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

[pemerton]

Barovia is fantasy Transylvania as depicted in countless Dracula-related media. If someone asked me to describe Barovia, I could start out by saying, "well, it's basically Transylvania" and you would know exactly what I am referring to. Of course, what I see in Transylvania is moody Hollywood soundstages while what you see is decades of hurtful stereotypes of Roma and Slavic people. We will always see what part we want to, and one person's allusion is another person's stereotype.

The issue, of course, is D&D (and media at large, but let's keep it to D&D) is full of those allusions and the accompanying stereotypes.

<snip examples>

All of it can be considered "lazy" and quite a bit of it built on tropes and cliches considered "hurtful" or even "racist."

One of D&D's greatest strengths is also its weakness: it uses a lot of familiar concepts in not-particularly unique ways.

authors draw from real ideas for a variety of reasons, and often simply because they're interesting or make for fun roleplaying.

For instance, an author might create a culture that is loosely based on the Aztec empire at its worst (or how it is stereotypically understood to have been), complete with child sacrifices and head-ball games.

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Creators draw from a wide range of ideas, and put bits and pieces together in different ways that serve their purposes. Of course they'll be influenced by common and/or stereotypical conceptions that might be wrong, but how can it be otherwise?

There's also marketability to consider. Creating unique cultures, in addition to being a ton of work (if it's even possible), decreases familiarity and potentially reduces your audience. They were and are trying to sell these books to as many people as possible, and using familiar things makes that easier.

I don't think any of these assertions about authorial creative process, and publication decision-making, is controversial. But I don't see how they have any bearing on whether or not a work is racist.

Quite a way upthread @el-remmen linked to some essays he (? I believe this is the right pronoun) wrote about Black characters in Legion of Super Heroes comics. One of those comics involves the Black superhero Tyroc being presented by himself and his fellow Legionnaires as a criminal, when in fact he is not, as part of some subterfuge or other.

@el-remmen makes the point that it is hardly coincidence that the only Black hero is the one being handed over to the police. Although in the fiction the Legionnaires assert that they are "colour blind", it seems obvious that the creators of this comic take it for granted that a Black character will be more easily seen, by the comic's audience, as being plausibly a criminal, than a white (literally, or as "coded" in their presentation in the fiction) character. Here is the full analysis:

Tyroc’s arrest and public humiliation at being accused of crimes turns out to be a ruse by the Legion to draw out a villain who brags about working at the police department while making a bomb threat. So Tyroc’s “rampage” was faked, an excuse for him to search for the bomb without the bomber knowing—as the Metropolis police were not in on it. But really, the details of the convoluted plot are not as important as the question of why does Tyroc have to be the one to play the criminal role? I can’t help the feeling (based on how Tyroc has been characterized) that writer Cary Bates felt he was the most “believable” in that role because of his race. That “believability” is heartbreakingly reinforced when Tyroc is drawn to say, “After the way I lost my temper, I don’t blame everyone for thinking I went on a rampage.” Furthermore, when Mon-El and Brainiac 5 discuss the “rampage” with the police they play up the expectation that Tyroc would go rogue. “Who else but Tyroc could be responsible? We shouldn’t have made him a member! I always thought he was too unstable!” and “He never really wanted to join our Legion anyway…” And while later it is clear that at least Brainiac 5 is in on the plan, the language they use leverages stereotypes about Black people, their inability to control their anger, and not making an effort to fit in with the dominant culture. Notice how one of them says “our Legion.” The story itself gives no reason why Tyroc has to be the one to play the criminal role, except for a throw away thought bubble that explains that his voice “homed in on the bomb.” There was never any suggestion Tyroc’s voice had that ability, so another member of the team could have just as easily had their powers written to work that way. Tyroc’s race is a lazy way to make the story work, relying on the implicit bias against Black folks common in our society. And, since the supposedly race neutral perspective does not allow it, the story cannot even serve as a critique of law enforcement racial expectations and corruption. Instead, after he is temporarily imprisoned, the Legion themselves perform some well-intentioned corruption by manufacturing evidence to exonerate Tyroc, allowing him to continue his rampage subterfuge.​

That doesn't mean the author is mocking the culture of all Central American peoples; it could be that they just think it involves fun ideas for a game setting.

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And if they're creating a culture that is only meant to signify itself, why can't it have elements of real-world cultures even if they are negative portrayals? If that Aztec-influenced culture I mentioned above is ruled by an evil god who seeks to quench his blood-lust and his culture is entirely about this, why does that have to be considered a castigation of Central American peoples? Why can't it simply be an evil fantasy empire with flavors drawn from Mesoamerica?

