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

[Scribe]

Ah ok. Thats an absolutely fair assessment. The argument put forward for the current Orcs, is that, they do what they are meant to do.

Simple, blunt, straightforward. Like Khorne.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I disagree. The racism starts and stops at really poor work like in Volo's, at least that I've seen.

Otherwise, GW Orcs are just as bad, because there isnt a culture of Orc or Ork that isnt ready to scrap with anything that crosses their path. Their entire purpose, literally coded into their fungus genes, is to fight stuff.

I haven't said anything about Games Workshop content. I don't disagree that their orcs (or orks) aren't great either.

The racism definitely doesn't stop in the books, though. People with some pretty horrible views find D&D's racial categorizations useful, no joke. And if you look beyond D&D to the tabletop genre as a whole, it's not hard to find games with unpleasant connotations...or even outright awfulness. (Read up on MYFAROG sometime. It's...not great.)

Video games, for example, heavily rely on naughty word tropes like this. Mass Effect--a series I quite enjoyed, other than the end of ME3--has outright Space Roma and Space Jews, complete with standard racist tropes. It also has Blue-Skinned Space Lesbians. I'm not going to sugarcoat the naughty word things done in other places; all of them need to be addressed. But D&D is in a special place, by being (in some sense) the "grandaddy" of an entire genre. It has special weight and influence not found in other things--and it's something people build an identity around, which is Seriously Concerning when that identity may be built around stuff that's not exactly wholesome. (This, for example, is why you see people make such a big stink about whether or not certain games "are D&D"; to allow a game that doesn't fit with the identity a person has developed creates dissonance.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I think they're just dull. Not much to do other than toss them in to the grind, which... whatever?

Like, I bring up hobgoblins because I like using them because they can appear in a variety of situations. You can meet them on the road, you can meet them in a forest, you can meet them in a tavern. They might attack, they might parlay, they might be aggressive, they might be polite. To me, that's what helps make them interesting: there's no simple reaction to them. Each scenario can be different and require a different response.

Well said. This is the problem I have with most ultra-monoculture approaches to race. It means people turn off thought; "oh, it's an X, kill on sight" or "oh, it's a Y, they're automatically friendly." I don't want that. I get why some abnegation is desirable, but making it not only baked into the game, but repeatedly so, and in ways that really do resemble nasty patterns IRL. But even when my players go up against something like a mindflayer--something they can know is Super Evil, and is so by its own choice--I want them to respond by thinking, not by reflexively reaching for a sword.

Ah ok. Thats an absolutely fair assessment. The argument put forward for the current Orcs, is that, they do what they are meant to do.

Simple, blunt, straightforward. Like Khorne.

The problem, of course, is that nothing human is actually simple. That's sort of what's being said here: that the claims of simplicity come across a lot more as a refusal to believe that there could ever be more to the story than what individual readers have personally seen and experienced.

 

[Zardnaar]

I haven't said anything about Games Workshop content. I don't disagree that their orcs (or orks) aren't great either.

The racism definitely doesn't stop in the books, though. People with some pretty horrible views find D&D's racial categorizations useful, no joke. And if you look beyond D&D to the tabletop genre as a whole, it's not hard to find games with unpleasant connotations...or even outright awfulness. (Read up on MYFAROG sometime. It's...not great.)

Video games, for example, heavily rely on naughty word tropes like this. Mass Effect--a series I quite enjoyed, other than the end of ME3--has outright Space Roma and Space Jews, complete with standard racist tropes. It also has Blue-Skinned Space Lesbians. I'm not going to sugarcoat the naughty word things done in other places; all of them need to be addressed. But D&D is in a special place, by being (in some sense) the "grandaddy" of an entire genre. It has special weight and influence not found in other things--and it's something people build an identity around, which is Seriously Concerning when that identity may be built around stuff that's not exactly wholesome. (This, for example, is why you see people make such a big stink about whether or not certain games "are D&D"; to allow a game that doesn't fit with the identity a person has developed creates dissonance.)

1. What's wrong with blue skinned space lesbians? Representation etc.

Who were the space Jews and Roma?

 

[Scribe]

The problem, of course, is that nothing human is actually simple. That's sort of what's being said here: that the claims of simplicity come across a lot more as a refusal to believe that there could ever be more to the story than what individual readers have personally seen and experienced.

That is not it at all. Like not AT ALL. They even wrote a story about it, the Kingdom of Many-Arrows.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

1. What's wrong with blue skinned space lesbians? Representation etc.

Who were the space Jews and Roma?

1: They deeply and fundamentally misrepresent LGBTQ experiences, particularly since the race in question has a taboo about reproducing with their own kind which only happened when they met other sapient species. That's...not a great look.

