With that portrayal (which feels more lizard than human) what is the downside to just reclassifying them as monstrous instead of humanoid, and not using the word shaman for their casters?
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D&D General Two underlying truths: D&D heritage and inclusivity
- Thread starter Mercurius
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With that portrayal (which feels more lizard than human) what is the downside to just reclassifying them as monstrous instead of humanoid, and not using the word shaman for their casters?
TaranTheWanderer
Legend
I find the exploration/expansion theme to be tricky. A big part of D&D heritage is exploring the unknown: Old Tombs, dark forests, strange people. Exploring Tomes and robbing from the dead is pretty on the nose. Especially if the tomb is of an elf or ancient race and the adventurers are a bunch of humans.
I've noticed in my own games that solutions to problems are different than they used to be when I was younger. I think part of it is because of my age but a big part is because of the world we live in. My druid who wants to help the forest by having the town use sustainable logging practices instead of going in and killing all the elves. Ironically, I don't find that younger players want to find other, more complex solutions. I think that's because many come to the game for the cool combat scenes.
Imagine an adventure where elves are preventing loggers from entering their forest and there have been some attacks. The town brings in adventurers to take care of the problem. I think that's a pretty common D&D trope. It has a lot more baggage these days with First Nations people blocking road access to pipeline workers. (not that there wasn't baggage back then, but I think it's more in the light now). Can we tell these kinds of stories? D&D is inherently a violent game with combat. I think a DM would have to be super careful how the adventure would be structured so as not to paint the elves in a bad way.
Is it possible to do these stories in a responsible, educational way or are they off the table?
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Dire Bare
Legend
We do have to be careful not to diminish the concepts of tribal and shaman. We still have tribal societies in the real world, often with shamans being an important part of the cultural and religious practices.
I don't think it's a problem to have tribal societies in D&D, and I don't think it's a problem to have shamans. The problem lies when a specific race is locked in as a shamanistic, tribal group . . . also with descriptors like barbaric, savage, bestial, chaotic, etc.
In fact, I've long felt D&D needs a shaman class as one of the core classes alongside the cleric and druid. We got that in 4E, but that was a brief moment.
I don't think we need to give up on any of these themes. Well, I'd dump "advanced" vs "primal".
We should just avoid assigning these themes as defining characteristics of D&D's races. Orcs shouldn't always fall on the wilderness, primal, warlike, and expansionist ends of these spectra, especially all at once.
Definitely. I was thinking that if it was decided something was monstrous (instead of humanoid) then describing them with the language we use for real world groups of humans seemed problematic.
I didn't play 4e much, but liked the way PF presented Shaman's as a divine caster type that just had a different source of power (in this case nature spirits). In that context, it feels like the divine casters of various creature types should just be referred to by their power source. If the lizard folk caster gets their power from a god, they're just a cleric like any other.
Maxperson
Morkus from Orkus
Or else they fit the narrative of LIZARD people and are being portrayed how lizards act in nature. There is no cannibalism, since they eat the flesh of different races.
The neutral alignment is appropriate, because they do not act with regard for law, chaos, good or evil.
For the group of 6th-8th graders I'm about to start running for, I can imagine them switching sides if I gave them a push or too... but I'm not sure how they would resolve it...
A group of 30 somethings I know might very well find the bait and switch fun and not go in with combat as the first thing on their mind.
The group of 50 somethings I've played with might just go in and do the job and not care.
For each of the three I'm not sure how much is the alignment of the characters they'd play, their age, or the politics of the group on average.
TaranTheWanderer
Legend
Why do we need Cleric/Druid/Shaman anyways? Are these not just references to a culture's holy people?
Why not just 'Holy Person'?
Break them into subclasses, like Nature/Structured (or whatever, I'm at a loss for a good adjective) that include druids and clerics. Then you don't have the druid and the redundant nature cleric.
I'm going to sound off on this, as I'm currently playing one and spent a lot of time figuring out what this all means...
So, here's the difference. Imagine, for a moment, that you were talking about deer. Deer are to be stalked, killed, and devoured? That's what a human hunter thinks, too. Nothing evil about that. Game taken back to camp to be part of a feast? Sure, that's normal.
In a pretty archtypical image of a druid, they care for both beasts and sentient creatures - and they generally are thought of as elevating the beasts to the level of sentient creatures in considering their welfare. Lizardfolk do that in reverse - lowering sentient creatures to the level of beasts in their concern for their treatment.
Evil creatures typically enjoy the suffering they cause. An evil carnivore will capture you, demean you, feed you disgusting food, leave you thirsty all the time, and then inform you of how they are going to eat your child first, alive, slowly, just to watch the pain on your face.
Evil creatures also choose to advance by way of harming others, and they over-consume. Evil will kill you to gain money, power, and higher position.
Lizardfolk will capture you, but do nothing for the purpose of causing you pain. You aren't kept long, and your death will be quick and efficient. And they do so only to put food on the table. They don't seek social, political, or economic power or other self-aggrandizement, or particularly notable expansion.
Snarf Zagyg
Notorious Liquefactionist
I am, with great trepidation, addressing this prior comment because I see it as being a fundamental divide that tends to preclude agreement about many things. I understand the impulse, but I think that when it's said categorically (like here), it subsumes a great deal of the nuance that should be implicit in the statement. For example, much earlier in this thread someone gave a good list explaining why the Satanic Panic was different than the current situation; that requires more explanation that just, "If someone says that they're hurt by something, you shouldn't ask questions, you immediately stop doing that thing."