It's one thing to condemn an easy target like Chief Sitting Drool, it's a much more complicated question of how you world-build without relying on those well-worn tropes we come back to so often?

@Mercurius, I take your use of "mocking" to mean something like setting out to mock. An author might not set out to mock, and might think something is fun, and yet end up producing work that has the effect of mocking others. Sometimes authorial intentions misfire just as other intentions do.

How does one world-build without drawing on stereotypical and/or racist tropes? I don't know. It's a big question. It is, in part, the topic of Teju Cole's critique of the Black Panther film:

I love the video clip for The Stranglers' Golden Brown:

I think it's beautiful, and incredibly evocative. Part of me would love to play the RPG of that video clip. But how could it be done? Maybe some things we just have to forego. Sometimes human wishes don't, or can't, come true.

 

[Remathilis]

I wouldn't say they bet on the wrong option. If they hadn't designed 5e as a legacy game, would it have become as popular, and drawn as much attention? I know if they doubled down on 4e I wouldn't have stuck around.

I wonder sometimes if 4e had been mechanically like 5e but kept the 4e lore changes would it have been more or less successful than the 4e we got. It's an interesting (if unrelated) thought experiment.

 

[Mordhau]

I wonder sometimes if 4e had been mechanically like 5e but kept the 4e lore changes would it have been more or less successful than the 4e we got. It's an interesting (if unrelated) thought experiment.

Probably. The degree of success that is dependent on Critical Role would probably be unchanged.

But it would probably have suffered a little initially from having less goodwill from traditionalist 3e fans.

 

[Zardnaar]

I wonder sometimes if 4e had been mechanically like 5e but kept the 4e lore changes would it have been more or less successful than the 4e we got. It's an interesting (if unrelated) thought experiment.

The big upset was the 4E classes chapter. Anything else was argueably salvageable but the class and role design wasn't. Hence no Warlord it's toxic to the player base.

Most of the insults towards 4E boil down to power design.

 

[Thomas Shey]

His work is widely praised and held up as Important Work in spec fiction and especially horror.

He's pretty much the poster child for the fundamental problem; he's very influential, many people found (and still do) find his work compelling, and a lot of it is stuffed full of Unfortunate Implications at best (you can argue almost all his horror is based around fear of the Other), and outright racism and xenophobia in front of God and everybody at worst. It also, at its best, evokes the sense Things Beyond Our Ken better than virtually anyone else has managed. So on one hand, its understandable that a lot of people would like to just forget him, some others are in denial about his more awful traits, and yet a third group would dearly like to untangle one from the other.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I wonder sometimes if 4e had been mechanically like 5e but kept the 4e lore changes would it have been more or less successful than the 4e we got. It's an interesting (if unrelated) thought experiment.

I think it would still have been largely unsuccessful, because thing with 4E is, it was sailing in very dark waters long before anyone really knew what the mechanics were, at least knew them enough to know they were not for them.

4E was essentially torpedo by WotC long before launch by really three major factors:

1) The messaging and marketing on 4E was absolutely appalling. Almost every bad decision that could have been made, was made. For example, deciding to mock people who played current editions, and not only doing that, but by doing it with a guy the sort of accent The Simpsons would use for a "snooty and unpleasant European". One of the major people at WotC coming out in an interview and linking 4E to MMOs and talking about how he wanted it to be successful like them. Now, his comments were misinterpreted, but they were so easy to misinterpret, and utterly primed people to see 4E in a certain light. It's much easier to see what he meant now, but... terrible.

2) The GSL instead of the OGL. To call the GSL a "slap in the face" of 3PPs and anybody who enjoyed the work of 3PPs would be to severely understate things. It was also rejection of the whole d20 era, which really, was a pretty popular era. The GSL was greedy, short-sighted, mean-spirited, and just an all-round bad idea. From a distance of time, you can see it made a certain amount of crude sense for WotC because WotC clearly believed, at that time, the OGL was a mistake and they should have profited from it more, but, they were wrong, very wrong.

3) Going very hard for digital before they had the developers, and just slightly before the world really had the technology, especially doing it during what was a major technological change (the rise of smartphones). Should they have seen smartphones coming? Perhaps not, but should have adopted the digital strategy they did, with a totally unproven studio, all eggs in one basket (eggs later smashed by the head dev being a murderer)? No. They should have gone for something proven and professional - hired a company to do it, like an established, decent-sized one. Or just not gone so hard for digital. They absolutely hyped people for digital - marketed as if they'd have a strong digital offering at launch, and totally did not - in fact, even by the time 4E was shut down, they still weren't at where they'd said they'd be at or shortly after launch.