2: The volus (the nerdy, weak, money-handling/greedy, short race that is a client to the obvious Space Romans, the turians) and the quarians (migrant culture treated like thieves or trash by other groups). This...really shouldn't have needed explanation, this is barely even subtext.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

That is not it at all. Like not AT ALL. They even wrote a story about it, the Kingdom of Many-Arrows.

I'm pretty sure Oofta and others are explicit about how they're looking for a simple, no-thought-needed antagonist. That that, in fact, is specifically the "niche" that they want orcs (and other races) to fill, and losing that means orcs (etc.) no longer have a "niche" and thus for some reason need to be eliminated.

 

[Scribe]

I'm pretty sure Oofta and others are explicit about how they're looking for a simple, no-thought-needed antagonist. That that, in fact, is specifically the "niche" that they want orcs (and other races) to fill, and losing that means orcs (etc.) no longer have a "niche" and thus for some reason need to be eliminated.

Yes, that is what they are looking for. That does not mean one cannot take that base, and build a more developed story out of it, which Wizards even published.

I mean I havent read every post by Oofta but I never saw them say 'if Orcs cannot be straightforward, then delete them'.

Now, if you are talking about 'if we make everything the same, why not just tell stories with humans' and that is a different thing that yes some have argued.

Like, I dont want (or have) a cosmopolitan world. I grew up on 40K, for better or worse, and your never going to have Ork's sitting down with the fine folks of the Imperial Guard.

Is it time to delete 40K or does it get a pass because its originally satirical?

I do not believe that there is no place for a species to serve as an elemental force of destruction, which the MM entry on Orcs makes pretty clear, is their desired and intended role. And AGAIN, I'm not saying we dont remove the clearly flawed language in Volo's. Shoot that into the sun, but everything else?

Like to back that all out, is just 'new edition time, we are all Eberron now'.

And I'll pass, just as I pass on Eberron.

 

[Zardnaar]

1: They deeply and fundamentally misrepresent LGBTQ experiences, particularly since the race in question has a taboo about reproducing with their own kind which only happened when they met other sapient species. That's...not a great look.

2: The volus (the nerdy, weak, money-handling/greedy, short race that is a client to the obvious Space Romans, the turians) and the quarians (migrant culture treated like thieves or trash by other groups). This...really shouldn't have needed explanation, this is barely even subtext.

You are aware nomads in general have often got negative press from "civilized" folk. That's why I never made the connection with Roma. Could easily be the Chinese referencing the steppe people. Similar thing if you read about Scythians in Roman sources, Persian sources or Russian sources. The migrant fleet aliens aren't depicted as Roma it's not like Vistani.

That's more on you.

Similar thing with the Volus. If they were drawn as caricatures as Jews sure but it's just so generic you could apply that anywhere.

Very very broad and the races in Mass Effect weren't negatively portrayed. Fascism did exist in game but that was on the individuals or on the protagonist.

The blue skinned lesbians did reproduce with each other they didn't have males. There was a very rare mutation that created the XYZ (memory fails me).

They could also reproduce with other species that were compatible.

 

[Haffrung]

There are three problems which you're not really acknowledging with this:

2) They have, including in 5E, aligned perfectly with some really SUPER RACIST tropes that been put around about black people and asian people at various points in the 20th century. Now, that's not your fault, and arguably, in some early iterations, they didn't align as well with these SUPER RACIST (like whoa) tropes that have done at other points. But all the stuff about them being fast-breeding, unnaturally strong, brainless violent thuggish worshippers of darkness who descend as hordes to wipe out "better" races is basically literally straight up the text of racist history books, propaganda articles and so on.

The narrative of savage fast-breeding barbarians descending on virtuous settled folk and menacing civilization isn't peculiar to Europeans or the 20th century. It's a human universal. Every settled corner of the earth has been threatened, raided, and conquered by nomadic people since forever. It's basically the history of the world in a nutshell. The steppes of Asia ('the navel of the world') alone have pulsed out dozens of waves of conquest into China, India, the Near East, and Europe. And the literate people who lived in those regions wrote sagas and myths and histories about the monstrous savages who lurk in the darkness beyond the lantern-light of civilization. The actors change in time and place - it might be the Scythians threatening Persia's frontiers in the 6th century B.C., Celts menacing Italy in the 2nd century B.C., the Saxons invading Britain in the 7th century AD, or the Mongols invading China in the 12th, but the story of the savage horde threatening civilization is a story told a thousand times in a hundred languages.

If some people want to excise that narrative from RPGs and drama, then okay. But it's a global human trope they'll be excising, not a recent or peculiarly Western one.