Recent content by Monadology

Hussar has already touched on this, but I want to emphasize that the concerns about impact are not constrained to the level of individual tables. Though there can be table-level impacts, it's also very much a question of the larger scale social impact of these tropes continuing to be embedded in...

Yes. See the entire extended discussion in this thread about the risks of reproducing harmful conceptions of 'race,' stereotypes, etc... Besides, the question is moot: their motivations are already defined. Orcs are literally characterized as innately evil in core books, as documented in this...

Those are cultures, not races. A culture is by its nature temporary and the evils of various cultures are not plausibly biologically determined. You are comparing apples to oranges. The existence of cultural evil is not the same thing as the existence of innately evil races.

I was being sloppy with the prefix and hadn't noticed the nuance you identify here. I definitely have no attachment to the 'pre' prefix! Thanks for pointing this out.

'Preliterate, pre-industrial' =/= pre-industrial. You could actually read the definitions you've posted. What does preliterate mean? Well: preliterate [ pree-lit-er-it ] adjective Anthropology. lacking a written language; nonliterate occurring before the development or use of writing. There...

'Anyone' here is not referring to literally anyone, it's referring to whether it is generally used that way by a plurality of people in some significant context. Especially relevant is whether it is used that way when cultures are described as 'primitive' in D&D books, a usage that you have been...

Does anyone actually use 'primitive' that way? When the Grippli are being characterized as 'primitive', it seems implausible that the author is just telling the reader that they haven't found a metaphorical brush hog yet. If you are proposing this new sense of 'primitive' be adopted, you should...

The notion that the word 'primitive' would fit any actual situation 'perfectly' is an absurd position to take. Do you really think anything is that simple? There are very general words we use despite the inaccuracies that come along with their generality: for example, it seems reasonable and...

The rejection of a sliding scale from 'primitive' to 'advanced' in the description of technology and culture does not imply and certainly is not equivalent to the claim that 'everything is equal.' The whole point of AbdulAlhazred's evolutionary analogy as I understood it is that comparing these...