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

[PsyzhranV2]

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.

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?

I echo their sentiment. There has been a lot of words written about this subject already, the arguments are out there, and as happy as I and others are that this is getting an inkling of mainstream attention after 35 years of what seemed like futilely screaming into the wind, people are getting tired of having to explain it over and over and over again.

Here's some places to get started:

How Dungeons & Dragons Appropriated the Orient | Analog Game Studies

analoggamestudies.org

Spoiler: NSFW Language

https://gomakemeasandwich.wordpress...ter-class-stop-naughty word-up-asians-part-4/

Oriental Adventures (1st Edition)

There's no gentle way to say this, so I'm just going to rip the band-aid off real quick - this book is kind of racist. It's not hateful or a...

www.itcamefromthebookshelf.com

Decolonization and Integration in D&D - POCGamer

So, I was driving home and tossed in The Rat

pocgamer.com

The Fortune Cookie Incident — James Mendez Hodes

This is a story about a racist role-playing game I encountered at Dreamation 2019 . This game exemplifies how racist expressions draw on public-facing and commercially available cultural expressions: in this case food, cinema, and sport. It is also a story about the man who designed and facilitated

jamesmendezhodes.com

Asian Representation and the Martial Arts — James Mendez Hodes

This article discusses how Asian martial arts stereotypes fit into orientalist dynamics, in which the Western gaze rewrites and reduces Asian experience to a cool violent thing for white consumption. I also point out how imperialist, exploitative attitudes complicate real-world martial arts practice

jamesmendezhodes.com

How to Change Your Conversations About Cultural Appropriation — James Mendez Hodes

This article discusses cultural appropriation. More precisely, it discusses discussions about cultural appropriation, which stress me out more than any other cultural consulting topic. The question of whether a given expression is or is not cultural appropriation, and the corollary question of wheth

jamesmendezhodes.com

EVERYONE: Please watch the language of the stuff you link to, not just the stuff you write yourself. I’m leaving the link here behind spoiler tags because it has some relevance.

 

[MGibster]

I echo their sentiment. There has been a lot of words written about this subject already, the arguments are out there, and as happy as I and others are that this is getting an inkling of mainstream attention after 35 years of protest, people are getting tired of having to explain it over and over and over again.

I'm not demanding free labor. I objected to the idea that I should butt out of the discussion.

 

[evileeyore]

Luckily I've still got my old AD&D Oriental Adventures books, so this won't affect me.

 

[Alzrius]

Here's some places to get started:

How Dungeons & Dragons Appropriated the Orient | Analog Game Studies

analoggamestudies.org

For anyone who reads that one, make sure to check out the comments section; none other than Jon Peterson, of Playing at the World fame, chimes in to make some very salient observations.

 

[MoonSong]

All I want to say is: Good riddance, stuff like OA, AL-quadim and specially Maztika has always been very off-putting and I would not shed a single tear if these get lost forever. On the other hand, I worry about cultural destruction, and I wouldn't want that stuff gone if it meant other stuff I like could also go away.

Anyway this could very well be my last day on the open internet so I don't have a horse either way. Tomorrow I'll get to see whether I can even see this site let alone the D&D marketplace. Good luck to everyone and I hope this can be sorted for the greater good. Cheers

 

[Chaosmancer]

Before Crawford and the rest of his crew started to show up with a dozen UA surveys indicating that this is bad for the game, we used to have our supplements full of wacky subsystems just because we could. I loved (still love) that.

Sure, it is great to have subsystems.

But this subsystem has allows been put forth as part of Far Eastern rules, settings, ect. Look at the image in the DMG right next to the Honor system, for 5e. Most definitely not a European knight.

Erm but you effectively did with the Paladin code, those were the chivalric knights. They had all sorts of restrictions and rules they had to live by.

Paladins don't use the Honor system though, do they? They have oaths.

And I agree, and oath would be a great way to show a lot of this. So, why is it that every time Far Eastern rules come up, people break out the Honor System instead of adapting paladin oaths?

Because Baldur's Gate to Cormyr was like moving from the UK to Germany (it's barely 700 miles away), very similar culturally. Exotic literally means" originating in or characteristic of a distant foreign country" not your neighbour. Kara-tur is distant.

700 miles through monster infested swamps and lands in a time period where most people never went more than 20 miles from their homes?

Sounds pretty distant.

 

[billd91]

To give you a specific example, in my native language (Italian) there is a single word denoting both eastern and oriental, so finding out that oriental has a negative connotation in US, but eastern is a (relatively?) neutral term was pretty puzzling*. I started watching the videos because I was interested in a better understanding of the issue, but most of the times I felt that they stated that something was problematic, but they failed to explain why.

* The only explanation I came up with was that given that Oriental literally means Rising, there was some association with the Rising Sun flag used by Imperial Japan, and that could be offensive due to WWII.

The term, as used in English-language discourse, has a lot to do with British colonialism and attitudes derived from it’s worldview. So I’m not really surprised if it doesn’t have nearly as much meaning to someone with a different background and with a different native language.

 

[Umbran]

I wouldn't say it's the handbook definition of book burning because there are no physical objects or fire involved, but it's probably the nearest you'll get from burning digital books.

No, it really isn't.

Various print materials have been going out of print and being unavailable since the creation of the printing press. Companies have always had a right to control when and where their materials are available, and choosing to not make them available is not equivalent to destruction. The public is not entitled to constant availability.

When they use DRM to erase the thing from your hard drive, then it is like book burning. When they send jackbooted thugs into your home to take and burn your physical copy, it is like book burning.

"I might maybe want this thing some time in the unknown future, and I may not be able to buy it at that time," is not destruction of that thing.

 

[Khelon Testudo]

I'm not going to read 20+pages of back and forth over whether people have a right point out something is offensive to them. They do. They have a right to make a request to remove said offensive item.
Whether the owner or seller of the offensive product removes it is a judgement for them. Personally, I'm of the opinion that a foreword/notice about the context of the original and how we see it now should suffice.

 

[MGibster]

I'm not going to read 20+pages of back and forth over whether people have a right point out something is offensive to them. They do. They have a right to make a request to remove said offensive item.
Whether the owner or seller of the offensive product removes it is a judgement for them. Personally, I'm of the opinion that a foreword/notice about the context of the original and how we see it now should suffice.

In the 20+ pages nobody challenged the right of others to point out that something is offensive or for them to request said offensive item be taken out of circulation.