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

[Crimson Longinus]

Orcs are representing this aspect of all humanity not a particular race, I always find it concerning when people say these features only reflect one particular race. Yes racist have used similar terms used to describe orcs (brutal, savage, etc) to describe particular races but that's because they are racists and accusing them of being the worst of humanity.

But orcs are an actual species. They are not humans who decided to be orcs. That way they utterly fail as a representation of human evil and become (hopefully unintentional) racist representation, embodying the idea that some groups of people are just "born bad."

Yes it is simplistic but there is nothing wrong with that. It provides a clear evil to fight against one that represents the evil men are capable of. Fighting against evil is a common trope in fantasy, sitting down to discuss issues and find common ground isn't.

In my game both do happen. But again, no one is saying that evil should not exist in the fantasy world, just that it should not be directly linked by one's species. At the point when you can tell who's "evil" not by the emblems on their uniform but by the tone of their skin things have gone wrong.

Okay but that's your choice, which you are requiring the nature of the game to change to accommodate, which in many ways is fine, games should change to reflect the times. Still people don't mind bad stuff being done by bad people being referenced in the game, it's not like it is constantly raised as an issue. That way I know they are the bad people to be killed.

I rather feel that the default assumption in a mass market game sold to teens should be that sexual assault is not present. Shocking, I know.

Ah but then it isn't the same game anymore is it. If I'm having to consider the moral aspect of dungeon delving and should I really be exploring this tomb that orcs have made their home seeking treasure, am I the bad guy? Not sure I want that in my supposedly fun leisure activity.

I do. But if you don't then there are easy and non-racist ways to designate the enemies. Or alternatively just accept, that the morality is not black and white, and whilst your character might see the orcs as "evil monsters" they will see your human paladin in the same way and neither is objectively right or wrong. People certainly have managed to fight and kill each other for several millennia just fine, without any heritage being "inherently evil."

 

[AnotherGuy]

Orcs act as a stand-in for human racism. That's not okay. It needs to stop.

It has stopped, has it not?

If it were only simplistic and nothing else, it would be okay. Sadly, it is not "only simplistic and nothing else." That's the problem.

Actually it has always been simplistic to most D&Ders.
Evil vs Good, Empire vs Rebels, Civilised vs Uncilivilised/Nature, Mortals vs Undead, Heroes vs Mortals and Cultists...etc
Many of us enjoyed playing half-orcs and all of us enjoyed the Warcraft take on Orcs and changed many of our homebrew settings, inverting/subverting the established/Tolkienesque norms we inherited. Many of us have shared such ideas here and on other forums.
Eberron happened. MtG happened. Points of Light happened. Theros happened. Etc

There are so many other ways to do this same thing, to have unrealistically simple problems with unrealistically simple solutions, without involving real-world racist tropes, terms, and projections.

Undead are an anathema to all living creatures, lycanthropes spread a curse while remaining hidden, while mind-flayers subjugate all other under their will. And all three feast on their prey.

Orcs (and the other humanoids of their kind), present another kind of threat and do not feast on their enemies (except for Trolls).
Orcs relish war, bloodlust and violence against the trappings of a soft life. They are known to use nature for different reasons than the fey, most druids and dwarves. This is a very different aspect to the undead, lycanthropes and mind-flayers.

Sure. But "bad people doing bad things" doesn't have to involve literal actual sexual assault. Like, why does it have to be THAT specific issue? Why does THAT specific crime have to be invoked? There are so many other horrible things people do to one another that don't involve sexual violence in the least.

There are many horrible things within the fantasy tropes of D&D.
Mythology from where much of our D&Disms come from is full of sexual violence.
You can use these horrible tools as story/character motivation tools or you can ignore them or alter them. Mixed breeds could be based on sexual assault, arranged unions for diplomatic reasons, wild magic, unsanctioned experimentation, deity intervention, rituals...etc

I see the stories of D&D as a celebration of imagination.

Which, I mean, I should hope that fictional sexual assault is not structurally nor creatively essential to playing D&D.

You are right it shouldn't be.
But it also need not remove it from the table of ideas for storytelling. If a player would like to incorporate that into their background let them.
If a DM would like to incorporate that into the background of an NPC (mortal or otherwise) let them. I'm assuming the DM also knows their table.

