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

[Gradine]

Upton Sinclair once remarked, “It is very difficult to make a man understand something when his paycheck depends upon not getting it.” There seems to be a similar dynamic at work with regard to sexually gratifying artwork in some quarters, as though any concession to anyone else ever is one step from jackbooted gaming police coming to confiscate it all and not even bringing snacks to share.

Yes, but the slopes and the slipperiness and the fallacy of it all.

 

[Maxperson]

We... we had an entire species in the books for decades that was explicitly, canonically the product of sexual assault.

Your group didn't have to do anything--the designers baked that crap right in.

If you are talking about half-elf, that is wrong. Sexual assault was part of the canon in some editions, but was not how they were all made.

The only race I can think of were sexual violence was baked into the entire race was with the Muls of Dark Sun. And that was in one setting for a few years.

 

[Voadam]

It's the hat. I am not okay with raw meat on my head and I cannot communicate why that's getting to me as I just discovered this limitation.

Not a fan of Orca '80s fashion?

 

[Autumnal]

Yes, but the slopes and the slipperiness and the fallacy of it all.

If it weren’t for fallacies, some people wouldn’t have any seas at all. Or See’s.

 

[FitzTheRuke]

Sorry, sorry...

The point was that I use Half-Elves and Half-Orcs to model that aspect of my lived experience as a trans woman through an allegorical medium. A character trapped between two worlds.

Ah! I understand now. Yeah, I wouldn't use "background" for half-species, either. No, they'll need to come up with a better way of doing that for D&D proper. I'm not sure why they're struggling, as it seems like a "problem" that both Level-Up and Critical Role (Daggerheart) and maybe Tales of the Valiant (I'm not so sure on that one) have solved, so it's not like it's unsolvable!

 

[Maxperson]

My experience is also that they weren't outliers. Of the ten or so groups I played with from 10 to 22, I never encountered someone suggesting sexual violence in a game - not even jokingly. Maybe that reflects who I played with, maybe that reflects some other peculiarity, maybe people just somehow intuited I wouldn't stand for it for even a heartbeat - but I wasn't something I talked about, because I didn't even think it was a thing anymore. I'd seen it in RPG horror stories which were on the web since the mid-90s, but never in person, and most of the horror stories seemed to be about the '80s or were in little backwards-sounding places in the US. I definitely encountered sexism, but my first DM was an my older female cousin (and she taught me a ton in just two-three days), so the idea that women shouldn't be in RPGs and/or weren't cool was insane to me. At 22 I met my first "lol sexual violence is funny" RPG-player freak, and yeah, that was horrifying, because it made it clear people were still around like that, and in London.

When I was in junior high and high school, quite often some of the guys would do things like grab the barmaids rear or say things like, "I try to seduce the barmaid" followed by some sort of roll most of the time.

Those sorts of juvenile antics went away for the most part as the people I played D&D with got older. I can't remember the last time someone grabbed a barmaid. Probably back in high school. Every once in a while, though, I still see someone try to seduce the barmaid/famer's daughter/other female here.

 

[Maxperson]

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.

If you look at settings, 3e went further than that. In the Forgotten Realms an entire army of orcs was betrayed and left behind in a country that Zhentil Keep(or maybe Thay) invaded. Those orcs were not killed or imprisoned. Instead they became a valued part of the society of that country with some of those orcs rising to prominent positions. Presumably, half-orcs would also have been treated well.

 

[Niafel]

Oh Lawd, I absolutely remember buying that issue with the Spirit of Night cover as a (female) high school student. It made me super uncomfortable, and I had to hide it from my parents.

 

[Gradine]

Ah! I understand now. Yeah, I wouldn't use "background" for half-species, either. No, they'll need to come up with a better way of doing that for D&D proper. I'm not sure why they're struggling, as it seems like a "problem" that both Level-Up and Critical Role (Daggerheart) and maybe Tales of the Valiant (I'm not so sure on that one) have solved, so it's not like it's unsolvable!

I've had two half-elf PCs made using 2024 rules; the first combined species features between the two species, like 50/50 from each species. The second is just using the full elf racial features, they just happen to be half-elven within the fiction.

 

[Maxperson]

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 went through the core books from 1e to 5e and looked. Quite literally none of them mention sexual assault as how half-elves come into being.

What I did find was one sentence in one paragraph under half-elves in The Complete Book of Elves(2e) that said,

"Many half-elves are also the unhappy byproduct of war crimes, and they are feared to echo the circumstances of their conception."

Many is not most, though, and most of the half-elf write up spoke about couples and love between an elf and a human.

So we basically have Tanis from 1e and one sentence in one paragraph of a non-core 2e book.