D&D General “‘Scantily Clad and Well Proportioned’: Sexism and Gender Stereotyping in the Gaming Worlds of TSR and Dungeons & Dragons.”

[Krachek]

I don’t have surprise here.
DnD don’t transform by magic players into kind and noble people.
DnD is a system that allow to build, share and play fantasy.
I have always seen this process as subversive and progressive because it implies that you get use to make your own judgement call.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the game only encourage bad behavior and bad thoughts that need to be tamed. That would be shameful.

 

[abirdcall]

Half Orcs are a great example of both unintentional racism and the pervasive presumption of sexual assault in fantasy worlds. First "Officially" introduced in the Monster Manual for 1e in 1977, their description is... grossly racist.
View attachment 387963
Orc society is blatantly sexist in the early days, with women existing exclusively to bear young. You never -fought- Orc women, you only slaughtered them and their children after killing the men in battle, like a -civilized- hero. References to Half Orcs being the "Unfortunate" result of raids between the two cultures (meaning humans were sexually assaulting orcs, too, because, y'know... horrible) are the prevailing story across various books and adventures.

3e kind of started toward breaking away with that when they made Half Orcs a core heritage for the PHB... but there's still a lot of references to raids and intentional breeding of Half Orcs in 3e materials. Like eugenics levels of grossness.

Not that it's limited to D&D worlds, either. In the Warcraft RPG they make a special note that half-orcs are "Almost always" the result of sexual assault.

4e moved a little further away from it, though explicitly had half-orc NPCs and example characters who were either outright stated, or heavily implied, to be the children of sexual assault.

And 5e has really gone the whole way of trying to get away from it by making half orcs often the result of frontier marriages to unite warring tribes... Because forcing your adult children to get married and have sex with orcs is -totally- not sexual assault or coercive...

Err...

Yup. The trope remains to this day about half-orcs being children of sexual assault perpetrated by members of one brutal species or another.

Yeah, thankfully in 2024 half-orcs are just gone along with half-elves.

There is a fantasy series I love that has half-elves but they only work because elves in that world are magical beings who are long gone from the lands. So the 'half' makes them mortal beings not solely made of magic.

It doesn't work at all when there are also elves around. While long lived, they are still mortal and just a little more magical than some other species.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

Half Orcs are a great example of both unintentional racism and the pervasive presumption of sexual assault in fantasy worlds. First "Officially" introduced in the Monster Manual for 1e in 1977, their description is... grossly racist.
View attachment 387963
Orc society is blatantly sexist in the early days, with women existing exclusively to bear young. You never -fought- Orc women, you only slaughtered them and their children after killing the men in battle, like a -civilized- hero. References to Half Orcs being the "Unfortunate" result of raids between the two cultures (meaning humans were sexually assaulting orcs, too, because, y'know... horrible) are the prevailing story across various books and adventures.

3e kind of started toward breaking away with that when they made Half Orcs a core heritage for the PHB... but there's still a lot of references to raids and intentional breeding of Half Orcs in 3e materials. Like eugenics levels of grossness.

Not that it's limited to D&D worlds, either. In the Warcraft RPG they make a special note that half-orcs are "Almost always" the result of sexual assault.

4e moved a little further away from it, though explicitly had half-orc NPCs and example characters who were either outright stated, or heavily implied, to be the children of sexual assault.

And 5e has really gone the whole way of trying to get away from it by making half orcs often the result of frontier marriages to unite warring tribes... Because forcing your adult children to get married and have sex with orcs is -totally- not sexual assault or coercive...

Err...

Yup. The trope remains to this day about half-orcs being children of sexual assault perpetrated by members of one brutal species or another.

It always seemed so unnecessary to me. Same assumption was usually not made with half-elves. (I know of the original backstory of Tanis, but that was an exception.) In my current setting different species cannot crossbreed, but they certainly often manage to coexist more or less peacefully and interspecies romances do happen.

 

[Steampunkette]

Yeah the issue here was D&D 5E 2014 wanted to have its cake and eat it - it wanted to like, completely demonize orcs and describe them in literally racist terms (see Volo's before the great edit), as sort of subhuman brutes, but it also wanted half-orcs to be fine and dandy. Pick a lane, people! 2024 removing them outright in favour of non-subhuman orcs is probably the right play.

I mean... Yeah, kinda.

We'll find out when the 2024 Monster Manual hits and Orcs are described in it as rapacious monsters, again.

Yeah, thankfully in 2024 half-orcs are just gone along with half-elves.

There is a fantasy series I love that has half-elves but they only work because elves in that world are magical beings who are long gone from the lands. So the 'half' makes them mortal beings not solely made of magic.

It doesn't work at all when there are also elves around. While long lived, they are still mortal and just a little more magical than some other species.

It makes me saaaaad...

I love playing Half-Elves and Half-Orcs and occasionally Half-Goblins because it lets me play around in a space of emotional distance and partial social isolation that really encapsulates a specific aspect of my life as a trans woman.

I never got to spend time with other girls when I was a kid due to social forces beyond my control, and spending time with boys allowed me to have some social fun but there was always a wall between me and the other kids present because I wasn't a boy, I was being forced into that world.

The narrative conceit of it being tied to age and societal expectations of beauty rather than just gender gives it -just- enough allegorical distance to make it comfortable for me to play.