I think the PHB and the DMG should offer a plethora of ideas and let the table run with whatever they like in their setting. Older settings though have established cannon, and that is a little trickier to deal with. It is kind of like
(a) Mythology, you do not suddenly clean up Zeus's sexual assaults because of our sensibilities. It is what it is.
(b) History, cannot go into this as this is politics, but history is what it is.

EDIT: With those older settings you can add a disclaimer, amend details where possible that do not change the setting or let them die/continue with their fandom. It is all good.

 

[Frozen_Heart]

I'm glad we've moved past always evil orcs, but I'm worried that it's swung the other way. Everyone is mentally identical to humans, rather than having species which think and act in an entirely different way.

Even in suggesting that other sapients should think differently to humans has been equated to racism, due to how irl racists like to claim that other ethnic groups don't think in the same way.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I'm glad we've moved past always evil orcs, but I'm worried that it's swung the other way. Everyone is mentally identical to humans, rather than having species which think and act in an entirely different way.

Even in suggesting that other sapients should think differently to humans has been equated to racism, due to how irl racists like to claim that other ethnic groups don't think in the same way.

Yeah, that I agree with. To me the point of having non-human sapients in fiction is that they feel at least somewhat alien, that they're different from humans. But this of course doesn't mean they would be inherently "evil" of "good" or silly stuff like that.

 

[Steampunkette]

I am not familiar with the word "homoracial", could you explain it please? A quick Internet search yielded little (although the one exact hit looked like an interesting read). I'd guess it has something to do with "same race" or, more specifically, exclusion of other races (or perhaps ethnicities/cultures, given the heroes' feast example).

Yeah, same race. The idea that the group is largely homogeneous and tries to maintain that homogeneity. Less so, now, than it used to, but still.

Can I ask what the problem with that is? Clearly rape in warfare is horrific, that is a problem. Unfortunately it is something that is very common in times of war, either due to a break down in discipline or intentionally as a tool of terror and subjugation as reports from the Ukraine show us.

What I mean is what is the problem in depicting such events in fiction?

Orcs are in fantasy fiction to represent the worst aspects of humanity when in war. They are there to be brutal, savage, uncaring creatures of primal rage that is what they represent. They are a fictional tool to explore the most deplorable side of man, so what is wrong in showing them as such in fiction?

The issues isn't "Orcs".

The issue is that orcs represent one part of a pastiche of storytelling in which cultural assumptions of fairly consistent sexual assault and sexism are happening within the story at any given time blending into the rest of the background noise of sexist assumptions and storytelling that combine in aggregate to make the D&D space less welcoming, or indeed in the Early D&D period outright -unwelcoming-, to women.

The Orcs, themselves, aren't the problem. If the orcs were the only example it'd be an uncomfortable and weird aspect but not outright unwelcoming. But combined with the artwork, armor, harlot table, assumption of manhood in all terminology, damseling of female characters, use of female characters as rewards and sexual objects, sidelining of female NPCs, the 'Goodwife will falsely claim Rape if she feels threatened', direct rejection of any attempt at accommodation, assumption that women players exist only as wives and daughters of actual players dallying in the game out of boredom, sexist attitudes around the game table, and more?

It creates an unwelcoming atmosphere.

Maybe you should read the paper in the OP for the context of the thread, since everything being discussed, here, is in relation to that paper, and it outright explains that it is a confluence of cultural forces and assumptions that result in the homosocial structures of early D&D that we're still tearing down, today.

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

I'm glad we've moved past always evil orcs, but I'm worried that it's swung the other way. Everyone is mentally identical to humans, rather than having species which think and act in an entirely different way.

Even in suggesting that other sapients should think differently to humans has been equated to racism, due to how irl racists like to claim that other ethnic groups don't think in the same way.

I understand this sentiment and to an extent agree, but think it’s just inevitable that it end up this way. Orcs are a humanoid species that has a lot of similarities to humans. To me, the only obvious outcomes is they either become an always evil barbaric race (often built on racist/colonialist tropes) or humans in funny hats. The average D&D player is not an experienced xenofiction novelist and how they roleplay Orc characters is dependent upon their own experience as a person and established lore/tropes. So you either end up with “mentally identical to humans, they just have different cultures/religions” or “Evil DNA, totally lawful good to exterminate them all.” Neither of which is ideal in my opinion, but I know that I prefer the former.

