WotC Older D&D Books on DMs Guild Now Have A Disclaimer

If you go to any of the older WotC products on the Dungeon Master's Guild, they now have a new disclaimer very similar to that currently found at the start of Looney Tunes cartoons.

We recognize that some of the legacy content available on this website, does not reflect the values of the Dungeon & Dragons franchise today. Some older content may reflect ethnic, racial and gender prejudice that were commonplace in American society at that time. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. This content is presented as it was originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed. Dungeons & Dragons teaches that diversity is a strength, and we strive to make our D&D products as welcoming and inclusive as possible. This part of our work will never end.

The wording is very similar to that found at the start of Looney Tunes cartoons.

Edit: Wizards has put out a statement on Twitter (click through to the full thread)

 

[Rygar]

Except they did't label everything wrong. The key word in the following statement is "some":
Some older content may reflect ethnic, racial and gender prejudice that were commonplace in American society at that time. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today.

Which they applied to all of the product. So yes, they're effectively calling every single thing created before 5th edition "Wrong". The key word would only work if it was applied to material which had some depiction of something that had a clear problem, like early Looney Toons, where almost no one would even try to argue that it wasn't clearly a problem.

They chose to apply it to everything, and that insinuates that all of it is wrong. To put it another way, you won't find a warning label "Product may contain nuts" in food that doesn't contain nuts, nor will you find a warning label about electrocution hazard on a product that doesn't use electricity. Warning labels aren't applied to things that don't have what the label is warning you about.

I just must stink to be one of the authors of those works. To have WOTC call you out, but still make money off of it.

TSR contracts didn't involve royalties IIRC, and I'm pretty sure WOTC's don't either. It's very likely that WOTC not only slapped a label declaring their work to be wrong on it, but they probably aren't even making a dime off it.

 

[VelvetViolet]

Because it's just a game and it can have as much or as little meaning as I care to give it. When I play chess, I don't wax philosophical regarding the political causes of war, all those parents, spouses, and children who will miss their loved ones, or why one piece is privileged with the right to live while the other dies as I throw my pawn under the bus in order to protect my queen. GOD SAVE THE QUEEN!

OK, fine. ALL Orcs, Drow, etc are not irredeemably monstrous & in need of killing.
Just all of the ones I, as the DM, am going to throw in your path. Don't fret, you'll have good reason to kill them.

Fair enough. It is a game.

I keep receiving conflicting arguments like "justifying genocide against fictional races is kosher," "justifying genocide against fictional races is still morally wrong," and "justifying genocide against fictional races is only morally wrong if they resemble racist stereotypes drawn from real life." It's difficult to keep track of who holds what view and which argument is the most sound.

I apologize for any confusion. I am not trying to force a moral view onto others. I am constantly learning with every interaction.

All nazis are inherently evil and must be destroyed.---OK, no one really bats an eye.
All goblins are inherently evil and must be destroyed.--suddenly a lot of people are up in arms.

At least nazis were real people lol. Goblins are fictional, written to be worse than nazis (everything evil nazis did plus eating their enemies), and they get more of a benefit of the doubt than actual real people.


*Not saying nazis don't deserve to be labeled as such, just an interesting observation, that's all.

This is false equivalence. Nazis aren't a race, they're a political party. Goblins are a race into which one is born.

When were goblins running industrial death camps and performing pointless medical experiments? I feel like this comparison trivializes the real life atrocities.

The way goblins are typically depicted is reminiscent of antisemitic caricature. I strongly suspect that is why people dislike it.

 

[Deset Gled]

They chose to apply it to everything, and that insinuates that all of it is wrong. To put it another way, you won't find a warning label "Product may contain nuts" in food that doesn't contain nuts,

First of all, you literally just highlighted the word "some" and choose to interpret it as "all".

Second of all, you find the warning "product may contain nuts" on all kinds of products that don't contain nuts. Milky Way bars and regular M&Ms are two that immediately come to mind. The warning is on there because they are packed in the same factory and the company can't give a guarantee there aren't trace amounts of peanuts in them. The exact same way that WotC puts the warning on all the books because there might be a trace reference to OA or other potentially insensitive material in other books that they haven't found. It's actually a great analogy, but for completely different reasons than you intended.

 

[JEB]

Since Wizards has indicated this is only a first step, I'd advise the following future steps (repeating some comments I've made in other threads):

1. The disclaimer should be rewritten to copy less from the WB disclaimer. I'm assuming for now that was a not-ready-for-release draft statement, based on Wizards' comments; if it stays that way, however, it'll just look lazy.
2. The disclaimer should, ideally, eventually be removed from works that don't actually have problematic content. Since a blanket disclaimer is both insulting to actually harmless works, and also kind of meaningless when it's applied universally. (Unless this is basically an admission that it's all potentially problematic; I doubt that was the intent, though.)
3. If we can provide histories of each work, we can also explain what is specifically problematic with each work, instead of relying on a blanket disclaimer. This is also an opportunity for them to contextualize the work (was the author actually trying to do right and messed up? or did they just not care?). It would be fine to limit this to the most-criticized works, of course (such as Oriental Adventures).
4. On specific most-criticized works, I think they could also afford to donate the proceeds of future sales to an appropriate charity. This would be a very direct way of compensating for any harms they've done and also addresses the accusation of them profiting off of problematic material.

