D&D General Old School DND talks if DND is racist.

[jasper]

Nick Cole responses to upcoming Wired article which hints that DnD fans are racists. Nice Cole is author. His books are Ctrl Alt Revolt, Soda Pop Soldier: A novel #1. Kind of cyberpunk.
Both people wander all over the subject. IT is about 41 minutes long.

 

[Waller]

sigh

Here we go ... yet.. again...

 

[fearsomepirate]

America wouldn't be America without a religious panic every generation or so.

 

[DemoMonkey]

First D&D is Satanic. Then it's Antisocial. Now it's Racist.

By the end of the decade I fully expect it to be accused of being both high in gluten and the main cause of tornadoes.

 

[Umbran]

First D&D is Satanic. Then it's Antisocial. Now it's Racist.

Well, yeah. I mean, not the Satanic part, but...

D&D is people. Lots of people. And, much as we may like to think otherwise, there's nothing about RPGs that selects against any of the bad traits of humanity.

So, racism, sexism, and such - you'll find them here, like you'll find them anywhere. The question for each of us is whether we dismissively wave it away, or whether we look at it and work to change that.

I haven't watched the video yet, but... a couple of older white men talking about racism? Not sure that's going to be relevatory.

 

[Oofta]

Any summary? I don't really want to make the time to listen to it, but I am curious.

Are there a few sentences here and there in the books that could be interpreted as racist? Sure. Is the game overall racist? I don't think so, no more than any other mass entertainment. It's virtually impossible for something like D&D to not have small bits and pieces that can be cherry picked to make a case for anything you want.

People see legitimate issues in the culture at large, D&D is a big target, I think many of the issues are projection. Doesn't mean we should not try to be aware of the issues, but D&D is just a ruleset.

 

[Alzrius]

By the by, I haven't read it yet, but Joseph Laycock's Dangerous Games: What the Moral Panic over Role-Playing Games Says about Play, Religion, and Imagined Worlds looks like a fascinating deconstruction of what the Satanic Panic of the 80's was about. The introduction (which you can look through via the "Look Inside" option) seems quite insightful, and has convinced me to add the book to my "to read" list.

 

[DemoMonkey]

This thread will not end well.

 

[jasper]

Any summary? I don't really want to make the time to listen to it, but I am curious.

Are there a few sentences here and there in the books that could be interpreted as racist? Sure. Is the game overall racist? I don't think so, no more than any other mass entertainment. It's virtually impossible for something like D&D to not have small bits and pieces that can be cherry picked to make a case for anything you want.

People see legitimate issues in the culture at large, D&D is a big target, I think many of the issues are projection. Doesn't mean we should not try to be aware of the issues, but D&D is just a ruleset.

Best summary I can give. Some players maybe racists but the Author of the article is just picking on D&D to get notice.

 

[Twiggly the Gnome]

It is a interesting phenomenon that both of D&D's big surges in popularity have occurred right before big societal moral panics.