 

[Crimson Longinus]

I understand this sentiment and to an extent agree, but think it’s just inevitable that it end up this way. Orcs are a humanoid species that has a lot of similarities to humans. To me, the only obvious outcomes is they either become an always evil barbaric race (often built on racist/colonialist tropes) or humans in funny hats. The average D&D player is not an experienced xenofiction novelist and how they roleplay Orc characters is dependent upon their own experience as a person and established lore/tropes. So you either end up with “mentally identical to humans, they just have different cultures/religions” or “Evil DNA, totally lawful good to exterminate them all.” Neither of which is ideal in my opinion, but I know that I prefer the former.

I guess I have more faith in the ability of an average roleplayer to offer more nuanced portrayals. Perhaps it is unwarranted. I don't expect deep xenofiction, but something on the level of the more developed Star Trek species. Like I would imagine most people who are familiar with Star Trek could play a Vulcan in a manner that would make them recognisable as one. But for this to be possible, the game should actually tell us how these species think and behave, and it really doesn't.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I understand this sentiment and to an extent agree, but think it’s just inevitable that it end up this way. Orcs are a humanoid species that has a lot of similarities to humans. To me, the only obvious outcomes is they either become an always evil barbaric race (often built on racist/colonialist tropes) or humans in funny hats. The average D&D player is not an experienced xenofiction novelist and how they roleplay Orc characters is dependent upon their own experience as a person and established lore/tropes. So you either end up with “mentally identical to humans, they just have different cultures/religions” or “Evil DNA, totally lawful good to exterminate them all.” Neither of which is ideal in my opinion, but I know that I prefer the former.

This covers two of my big problems with most "but make them alien" requests.

The vast majority of fantasy races see more or less the same spectrum of light that humans do, and while low-light vision is helpful, it only works out to about 60', so it's not exactly They feel comfortable in the same range of temperatures, they eat more or less the same foods, they have more or less equivalent palates (possibly being slightly more or slightly less sensitive, but what one finds spicy, most will also recognize as spicy), they spend loosely equivalent amounts of time sleeping. They're bilaterally-symmetrical, bipedal, plantigrade, mammalian, viviparous, capable of sweating, have five digits per hand/foot, etc., etc.

The one thing that actually makes some races genuinely pretty alien compared to humans is never actually given meaningful attention in D&D, and that difference is lifespan. Lifespan differences should make dwarves and elves very different from orcs, humans, dragonborn, etc. Instead....it's basically written off as "yeah they just take life at a slower pace but are otherwise the same."

But because those two races have some of the longest history in D&D, we're never actually going to get truly alien elves and dwarves. This makes complaints that anything new (dragonborn are the commonly-cited example) is reducing D&D to "rubber forehead aliens" deeply frustrating, because it already was! It's just that the two most egregious rubber forehead aliens get grandfathered in, but anything with the temerity to not be included in Tolkien's work must jump through a dozen hoops just to get rejected anyway for not being alien enough.

Real, outright xenofiction levels of portrayal would not an interesting RPG make.

 

[Aldarc]

I think that when it comes to sexist or racist tropes, a key point of discussion that come ups is the aggregate pattern, and therein also lies the solution. It's about moving away from singular or monolithic tropes but instead to present peoples with greater diversity, complexity, and nuance. It doesn't necessarily erase these other tropes, but it creates room for other tropes and pictures to create a more enriching aggregate pattern.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I guess I have more faith in the ability of an average roleplayer to offer more nuanced portrayals. Perhaps it is unwarranted. I don't expect deep xenofiction, but something on the level of the more developed Star Trek species. Like I would imagine most people who are familiar with Star Trek could play a Vulcan in a manner that would make them recognisable as one. But for this to be possible, the game should actually tell us how these species think and behave, and it really doesn't.

Isn't this necessary for it to be a toolkit, though?

What you're asking for is the game to lay down the one and only way that elves can be elves, that dwarves can be dwarves, etc. No designer in their right mind would do that for a product meant to be generic and embrace the wide variety in fantasy fiction.

You can't have a "Vulcans have a very distinctive culture" and simultaneously "you can do whatever you want and incorporate stuff from any fantastical work you know" in the same game. Either the game is made for one specific taste and everyone else has to like it, lump it, or exhaustively rewrite it; or the game has to stay vague so each table can figure out what elf-ness and dragonborn-ness means for them.