D&D General Drow & Orcs Removed from the Monster Manual

[Bedrockgames]

Well, I'm certain if they hadn't made this minor change to the flavor text of a single monster then we could have had so much more, think of the vague lost opportunity cost?! Think of how you were robbed of something you cannot measure, have no clue if it existed, and may or may not have liked if they just hadn't spent so much time (which is obviously a lot of time!) on this!?!

It isn't a minor change in my opinion. This is pretty central Lich lore. I get the change might not bother you and that is fine. I've already given the reasons why it had value for me and other posters. So you can check those posts if you didn't happen to see them.

 

[Bedrockgames]

No, you don't need to second-guess every creative decision. No, it isn't a religion and it is really weird how you keep trying to frame this as some sort of zealous religious quest for purity.

I think if you take a step back and take a broader look at it, you will see there is a degree of religiosity to it.

 

[Hussar]

But the community in general has spent, in my view, an inordinate amount of time dealing with this kind of focus on language and how things are expressed in the past ten years. I feel like I have already spent a lot

I certainly cannot argue against this. You most certainly have spent an inordinate amount of time in the past several years opposing this. That is certainly true. In the face of virtually zero evidence that your opinion carries any actual weight - there's zero sign that there has been any chilling of creativity in the RPG sphere because of the removal of orcs or a couple of words from the Monster Manual - you have spent hours and hours claiming that we should stop.

It is actually quite impressive.

 

[Hussar]

I think if you take a step back and take a broader look at it, you will see there is a degree of religiosity to it.

Just like if we could only see, we would see the chilling effect on creativity?

For someone who keeps complaining about being painted with a broad brush, you've certainly managed to frame the conversation in interesting ways. People are "academic", not just every day people. Despite zero actual evidence, there is a chilling effect among creatives. Now we're delving into Satanic Panic territory with vague claims of religiosity. Oh, we're too fixated on historical accuracy, but, also not aware enough of history. This problem is only in the past ten years or so, but, has also existed for decades.

This is just hillarious.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I'm perfectly fine excluding some people from the media landscape. Do you know how many video games there are, that the only thing I know about them is that the main character is a woman who is "too ugly" and that the "gamer" in question feels personally offended that there isn't someone boobily breasting about their screen while they play?

Did you know there was a "Critic" just a few weeks ago who was raging about Lois Lane in the new Superman movie because she wasn't pretty enough.... like the AI altered image of a former female lead that they compared her to?

New Spider-Man series is out, lot of "critics" declaring it full of racial swaps (they made the Osborne's black and that is about it) and that all the women are really Trans. Evidence? Well, the one woman is taller than the guy, so CLEARLY she's not a real woman in their eyes. Because she is tall.

You may not buy the "equality feels like oppression", but when a character whose race doesn't matter being shown as a minority is enough to get a project review bombed and death threats sent to the creators, and Tall Women are seen as signs of a Trans-Activist agenda to destroy the whatever it is those people are scared it will destroy... I think it is a theory with some teeth. When something as minor as a name change can get calls foretelling the destruction of creativity as we know it... I think there is still a long way to go.

I don’t know any of the media you’re talking about here enough to weigh in. I can say I am not thrilled with either camps take on media. I also find both camps use a lot of hyperbole and paint worst case scenarios. So when a movie or book comes out that is controversial, even if I share some of the concerns about the controversy, I wait several months, sometimes years to watch them so my experience isn’t shaded by the cultural discussion and controversy.

I never said the total destruction of creativity. I said chilling effect and stifling. It is constraining. But I mentioned the hays code to show people still make good things within those constraints. It doesn’t make the constraints a great thing

Again on the phrase equality feels like oppression, there is so much wrong with that. It is an incredibly bad idea. But it is impossible to get into without getting into issues outside the scope of the forum. The bottom line for me though is when I see someone use that phrase, I have less trust in their judgment

 

[pemerton]

What books we own is entirely irrelevant to whether or not they took phylacteries away from 5.5e. What we can add in to 5.5e is entire irrelevant to whether or not they took away phylacteries.

Are they in 5.5e? No. Were then in 5e? Yes. They took them away. It's really that easy.

5.5e D&D never had the word phylactery in it. So that word was not taken away from it.

 

[pemerton]

Since nobody is coming to your house to take your books, it is all additive. Soul jar, or whatever the term is, is just another word of phylactery. I mean, do you really think that everyone in-setting uses the same word for everything?

Every single thing in D&D is still there. New lore adds to it, even if the book says "we're changing things to X isn't true anymore; instead, Y is true." Because as I said, nobody is taking your stuff away. If you feel like trying to adapt THAC0 to 5e, go ahead. Nobody is going to stop you.

100% this. Hence why I deny that anything is being taken away.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

The conversation has gotten kind of uh... intense... for a single word being changed in a stat block.

Stupid arguments over pointless minutiae is what the internet is for (aside from the other thing).

 

[pemerton]

Perhaps I misunderstood pemertons point, as I had to read that post a few times to respond to it. But I was replying to this part of his message (which seemed to draw a connection between the two things: otherwise I am unclear on what he was trying to say):

"Some of those students also played D&D. I don't think they worried about the racist implications of some fantasy tropes! But what does that tell us?"

Certainly we have spent a great deal of energy on this topic. I choose to do so because I think the impact of things like the ongoing debates about orcs and colonialist dungeons have massive implications for the future well being of the hobby so I think it is important for people to weigh in and push back on a lot of these ideas if they disagree with them. The orc thing in particular I have been making a point of weighing in on since I first became aware of it being discussed because I think fretting over evil orcs or killable orcs, is one of the worst things to take hold in a long time

I have a complete collection of REH's Conan stories. Some of them are terrible, some - though pulp-y - I think are pretty good. I like Tower of the Elephant, and Rogues in the House, and the Scarlet Citadel.

When my children were young, I had to forbid them from picking up my REH volumes. Because I didn't want them to read the casual racism that is found in so many of the stories. Including The Scarlet Citadel. I wouldn't want them reading the African-a parts of Dark Sun, either.

Now I imagine you are imagining my children as white, and that this is part of their moral education. But it's not my duty to remind you that not everyone in the world is white. I just didn't want my children to be exposed to material that might encourage self-hatred or self-alienation, or just make them feel a little bit worse than they need to.

Recently I spent a lot of time with someone whose grandparents were tortured by colonial authorities. I don't think this person plays RPGs or video games inspired by them. I don't know if they have even encountered the dungeon motif. I think, though, that they would not be likely to warm to a game that frames "savages" (ie people who live in small villages of relatively simple structures, much like their grandparents did) as violent hordes ripe to be killed to eliminate the threat that they post to "civilised" peoples. That was exactly the language and framing that was used to "justify" the torture of their grandparents.

These sorts of facts don't necessarily give any individual a reason not to play dungeon-crawl D&D. But they might give WotC a reason to think about what it is publishing.

I believe that at least one Jewish RPGer was affronted by the fact that one of the few references to a Jewish cultural artefact in the game is in the context of a lich's soul object - I posted the link to D&D Beyond upthread. Why would WotC not want to make that RPGer feel more comfortable in engaging with their books?

 

[Chaltab]

Stupid arguments over pointless minutiae is what the internet is for (aside from the other thing).

Ah, of course.