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

[Vaalingrade]

'Controlling how we react' would just be 'shutting up and letting the person causing offense to run rampant' and that dog doesn't hunt anymore.

 

[Bedrockgames]

'Controlling how we react' would just be 'shutting up and letting the person causing offense to run rampant' and that dog doesn't hunt anymore.

By the same token heeding every instance of a person taking offense, without weighing whether it is warranted, let’s those people run rampant too. It is a dialogue, we shouldn’t just let people automatically take control of a conversation because they invoke being offended. Especially when the thing in question is describing what a game feels like. It is about gauging whether our reactions to things are reasonable and in proportion to the statement. A person critiquing a medium, or a game by comparing it to a medium, isn’t an attack or insult against you personally.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I'm not going to rehash the edition wars here, but there was previous little critique going on and using D&D's weird beef with videogames and other media goes back way beyond trying to leverage WoW to foment resentment against 4e. When 3e came out, it was Diablo and anime.

The basic format is 'I hate this thing and want others to hate it too. I'll therefore compare it to things I expect other people to hate.' That's coupled with blaming changes they hate on new players who don't conform to what they expect from the game.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I'm not going to rehash the edition wars here, but there was previous little critique going on and using D&D's weird beef with videogames and other media goes back way beyond trying to leverage WoW to foment resentment against 4e. When 3e came out, it was Diablo and anime.

The basic format is 'I hate this thing and want others to hate it too. I'll therefore compare it to things I expect other people to hate.' That's coupled with blaming changes they hate on new players who don't conform to what they expect from the game.

You are projecting. Some people just played these games, and felt they were similar to WOW or diablo (personally I didn't think that about 3E). That is a fair reaction. They are basically saying, Y feels too much like X and I don't like Y to feel too much like X. Given how popular WOW and Diablo were, I don't think it is a slam dunk that making that comparison would cause people to automatically want to side with you. Yes in edition wars, on both sides, people often try to convince others how great or how bad they think an RPG is. But that is part of what happens in hobbies where people are passionate about them. We are going to have differences of opinion about how good a given thing is (whether that is a movie, a book, an RPG, a video game). We should be able to openly express how we feel about those things, without them being turned into something bigger than an opinion about media.

 

[Willie the Duck]

I might get in trouble for this but people sound like such children when they do this, (quoted above). Just say 'magical negro'. It's a real trope of racism that has been written about and examined for years. It has it's own wikipedia page.

Your position on the matter has been noted and will be treated with all the deference it deserves. As a simple (and genuine) piece of advice, pointing to a thing someone did and saying "people sound like such children when they do this" is not a great way to convince them of your own expertise in what adulthood looks like. A simple, "In my opinion, self-censorship of this nature in unnecessary, the term is the name of an established trope in racism with its own wikipedia page," would have communicated the same desire-for-specific-behavior, and had a much greater likelihood of being treated seriously.

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).

Once one brought the acquired treasure back to town and got the XP reward, there wasn't all that much to do with money (until name level, I suppose; and of course campaign-dependent things like ship's passage, bribing nobles, etc.) until training costs for level-up were introduced (and when prices for plate mail were upped). My group of players always considered a group of sturdy hirelings to be the important equipment (well, equipment analog, although equipping them well also came into play) in which one invests after you have your weapons, armor, horse, 10' poles, wolvesbane, etc.

As to getting by without after a few levels, how did you protect your magic users once you started the wilderness adventure portion of adventuring, and you couldn't keep them behind the front line in conveniently narrow corridors? We certainly implemented workarounds (mostly homemade interception rules/gentlemen's agreements that enemies stopped and fought the front line), but that was us moving far afield of the rules (and certainly Gygaxian playstyle, presumably).

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.

If and only if you limit yourself to their dungeon-crawling portion of the game (which, admittedly, was most of what made it into the oD&D ruleset). They also had a RP-intensive (or at least nobles and factions with semblances of personalities) gameplay mode -- it was just called Braunstein and didn't make it into the published product (for reasons I suspect a Peterson book could inform us, Snarf?).

Yeah, his life was certainly characterized by some sort of feelings of disconnection from mainstream society and such. I think his correspondence with Lovecraft and other people in that circle was a big thing for him. Perhaps he got some of his ideas from HPL, lol. More likely they were just the normal tropes of his day. Anyway, it stands out now to a large degree because most of the rest of what was written in that period has faded into near oblivion.

That's a gross oversimplification of Howard's life at the time. Certainly he had his issues (as we all do), but he was very much in the position of being a caregiver for his mother, decades before such a term even existed. And with those duties came a substantial amount of stress.
I have seen no evidence of his being a "weirdo." He seems to have been a loner, although he did write of friends & traveling companions in his correspondences so it's unfair to think of him as being a complete separatist from society. He lived in a somewhat desperate era, and was definitely a product of it.

I think there's probably a spectrum of these things, just like there are continuums of social stratifications, social isolations, or general weirdness today. Lovecraft certainly seems on one end, REH less so, Arthur Conan Doyle seeming nearly social norm (the mysticism fixation was mainstream at the time, right?), to someone like H Rider Haggard (another author whose work would not fly today) being kinda mainstream British gentleman.

