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

[Mirtek]

D&D was first published formally in 1974 so what "roots" were they returning to? Those WERE the roots.

Articles about Gygax and Arneson about their early home games that lead to the first published version of D&D.

If you read through thee there seems to be almost only hack&slash dungeon crawling going on. Characters were as nuanced as being named "Erac's Cousin" with such deep character traits like"dual-wielding vorpal swords". Or the great "Melf" who came to be due to the player not bothering with actually thinking of a name and thus "Gender: M" and "Race: Elf" combined into the famous wizard we know today.

Sessions seem to have most started right in the dungeon with no other motivation for being there other than the out of game knowledge that the DM has just invented something new and the players wanting to find out what it was.

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.

Yet WoW merely shifted the "always evil savage" race trope from Orcs and Trolls to Gnolls, Murlocs, Centaurs and other NPC races existing only to be slaughtered.

And whenever an expansion needs an evil faction doing bad stuff, it's always the Horde that is lead astray, again, by an evil warchief

 

[Zardnaar]

Errr... in what way does MTG compete, in any way other than literal time usage, with D&D? They're completely different and I'm willing to bet the vast majority of MTG players are also people who play D&D.

Time. It's easier to play MTG vs DMing.

Opportunity cost I can play D&D or Stellaris or Civilization or GTA etc. I can turn the PS4 on and be playing as Kassandra in Assassin's Creed Odyssey in a few minutes no prep time required.

Added bonus you don't have to smell the other players or travel/have them mess up your place.

 

[Scott Christian]

There's a particular narrative that D&D in the 70's was A Particular Thing, mostly put forth by some Old School types in a "return to our roots" thing that, at best, overextends how influential the Lake Geneva games were on the D&D populace as a whole, and at worst assumes this influence kept people solidly in the lane for far longer than it did.

While I agree with this, it is only a partial truth. In the 80s, D&D was male dominated. Not by a little - but a lot. Same could have been said for football. So to say tables were different is kind of an exaggeration. They were different, but they were still mostly males who read fantasy, which leads to similarities.

 

[Scott Christian]

Critical Role is a weird one to pick because the first setting book leans hard into fantasy racism and making out orcs and such as pure monsters.

• The dwarves of Kraghammer have rock gnomes as a model minority and only allow people of other races to live in the "Otherwalk" section of the city. Also one of the Dwarven noble houses once responded to discovering a myconid colony in a cavern they opened up by sending in pyromancers to burn all the myconids alive.
• The elves of Syngorn have a "kill drow on sight" policy, don't even allow trade with dwarves, and refer to half-elves as "illbloods".
• Goblins are described as barely more than vermin who are brainwashed into serving as foot soldiers in their evil god's army from birth.
• The primary orc group is the Ravagers, who not only go around killing and destroying but also force strong captives to drink a brain-damaging poison that eliminates the ability to feel any emotions other than hate or rage. Half-orcs are noted as the subject of prejudice and that the rare stories of good orcs trying take their half-orc children away from the evils of orc society end with the orc parent getting killed and leaving their children orphans who usually grow up to be criminals.
• Drow society, in at least a minor subversion, is a hellscape where the nobles worship Lolth and the commoners worship Tharizdun, leading to constant peasant uprisings and a dwindling population. Becoming a drider is considered a blessing because that way someone can get strong enough to leave drow society without getting killed by aberrations. Some are so desperate to escape their home cities that they willingly let themselves be transformed into aberrations.

About the only subversion in the first book was the wood elf city of Lyrengorn, who welcome drow refugees from the Underdark as opposed to high elf majority Syngorn's "kill dark elves on sight" policy.

Of course, I'm sure most of this will be altered or retconned in the upcoming book, but the original Tal'dorei Setting Book definitely wasn't being re-released as is in 2022.

I think this is called "using existing lore to build a foundation of the game world players understand." Individualism is great. It is really fun to focus on in a game. The majority of individual focus should be your PCs. The rest need to have a foundation somewhere or the world will simply not make sense.

 

[Umbran]

Mod Note:
Folks,

I just removed a post from this discussion - it contained fairly frank descriptions of willful harm of real-world innocents. While we do not deny that these things happen, WE HAVE YOUNG PEOPLE WHO READ THIS PLACE. It was an ill-considered post.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

.
Again, I am not saying this was universal, and there are well-documented cases of people doing heavy RP, but the chance that you could throw a stick at random and hit THAT table, it was small.

