D&D 5E D&D Races: Evolution, Fantasy Stereotypes & Escapism

[DarkMantle]

OP’s primary assumptions are wrong.

Wow, as a conversation starter, I find that problematic on both tone (too blunt) and approach (too binary). At the risk of sounding harsh, but I say this out of transparency, my only response is to say I won't spend my time and effort replying to you except this part:

The stuff about stereotypes I am only confused by the last point. What do you mean by ultra-human? Very human-like? Wouldn’t that make them more relatable?

You're right, I was aiming for "beyond human" and chose "ultra" but that's actually the wrong word. I'll edit it to "un-human"

 

[Kurotowa]

Absolutely, there is nothing wrong with wanting escapism. But a big part of this debate is about who is allowed to get escapist fantasy and who has to put up with elements that prevent it from being escapist for them.

Indeed. Let's spin an example that's removed from the thorny tangle of race, gender, sexuality, and all that jazz.

There's a style of novel that's all about strong military men and women making hard choices and taking decisive action to save the day, while the weak civilian bureaucrats can only get in the way with their corruption and pointless regulations before they're (at best) pushed aside or (at worst) suffer an ironic death or summery execution. You see it come up in Mil Sci-Fi and others.

Now, that style isn't my cup on tea. I was raised on the more Doctor Who style of science fiction where the military are aggressively trigger happy and it takes the calm rational judgment of scientists and civilian leaders to sort things out without setting off needless wars. Also my brother is one of those government bureaucrats, and to my eye he goes out of his way to try and be of service to the community, so painting them all as cowards and weaklings doesn't go over well with me. But to each their own, and I accept that Mil Sci-Fi has an audience.

Now, it's fine to have different works that reflect the different assumptions and biases of the authors. I'm free to pick and choose which of them I invest my time and money in. But from a business perspective, the creators have to be aware of which audience segments they attract or repel with their choices. And while "creative integrity" is a nice buzzword, it gets complicated with legacy shared worlds that have existed for decades and passed through many hands. Creators often walk a fine line between respecting the past and staying true to their own voice and reflecting cultural shifts. And it just gets messier with RPGs, where the creator's assumptions about how the world works are often made bluntly explicit in the game rules, rather than depending on the art of literary criticism to decipher the difference between character voice and authorial voice.

So yes, it's very easily claim that a work is harmless escapist fantasy when it adheres to your own assumptions about how the world works. But that doesn't mean everyone else will see it the same way. People who seen an RPG's rules encoding the assumptions or attitudes that have caused them pain in real life are either going to walk away or play with gritted teeth. So both as a business and as persons empathetic to the pain of others, the creators have to make choices about what gets a pass as harmless entertainment and what's classified as decidedly harmful and needs to be cut.

 

[Sulicius]

Wow, I find that really problematic on both tone (too blunt) and approach (too binary). At the risk of sounding harsh, but I say this out of transparency, my only response is to say I won't spend my time and effort replying to you except this part:


You're right, I was aiming for "beyond human" and chose "ultra" but that's actually the wrong word. I'll edit it to "un-human"

Sorry, I don’t post here hardly ever. I didn’t meant to be rude. It’s a subject many of us have strong feeling about, and I understand that I should have worded this less blunt.

Please do let me know what you think of the other rambling I did. I am curious what you think. This is a hard discussion to have without making sides, and I am afraid I might have pushed our lines of thinking away from each other, rather than adding to the discussion.

I will be more nuanced than your original assumptions: we like “a healthy amount” of uncertainty. Uncertainty makes our brains work a bit harder and chances of 50% tend to give us lots of dopamine reactions. Saying we like to shut our brains off to relax is not true.

 

[TerraDave]

Archetypal exploration of deeply seeded and ancient psychological patterns....in which we can wallow in violence and danger and not actually die. Maybe.

Fantasies roots run deep, and not in a saccharine disneyfied way, though you can take that approach, and its fine.

But, as for races, Tolkien took folkloric beings and made them more like people, and it was really, really popular. Really popular.

The fantasy stories that EGG liked did not really do that. Usually non-humans, if there at all, were foes. But he knew that these "demihumans" were popular, so he stuck them in. It seemed to work.

 

[DarkMantle]

Sorry, I don’t post here hardly ever. I didn’t meant to be rude. It’s a subject many of us have strong feeling about, and I understand that I should have worded this less blunt.

Please do let me know what you think of the other rambling I did. I am curious what you think. This is a hard discussion to have without making sides, and I am afraid I might have pushed our lines of thinking away from each other, rather than adding to the discussion.

OK thank you. I really appreciate that. I really do.

