D&D General Let He Who Is Without Sin Cast the First Magic Missile: Why Gygax Still Matters to Me

[Bedrockgames]

So it cannot do those things--y'know, the like dozen different cultural backdrops I referenced. How does that not explicitly reject the idea that it's a toolkit?

Shouldn't we be showing people how the toolkit type stuff can be done? Or is this another example of throwing DMs to the wolves and expecting them to come back with pelts?

I mean there are a lot of people doing these kinds of things. You can absolutely do them. People have done those kinds of things and still are doing them with D&D and D&D like systems. But it is still fundamentally built around D&D, so the game is still going to have a certain feel in most cases. And you can get creative and work around that with new mechanics or alternative approaches to design (Cthulhu d20 was pretty clever in that respect). Sometimes though it is easier to just start with a different system entirely.

And if there is a niche that isn't being filled, that is an opportunity to do it yourself.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Taken me a bit to wrap my head around the issue some folks have with artists and their creations and society. For some folks, Gygax is D&D, and folks also see Mythos as Lovecraft. If the person ends up being awful, then it poisons the well of the creation and its shared experience. However, if you can off load that behavior onto a general society tolerance, it excuses the person and seemingly restores the good nature of the creation. "It was the times...It was all of us!"

Where I think this fails is in a general, not specific application. For example, if someone writes a story using popular misconceptions and lends offense unknowingly, they can be challenged on that. A person who meant no offensive intent can own up to that as a mistake, and be part of the culture that rectifies it. Others, reject the notion they have given any offense, or worse, they own it as proclaiming to be a bigot. It was their goal all along to give offense because they fully intended what they created. To be fair, to some artists were/are never challenged, or recorded on the nature of the intent and topic. Others, however, speak directly to it and you can weigh their place in society in general in comparison.

Personally, I think a creation can grow a community that goes beyond its creator. At this point, D&D is part of our culture and the collective owners, designers, editors have responsibility for it going forward. I can enjoy D&D and the mythos regardless of the stature of their creators becasue it is beyond them at this point.

I just don't like the idea that we are going to condemn great works of the past to the dustbin out of a desire for them to be as pure as we are.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Lovecraft wrote racist poetry. That is proper dedication to racism. It was a feature of his character as a person. Yes, we can look at him in the context of his time, but when we do so, don't give him a pass, because in a sense it gives those times a pass.

Lovecraft wrote a lot of stuff I disagree with. Much of it pointed at my ancestries as his racism wasn't the bog standard black/white racism we are accustomed to talking about from US history but a very North Eastern, elite type of racism centered on ethnicity, breeding and bloodlines. That said, as bad as some of the stuff he said was, I think people sometimes try to act like he was exceptionally bad for the times (which doesn't really make sense when you consider this was during lynching, segregation, the clan at its height, eugenics, the rise of Hitler, etc). We can reject his ideas but still enjoy his stories. If you read a lot of material from the past you are going to encounter ideas that run against the morality of the present age. Doesn't mean we accept those ideas. And you are going to encounter individuals with some bad ideas who made good art. Everyone has to make that assessment for themselves. We also run into the issue or reducing everything he wrote to being about race (which I think has become itself own issue).

This was one of the more nuanced takes I have seen on it in recent years:

Intro to Lovecraft Live: The Great Old Ones History

My Lovecraft Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRXGGVBzHLUcMoc_ZljrDbgrRi3x_CLYDSupport Quinn's Ideas: https://www.paypal.me/quinnsideasFollow...

www.youtube.com

 

[mamba]

So it cannot do those things--y'know, the like dozen different cultural backdrops I referenced. How does that not explicitly reject the idea that it's a toolkit?

it can, none of the rules preclude it, that is almost exclusively about the setting. You will still be playing a superheroic fantasy in that setting, but the setting itself is possible

 

[TiQuinn]

Lovecraft wrote a lot of stuff I disagree with. Much of it pointed at my ancestries as his racism wasn't the bog standard black/white racism we are accustomed to talking about from US history but a very North Eastern, elite type of racism centered on ethnicity, breeding and bloodlines. That said, as bad as some of the stuff he said was, I think people sometimes try to act like he was exceptionally bad for the times (which doesn't really make sense when you consider this was during lynching, segregation, the clan at its height, eugenics, the rise of Hitler, etc). We can reject his ideas but still enjoy his stories. If you read a lot of material from the past you are going to encounter ideas that run against the morality of the present age. Doesn't mean we accept those ideas. And you are going to encounter individuals with some bad ideas who made good art. Everyone has to make that assessment for themselves. We also run into the issue or reducing everything he wrote to being about race (which I think has become itself own issue).