Cool stories.

I will say for the third time that since this not only contradicts the lived experience of other people, but there was also AN ENTIRE BOOK JUST PUBLISHED that uses primary sources, maybe stop insisting that your stories was how everyone else played?

it’s historical one true wayism, and it’s not accurate and also minimizes the variety of extant playing styles of the time while elevating your own experience.

 

[Faolyn]

Maybe I don't understand the concept of 'gate keeping' but I didn't think it was intrinsically/inherently bad? For example, a forum rule that forbids bigotry is a kind of gatekeeping as I understand it. But maybe whatever it is that counts "gatekeeping" is always bad and that no good things can ever fit into the descriptor of "gatekeeping".

Gatekeeping isn't the same as forum rules. Those rules apply to everyone. Gatekeeping is claiming that only some people are allowed to engage in the whatever or that only some people can be considered true followers of the whatever, because you said so, and only because you said so.

Saying that women can't be real gamers is gatekeeping. Saying that people who prefer to play in a certain way aren't playing real D&D is gatekeeping. Saying that only people who play a particular edition are real gamers is gatekeeping. Saying that people who like a particular class or race aren't real gamers is gatekeeping. Saying that people who don't play a particular RPG aren't real gamers is gatekeeping.

 

[Hexmage-EN]

Maybe, though I'm not sure what's wrong with having a section that shows some flaws in the social order of some closed off, insular, societies. Both places are there, in part, to not be nice places for most people.

If the product showed them as the good guys, it would be a problem.

But vanishingly few people think that it's wrong to criticize xenophobia. There are folks who prefer for the media they consume to not focus on xenophobia as a challenge in the story, and instead focus on other conflicts and get to lose themselves in a story that has nothing to do with bigotry, but I doubt may of them think a game setting is bad because it doesn't present a world without sin.

I guess I'm just still a little surprised by how harsh Kraghammer in particular sounded in the original book. It read more like a description that would be given of a duergar city. Though, maybe that was the point?

 

[Thomas Shey]

While I agree with this, it is only a partial truth. In the 80s, D&D was male dominated. Not by a little - but a lot. Same could have been said for football. So to say tables were different is kind of an exaggeration. They were different, but they were still mostly males who read fantasy, which leads to similarities.

I'll just note that during the period I was in D&D (about 75-78), I don't think I ever visited a group that did not have female players. They might not have been in the majority, but the West Coast fandom-based D&D culture was a pretty different beast than the primarily wargame-based ones found in some other areas.

 

[Thomas Shey]

Well..... I don't disagree with you guys that the style of 'Troupe Play' with lots of PCs and henchmen and so forth was necessarily typical of other places. OTOH starting out with 2 PCs each, how is that really different from starting out with one PC each and a henchman for each one?

Well, two ways: one, the second PC in most cases was going to be at least somewhat more capable than a random henchman; they might be a spellcaster, a thief or something else, and even a fighter was usually slightly better. Second, they were more likely to have at least a vestige of personality (to the degree the player's characters had any in the first place).

Also, a lot of the people talking about the henchman-support games have talked about a hell of a lot more than 4-6. I've seen quotes of as many as 20.

I mean, the original game doesn't actually discuss henchmen, except to note how many a PC can have based on his Charisma (even that maybe is a Greyhawkism, I'd have to look). So I think it was just a bit different way of parsing the same thing to a degree. Gygax clearly intended that henchmen get 'promoted' to full PC status when convenient anyway. Hirelings OTOH, I don't know really for sure how many were used by players in Gary's game, probably a lot, but who knows? Sometimes players in games I was in bought them too. They were a two-edged sword though, because GP was a key gating factor in advancement, and when you had to pay pay pay for those hirelings, you didn't advance as fast, or you were short of important equipment. So its more there were different strategies to the game, and Gary maybe favored some that other later GMs were less interested in.

Again, there seems a big difference to me. In addition, after a few levels it was entirely possible to get by without extra characters at all (though people had usually gotten in the habit of playing two by then, since especially with smaller groups it didn't make some of the less usual classes an expensive luxury).