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

[Bawylie]

I mean, in the grand scheme of things its not the most harmful thing. But it has problems, and presenting as-is with no commentary isn't the best look

Slap in a one page "This is presented as is from 1985 for the purposes of just putting it out there" and I think most issues would be resolved

Do you remember that old disclaimer at the end of movies and TV? It went like “This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any real person, people, or place is not intended and purely coincidental.”

Would something like that help a contemporary product?

 

[Bagpuss]

Yeah, they rambled off-topic, a lot.

It gets even worse in the second episode... yes I'm still watching.

They go off on tangents that are unrelated to Asia representation in D&D, like body hair being codified with evil. Then another tangent on the indigenous people of Japan, the Jomon verse the Yayoi. Then another tangent on tattoos. Pretty interesting stuff, but not really that related to the book they are looking at.

 

[PsyzhranV2]

I'm a person of Chinese descent living in Canada. My personal thought on the Oriental Adventures line and on the Kara-Tur setting as it is is a resounding "this ain't it chief". A pet project idea of mine was to one day do a Kara-Tur update to post-Second Sundering that would inject some more overt fantasy elements into the setting, while also retooling it to be less dependent on outdated stereotypes of Chinese, Korean, Japanese, Mongolian, and South Asian cultures. But I recently learned that there are individuals who are have actual, professional involvement in the game design industry, Kwan included, who find it too irrevocably broken to reclaim, and it's leaving me wondering if I'm giving the setting too much credit. As well, recent revelations concerning Wizards of the Coast's businesses practices have started turning me off of the D&D property as a whole. D&D may be an industry leader in sales and marketing reach, but when it comes to promoting progressiveness and inclusion, it is trailing quite a bit behind.

For my fellow people of East, Southeast, and South Asian descent, if you don't have a problem with Oriental Adventures, I'd be happy to hear your thoughts. I'm not going to deny your lived experiences that led you to that conclusion, but I hope that a dialogue about cultural artifacts as vehicles of social value transmission, as well as the ways in which the tabletop game industry is grappling with a legacy of systemic racism, D&D especially, would leave both of us walking away wiser.

FOR EVERYBODY ELSE:

Is it really that hard???

 

[Reynard]

Talking about this stuff is valuable, even if people disagree. Sometimes people just don't ever consider how something they consider innocuous and part of their regular diet of popular cultural intake might be distressing or harmful to others. Accidentally partaking in cultural appropriation or even systemic racism isn't a condemnation of a person, it's a condemnation of the system that allows it to continue to exist. Individual people are only the problem when they take pains to knowingly defend that system with no regard for those that are distressed or harmed.

No one cares what you do at your table at home with your group of friends who have been playing together for 30 years. You do you. But by the same token, neither WotC nor the community at large needs to coddle whatever off color preferences exist at your table. The company and the community have the responsibility to be welcoming and safe for every person that wants to discover D&D. Things like OA that display at best cringeworthy stereotypes create a barrier to entry in the same way sexist stereotypes do.

tl;dr: we only get better by examining the game and community and refusing to acknowledge the things we find when we do holds us back.

 

[MGibster]

I mean, in the grand scheme of things its not the most harmful thing. But it has problems, and presenting as-is with no commentary isn't the best look

It's a 35 year old book with "oriental" in the title. I expect the adults who are purchasing digital copies and I believe they're intelligent enough to figure out whether or not they want to buy it. You can't buy a product that's almost old enough to retire with full benefits and expect it to have been written with the same sensibilities, style, or standards of 2020. But while I think a disclaimer is silly and won't appease everyone I don't object to it being there.

Slap in a one page "This is presented as is from 1985 for the purposes of just putting it out there" and I think most issues would be resolved

Please, for the sake of Call of Cthulhu, let's not tell anyone about HP Lovecraft.

 

[Giltonio_Santos]

Slap in a one page "This is presented as is from 1985 for the purposes of just putting it out there" and I think most issues would be resolved

As I said before, I'd prefer it if they don't make me go through the work of removing that message before printing, as the DRM watermark is already bad enough. On the other hand, a disclaimer in the product page is not only reasonable, in my opinion, but also something that people would see before buying, which I think is the best option in this case. While I don't think OA is offensive, I'm in no position of speaking for anyone else, and I wouldn't like it if fellow gamers got it from the DMG just to realize that the book somehow offends them.

 

[MGibster]

FOR EVERYBODY ELSE:

Is it really that hard???

Yeah, it kind of is. You're asking me to just accept your point of view at face value without any consideration on my part. No. That's not how a dialogue works.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

Slap in a one page "This is presented as is from 1985 for the purposes of just putting it out there" and I think most issues would be resolved.

When I posted about it earlier, I did not have the actual wording to add to the post, but here is how Disney words it on at least some of their older content:

This program is presented as originally created. It may contain outdated cultural depictions.

@PsyzhranV2 It is nice and all to show that person's tweets saying to butt out, but does Kienna actually tweet why they think it is harmful? Or are they just trying to pull one of those "because I said so" things that parents use?[/quote]

 

[Mecheon]

It's a 35 year old book with "oriental" in the title. I expect it's adults who are purchasing digital copies and I believe they're intelligent enough to figure out whether or not they want to buy it. You can't buy a product that's almost old enough to retire with full benefits and expect it to have been written with the same sensibilities, style, or standards of 2020. But while I think a disclaimer is silly and won't appease everyone I don't object to it being there.

And its being sold for $5 on a website today with basically no notes on that history. I know you and I know about all of the history of 1E and all of its weird quirks, but given D&D's a lot bigger of a thing nowerdays, we're among the few. If there's no disclaimer of "We're just shoving this up here for archival purposes and haven't touched a thing", then, well, you can at least assume stuff is being checked for any problems. And then you get OA.

D&D's bigger than ever before and folks are going to poke downwards from the surface of 5E into facets of its history while not being aware of other parts of it. Disclaimer at least shows they're willing to put their money where their mouth is and do -something-, because most of the original call-out was pointing out that WotC weren't doing anything despite their words saying they would

As I said before, I'd prefer it if they don't make me go through the work of removing that message before printing, as the DRM watermark is already bad enough. On the other hand, a disclaimer in the product page is not only reasonable, in my opinion, but also something that people would see before buying, which I think is the best option in this case.

Hence, slip it onto a separate page. Its a PDF, just slip it between the title and the contents. Don't want it? Don't select page 3 when printing. Quick, simple, should handle most problems

 

[SkidAce]

That we should double check what they find offensive, and triple check with those consultants about how big of a deal it is.

I think this is the majority of the problem, how "big" it is lies on a kinda wide spectrum, and like most things on the internet, our discussions get polarized into the extreme ends of right and wrong absolutes.