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

[Haffrung]

Moreover:


And of the specific groups that have info about complexion:
Aquatic - greenish silver
Wood elf - "Their complexions are fair..."

So, yeah, when your evil variety is dark but everyone else is light, it may not have been intended to be racist, but it sure is tone deaf to the concern.

"Most gnomes are wood brown, a few range to gray brown, of skin." - 1E Monster Manual

"[Dwarves] skin is earth-colored, and their hair is dark brown, grey, or black." - Moldvay Basic

What's actually remarkable about the early monster and race descriptions in D&D is how fantastically varied they are in complexion.

"Ogre magi have light blue, light green, or pale brown skins."

Orcs are "brown or brownish green with a blueish sheen."

"Goblins range from yellow through dull orange to brick red in skin color."

"Gnolls have greenish gray skins."

 

[Don Durito]

Well it is if you were brought up CoE and had never heard of the Curse of Ham until you mentioned it. Seems another US culture thing. Edit: Also checked with my RC wife and she’s not heard of it either.

The curse of ham was a big deal in historical colonialism. It's not just a US thing.

 

[Sacrosanct]

It’s entirely possible with cross-hatching and a solid value scale. I couldn’t do it, but the technique has been around for hundreds of years.

More the point, it's not about literally capturing bronze skin in a b/w line art per se. "Tanned white person" isn't much more diverse than just "white person in general" if the physical features are the same (Caucasian). So it's less about capturing actual skin tone, and more about capturing defining and diverse physical features, which absolutely can be done in b/w line art (see my post above).

 

[Haffrung]

It’s entirely possible with cross-hatching and a solid value scale. I couldn’t do it, but the technique has been around for hundreds of years.

It's possible. But you've seen the artwork in question, haven't you? These were mostly amateur artists who spent maybe an hour or so on each illustration. Is it more reasonable to assume they carried out their assignments in the easiest way (which is to depict humanoids as having white bodies, regardless of how they're described in the text or whether they're good or evil), or that they were subverting the text they were given by making everything white?

 

[billd91]

"Most gnomes are wood brown, a few range to gray brown, of skin." - 1E Monster Manual

"[Dwarves] skin is earth-colored, and their hair is dark brown, grey, or black." - Moldvay Basic

We're talking about elves, pal. That should have been pretty obvious from the context.

 

[Charlaquin]

It just feels like a solution looking for an issue, at least based on the articles where the interviewers actually talked to Hispanic people.

Yeah, I mean I’m nonbinary and mixed-race white/Hispanic and I’ve never taken issue with Latino/Latina being gendered terms personally. But there are people who do, and adopting a more gender neutral term is super easy - barely an inconvenience. So, if it makes other people more comfortable and doesn’t harm me, eh, may as well. I think it’s the same issue here. Changing the default to “any alignment” doesn’t prevent people who want always-evil races from having them, so if that change would make the game more welcoming to more people, the resistance to making it seems misplaced to me.

 

[Sacrosanct]

That's not a 'mountain of evidence'. It's people with largely similar backgrounds from the same community interpreting material in largely the same way. If you were seriously claiming that all these people had come to the same conclusion independently then you'd have the beginnings of a case, but obviously that's not true.

A mountain of evidence would be going out into the world beyond highly educated and extremely online people and asking ordinray people if they found representations offensive. (And you'd have to have a statistically significant sample).

Now we can of course argue that there are lots of problematic things in D&D and what should be do about then, but you can't point to a bunch of people who agree with you and say 'case closed', you actually have to argue the thing on its merits.

This is not only ridiculous, it's an impossible arbitrary standard you just came up with out of thin air. It's also a horrible standard.

"Well, the majority of doctors have written papers about how the transmission rate of this virus is a problem, but I don't consider that a mountain of evidence unless you also include the opinions of Joe at the car wash and Jane at the Walmart."

 

[Charlaquin]

"Most gnomes are wood brown, a few range to gray brown, of skin." - 1E Monster Manual

"[Dwarves] skin is earth-colored, and their hair is dark brown, grey, or black." - Moldvay Basic

I thought we were talking about elves...

 

[Charlaquin]

This is not only ridiculous, it's an impossible arbitrary standard you just came up with out of thin air. It's also a horrible standard.

"Well, the majority of doctors have written papers about how the transmission rate of this virus is a problem, but I don't consider that a mountain of evidence unless you also include the opinions of Joe at the car wash and Jane at the Walmart what their opinions are."

This does seem to be one of the core issues of the culture war though. A depressing number of people truly do believe that Joe’s and Jane’s opinions should be given equal weight to those of the experts.

 

[Sacrosanct]

It's possible. But you've seen the artwork in question, haven't you? These were mostly amateur artists who spent maybe an hour or so on each illustration. Is it more reasonable to assume they carried out their assignments in the easiest way (which is to depict humanoids as having white bodies, regardless of how they're described in the text or whether they're good or evil), or that they were subverting the text they were given by making everything white?

Look man, I've been doing art for 40 years. It it literally no extra effort to make a line drawing of someone who looks African, or Asian, or any non-white person. See my post above of very simple lineart that captures these traits.

You seem to be bending over backwards to double down on positions that have been soundly debunked and refuted. For what, exactly?