WotC Dungeons & Dragons Fans Seek Removal of Oriental Adventures From Online Marketplace

[Horwath]

While that's not really the point I was getting at....yeah. Thirty five years ago I don't think it was (in fact I always looked at OA, Maztica, Al-Qadim, etc.. as attempts to be more inclusive, not less) but with our better understanding of how media impacts people I do look at them as potentially problematic and worth updating. If you're not certain what's problematic about OA, give that dude's podcast a listen that's linked in the original post..

I don't know what "damn we got some nice racist then" is supposed to mean.

As you said, people spent time and effort to make more diverse setting in Toril, not just Faerun(medieval Europe), without any backhanded attempts to be bigoted, and now their work if labeled as racist.

If that is racism, then we do not have any problem with racism in the world.

And if someone claims that is racism, they haven't witnessed any racism at all. Or any hardship in life.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

But isn't offering the PDF on DMsGuild basically "publishing"?

Nobody is saying we have to burn old copies. Nobody is saying you can't sell these on the 2nd hand market. They're just saying, "Maybe WotC shouldn't continue selling it."

No offense, but that is a total weasel way to look at it. I meant that no new book could be made like that.

If we go in the past (10 years, even) we will find offensive material. Not just pretty much all of D&D history. All of film. TV. Books. Music. Because the past wasn't as enlightened as the present.

I will never favor trying to destroy the past. And an organized campaign against WoTC isn't "Maybe WotC shouldn't continue selling it,"

It's, "We will force the IP holder to not make it available."

If you don't see that difference, I'm not sure how I can help you.

And this has nothing to do with making D&D more inclusive in the present- as noted, it's not like tons of 5e players are buying it. It's about suppression of this material. Which I will never ever think is proper.

 

[Xenonnonex]

@wingsandsword also you may want to have a more in-depth conversation with your friends. I was raised to not rock the boat. To stoically carry things silently and move on. And I’ve had conversations with others in my same boat from Japan and China.

I have witnessed that as well.
Perhaps more visibility would not hurt. Then there would not as much excessive reaction to overstepping the boat. But the start of dialogue. Needed dialogue.

 

[Danzauker]

As I said to @Danzauker, if you wish to complain about depictions of White culture made by White culture, you are more than able to. And you quite possibly will find some people to agree with you.

You just can't say "Well, I'm not offended by White culture stereotyping White culture, so no one else gets to be offended either." You don't get to make that call.

I don't get it, since when are Japanese manga and anime "white culture"?

And secondarily, you seem to put everything that's not Asian or Black into the same big bowl. That's not the case. things are not that simple.

Go tell a random Japanese and tell him he's the same as a Chinese. Or try calling a random Irishman "my dear English friend". Could be up for a surprise.

There are chances that I could be offended by an unrespectful or malicious comment or remark by an American, whatever his skin tone. Even by those with my same skin tone. and i have been. It's just that i think i can tell apart when something is offensive on purpose or not.

So if you're implying that you're allowed to complain only within your same "phenotype" then you are wrong. Twice. First because ethnicity goes past skin tone. Second because it's bad nevertheless.

 

[Fenris-77]

But is that what we're talking about here?

It probably shouldn't be, for it is for a lot of the post content. My issue is with the use of the word 'Asian' mostly. It has no particular connection to any authority to comment on the appropriation or mis-use of Japanese and Chinese culture.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Well, as some people have said, Japanese pop culture sometimes mangles Western culture a bit. I've seen it here and there in video games, and while I'm not really into anime or manga, what little I've seen has occasional mistakes.

If you've ever watched Neon Genesis Evangelion, you might have noticed certain imagery. (If you haven't, watch it!). Here's a great quote on the subject:

There are a lot of giant robot shows in Japan, and we did want our story to have a religious theme to help distinguish us. Because Christianity is an uncommon religion in Japan we thought it would be mysterious. None of the staff who worked on Eva are Christians. There is no actual Christian meaning to the show, we just thought the visual symbols of Christianity look cool. If we had known the show would get distributed in the US and Europe we might have rethought that choice.
-Kazuya Tsurumaki

If anything, I would say that we are far more sensitive to these types of issues. But that's a good thing!