I should clarify, my intent is to have a more structured way of deconstructing what's going on with this D&D war of words (unlike that other thread). I'm willing to take responsibility if I truly screwed something up, but I'm not interested in a protracted or binary arguments.

I will be more nuanced than your original assumptions: we like “a healthy amount” of uncertainty. Uncertainty makes our brains work a bit harder and chances of 50% tend to give us lots of dopamine reactions. Saying we like to shut our brains off to relax is not true.

Yes, we're good with a certain amount of uncertainty. But not too much, or it will damage our mental and physical health. I can't tell you how many times, especially during the pandemic, I've heard the advice of accepting or tolerating uncertainty as a way of reducing anxiety in our lives (and there are a lot of people who suffer from anxiety).

Upthread, I referenced this study where knowing that there is a small chance of getting a painful electric shock can lead to significantly more stress than knowing that you will definitely be shocked, and:

"From an evolutionary perspective, our finding that stress responses are tuned to environmental uncertainty suggests that it may have offered some survival benefit," explains senior author Dr Sven Bestmann (UCL Institute of Neurology). "Appropriate stress responses might be useful for learning about uncertain, dangerous things in the environment. Modern life comes with many potential sources of uncertainty and stress, but it has also introduced ways of addressing them. For example, taxi apps that show where a car is can offer peace of mind by reducing the uncertainty about when it will arrive. Real-time information boards at bus stops and train platforms perform a similar role, although this can be undermined by unspecified delays which cause stress for passengers and staff alike."

Anyway, my hypothesis was that fantasy fiction, particularly when it first came about, was an escape from the stress of real-life uncertainty -- not the uncertainty people liked (which I understood you're referring to) but the kinds of uncertainty they found difficult to tolerate.

In other words, I don't think people escape to fantasy because they don't like the uncertainty of a coin toss. But I suspect some people did escape to fantasy when they couldn't tolerate the uncertainty of war, for example.

I don't think I said, or intended to say, that everyone wants to shut off their brains.

Some people here have expressed how they want certain kinds of uncertainty and ambiguity in their fantasy. I guess, for some, it could be a way of processing uncertainty from a safe distance. Fine to have an anti-hero in your midst in D&D. Worse case scenario, the anti-hero kills your imaginary character, but there is no risk they will murder you as a player.

 

[D1Tremere]

As an experimental psychologist I really like the OPs way of breaking this down, they did a good job.
I don't think the problem is with stereotypes, though the OP is correct that modern global society is more conscious of different perspectives on how specific stereotypes impact others.
I also don't think the core problem/solution is a threat to escapism. If anything it should make games easier to escape into.
The core problem/solution as I see it is mindless evil. It is one thing to say that some groups participate in cultural practices that others see as a threat to their way of life, but quite another to say that all X are murderous monsters that can be killed with no moral ambiguity. The lack of moral ambiguity in an RPG session is not escapism, it is a specific type of escapism. It is a power fantasy revolving around a simple violent response to the "Other". Nothing takes me out of escapism faster than the paradox of telling me that I am facing an intelligent creature with its own culture and beliefs, but that it cannot and should not be reasoned with in any way.
For some things this "Put the boot to it" mentality makes perfect sense. Demons are by definition the embodiment of horribleness without reason as most see it. Illithids are complicated because they see humans as food and incubators. This is a predator prey relationship and very alien mentality. Drow and Orcs are being handled much better now than they were in past editions, and that is good for a number of reasons.
Just my 2 cents.

 

[DarkMantle]

As an experimental psychologist I really like the OPs way of breaking this down, they did a good job.
I don't think the problem is with stereotypes, though the OP is correct that modern global society is more conscious of different perspectives on how specific stereotypes impact others.
I also don't think the core problem/solution is a threat to escapism. If anything it should make games easier to escape into.
The core problem/solution as I see it is mindless evil. It is one thing to say that some groups participate in cultural practices that others see as a threat to their way of life, but quite another to say that all X are murderous monsters that can be killed with no moral ambiguity. The lack of moral ambiguity in an RPG session is not escapism, it is a specific type of escapism. It is a power fantasy revolving around a simple violent response to the "Other". Nothing takes me out of escapism faster than the paradox of telling me that I am facing an intelligent creature with its own culture and beliefs, but that it cannot and should not be reasoned with in any way.
For some things this "Put the boot to it" mentality makes perfect sense. Demons are by definition the embodiment of horribleness without reason as most see it. Illithids are complicated because they see humans as food and incubators. This is a predator prey relationship and very alien mentality. Drow and Orcs are being handled much better now than they were in past editions, and that is good for a number of reasons.
Just my 2 cents.