With the understanding that I am not trying to be an authority on this, or anything, here are my thoughts as to why I'm not sure I can agree with that. I apologize for the length of this reply, but I am not going to start another contentious thread on this topic!
PLEASE NOTE- THIS IS A LONG POST AND COMES AROUND TO A POINT DIFFERENT THAN HOW IT LOOKS AT THE BEGINNING.
A. Good faith, no faith, and bad faith.
We assume that people, at all times, are operating in good faith, both because it is the right thing to do, and because it's a better way to live you life. Unfortunately, that's not always the case. Sometimes people say that they are offended for reasons .... political reasons, getting even, because they think they are showing some type of hypocrisy in other people, whatever. I don't want to be forced to list examples, but I know that we can all think of them.
The reason I say this is that for this reason, I think that there is an uncomfortable tension; on the one hand, "offense" is a subjective measure. What offends one person (our group, etc.) is often different than what offends another person (or group). On the other hand, since we can't ever truly know what people think, we have to accept that there is some, objective standard of offense that we can look at or we can never weed out the (hopefully exceedingly rare!) cases of people raising offense in bad faith.
Not to mention the so-called "mixed" cases. Where people target people they don't agree with and try to find something in their past that might be offensive to their current beliefs or supporters, and then use that. In that case, the subjective motivation was in bad faith (the person wasn't offended) but once the thing is brought to light, it might be objectively offensive.
Oof.
B. "Everyone lies. The innocent lie because they don't want to be blamed for something they didn't do, and the guilty lie because they don't have any other choice."
I don't want to dwell on this, but people (sometimes) lie. To use a quick example that recently made the news, someone set up multiple twitter accounts to (apparently) lie about certain Riverdale actors. During the Satanic Panic, there were occasions when people lied (for profit, publicity, pressure, or other reasons) about things they purportedly saw regarding D&D. And so on.
C. "People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazis. You can't trust people, Jeremy."
If you've ever been to a meeting of your local government, or even had to deal with homeowner's association, or got in a spat with a neighbor about the tree on the property line, you know that people don't agree about everything. People have all sorts of bizarre, terrible, and weird opinions, and even worse, some don't agree with me!
People are idiosyncratic and messed up and not monolithic. And not just people, groups of people, too. This is important when it comes to art and literature. The very same comedy, or horror, that one person finds stimulating, exciting, and transgressive might be offensive to another person, because tastes are not always the same. A blanket statement such as the one I bolded, taken literally, would require that almost all comedy, all horror, all drama, all irony, and so on be reduced to the blanket level to pablum to ensure it does not offend anyone. And I am sure that there is someone, somewhere, that could be offended by that.
But ... but ... but ....
1. Systemic and structural issues do need to be addressed.
I shouldn't have to write this, but D&D should be a game that is inclusive. There shouldn't be outdated racial (or racist) stereotypes in the game. Maybe (maybe....) there is some confusion about an absolute alignment system and humanoids, but I don't think there can be any confusion about the portrayal of Vistani and the historic issues with the portrayal of the Romani people.
2. Traditional Power Imbalances are Often Codified.
D&D (and a great deal of nerd culture) traditionally reflected a white, male, straight (cisgender), Eurocentric paradigm. Greyhawk, for example, had the mysterious "jungles" to the south of the map where there were, and I quote from the '83 version, where civilized traders would get "rare woods, spices, ivory, and gold which they wrested from the jungle savages." Not just savages, "cannibal savages" with "blowguns."
Many of this early material, by the way, did not mean that the creators were overt racists, or sexists, but it simply reflected that mindset; of course there were dark jungles to the south with cannibal savages with blowguns! Of course the evil elves were dark-skinned (because living in caves makes you ... black?)! Of course the art in early D&D featured attractive and scantily-clad (or unclad) women, because, you know, fantasy art! Of course the NPCs in Curse of Strahd were just called gypsies and reflected terrible stereotypes of the time because it was 1984 and no one in America was seriously thinking about the depiction of the Romani people! And so on.
To the extent that these materials are brought forward, they need to be examined from time to time. And there can be an issue with people (usually, but not always, part of the traditional power) who simply don't understand what the problem is. Because of course they wouldn't! It was always going to reify their own outlook.
3. Eternal debate is tiring. And just as offense can be in bad faith, so can debate.
Look at this thread. Look at every thread. Sometimes, you just want to say, "ENOUGH." It is a truism that people will argue, just for the sake of argument. They will whatabout until the cows come home. And then there will be trolls, and then there will be other people who join in and ask the same questions, and it just gets tiring.
TLDR: I don't agree with the part I bolded. But I understand the impulse to say it. I think in this case it is preferable to say that certain stereotypes are a legacy that the game does not need, makes the game less inclusive, and hurts people by continuing to perpetuate negative stereotypes.
Dire Bare
Legend
Why do we need the wizard, sorcerer, and warlock? And really, outside of metagame mumbo-jumbo, what's the real difference between an "arcane" caster and a "divine" caster?
Why have the fighter, paladin, barbarian, and ranger as separate classes? How different really is the rogue from the fighter? What the heck is a bard anyway?
Which character archetypes get full classes, or subclasses, or some other game construct (prestige class, kit, feat, etc) is subjective and there is no single right way to do it.
But considering the class list we have in D&D now, the concept of a shaman is different enough from that of a cleric or druid that it warrants it's own class. IMO, of course.
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