Something I have wondered about after finishing the Elusive Shift is whether the explosion of popularity of D&D after Egbert had the strange effect of decreasing the number of female gamers (relative to the total).

The 70s culture, especially the sci-fi and west coast coast culture that wasn’t brought in from wargaming, was quite different than the influx of younger gamers in the 80s and from the war gamer culture.

IIRC, there was an anecdote about a misogynistic piece published in a zine in the late 70s that was met with swift censure - and yet I doubt it would have done so if published just a few years later.

My completely personal take on the situation is that the original wargamers (mostly male) and west coast wing (which had a significant female contingent) were just overwhelmed by an influx of middle school through college-age people who mostly fit the 70s/80s 'nerd' archetype (which, again in my experience, was predominantly white males, but the actual ratio is not clear).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

Yep, that is exactly what I'm talkin' about. Our play sessions could have been ALMOST equally 'shallow' in an RP sense. My father named his first 1e character 'Felamu', (Fighter Elf, And Magic User). My best friend had virtually identical wizards, one after the other, Triborb I through VII, although a few of them in the middle varied a bit in race, etc, because I remember TBRVI was an elf fighter/mu.

This was pretty universal play too. I played with at least 3 different tables in Dayton, Ohio (Beavercreek); the scout troop, my family, and some of my school friends. Then we played for a couple years in dozens of games at The Bunker (it had various names) in Copperas Cove TX (right outside Fort Hood) where tons of Army kids played (it was a club with maybe 2-3 hundred members). Forrest Brown from Martian Metals, and some of the Metagaming guys from Austin would show up and playtest stuff. It was all hack & slash. You'd run into a GM now and then that would aspire to something more, but it rarely lasted long. I played a lot at college in Missouri (Tarkio, really the boonies but we had a couple games going when I was there in the early 80's). Played a lot in games in Vermont, I have quite a few different groups of players there I've run stuff for. After college, that was when we really aspired to something more than H&S dungeon play really. That was about the time OA came out, which is definitely at least D&D's first attempt to relate characters to something besides a dungeon maze.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

Yes and no... I mean, my sister (@Gilladian) was the first person I really played with, we had to invent our own rules, because we didn't yet own any. They were pretty silly... I agree, girls were not much present in public game play, like at the club or obviously in Boy Scouts. In college we had women players, though it was clearly 'uncool' to play D&D and that seemed to discourage the ladies more than the men perhaps? I'm not sure, TBH. The people I played with were fairly cool people, it wasn't misogyny, though some of the trappings of the game may have been offputting!

Beyond that though, I've consistently had at least 50% female participation in the vast majority of games I've played in and run. If it wasn't my sister then it was a whole long list of other women who were in my circle of friends. Not that I'm disputing that this is simply one experience that doesn't really reflect the whole rest of the world. I knew of groups that were all male and didn't welcome women as well. I suppose its possible there were also the opposite, but I'd not have heard of them, lol.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

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.

Yes, someone published a book, and I'm not going to debate YOU about what some other person whom I don't know and have never met has to say. I don't even particularly dispute any of the particulars they cite, as I wasn't present in any place they talk about specifically. I was in a lot of other places. I didn't see any of the things they saw. If I write it down in a book does that somehow bless it with the badge of 'truth'? Lets not get silly here. My contention is that if you threw a dart at all the D&D tables in the US in 1978 that the chance of it landing on one that was RPing in anything substantively beyond the level of what was going on in Lake Geneva would be VANISHINGLY SMALL. That could still leave 100's of such groups around that were doing amazing RP. Now and then we would hear some rumor of such; but nobody really understood what they were doing (because D&D as-written pretty much crushes that kind of play). We were all having enough fun that if a random GM suggested some more RP-heavy game it either got ignored, or it lasted a few weeks and died of lack of interest. GRADUALLY, over the period 1977 to 1981 or so, people generally came to realize that you could RP and figured it out, but mostly in OTHER GAMES, NOT D&D.

I would call the period 1974-1981 or so, roughly, 'early D&D'. You can see from published adventures and stories of the most documented campaigns and such that it was an era of homebrew, lots of dungeons, and a general emphasis on treasure hauls and whatnot. The ideas of deeper characterization existed, but it wasn't much taken in depth in 'community play' certainly. What happened in people's family rooms on Saturday Night is hard to say, we didn't have Internet!

 

[Filthy Lucre]

Your position on the matter has been noted and will be treated with all the deference it deserves. As a simple (and genuine) piece of advice, pointing to a thing someone did and saying "people sound like such children when they do this" is not a great way to convince them of your own expertise in what adulthood looks like. A simple, "In my opinion, self-censorship of this nature in unnecessary, the term is the name of an established trope in racism with its own wikipedia page," would have communicated the same desire-for-specific-behavior, and had a much greater likelihood of being treated seriously.

You know what, that was a little curt of me. Lo siento.

 

[Aldarc]

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.

One potential issue I would raise is that most of D&D history seems to be presented and published by only one person (i.e., Jon Peterson) with many of the books you make recent reference to (e.g., Playing at the World, Game Wizards, Elusive Shift, etc.) being from that one person. While Jon Peterson does use primary sources, relying too much on Jon Peterson's account also runs a risk of a one true history or singular historiographical narrative, much as was the case with Edward Gibbon's The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.