D&D General "Red Orc" American Indians and "Yellow Orc" Mongolians in D&D

[Filthy Lucre]

IMO, saying that a race (or culture, or ethnicity) is Always Good is just as bad as saying it's Always Evil.

But anyway, I've read one criticism of the trope as saying that it's designed to differentiate the "good" savages from the "bad" savages--you could kill/exploit/enslave the bad ones with impunity, but you can't with the good ones. But even the good ones are still savage, and therefore lesser, than the civilized people.

That, IMO, would be the most fatal critique of the trope. It smacks of "Well, you're one of the good ones".

 

[Mordhau]

But doesn't this have more to do with Howard living in a time when racialist ideas had a lot of traction than with story structure? He uses racialist descriptions all in a number his stories (I am going by memory, so it isn't like I have a list of examples next to me, but one that sticks out was his him talking about a character's semitic features (something about the way it was done) for example and at times him talking about peoples that was noticeably racialist). I think had he not been steeped in an intellectual world where racialist explanations were the norm, those descriptions would have been a lot different. I get that there is an argument to be made for the picts occupying the same space as native americans and Howard possibly using the american frontier and stories about it as foundation....but I am not seeing how that means the structure itself is the problem. I can have a game with orcs filling in that role. And I can imagine a world where those orcs aren't littered with racist stereotypes, and I can also imagine a world where they are (I can also imagine a world where those orcs have real world cultural features and whether those are negative, racist, bad or good depictions are debated).

Racialist thinking itself is definitely something we call agree is bad. I think where I would disagree with people is the direct line they draw from orcs are evil to racialist theories about human groups.

I didn't say the structure itself was a problem. It's an entirely different argument whether using colonialist story structures but removing problematic racial elements remains problematic.

My point was that Orcs may allow the possibility of continuing to use a lot of those story structures without the problematic racial elements - however, because those story structures remain recognisable, sometimes the racial elements start to sneak back in.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I definitely always saw that as how the game was designed to be played, if for no other reason than TSR D&Ds by-the-book-otherwise was crazy hard without massive walls of henchfolk or everyone playing multiple characters. We just decided it wasn't our cup of tea and adjusted the challenge to match. It certainly never occurred to us to play the game in a way we didn't find fun because of some notion of original intent. I don't remember anyone ever proverbially patting themselves on the back over adherence to 'RAW' or whatever similar term would have been at large bitd.

Well, you mention the obvious way around I saw in multiple places: two PCs a pop. When you had 12 classed characters walking out, at least some of them would go home; at the first couple levels that might look like a DCC funnel, but it still didn't look much like the way the game was apparently written to be.

 

[Bedrockgames]

But anyway, I've read one criticism of the trope as saying that it's designed to differentiate the "good" savages from the "bad" savages--you could kill/exploit/enslave the bad ones with impunity, but you can't with the good ones. But even the good ones are still savage, and therefore lesser, than the civilized people.

My understanding is it is about purity. It is a trope that says they are good because they are unpolluted by civilization. Not saying the trope itself is a good one. But I always read it as being along those lines.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Whether or not they were first, I think you're going to be very hard pressed to say that WoW and W3 didn't do a lot of heavy lifting at rehabilitating the orc image for mainstream audiences.

The treatment of humanoids being revised was inevitable. Society was going to march on from those depictions and had been trying to for twenty-odd years when WoW became the watershed.

But it's a videogame and D&D explicitly has a weird one-sided beef for scapegoating videogames--specifically Diablo and WoW for whatever we don't like. I'm frankly shocked the most recent scapegoat is Critical Role (notably not a videogame) instead of Skyrim. Which says a lot about Skyrim. It was so good that people don't feel confidently safe making things up about it to insult something they don't like in D&D.

 

[Mordhau]

My understanding is it is about purity. It is a trope that says they are good because they are unpolluted by civilization. Not saying the trope itself is a good one. But I always read it as being along those lines.

Rousseau "Man is born free but is everywhere in chains" vs Hobbes "life in it's natural state is nasty, brutish and short".

 

[Bedrockgames]

Rouseau "Man is born fre but is everywhere in chains" vs Hobbes "life in it's natural state is nasty, brutish and short".

That comes to mind. But also Eden comes to mind too.

 

[Thomas Shey]

But doesn't this have more to do with Howard living in a time when racialist ideas had a lot of traction than with story structure? He uses racialist descriptions all in a number his stories (I am going by memory, so it isn't like I have a list of examples next to me, but one that sticks out was his him talking about a character's semitic features (something about the way it was done) for example and at times him talking about peoples that was noticeably racialist). I think had he not been steeped in an intellectual world where racialist explanations were the norm, those descriptions would have been a lot different. I get that there is an argument to be made for the picts occupying the same space as native americans and Howard possibly using the american frontier and stories about it as foundation....but I am not seeing how that means the structure itself is the problem. I can have a game with orcs filling in that role. And I can imagine a world where those orcs aren't littered with racist stereotypes, and I can also imagine a world where they are (I can also imagine a world where those orcs have real world cultural features and whether those are negative, racist, bad or good depictions are debated).

Racialist thinking itself is definitely something we call agree is bad. I think where I would disagree with people is the direct line they draw from orcs are evil to racialist theories about human groups.

It gets really complicated with Howard, because he had two different sets of Picts. The ones in the Bran Mak Morn stories, and the ones in the Conan stories; the latter are supposed to be the degenerate descendants of the former. Howard seemed to have this concept that humans had serious trouble retaining, from lack of a better term, vigor; either you were civilized and slid into decadence, or you were barbaric and slid into degeneration.

 

[Filthy Lucre]

But it's a videogame and D&D explicitly has a weird one-sided beef for scapegoating videogames--specifically Diablo and WoW for whatever we don't like. I'm frankly shocked the most recent scapegoat is Critical Role (notably not a videogame) instead of Skyrim. Which says a lot about Skyrim. It was so good that people don't feel confidently safe making things up about it to insult something they don't like in D&D.

I actually don't know what you're talking about at all right now.

 

[Filthy Lucre]

It gets really complicated with Howard, because he had two different sets of Picts. The ones in the Bran Mak Morn stories, and the ones in the Conan stories; the latter are supposed to be the degenerate descendants of the former. Howard seemed to have this concept that humans had serious trouble retaining, from lack of a better term, vigor; either you were civilized and slid into decadence, or you were barbaric and slid into degeneration.

Lmao we're also talking about a guy who was buddies with Lovecraft - who I love - but he wasn't exactly a civil rights progressive, amirite?
(He was super duper racist)