingly recognizing and slowly working to correct to varying degrees of success.

I don't play Warcraft, I have not since the early RTS game. The only MMO I spent real time in was Eve Online where I ran a large and successful and mean pirate alliance.

I don't think there is a need to change a good use of race in 5e D&D because, maybe (as I don't know Warcraft), another game does it poorly.

I think this is a false struggle and topic. There is real racism that matters that can be fought. I have done it in the best way I know, which is hiring well as senior management based on talent, not where people are from or their gender, and in raising my children to reject racism (I seem to have spawned 3 left leaning fighters for social justice, but I struggle to see why that is a bad thing even if I am more conservative). I do know that illogical leaps and conclusions are dangerous. If other games get it wrong, the game that got it right does not have to change.

james501 · Apr 5, 2018

pemerton said:
The last quoted sentence I'll ignore, as it's inanity speaks for itself.

Otherwise, "common sense" = "your own intuition". So this is another case of there being more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in your philosophy.

I had explained my reasoning about "common sense", dunn owhy you didnt include it.
But here we go again :

"race" in the real world is used to seperate humans.
"race" in fantasy is used in a different context to separate species. Humans in fantasy are a single race.
Different context is important.

Also no, my last sentence isnt "insanity".
Quite the opposite actually. To determine something is offensive you must see evidence of people actually getting offended.
When fantasy has used such terminology for long time without anyone caring or demanding it changed, and non-white people still play it, it is evident it isnt the problem it is made out to be.

james501 · Apr 5, 2018

Aldarc said:
In contrast, trolls in Warcraft are depicted as primitive and barbaric savages. Their culture(s), themes, and aesthetics draw heavily upon Afro-Caribbean and Mesoamerican cultures. They practice voodoo, worship loas, ritual sacrifice of sentient humanoids, and are occasionally cannibals. They live in ruined ancient cities and straw huts. Their empires, kingdoms, tribes and people, etc. are depicted as in a state of constant decline, decadence, and degeneracy. And elves are treated as a more highly evolved form of troll that was "uplifted" by magic into a more civilized form. (And ancient elf society had a more Greco-Roman with sprinkling of Celto-Norse aesthetic.) And the history in Warcraft is often framed in terms of "Isn't it great that elves and humans defeated trolls in all these various points in history and took their lands?" Ouch.

The humans and elves didnt quite take their lands. The humasn certainly didnt as they lived in their own ones. The Elves founded their capital, uknowingly, upon an ancient buried Troll city which did anger the Troll,s but the region the Elves colonised wanst inhabited itself.

Also the specific Trolls that they waged war with, the Amani, although still retain Loa and other elements, dont have a very distinct real life counterpart. They resemble neither Mesoamericans (which are the Zandalari, and have become allies in the new Xpac), nor Afro-Carribean (the Darkspear, who arent cannibals, dont sacrifice sentients and werent ever "evil" or enemies).

Also, European cultures are similarly portrayed as enemies :

The Ogres are an expy of the Roman Empire.
The Vrykul obviously are vikings.
The Forsaken (not enemies per ser, but portrayed as immoral and ruthless) draw from Gothic Architecture.

Jay Verkuilen · Apr 5, 2018

Myrdin Potter said:
Let me address HPL and REH. I am of the opinion that both were racists and that HPL was much more and that REH was more a product of his times.

I agree about REH. I think he's much more an example of "product of his times." He might even be somewhat more open-minded than many of his background and era given that Conan "had black friends" and there are a number of independent female characters in the stories. Neither are things a hardcore racist/sexist of the time would countenance at all.

HPL... yeah, no question about his private beliefs being noxiously racist, even for his era.

I think that is a reflection of the pulps being very commercial and, although quite base and titilatimg, still a mass market for of literature and needed to be more mainstream in beliefs being manifested, so the editors tones down most of the worst stories.

That's true. In addition, in some respects there's a 1930s version of social justice or at least open-minded aspect to some of these stories that has often been forgotten. The pulps had authors such as Catherine Louise C. L. Moore, who wrote Jirel of Joiry, one of the first notable heroines who ruled lands in her own name and was a clearly competent warrior as well. Certainly there was to superhero comic books like Superman and, even more notably, Wonder Woman. By the 1960s, the X-Men had a pretty clear agenda to anyone paying attention.

TheCosmicKid · Apr 5, 2018

Jay Verkuilen said:
I agree about REH. I think he's much more an example of "product of his times." He might even be somewhat more open-minded than many of his background and era given that Conan "had black friends" and there are a number of independent female characters in the stories. Neither are things a hardcore racist/sexist of the time would countenance at all.

In addition, there's a pretty obvious divide in the REH canon between stories he wrote for a quick paycheck and stories he wrote because he wanted to, and the former deal in cheap stereotypes and flat female characters while the latter show some interest in asking questions about race and culture and gender. Much like Tolkien, nobody is gonna accuse Howard of being a 21st-Century progressive, but he had an active mind and an interest in the subject, when he had the freedom to exercise it.

Dannyalcatraz · Apr 5, 2018

james501 said:
"race" in the real world is used to seperate humans.
"race" in fantasy is used in a different context to separate species. Humans in fantasy are a single race.
Different context is important.

Agreed, 100%

When fantasy has used such terminology for long time without anyone caring or demanding it changed, and non-white people still play it, it is evident it isnt the problem it is made out to be.

This doesn’t exactly track. Minorities are still engaged with genre fiction and the other entertainment derived therefrom in very small numbers, despite the measurable shift in American demographics. The dearth of complaints may be less of a testimony to the issue than the lack of participation.

Put differently, the reason you may not see the complaints is because minorities are still staying away in droves. That the USA is now @72% white, but roleplaying is closer to 90%+ indicates there is a lag in participation. Why would this be? It could be a simple whiff of unwelcoming culture in the hobby, either from the words used or the players themselves. Or both.

It isn’t clear, one way or the other.

As hinted before, the fact that I can shrug this stuff off and continue to play despite the issues is no indication as to how others will react. Upthread I mentioned I only knew 2 other black gamers. I forgot one.

I have a cousin who lives a couple blocks from me, and he’s about half my age. I haven’t heard him peep about the issue. But we rarely discuss race issues in general. But I do know he’s an enthusiastic gamer in what appears to be a diverse and really cool bunch of kids.

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