 

[Imaculata]

As I posted in the "what are you reading" thread, I bought the complete Tales of 1001 Nights a few months ago. Those stories are translated very faithfully from their source material, which includes plenty of stereotypes and racist views about people from various countries. It is a good reminder that racism has always existed everywhere.

But I sure am glad I was still able to purchase them, without someone banning them, editing out anything deemed offensive, or adding a disclaimer. The books are what they are:

Fantastic stories, told in old fashioned language, full of sex, violence, beautiful illustrations... and also a lot of very old ideas and racist stereotypes. But I don't have to like all of it to appreciate them.

 

[wingsandsword]

And that's why it's taken 30 years for the idea to gain any traction. But now the "small fringe group" has gotten larger. Large enough for the idea to start being taken seriously. So look on the bright side... you've had 30+ years of unrestricted access to this book while the small fringe group wasn't able to get anyone to get anything done.. Be thankful for that! I hope you've run plenty of enjoyable OA campaigns in all that time!

One guy with a podcast tweeting something and getting a hype site to cover it (which is the whole article linked in the initial post was about) is hardly a matter of a fringe group getting larger. It's one guy with a podcast getting a site hungry for clicks to write a short article about a tweet.

You'd really think that in the last few decades, if this was a serious ongoing problem, there would have been more threads about it on ENWorld (or other RPG message boards), that I would have seen them when I was a regular on the WotC forums (when they had them), that in my days on Usenet in the '90's I would have seen people complaining then. There was a period of about 5 or 6 years when I was involved with gaming above all else in my life (including my grades, much to my regret years later), and for all the time I spent on message boards, usenet, IRC, going to Gen Con, going to local cons. . .I never heard any serious complaints about OA. At best there was some slight cringe at the outdated name of the book, but nothing seriously hostile to its contents.

Instead now we've got one guy from a podcast, his tweets, and a short article about his podcast and tweets on an entertainment news/hype site.

I'm seriously unconvinced that this is anything substantial and not a made-up scandal to drive clicks to his podcast and clicks to that news site.

 

[Guest 6801328]

No offense, but that is a total weasel way to look at it.

Wow.

It's hard for me to be really offended, though, since I've had much worse thoughts about many of the posters in this thread.

I meant that no new book could be made like that.

If we go in the past (10 years, even) we will find offensive material. Not just pretty much all of D&D history. All of film. TV. Books. Music. Because the past wasn't as enlightened as the present.

I will never favor trying to destroy the past. And an organized campaign against WoTC isn't "Maybe WotC shouldn't continue selling it,"

It's, "We will force the IP holder to not make it available."

If you don't see that difference, I'm not sure how I can help you.

And this has nothing to do with making D&D more inclusive in the present- as noted, it's not like tons of 5e players are buying it. It's about suppression of this material. Which I will never ever think is proper.

I don't really see the distinction you are making. Is there, for you, any line between a group of people trying to make their voices heard, and "forcing" a company to do something? Where is that line?

 

[Aldarc]

Did you know about the below which was included in the book? They seemed to have skipped it in the little of their video which I watched. That is pretty disingeneous by them. Guess Gygax and co had "Sensitivity Consultants" but that didn't stop the Haters who gonna hate.

"Special Thanks to
Whenever a project of this size is put together, there are many people who give their time and extra effort to see it through.This is particularly true for Oriental Adventures as there was much assembling and doublechecking of the fine details of rulesand culture. No doubt there are some who have been left off this list, but they deserve every praise nonetheless.

...(snip)...

To the Japanese players Masataka Ohta, Akira Saito, Hiroyasu Kurose, Takafumi Sakurai, and Yuka Tate-ishi for
critiquing and improving the manuscript on short notice. "

Several things worth pointing out here. (1) "on short notice" suggests that they weren't particularly involved for the bulk of the project - with credits that consist of mostly American white guys - and that it was done fairly last minute. (2) These listed players are only Japanese, which is part of the problem with creating a book called "Oriental Adventures" which would suggest an encompassing East Asian setting, but then the cultural readers are only Japanese. But OA also takes quite a bit from other East Asian cultures, does it not? And from what I recall from those videos that examine the 1e Oriental Adventures book, they do talk about this as well.