Changing the rules doesn't change any of that.

It also still leaves things wide open for Paizo and Pathfinder. Instead of 4E being called "The MMO version of D&D" or "A wargame pretending to be D&D" or the like, you'd likely have got "D&D got dumbed down so they could make it into an MMO!" (things like Warlocks would be held up as evidence of this) or "Baby's First D&D" or the like, because realistically, going from 3.5E's extreme range of options, and fiddly, complex mechanics involving dozens of types of bonuses and them stacking or not, hundreds of feats, and so on, to "Advantage/Disadvantage" and like a dozen feats, with an audience already primed to hate the game by the three things I listed above, it would not look good.

Would it have done better than actual 4E? I don't really think so. Maybe a little but not a lot. Pathfinder would still have succeeded in capturing a large audience share. I think rather, the insults about it would be a little different, the distaste would be that it was a "simplified game for video game people", rather than "a wargame masquerading as an RPG".

 

[Mordhau]

The big upset was the 4E classes chapter. Anything else was argueably salvageable but the class and role design wasn't. Hence no Warlord it's toxic to the player base.

Most of the insults towards 4E boil down to power design.

As I said in another thread, I wouldn't be too sure about the exact reasons 4e failed. Lots of elements of 4e have passed over latterly into 5e with nary a peep. It was probably a whole lot of things combined that caused it to fail.

I seriously doubt that the Warlord, by itself, is a serious issue to the player base.

 

[Mordhau]

He's pretty much the poster child for the fundamental problem; he's very influential, many people found (and still do) find his work compelling, and a lot of it is stuffed full of Unfortunate Implications at best (you can argue almost all his horror is based around fear of the Other), and outright racism and xenophobia in front of God and everybody at worst. It also, at its best, evokes the sense Things Beyond Our Ken better than virtually anyone else has managed. So on one hand, its understandable that a lot of people would like to just forget him, some others are in denial about his more awful traits, and yet a third group would dearly like to untangle one from the other.

I just realised that Lovecraft is basically the Martin Heidegger of speculative fiction.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

The big upset was the 4E classes chapter. Anything else was argueably salvageable but the class and role design wasn't. Hence no Warlord it's toxic to the player base.

Most of the insults towards 4E boil down to power design.

That's some rather revisionist history. The game was basically stuffed before anyone even knew about that stuff, because there were the three huge bad decisions I mentioned above. This place was not looking forwards to it, and indeed there was a ton of anger before we really knew anything about the mechanics. Like, people were enraged about the gnomes even. I can't remember people ever caring about gnomes that much before - but they were really mad about was a bunch of bad decisions, that they had every right to be mad about, but the gnomes were just an easy way to discuss that.

Once we were past the launch, the game had essentially already failed - nowhere near as many people as expected had converted, and that wasn't because of the rules initially, but because of marketing and perceptions. The continuing discussion, yes, centered around power design and so on, so you're not wrong there, but that was essentially people who'd already decided 4E was not for them discussing it, and obviously they'd moved on past the launch and were then discussing mechanics. The Warlord is a great example, because it wasn't a "huge problem from day 1", it was something people who'd already given up on 4E (as well they might) would point to as a particularly good example of a thing they didn't like. Which is fine - legitimate even - but let's not pretend 4E sold amazingly then people just handed in their rulebooks or something. It failed from the get-go, before things like that were a major issue.

A 4E with 5E's mechanics would have been interpreted in the most negative possible light, rather than as an apology or reprieve (as 5E was), and the fact that they were so much more simple than the 3.5E mechanics would not, in 2008, have been seen as a broadly good thing. It would have been seen as something of an insult.

 

[Zardnaar]

As I said in another thread, I wouldn't be too sure about the exact reasons 4e failed. Lots of elements of 4e have passed over latterly into 5e with nary a peep. It was probably a whole lot of things combined that caused it to fail.

I seriously doubt that the Warlord, by itself, is a serious issue to the player base.

Yeah but look at what didn't creep into 5E. 4E type classes and the warlord.

If they're claiming 4E is an MMO it's really about powers recharging eg encounter powers. That's class design.

Throw in healing surges and the game being a grindfest because of the surges, class design etc that's most of it.