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

[embee]

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.

Can confirm that the Mountain Dew, pizza, and bags of Doritos typically consumed at the table may lead to Type I Diabetes.

 

[Charlaquin]

I can't help but notice that KKK titles have, for at least a century and a half, been... strongly evocative... of fantasy and myth: Grand Wizard, Goblins, Cyclops, Ghouls, Hydras, Titans. Maybe it's just that there's a lot of white supremacists who are attracted to reducing complex, thinking populations and nuanced issues into two-dimensional fairy-tale epics where one side is incorruptibly pure and the other is irredeemably evil.

That may play a role, but it’s also a diversionary tactic. Tons of hateful groups engage in silly rituals and practices (see also: the proud boys reciting names of breakfast cereals while getting repeatedly punched) specifically to make themselves harder to take seriously.

 

[Bagpuss]

Can confirm that the Mountain Dew, pizza, and bags of Doritos typically consumed at the table may lead to Type I Diabetes.

Type 2 I believe Type 1 you are born with.

 

[DemoMonkey]

"Type 2 I believe Type 1 you are born with."

Sufficient quantities of Mountain Dew will allow you to travel through time and punch yourself as a fetus in the pancreas.

It's on the label!

 

[turnip_farmer]

In a D&D context, the difference between ogres and orcs is literally just one is a little taller and even stronger. They're both brutish humanoids. . .like people, except more muscular, and taller, and hairier, and uglier, and scary and violent. In a generic D&D context, just add a few more hit dice to the Orc and you've got an Ogre.

I grew up with Warhammer long before I was ever really exposed to DnD, so orcs and ogres are very different in my conception.

Ogres, to me, do indeed just seem like bigger more brutish humans. To the extent that when they made Space Ogres for Warhammer 40k they were, indeed, just humans that had mutated in isolation somewhere in the cosmos over the millenia.

Orcs, on the other hand, are something completely different. They don't have societies like we would think of them; they don't have females and don't have children. Orcs are more a force of nature than a collection of thinking individuals.

It took some effort to readjust my notions of orcishness to play DnD and grapple with absurd concepts like a half-orc.

None of this is really relevant to the conversation, I am just rambling my thoughts. But it's interesting how these ideas develop. Warhammer fans can sometimes get very angry when people mention the racist implications of the Warhammer mythos, and will often angrily insist that orcs are based on football hooligans so cannot be racist. But then you have savage orcs, whose iconography is largely based on cartoonish versions of African cultures.

 

[J-H]

40.9 minutes longer than such accusations deserve.

The Wired article is about a "study" done by a "social scientist" at a politicized upper-class university in a highly politicized state in the US. In other words, it's done by someone without a real job in an environment that's highly intolerant of dissenting viewpoints.

"Sod off swampy, get a real job and stop trying to cause trouble for people who just want to have fun."
There is no good faith presumption any more from the attacking side, so don't extend the same to them. Certainly don't give them coverage or passively spread their views by talking about their crap.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

Speculative fiction from decades ago, even some Disney productions, may have got some unconfortable stereotypes, and maybe productions from today will need some disclaimer about "it is not our intention to promote anticlericalism or hate speech against religious communities".

Some players may be racist or intolerant but the true D&D doesn't promote hate speech against people from real life. Before we should wonder about if Warhammer 40.000 and the xenophobes space marines are promoting totalitarism. Or we could talk about the red paladins, the antagonists from Netflix's "Cursed", or the Gilean republic from "the tale of the maid".

I say it again, and time after time if it is necessary: reporting hate speech is not enough, we have to use speculative fiction to teach and to promote the respect for the human dignity, the core of our rights as citizens and people. We have not only to stop the hate, but making efforts for a mutual trust between everbody.

* Lovecraft had got predjudices, but this usually is forgotten.

* Should we report manwha fantasy if this too human-centric and not enough inclusive with fantasy races?

* Has anybody complained about the darkspawns from the videogames "Dragon Age"? Then why complains about Tolkien's orcs or D&D gnolls?

* Take care with your words. If the other side suspects you are trying to manipulatin emotionally appealling the feeling of guilty and shame then they will not want to keep hearing you. Be absertive and diplomatic, and try to get their trust.

* Today Disney's "our dinosaur is missing" may be tagged as sinophobic, but when I watched it being a child my respect for Chinese people was not worse, maybe thanks "Kung Fu" serie, a door what helped me to know more about Chinese culture. Sometimes I can say some horrible things against the current Chinese goverment, but this doesn't mean I despise China, I don't at all. I can talk about the "rotten appels" or the "black sheeps" but being respectful with the rest of the group.

* I am afraid 2021 will be the year of a new Satanic panic, and this will be worse. The good new is teorically the RPG franchises will not affected, or at least not before videogames with lot of gore and extreme violence (Mortal Kombat, Doom Eternal..).

 

[Oofta]

I agree that in D&D orcs are not being used as an allegory or replacement for one kind of human being. At the same time, the way orcs (and drow, and elves, and halflings...) are described uses the practice of ascribing the values of a culture to one singular "race." And whether this race or culture is real or imaginary, the act of ascribing the values of a culture to a single race is, in itself, a harmful practice.

The big difference to me is in the following two models:

A) orcs are barbaric raiders

B) there are barbaric raiders, and some of them are orcs

In example A, the "race" of orcs is being defined by the values of a culture (barbaric raiders). In B, the values of a culture are separated from race.

Obviously no orcs in real life are being harmed by being depicted as barbaric raiders. But I would argue that the very act of ascribing the values of a culture to a single race is harmful, and it's harmful to those who act it out playing the game because it's an unhealthy practice.

D&D vastly over simplifies most things down to a sentence or two whether that's how armor and weapons work to skills, professions, areas of expertise. It's a game. It has some simplified versions of reality like HP and monsters in order to make things easy to grasp.

There are a lot of compromises in D&D to make things easy to grasp. Those compromises and simplifications aren't perfect, but they are just compromises and simplifications. That doesn't make it racist.

 

[R_J_K75]

Any summary?

D&D fans are racist. It says so in the first sentence of the thread. Its on the internet so it must be true...BONJOUR!

 

[BookTenTiger]

D&D vastly over simplifies most things down to a sentence or two whether that's how armor and weapons work to skills, professions, areas of expertise. It's a game. It has some simplified versions of reality like HP and monsters in order to make things easy to grasp.

There are a lot of compromises in D&D to make things easy to grasp. Those compromises and simplifications aren't perfect, but they are just compromises and simplifications. That doesn't make it racist.

I think this is where we have disagreed in the past, Oofta.

I totally agree that D&D simplifies many things. But I would argue that simplifying how armor works is vastly different than ascribing the values of a culture onto a single race.

I really do believe that scribing the values of a culture onto a single race, whether that's a made up race or not, is racist.

I don't think it's done in D&D in order to be purposefully racist.

But racism doesn't have to be purposeful!

I totally understand that you do not see the practice of ascribing the values of a culture onto a single race as racist. I'm not going to try to convince you otherwise.

I do see it as racist. So in my own D&D games, at my table, I make sure cultures are not defined by race. There might be a dominant race (this village of artisanal muffin bakers is mostly tortles), but I'm going to make sure that every Tortle is not an artisanal muffin baker.

I actually think WotC believes the same thing! But in the effort to keep D&D simple and fantasy oriented, they sometimes fall back on old, harmful practices.