 

[pming]

Hiya!

What will be really interesting...is to see this all happen again in a couple years, when new terms/descriptions become "problematic to todays society" and we go through all this again.

If there is one thing that never changes...someone, somewhere, will always find something to be offended about....and force others to be offended as well.

shrug I guess I'll just keep on playing my "problematic editions" with "racial prejudices" and "colonial colonization undertones" and let others label me with whatever naughty-bad-wrong-word they want. No skin off my teeth. I'm still having a blast creating stuff for me and my groups "problematic and wrong" fantasy games.

^_^

Paul L. Ming

 

[whimsychris123]

Which they applied to all of the product. So yes, they're effectively calling every single thing created before 5th edition "Wrong".

You're really stretching here. They don't even say in the so-called disclaimer that "this product" contains content that doesn't reflect their current values. You've jumped from "We recognize that some of the legacy content available on this website" to "All of the content prior to 5e on this website."

You don't like the disclaimer. That's fine. But you're now putting words into WotC's mouth.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

3.5 Book of Exalted Deeds and Book of Vile Darkness supplements had a sticker in their covers warning about its mature content and no body cared, but it was another time.

Oh buddy I would have shunned the hell out of anyone who wanted to use BoVD in a game back in 3.5E and I'd do it now. People cared but in "Wow what a loser..." kind of way.

The disclaimer should, ideally, eventually be removed from works that don't actually have problematic content. Since a blanket disclaimer is both insulting to actually harmless works, and also kind of meaningless when it's applied universally. (Unless this is basically an admission that it's all potentially problematic; I doubt that was the intent, though.)

Whilst this is a nice ideal, the difficulty is that someone then has to go back through every one of those books, and with a fine-tooth comb, because I can assure you that somewhere in some harmless-seeming adventure there's probably grotesque bit of weird racism that the author didn't even think of as racism. So this may be harder than it seems.

 

[Sacrosanct]

This is false equivalence. Nazis aren't a race, they're a political party. Goblins are a race into which one is born.

Even setting aside how at the time, a german being associated as a nazi is a lot more complicated than just someone joining a political party, it was widely accepted that Germans were the enemy. As is pretty much every opposing force in the history of war ever as viewed by the opposing side.

When were goblins running industrial death camps and performing pointless medical experiments? I feel like this comparison trivializes the real life atrocities.

Well, they haven't been because goblins aren't real. But in literature and fiction and media, they do stuff like this all the time. And worse Ever hear of Lord of the Rings? Or Warhammer FRP? I'm also not comparing fictionalized atrocities as being as bad as real life. I'm doing the opposite, and saying people don't have much objection to killing real people, but get more upset when a fictionalized creature gets killed in said fiction. That trivializes real atrocities more than anything I've said.

The way goblins are typically depicted is reminiscent of antisemitic caricature. I strongly suspect that is why people dislike it.

Oh please. You're gonna have to start citing this kind of stuff. Do you even know how long goblins have been around in folklore? And the literally thousands of various representations of them over the past several few hundred years? You're going to argue the real reason people dislike them is because they resemble Jews, despite every culture all over the globe has variations of goblins? I guess it was a global conspiracy from Asia to Europe, from Africa to South America, to get together and agree that the reason they came up with goblins in their lore was to create antisemitic caricatures before most of these cultures even knew Jewish people existed.

And then we've got Tolkien; probably the biggest influence on the depictions of modern monstrous humanoids. Tolkien gets a lot of heat for comparisons between orcs and black people. Since in Middle Earth, goblins are literally the same thing as orcs (orc being the hobbit word, goblin being the English translation of orc), are we to believe that orcs/goblins in middle earth were caricatures of both black culture and Jews now? I very much doubt that, since Tolkien himself said he had modeled the dwarves after Jewish stereotypes :

In a BBC radio interview with Dennis Gueroult, recorded in 1964 and broadcast the next year, Tolkien connected his Dwarves with the Jewish people, stating: “The Dwarves of course are quite obviously—wouldn’t you say that in many ways they remind you of the Jews? Their words are Semitic obviously, constructed to be Semitic.” Also in 1964, Tolkien wrote to W.R. Matthews: “The language of the Dwarves . . . is Semitic in cast, leaning phonetically to Hebrew (as suits the Dwarvish character).” Indeed the dwarven tongue Khuzdul has a phonology and a triconsonantal root system that resemble Hebrew

 

[Parmandur]

Oh buddy I would have shunned the hell out of anyone who wanted to use BoVD in a game back in 3.5E and I'd do it now. People cared but in "Wow what a loser..." kind of way.

Yeah, kind of a red flag.

 

[Mercurius]

I never owned Book of Vile Darkness and have no interest in that kind of play, but...isn't calling such folks "losers" etc exactly the type of gate-keeping that gets people upset?