This was one of the more nuanced takes I have seen on it in recent years:

Intro to Lovecraft Live: The Great Old Ones History

My Lovecraft Playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRXGGVBzHLUcMoc_ZljrDbgrRi3x_CLYDSupport Quinn's Ideas: https://www.paypal.me/quinnsideasFollow...

www.youtube.com

The boundary between racism and eugenics versus breeding and bloodlines is pretty thin. In many respects, it’s simply substituting words. Did every story Lovecraft wrote feature these things? No. But the ones that did, did so to a large degree, while others were tinged by them with to a very casual reader would seem like throwaway remarks if that was the only story of his they read. As for whether he was bad for his times, I think about the banality of evil. Evil in society is not some hand-wringing fiend with delusions of power and complete disregard for human life. It’s much more nuanced and often comes from a place of laziness.

 

[David Howery]

another fantasy icon who had some questionable views was Robert E. Howard. Way back when I was a young teen, I loved the Conan comics, and when Ace started re-releasing the old Lancer books, I eagerly bought them, and in general, they are not objectionable. But as the REH stories proved to be profitable, and more of his works were republished, I started to get the idea that he had some ugly views back when he was alive. Starting with the Solomon Kane story "The Moon of Skulls" and ending with the short story "Black Canaan", there are some really awful racial views. By the time I got in D&D when I was around 20, I was past the whole 'worship an author' thing....

 

[Bedrockgames]

Evil in society is not some hand-wringing fiend with delusions of power and complete disregard for human life. It’s much more nuanced and often comes from a place of laziness.

Except he was writing at a time when people were being murdered for being black and having their rights deprived, and the Germans were building towards a genocide. People may not have been wringing their hands, but they were doing much much worse than writing stories with racist ideas reflected in them (and I am not defending those ideas, but I think it is important not to minimize the racism that was going on around Lovecraft, just to make him seem worse)

 

[Alzrius]

Except he was writing at a time when people were being murdered for being black and having their rights deprived, and the Germans were building towards a genocide. People may not have been wringing their hands, but they were doing much much worse than writing stories with racist ideas reflected in them (and I am not defending those ideas, but I think it is important not to minimize the racism that was going on around Lovecraft, just to make him seem worse)

Precisely this. I've seen repeated instances of people saying "Lovecraft was egregiously racist even by the standards of his time."

No, he wasn't.

Egregiously racist for the standards of his time was putting on a white sheet and committing mass murder and domestic terrorism against an entire swath of the population. It was not writing a racist poem (that was only published after he died), or giving his cat an offensive name, or writing stories with themes of xenophobia and othering.

Suggesting that Lovecraft can be held up as any sort of example of what African-Americans had to deal with one hundred years ago is incredibly reductive to what the reality of life was like back then for people who weren't white.

 

[Bedrockgames]

The boundary between racism and eugenics versus breeding and bloodlines is pretty thin. In many respects, it’s simply substituting words. Did every story Lovecraft wrote feature these things? No. But the ones that did, did so to a large degree, while others were tinged by them with to a very casual reader would seem like throwaway remarks if that was the only story of his they read.

I was troubled by those casual remarks from the first moment I read him, which is why I mentioned his more elite north eastern style racism (it is apparent if you are familiar with it and know what it means). A lot of people don't understand right away for example what his distrust of southern Europeans signifies. But it is also just one of those things. You read a book written from a given period of time, bad ideas that were floating around then are going to be present. Reading the book, enjoying the story, doesn't mean you endorse those ideas.

 

[TiQuinn]

Except he was writing at a time when people were being murdered for being black and having their rights deprived, and the Germans were building towards a genocide. People may not have been wringing their hands, but they were doing much much worse than writing stories with racist ideas reflected in them (and I am not defending those ideas, but I think it is important not to minimize the racism that was going on around Lovecraft, just to make him seem worse)

Lovecraft was a somewhat obscure writer and academic who was frequently ill and died impoverished. Of course, he doesn’t compare to either people who actually perpetuated or advocated for violence, and he wasn’t in a position of power to really make anyone’s life worse. Still, his viewpoints were on full display.