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

[Justice and Rule]

Of what orcs are like. At least in this region (which is fine)

I mean, you called them orc, thus invoked orc tropes. These orcs aren't like typical orcs. The players have some idea in their head about what a typical orc is, from exposure to media. You've edited that.

If they didn't have any idea what an orc was, you'd have given half an answer (you didn't describe them physically). If you didn't want them to look like orcs, or have some other orcish trait, you shouldn't have called them orcs.

You can't make your audience only think of half a trope.

I feel like this is a meaningless distinction. The concept of an "Orc" as a physical creature is known, but we need not have to immediately default to "This is a bloodthirsty creature that has no concept of empathy or love" for what they are beyond their physical attributes.

I'm all for doing a better job making it clear that monster fluff entries are only 'typical' versions and that variations exist, and I'm among those actively asking for cleaning up language, but if there are going to be races in the game, the race has to mean something. Not, "the race should mean something" - "the race will mean something, whether the designers control that meaning or not."

I mean, you could just give examples of different Orc cultures. Like, if we are doing this for people who might be building their own world, why not give them inspiration for what they can do, not try to shackle them to what has already been done?

 

[Mind of tempest]

Nentir Vale? (takes cover)

the one I can not spell for the life of me.
I would take it just to have the thri kreen back.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Well, I disagree. It doesn't matter if I jump in a Mini, a Panel Van or a Porsche. Give me a moment and I'll know most of what I need to drive. It's the same with D&D. If we don't have basic assumptions it would be like trying go from driving a Camry to driving a tank.

The cars? Same for the most part. The tank? That would be more like jumping into a Cthulhu game. Well, if the tank was made of nightmares trying to drive you insane.

I just don't think this holds up.

I've run dozens of different settings for D&D, some which destroy every non-rules assumption about D&D (like Dark Sun). If this was really a major issue, there should have been difficult running those, but there absolutely never was. Why didn't I have problems? Why wasn't anyone confused? It really seems like Dark Sun should be the testing ground for this opinion, as it pretty much systematically averts every typical assumption about D&D settings/races. But it worked really well. I didn't have people going "Oh my goodness, these elves don't act like elves!" or "Where are the orcs?!?" or the like, and I know my players aren't exceptional specimens. Were what you saying true, a common complaint about DS would be "it confuses the hell out of players". Yet that's not the case. Indeed I've never heard that.

I have seen difficulty in one place - which is when you take an extant setting, like the FR, then make changes to basic stuff about it, and yet still call it the FR. If you come into an FR game and it turns out all elves are genocidal maniacs that might be a bit confusing or hard to take. But that's because the FR has a specific setting.

Regardless, racial alignments are likely to disappear down the plughole of history and I don't think anyone will really experience any difficulties because of it.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

Maybe people of a given race not being evil shouldn’t be a novel and exciting thing. Normalizing diversity among fantasy races is kind of the point.

So not rhetorical...would drizzt have made the splash he did if he was just another good drow? One of many?

I don’t think so personally. It was exciting that he was not the norm. It was exciting because there was a norm.

I honestly wonder if making the the monsters playable will be worth it in the end after we anthropomorphize them all. I mean it seemed cool at first (again since it was not the norm) but now seems like it will lead nowhere easy for a once leisurely past time

 

[Mind of tempest]

So not rhetorical...would drizzt have made the splash he did if he was just another good drow? One of many?

I don’t think so personally. It was exciting that he was not the norm. It was exciting because there was a norm.

I honestly wonder if making the the monsters playable will be worth it in the end after we anthropomorphize them all. I mean it seemed cool at first (again since it was not the norm) but now seems like it will lead nowhere easy for a once leisurely past time

depends on how they do it, merely human cultures with ear and teeth pasted on would suck but done properly and you would get icons.

 

[Remathilis]

Have you not gotten the point that globally attaching specific function to race is the problematic thing?

Racial monoculture seems a pretty cliche notion at this point, and without mass comunication, make very little sense over significant distances. Dramatic functions can be determined locally, where the PCs happen to be adventuring now, rather than globally.

I ask (almost as a tangent): does this apply to sci-fi too? Are wookiees, klingons, vulcans, daleks, kree, predators or similar which are not only mono-culture but often come from a single biome planet also bad and should be redone?

 

[Justice and Rule]

So not rhetorical...would drizzt have made the splash he did if he was just another good drow? One of many?

If the books were good, wouldn't he? I mean, is Drizzt's only characteristic that "He's the good Drow"?

I don’t think so personally. It was exciting that he was not the norm. It was exciting because there was a norm.

Yeah, but that's not a great argument to keep up a terrible norm.

 

[Oofta]

depends on how they do it, merely human cultures with ear and teeth pasted on would suck but done properly and you would get icons.

But how would you do it differently?

 

[Haffrung]

Have you not gotten the point that globally attaching specific function to race is the problematic thing?

So it's racist if ogres are brutal? And medusa are cruel? And dragons are greedy?

Basically, monsters cannot be monstrous by default?

You're demanding that we fundamentally dismantle how drama works. Not just in D&D, or in Western culture, but in all storytelling in every culture. Drama works by contrasting traits. It's done at the individual level, and at the group level. If a group is going to have a dramatic function, it must have traits that are contrasted with the traits of other groups.

If elves and dwarves are the same except in appearance, there is no longer any dramatic tension or contrast between elves and dwarves.

If ogres can have any qualities, then they've become generic vessels instead of monsters.*

A D&D that met the moral ideals many here are calling for would be unrecognizable. It would be like turning every Hollywood movie into a Paul Thomas Anderson film.

And the elephant in the room here is that we've apparently evolved past treating ogres as monsters and into an enlightened era where they have rich and nuanced possibilities of values and behaviour. But the default solution to every problem is still to hack it apart with swords or incinerate it with fireballs. If we're interrogating the hobby to remove behaviours we find problematic in the real world, why ignore the brutal and unrelenting violence, much of it against intelligent and sentient beings? Or is that more of a 2025 project?

* I enjoyed reading John Gardner's Grendel, but it would make for a naughty word D&D adventure.

 

[Remathilis]

So it's racist if ogres are brutal? And medusa are cruel? And dragons are greedy?

Basically, monsters cannot be monstrous by default?

You're demanding that we fundamentally dismantle how drama works. Not just in D&D, or in Western culture, but in all storytelling in every culture. Drama works by contrasting traits. It's done at the individual level, and at the group level. If a group is going to have a dramatic function, it must have traits that are contrasted with the traits of other groups.

If elves and dwarves are the same except in appearance, there is no longer any dramatic tension or contrast between elves and dwarves.

If ogres can have any qualities, then they've become generic vessels instead of monsters.

A D&D that met the moral ideals many here are calling for would be unrecognizable. It would be like turning every Hollywood movie into a Paul Thomas Anderson film.

And the elephant in the room here is that we've apparently evolved past treating ogres as monsters and into an enlightened era where they have rich and nuanced possibilities of values and behaviour. But the default solution to every problem is still to hack it apart with swords or incinerate it with fireballs. If we're interrogating the hobby to remove behaviours we find problematic in the real world, why ignore the brutal and unrelenting violence, much of it against intelligent and sentient beings? Or is that more of a 2025 thing?

To say that if ogres are "people", then D&D has to question the use of violence in non-self defense.

I love pointing to this RPG idea from nearly 20 years ago as an example of what an RPG looks like when you bring in real world consequences to violence into it.

Power Kill