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

 

[GMforPowergamers]

Sure. But going into people's houses and taking their stuff is still immoral, even if going in and killing them is worse.

do you really play that way... just random break into someones place and take there stuff?

 

[Smackpixi]

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.

I don’t think it’s offensive to compliment a foreigner (to America) on how well they speak English…if you know when they started learning it, and it’s a wow You’re quick. It’s offensive to presume someone who is, for example, Hmong wasn’t born here and then compliment them on their English. Hint, if someone speaks English like they were born here, they probably were.

(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 is difficult because unlike many languages, it doesn’t have really have specific ordered rules, but instead a dizzying array of conventions, that function like rules. It’s a Kafkaesque bureaucracy of a language. Gaining the ability to communicate professionally seems ming boggling hard.

That said, because it’s more of a giant collection of words than a language, it’s always seemed to me pretty easy for a native speaker to understand what a non-native is getting at no matter how limited their English language skills are. Toss out a jumble of words you know, I can understand. So by that metric, it’s a pretty easy language to be able to communicate in at a basic level. It’s also not a tonal language, so when you pronounce things badly, meaning isn’t obscured.

I guess none of that actually helps anyone learn English, just saying that it seems like a language where doing it badly isn’t so bad. Half the people I work with don’t know the difference between “seen“ and “saw” ffs. But I know what they mean.

where it’s used, and America especially, is loaded with a-holes who won’t admit they know exactly what you mean. So there’s that problem. But not one of language.

 

[Faolyn]

Well sure. But the mechanics of D&D (any edition) are centered around violence (or at least armed combat), and the history of D&D adventures focuses on going into places and killing the inhabitants. Limiting that to non-sapient animals, mindless undead (the intelligent ones can be talked to) and demons is a strong limit. Even cultists could potentially be reasoned with.

Frankly, D&D is the wrong game, mechanically and historically, for always reaching for the peaceful answer. Even if some play it that way.

I fail to see how it's wrong. If there aren't enough mechanics for dealing with non-combat interactions, and you need those mechanics, make some. Nobody would blink an eye if you create new combat rules or mechanics after all, so saying that you need a different game altogether to have some non-combat rules or that D&D is "centered around violence" and therefore should remain that way... it's a waste of a system and game, in my opinion.

And again, I didn't say "limit." or "you can't kill sapient beings." I said "find a reason to kill these sapient beings." Something beyond "because they are green and we're not." It's actually really, really easy to do.

Quite frankly, if the "history" of D&D adventures focuses on murder-hoboing your way across the world, then it's a good thing I write my own adventures, right?

 

[darjr]

From Perkins blog, this surprised me:

"Future reprints will omit both the illustration and the offensive text, neither of which had been reviewed by cultural experts."

I was under the assumption that reviewers doublechecked recent products.

They did but only for select things deemed needing it. So this wasn’t flagged for review and here we are.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

A bit of cultural context for that one; Japanese is considered one of the hardest languages to learn, and (as a generalization which will obviously vary from individual to individual) this is something that native speakers consider to be a point of cultural pride. Hence, for a native speaker to congratulate a foreign speaker on learning the language is a comment on them having achieved something notable, not on any presumed lack of intelligence/ability.

I started to learn different languages in Duolingo. Japanese needs time and work, but it is not too hard. The Russian languange is harder, and the Arabian. And this has been a simple example of unintentional offense, a simple misunderstanding.

English has got a very grammar to be learnt, but the pronunciation is different, and maybe the spelling. Among the Latin languanges the Spanish is maybe the easiest, but the conjugation of the verbs, and worse the subjuntive mode.

In my opinion the American-English is going to evolve and not only by the influence of Hispano community (the fact is Spanish was talked in the West of USA before the 1848 Mexican cession, and the English language arrived later) but the no-American people using internet.

Pidgin - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Llanito - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Spanglish - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

There are Western people who want to learn Japanese because they love manga+anime.

 

[Lanefan]

do you really play that way... just random break into someones place and take there stuff?

That sounds pretty much like it'd describe most typical dungeon crawls; and I've been running those a very long time now.

The most recent 3-part adventure I just got done running, they were

a) asked to go into a house and find the previous group that went in there and never came out, they looted what the previous group had missed; then
b) sent through a teleport trap that put them in a cell in a dungeon under a castle, they killed everything alive in the place and looted it; then
c) they invaded a dragon's lair, killed her, and looted the place.

Nothing unusual there. (oh, and during part b they found what was left of the original group)

 

[Aldarc]

Interesting. As an English-speaker, I find German to be comically easy, despite having originally learned it (and poorly at that) decades ago.

Coming from English, it's amazing to have a language that's 99.99% phonetic.

It also has a comically small number of words that are used to, even more comically, smash together to make compound words instead of inventing new words: A glove is a "hand shoe," because the Germans already had "hand" and "shoe," so why bother with another word? And turtles are "shield toads," which sounds like a minor AD&D monster.

I have been living in Austria for seven years. My German is still mediocre as I am trying to get it over the hump to fluency. One of the difficult things in that regard is that my German partner speaks to me primarily in English. I work in English, often teaching English. I write in English. And my German is good enough in most day-to-day living, though I still struggle in specialized areas that my generalized vocabulary is ill-equipped to handle: e.g., medical, financial, bureaucratic, etc.

Some of the phonetic aspects of German are still difficult for me because my ear is not trained to hear subtle differences in pronounciation, especially with some of the umlaut phonemes. But this is also an issue that German speakers have with English as well as English speakers across dialects. For example, in the American South, "pin" and "pen" are pronunced roughly the same and it is difficult (on the whole) for Southerners to hear the distinction between the two sounds.

IME, German is less consistent than its reputation. Like with many languages, it gets more complicated the higher you advance in the language. And there are also a lot of basic issues that can be an issue, such as the gender and casing for noun articles, which prepositions to use for which verbs, word order with more complex sentences (the verb is not always second), or more advanced verb tenses.

One thing English has going for it . . . . it's spoken all around the world. Western culture and media is widespread, and that influence and exposure can help folks learn the language quicker than they might otherwise. English is often taught as a second language in schools around the world also. But the language itself, crazy hard to pick up.

Mixed experiences with that last bit. I think that the "crazy hardness" of English gets overstated.

 

[Staffan]

Mixed experiences with that last bit. I think that the "crazy hardness" of English gets overstated.

My guess is that while English objectively is difficult because of its irregularity, it is also incredibly pervasive which makes you pick up some of it by osmosis – moreso in countries that subtitle movies rather than dub them.

 

[Aldarc]

My guess is that while English objectively is difficult because of its irregularity, it is also incredibly pervasive which makes you pick up some of it by osmosis – moreso in countries that subtitle movies rather than dub them.

I suspect that the “crazy hardness” is more about the relation of the written language to the spoken one. My own teaching tends to emphasize more practical spoken English for people and businesses who want to improve it for professional, travel, or other personal reasons.

 

[John Lloyd1]

The whole idea of gendered nouns scares me. I can't get my head around everything having a gender.