WotC WotC's Chris Perkins On D&D's Inclusivity Processes Going Forward

Over on D&D Beyond, WotC's Chris Perkins has written a blog entry about how the company's processes have been changed to improve the way the D&D studio deals with harmful content and inclusivity. This follows recent issues with racist content in Spelljammer: Adventures in Space, and involves working with external cultural consultants.

The studio’s new process mandates that every word, illustration, and map must be reviewed by multiple outside cultural consultants prior to publication.

Leveling Up Our Creative Process: Learnings From Spelljammer

In this blog post, I'll talk about how we in the D&D Studio are changing our review process following the problematic content that appeared in Spell...

www.dndbeyond.com

 

[Umbran]

Individual experiences like this are also why it's desperately important to act with empathy and not just our own personal reactions, to listen and not just opine.

Yes, but...
...there is always a but...

It is fine for us to act with empathy. However, the person who accidentally transgresses needs to be aware of it, and needs to take that issue seriously. Once you have been informed that what you have accidentally done is a problem, you need to accept that, give a proper apology, and change your actions accordingly. "I didn't know," is a defense once, not several times over.

Three people got permanently banned from this site for their behavior in this thread. Not a single one of them was an accident, or cultural misunderstanding. They all knew what they were doing, and they chose to persist anyway.

So, let us not get into hand-wringing over edge cases.

 

[MGibster]

Is it possible when you hear “Let’s cancel this…” what’s actually being said is, “Let’s not sugar-coat this…”. Is every attempt to draw attention to insensitivities of the past a cancelation?

I don't know if I've heard anyone say, "Let's cancel this." For the most part, I do think people who bring up problematic elements are doing so to draw attention to it. Sometimes I don't think it's so much to draw attention to the issue but to condemn an author or product.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Of course, English is also an incredibly difficult language for people to learn, and it's often considered (in the U.S., at least) very rude to compliment someone on how well they speak it... because such a compliment is often wrapped up with racism against non-natives and assumptions that if you're the "wrong" color, you must not be a native.

Oh man, it is a going common thought that English (American especially) is one of the hardest languages to learn... but if you tell a random person at a bar "you speak english better then I would think" the odds of starting a bar fight are high.

 

[J.Quondam]

(I thought English is a relatively easy language to learn? The spelling can be tricky, yes, but the grammar is pretty straight forward. And even if a nonproficient speaker mangles a sentence, it's still usually easy to figure out the intended meaning.)

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

(I thought English is a relatively easy language to learn? The spelling can be tricky, yes, but the grammar is pretty straight forward. And even if a nonproficient speaker mangles a sentence, it's still usually easy to figure out the intended meaning.)

No, it's widely seen as one of the hardest. It's got about five times as many words as any other language, and since so many of them are from still other languages, there are often more exceptions to grammar and spelling rules than there are words that follow them.

A given sentence in English might have words that originated in Greek, Latin, French and German, and that's without the times when the speaker is intentionally using words from other languages.

English is a mess, but it's the ligua franca of international business and diplomacy (sorry, French), so it's widely spoken despite that.

 

[generic]

(I thought English is a relatively easy language to learn? The spelling can be tricky, yes, but the grammar is pretty straight forward. And even if a nonproficient speaker mangles a sentence, it's still usually easy to figure out the intended meaning.)

English has very inconsistent spelling rules and extremely cumbersome grammar that doesn't allow you to recognize how a sentence is constructed on the basis of suffixes or prefixes with any regularity. It's the unofficial lingua franca, so basic phrases and concepts have gained a wide reach, but to master the language is a difficult task indeed.

 

[Faolyn]

(I thought English is a relatively easy language to learn? The spelling can be tricky, yes, but the grammar is pretty straight forward. And even if a nonproficient speaker mangles a sentence, it's still usually easy to figure out the intended meaning.)

English has a ton of different rules and each rule has a ton of exceptions, for both spelling and grammar. Unlike Japanese, or even Romance languages, English is a mix of Romance and Germanic and stuff stolen from other languages, and almost everything that goes into English keeps its source language's rules, which leads to different types of possessives and punctuations. And a lot of the rules are unspoken and that aren't necessarily clear to people who learn the language as a second or third language. Such as adjective order.

 

[SakanaSensei]

(I thought English is a relatively easy language to learn? The spelling can be tricky, yes, but the grammar is pretty straight forward. And even if a nonproficient speaker mangles a sentence, it's still usually easy to figure out the intended meaning.)

The grammar is so far away from straightforward. If living in Japan and learning Japanese has taught me anything (there’s two of us in this thread, small world), it’s the wonders of a language with relatively consistent grammar. Add inconsistent pronunciation on the American English side, like the “o” in “not” making an “ah” sound, “t”a being pronounced as “d”s (and vice versa on words that end in “ed” like “worked”)…

English is a hot mess of like eight different languages in a trench coat trying to bluff their way past the bouncer at a night club.

 

[Nikosandros]

Hmm... interesting. For me, among the foreign languages that I've studied (English, French, German and Russian), English has been the easiest. Maybe comparable to French, but just because French is much closer to Italian than English is.

 

[Umbran]

English is a hot mess of like eight different languages in a trench coat trying to bluff their way past the bouncer at a night club.

Or, perhaps less colorfully - English is a language that has undergone mixing/hybridization several times over in its history.