D&D (2024) How did I miss this about the Half races/ancestries

[FormerlyHemlock]

Yes. McGibster and I are actually identical twins.*


*This might not be true

Oh, sorry, when you interjected to claim they were indigenous-themed, I assumed you were speaking from data about the uncle. Sorry for the misdirected question.

Now I don't know why you addressed your reply to me in the first place, nor what you meant by "the opposition." Care to clarify?

 

[Incenjucar]

Given we already had orcs being shown as not wanting to be involved in war even in the Return of the King animation in 1980....

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

Given we already had orcs being shown as not wanting to be involved in war even in the Return of the King animation in 1980....

But they did have a terrific (and diegetical!) men's choir! I guess joining the choir must be a good way to get off the frontline. Captain Black Adder would surely approve.

 

[MGibster]

But the idea of getting offended about the existence of evil orcs because you IDENTIFY with the fantasy Nazis (orcs) on behalf of your a real world-identity is something that your uncle happily does not seem to have had.

I'm fine with always evil orcs, but I do think you're mischaracterizing the other side's argument. Their argument is that the language surrounding orcs and the way they're handled is reminiscent of racist language for the 19th and early 20th centuries. I actually don't find their arguments without some merit. i.e. They're making a reasonable agument that I can take seriously even if I disagree with their conclusions. It's not so much about identifying with the orc as it is about the language used to describe them.

 

[MGibster]

Yes. McGibster and I are actually identical twins.*

We can plan the perfect crimes together!

 

[FormerlyHemlock]

I'm fine with always evil orcs, but I do think you're mischaracterizing the other side's argument. Their argument is that the language surrounding orcs and the way they're handled is reminiscent of racist language for the 19th and early 20th centuries. I actually don't find their arguments without some merit. i.e. They're making a reasonable agument that I can take seriously even if I disagree with their conclusions. It's not so much about identifying with the orc as it is about the language used to describe them.

Hmmm. That's generous of you, and a fair point, but I think the reversal goes deeper than just the language level. I think 2023 gamers and GMs are now more inclined to roleplay orcs as pastoralists than industrialists, too. Somewhere along the way, the whole idea of what an orc is seems to have flipped 180 degrees and they are now more like Tolkien's hobbits than Tolkien's orcs in some important respects (not all), in conventional wisdom anyway.

I reserve the right to be weirded out by that fact.

 

[MGibster]

Hmmm. That's generous of you, and a fair point, but I think the reversal goes deeper than just the language level. I think 2023 gamers and GMs are now more inclined to roleplay orcs are pastoralists than industrialists, too.

You may be correct about that, but I can't say I have much of an idea of what the yutes of America, pardon me, the youths of America are doing in regards to orcs in their game. While I wouldn't describe myself as a cranky old man, I don't have a strong desire to spend a whole lot of time with people under the age of 30. It's not that they're bad people, I work with some of them, but we're at different stages of our life and we don't have a lot in common even when we have some shared interest. I must admit that I've never seen orcs as industrialist outside of Tolkien though I've never seen them as pastoralist either.

Actual photo of me interacting with younger D&D players.

 

[Incenjucar]

The very first version of orcs in the D&D monster manual depicted them as bullying tribal people with villages who were often bullied into service by stronger bullies. So blame D&D?

 

[Justice and Rule]

You can make excuses for the bigotry in those write-ups if you want to, but those are and have been generalized racial tropes since the game started. At BEST you are excusing a bigoted write-up because it is one example of a member the race. The ONE example they most focused on. At worst it's as I said and is implied. The general attitude of that race.

I'm not really making an excuse for the bigotry as much as saying they aren't equal: one is done by the in-universe narrator (Even the "quote" you try to gotcha is, in fact, the narrator of a book and not someone making comment), the other is done by characters in-universe. When you are using such language, it's different when it comes from the Word-of-God versus someone talking in-universe. You can try to hide that all you want, but in the end it's literally just a quote from a dwarf to take inspiration from, not Word-of-God calling implicitly saying you are uncivilized (and savage, I suppose, given the rules).

But even with that bigotry (Which, by the by, is just lame in and of itself because it's just generic as all hell and should be either left behind or find real reasons beyond "Well, elves and dwarves don't like each other"), in those statements they are just not at at the same level as what an Orc faces. In the Dwarf entry, the comment on elves is for all their faults, they at least hate Orcs! It is focused because even other races uses it as a commonality despite racial enmity. The whole bigotry against Orcs is focused on because that hatred and xenophobia goes deeper than the mild bigotries seen in the other entries.

So if something comes up, it has to go back to the earliest possible reference as the cause and what needs to be discussed? I reject that. I brought it up because the D&D dwarf write-up referred to dwarves in that manner. What Tolkien did doesn't matter unless we are discussing Tolkien. The entire discussion can be about D&D dwarves.

No, it goes back to Tolkien because Tolkien was explicit in his reference, and D&D is very much inspired by Tolkien as we can see people literally using Tolkien's idea of orcs as references in this very discussion within the last two pages.

So yeah, feels relevant enough.

 

[Justice and Rule]

Hmmm. That's generous of you, and a fair point, but I think the reversal goes deeper than just the language level. I think 2023 gamers and GMs are now more inclined to roleplay orcs as pastoralists than industrialists, too. Somewhere along the way, the whole idea of what an orc is seems to have flipped 180 degrees and they are now more like Tolkien's hobbits than Tolkien's orcs in some important respects (not all), in conventional wisdom anyway.

I reserve the right to be weirded out by that fact.

I mean, if we are using Tolkien as a base, they moved away from that when they stopped making them corrupted elves. They were long past that when they were basically tribal warriors because, as you point out, Orcs for Tolkien were industrialist and worked well with metal rather than just being barbarian raiders. And that's also arguably why they move towards pastoralism, too, when they were reassessed and reimagined.

But really, once you start getting people roleplaying as "half-orcs", you're getting to people who are interested in seeing another side to that story. History is written by the victors, and I think that revisiting our own history to see our flaws also had people wanting to revisit Orcs in a similar way, using their previous portrayal as a sort of racist view of a people whose story has yet to be told. Given that they used the same sort of racist language to describe them as they used against indigenous people, is it any surprise that maybe people wanted to explore that angle of things?