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

[Ruin Explorer]

Though personally I was not fine with all the male options looking hideous either. I could not play a male character in WoW until they added Blood Elves, and I’ve switched to Final Fantasy XIV since.

That's for sure a real issue, and until Blood Elves were added to the Horde, it's a big part of why the Horde had perpetually fewer players than the Alliance (now I believe it is the reverse, again, thanks to Blood Elves lol).

I personally can't play a male character if they're hideous either - I only like to play "elegant" or like "bulky-but-friendly-looking" male characters or a slightly more diverse set of female ones in MMORPGs generally.

 

[Steampunkette]

I only got into the game late in its life cycle when it switched to Free-to-Play, but I always had an interest in the game, especially as someone who loves science fantasy.

Sometimes when I'm writing a bunch of A5e content I'll just throw on the extended soundtrack album and vibe out while the fantasy and western flows through me...

And then I make Sci-Fantasy content because come the hell on, it's so cool.

 

[dbolack]

Something that actually kind of tapped into the female gaze: George of the Jungle.

What Brenden Fraser vehicle pre-2020 didn't?

 

[Faolyn]

Sure. But we can do that without needing, y'know, actual human racism? Mind flayers are a great example. Zombies, if you want massive hordes. Vampires, if you want hedonistic consumption. Werewolves, if you want a tragic inability to control horrible, violent urges. 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.

For another example, in the Draw Steel!/MCDM game playtest, there are the War Dogs. They're sewn-together flesh construct who've been brainwashed into being fanatical super-soldiers. They definitely take the place of the "always-evil-kill-on-sight monster race" without actually being a monster race.

 

[Steampunkette]

What Brenden Fraser vehicle pre-2020 didn't?

These are the only two I can think of, really!

 

[Charlaquin]

Who’d have thunk that after about 50 pages of arguing, this thread would take a turn for the inspiring and just end up as sharing fun ideas for depicting different species in the game.

 

[Charlaquin]

These are the only two I can think of, really!

“Incel gets a jerkass genie” and “horny animator’s bizarre fever dream” sure were movies he was in

 

[Mannahnin]

Frankly, I think the approach where you have a few sample nonhumans and a system for constructing new ones to suit a particular campaign is better, but its more heavy lifting than most game systems (including pretty much all in the D&D adjacent sphere) seem to want to bother with.

Yeah, it's tough to do. Any kind of construction/point-buy kit is difficult to balance and complex ones (I'm thinking of experiences with GURPS, in college) are rife with opportunities for min-maxing.

I do think swapping out the standard species for setting-specific ones that fill similar niches can be a great way to customize a setting. I always cite the example of Bigfella Games' Creepy Crawl and Thousand Year Sandglass, which swapped the classic three demihumans from B/X or Labyrinth Lord for bespoke alternatives.

 

[Faolyn]

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.

Everyone was already mentally identical to humans. It's hard not to be, when they were written by humans and played by other humans. Xenofiction is hard to do well, and most of the time, people don't really want to think about it that deeply. That's why D&D races have always been "planet of hats" races. Dwarfs are surly, alcoholic miners. Elves are either pretty nature-lovers or pretty snobs. Drow are incredibly evil, but sexy. Halflings are overeating small-town burglars. And so on.

And orcs (and other evil humanoid races) were always the mean, hateful, ugly, stupid, destructive humans who did mean, hateful, ugly, stupid, destructive things. Very few people ever really bothered to actually think about orc biology and psychology.

 

[Remathilis]

They are thought experiments and the point is to engage the thought experiment as you are doing here to the best of ones ability. If it falls short for you, that is fair, but I have been in a lot of campaigns where the fun was doing things like thinking of how a long lived being would view an immediate political problem.

And campaigns can last hundreds of years long. If you haven't been in one where time has progressed like this, I can see where you are coming from. But lots of people run lengthy, multigenerational campaigns. And you can always elapse time too (you can one campaign and maybe the next one is set two hundred years later, but you are playing the same elf).

If characters weren't balanced by level, you'd have a point. But an elf who adventures with his human friends is too powerful to adventure with his children. Campaigns are still measured in human generations, not elven ones.

Someone above (sorry, can't remember who) the notion of an elf born on Earth in the Middle Ages could live to the millennium. Think of all the things that elf would have seen. The plague, the Renaissance, the Age of Exploration, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the World Wars, the Space race, and the digital age. The idea of one person seeing all the history first hand is mind boggling. Even a young elf has a human lifetime worth of time to master all manner of skills and learning. The idea that a 120 year old elf and a 20 year old human have the same levels, skills and abilities should be farcical! What, did the elf sleep though class for 90 years?!?

So while an elf may live 700 years, the game does nothing with that because it would fundamentally change the nature of the world in ways that would be unplayable.

Anyway, getting off topic. Just saying the idea that any species can be more than a funny costume is aspirational, but not practical.