Thank you! Nobody has all the answers in one shot, and it's definitely my goal to integrate with other perspectives and come up with a better answer.

I agree that X are murderous monsters that can be killed with no moral ambiguity is a kind of escapism. That make sense!

I think D&D can make moral choices far more painful than they have to be, because proper law enforcement, justice systems and jails/correctional institutions are insufficient or non-existent (especially outside big cities). Capture some mass murderers in the wilderness, for example, and there's often nowhere to turn them in and no way to stop them from murdering innocent people again.

Plus there's often the conceit in D&D that the PCs happen to be the only ones in the area capable of handling that threat level. If I think about it, that's a lot of moral responsibility on a handful of folks who didn't particularly set out to be vigilantes and have no defined rule of law and no professional support network.

They make a wrong choice, and the souls of helpless innocents is fully on their conscience. And in D&D, the stakes can be really high. Sometimes of the torturing or soul-sucking variety.

In real life, if someone is imprisoned for attempted murder, gets early parole, gets out, and then murders their girlfriend... That leaves psychic scars. In Batman, the Joker is imprisoned for mass atrocities, escapes Arkham Asylum, and goes on to torture/murder even more -- I imagine at least 80% of Gotham City is on therapy and really strong anti-anxiety drugs.

So there are tons of opportunities for moral quandaries in fiction. To me, these things will have some impact on my conscience, fantasy or not. Because if I start thinking through the repercussions, I go down that rabbit hole. Before you know it, I'm thinking about how much PTSD the folks of Neverwinter are suffering from after the invasion, and does Cure Wounds heal PTSD or just physical wounds?

So I can see how people could want a fantasy setting that conveniently circumvents that. Maybe they don't want the real stress of moral quandaries. I can't begrudge someone's right to escape into fighting mindless evil, any more than someone who shoots to kill in the hundreds in violent video games.

At the same time, I 100% support someone's need to see a fantasy world where their needs are properly represented in the fiction. This is very important.

For what it's worth, I personally found the always-evil goblins and orcs to be boring in D&D. (I really like the recent multiverse take on goblins coming from the Feywild and only some goblins were corrupted under evil gods -- it seems like a compromise that might not be perfect for everyone, but I like it.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Generalization is a very broad usage. Definition I just pulled for stereotype was "a widely held but fixed and oversimplified image or idea of a particular type of person or thing". I could be wrong, but I think I used the word correctly.

Bold added: these are exactly why stereotypes are a problem.

To reference an earlier example, laws exist to limit the behavior of children, even though we know some children will not have problems, because the cost of not making that generalization is far too high. But as soon as we start assuming that children are always idiots or unworthy of respect simply because of their age, we have turned a useful generalization ("children are vulnerable and need protection") into a bad and even dangerous stereotype ("children are just idiots who must all be leashed for their own good.") This is literally a stock character drama (the "competent but still developing child who is condescended to by adults incapable of believing that a child could be worthy of respect" plot is common family drama.)

Stereotypes are bad. Period. That's literally what the word is for. Hasty, ossified, and oversimplified generalizations. To be a "good" stereotype is to not be a stereotype at all, and instead a generalization, one understood to have limits.

Like...this is like saying there's "healthy junk food." By definition, junk food isn't healthy. (Though there's definitely junk food that tries to pass itself off as healthy.) As soon as the food becomes healthy, that is exactly the moment when it ceases to be junk.

 

[Lyxen]

Like...this is like saying there's "healthy junk food." By definition, junk food isn't healthy. (Though there's definitely junk food that tries to pass itself off as healthy.) As soon as the food becomes healthy, that is exactly the moment when it ceases to be junk.

Only "Junk Food" is a stereotype, just as "healthy food" is a stereotype, and you have used both here, showing the usefulness of stereotypes.

If only people would stop putting bad labels and connotations on very useful words that are used every day, just because some bad people use them for bad purpose. "Race" is a perfectly acceptable word, and WotC continues using it, and by the way, in much more of the proper sense (although not yet completely) as it's commonly used, since there are no human races. Stereotypes exist and are useful, in particular when you want to describe a culture on a fantasy world. It's never going to be anything else than a generalisation, but it's going to be useful to describe it simply to your players, or even to apprehend it yourself.

Unless, of course, you prove to us that, to play the game, we need all these cultures to be as detailed as real world culture. But otherwise, having these cultures described by stereotypes is perfectly OK, except of course if you use bad stereotypes referring nastily to real world culture. But then, once more, the problem is not going to be with the stereotyping, but with the way you use it. Simply don't, and there will be no such problem.

 

[Vaalingrade]

And now we're defending stereotypes. Positive stereotypes are damaging too, you know.