Kind of sucks they stole that from me. But also I get it. Still gonna play half-orcs and half-elves any time I get the opportunity to do so though!

 

[Bedrockgames]

And I'm not dismissing the 'lesser evils' here- I am saying that they are just that: Lesser. The difference between "don't read that book"- which was usually unenforceable and a losing argument at law- and "go directly to jail" is massive. The removal of demons and devils from 2e was a much more personal tragedy to me than some people I don't know getting thrown in prison for things they didn't do, but I can still clearly see that, personal or not, it didn't matter a dingo's kidneys compared to the misery inflicted on those people.

I don't think anyone is denying this distinction. We can juggle both these things I think. I had my D&D books taken away as a kid. I don't begrudge my parents doing that (they thought they were doing the right thing and it did not do me any real harm). At the same time I can appreciate the problem with the mindset the Satanic Panic helped create around art and be wary of efforts to enforce religious taboos in art, to use concerns about art being offensive to silent it (and there were artists and works in the 80s who were impacted by this: certainly not the same thing as going to jail but like I said the Satanic Panic had many facets)

 

[abirdcall]

I mean... Yeah, kinda.

We'll find out when the 2024 Monster Manual hits and Orcs are described in it as rapacious monsters, again.

It makes me saaaaad...

I love playing Half-Elves and Half-Orcs and occasionally Half-Goblins because it lets me play around in a space of emotional distance and partial social isolation that really encapsulates a specific aspect of my life as a trans woman.

I never got to spend time with other girls when I was a kid due to social forces beyond my control, and spending time with boys allowed me to have some social fun but there was always a wall between me and the other kids present because I wasn't a boy, I was being forced into that world.

The narrative conceit of it being tied to age and societal expectations of beauty rather than just gender gives it -just- enough allegorical distance to make it comfortable for me to play.

Kind of sucks they stole that from me. But also I get it. Still gonna play half-orcs and half-elves any time I get the opportunity to do so though!

Yeah, I can see that.

It's just tough. The allegory, as it is under 'species', fits to kids of parents of mixed cultures and saying someone is 'half-black' is not okay or accurate even though there are very real consequences and stigma to it.

So what do?

I think we can still play them even without having them in the book.

They also completely removed the section telling us how to assign our characters genders. I'm happy for that because I don't want anyone to tell me how to gender correctly.

So I guess in the same way I don't want anyone to be told how to represent this either.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Also, being real, even just in D&D, the peak of "character power fantasy", depending on perspective, is absolutely 3.5E or 4E (I would say 3.5E because of LFQW, PrCs, and single characters being more powerful than entire parties, but 4E is probably arguable). So we're moving away from that, if anything, with 5E.

Though 4e desperately tried to make it clear D&D is a team sport and got solidly roundhouse-kicked in the chicklets for it.

Yeah the issue here was D&D 5E 2014 wanted to have its cake and eat it - it wanted to like, completely demonize orcs and describe them in literally racist terms (see Volo's before the great edit), as sort of subhuman brutes, but it also wanted half-orcs to be fine and dandy. Pick a lane, people! 2024 removing them outright in favour of non-subhuman orcs is probably the right play.

I was genuinely shocked they had the gall to write the kind of stuff they did in Volo and the 'in universe documents' gimmick served to make me genuinely hate the character.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I think we can still play them even without having them in the book.

We absolutely can but... I think there's a real difference between something being presented as just "an option", which you can pick, from the menu, and you essentially having to ask the chef to whip up something special and specific, which you have to know is possible, and describe, and so on.

The former is possible even if you're shy, inconfident, new to RPGs, and so on. And people who are attracted to this kind of "torn between two worlds/two sets of expectations" theme are often going to be a little inconfident themselves.

The latter generally requires you to know who you are and what you want and to be pretty confident that this is "a thing" in that universe even if it's never described.

So I think this is an actual, real loss. Not half-orcs as much as half-elves, because the former had a lot of dodgy baggage, but...

 

[billd91]

It always seemed so unnecessary to me. Same assumption was usually not made with half-elves. (I know of the original backstory of Tanis, but that was an exception.) In my current setting different species cannot crossbreed, but they certainly often manage to coexist more or less peacefully and interspecies romances do happen.

I think both D&D half-races strongly represent the influence of the source material - Tolkien. Since in Tolkien, orcs stem from the corrupt influence or creation of Morgoth, any human/orc mix represents the work of unsavory forces - mostly the involvement of evil humans or under evil direction like Saruman's - though any unsavory sexual violence aspect is strongly veiled behind implication rather than explicit. In any event, this would not be the willing behavior of decent people who would normally shun such obvious evil even if the don't normally look to the west for their moral compass or cultural influence. But even the fact that a half orc or goblin-man would be notably powerful or be leaders among their orcish kin comes right out of Tolkien.

And in the case of half-elves, all of whom are esteemed in Tolkien's work, the worst aspect is the idea of a tragic romance of a long-lived elf partnering with a short-lived human and what that ultimately means for their love and other relationships. But the main element is this is a matter of free choice, even if ultimately heartbreaking. Tanis's origin is a contrast with that - I think underscoring Weiss and Hickman's declaration that they may be using elves but aren't beholden to Tolkien's shadow.

 

[Vaalingrade]

Helves were still dodgy, just not in the way that you normally see depicted as dodgy in pop culture, but rather ~super romantically tragic~.