WotC Dungeons & Dragons Fans Seek Removal of Oriental Adventures From Online Marketplace

Dire Bare said:

EDIT: To add . . . expecting critics of D&D to have an encyclopedic knowledge of the development of the game and it's early editions is also pure gatekeeping.

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This type of argument is trying to hand wave significant issues with the complaints being made.

Panda-s1 gave good examples of blocks of text that without game mechanics that are bad. It is not hard to see why the title and marketing copy on the back cover, the rice discussion and other such items on their face can easily be seen as giving offense to some Asians.

When one of the arguments was that comeliness was added for the first time for OA to sexualize and feminize Asian men, and then it is pointed out that it existed and was used well before that book makes that argument factually incorrect and false. That is basic research and it looks like Kwan was cribbing from a prior article in which that error was pointed out in the comments. The correct response is not to claim that expecting him to be an expert on this is gatekeeping when his credentials as an Asian expert are used to bolster his critiques and it is a simple google search to discover the truth.

How Dungeons & Dragons Appropriated the Orient (read the comments below the article).

Plus, he is an Asian Canadian, not an Asian American, right?

Greg Benage said:

I'd thought that "gatekeeping" in this context meant using some presumed authority to block someone's access to something. So, for example, incels who argue "That woman isn't a real D&D player because she doesn't even know the rules very well."

So:

1. I don't think anyone here is trying to pull that kind of naughty word with Mr. Kwan.
2. Not only is it not an example of gatekeeping, the in-depth engagement of Mr. Kwan's claims and arguments here is the opposite of "dismissive."
3. If one's argument is that "This is problematic because they developed this new rule specifically for Oriental Adventures," and it turns out that the rule was developed prior to that product, it isn't "gatekeeping," "dismissive," or anything else to point out that this is a flawed argument.

If I say, "A, therefore B" and it turns out "A" is wrong, the gate hasn't been slammed in my face -- I just made a bad argument. "B" may still be true, but I need to admit my error and offer some good arguments to support it.

There have been dismissive posts in this thread, IMO. Posts such as "I don't see a problem with it" strike me as dismissive. And frankly, "That's gatekeeping!" also strikes me as dismissive.

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By dismissing Kwan's commentary (or parts of it) because he isn't a historical expert on early D&D, we are trying to prevent his criticism from being heard or seen as relevant and legitimate. Yes, gatekeeping. Only D&D super-nerds immersed in the esoterica of the game have any right to level complaints.

Kwan is reacting to the perfect storm of NWPs, the honor system, the Comeliness stat, orientalist language, and bad stereotypes as an Asian American gamer encountering Oriental Adventures.

To go all "well, actually . . ." after specific points like NWPs, honor, and Comeliness being developed in the pages of Dragon Magazine and/or appearing in Unearthed Arcana before being included in Oriental Adventures misses the point and tries to diminish his experience and offense.

It's certainly a fact that these three mechanical elements of the game were developed before the publication of Oriental Adventures and can be (and have been) applied to cultures other than Asian. It also is irrelevant to Kwan's experience reading through the book, it also doesn't change the highly problematic nature of the work.

WotC doesn't have the responsibility to create any particular form of content.
WotC is a small but growing subsidary of a major corporation, Hasbro, which has a fiscal responsibility to its shareholders to turn a profit.

If we the consumers want a particular type of content, such as more socially conscious material, then our purchase habits, and our voices on what we care about will drive the company to produce that type of content. And likewise, we have the ability to stop production and distribution of socially upsetting content if we so demand it - if it becomes big enough of a concern for Hasbro's bottom line.

What WE care about as a gaming community matters. Our ability to hold producers accountable, to buy or not to buy, to demand change and protest, these things can have real effects for the positive.

But they are not the same as censorship in any way. If DM's Guild no longer sells Oriental Adventures on its digital marketspace, that doesn't mean that they're coming knocking on my door to take my old copy of the book (that I got secondhand). I can choose to destroy it myself as a statement, or I can choose to treat it as a relic of the past in its context. But that doesn't mean other people need to have that relic easily available to them. Publishers do not need to keep printing books. Most books stop printing in short order because it's no longer profitable to do so.

If someone was saying, go tear this book out of the Library of Congress (or worse, attempt to destroy such a repository of knowledge of the history of Humanity, like they did with the Library of Alexandria), then we might have a problem.

But I think there's room for WotC to put disclaimers over some products, and to outright stop selling other products. Disney seems to understand that quite well: they're going to put disclaimers over "Saludos Amigos" on D+, but they're not going give "Song of the South" a platform to wedge its toxicity into the minds of unassuming viewers. That's their perogative as a business. They realised long ago that it didn't make business sense to keep publishing the film. Does that make them a changed company from the one that made the film? Probably not, despite any apologies made in context of the removal. But in my opinion - and the opinion of enough people who consume their products - they had a moral responsibility to stop sharing that film. That said, inevitably, someone will start distributing the film legally come 2041, when the copyright on the film expires. Until then, Disney can simultaneously refuse to take it out of the infamous Disney Vault (Disney Walt?), and also prevent anyone from attempting to sell or recreate or distribute the film (say, on YouTube or some such place). Circling back to WotC by comparison, they do not have to sell us OA. I would prefer they didn't.

I still want to see positive adventure stories in the worlds of D&D told of people and lands that take inspiration from parts of the world that are not Western Europe, 800-1600 CE. But I won't buy such a product if it doesn't lift up minority authors to be able to tell their own stories. This hobby is too white. It was too male for a long time, but that's changing. It's changing because certain gates into the fandom have been torn down, wittingly or not. But high-selling content creators are still overwhelmingly white and male. I know there are great designers of content who do not fit that profile, but are overlooked because of implicit and explicit biases, because of gatekeeping, and because of carryover and ongoing corporate practices instituted in a time that this wasn't a concern to the shareholders. We have a chance now to tear down those gates and fences, because the corporate shareholders are listening carefully with their wallets. They'll want to give us little treats to placate us from keeping up the pressure. It's our job to take what we can get but then pressure for more, until we actually reach a society where no people are more equal than others, and when we get there, it's our job to protect that equality from the forces that say "it's working so we don't need it anymore."

Dire Bare said:

By dismissing Kwan's commentary (or parts of it) because he isn't a historical expert on early D&D, we are trying to prevent his criticism from being heard or seen as relevant and legitimate. Yes, gatekeeping. Only D&D super-nerds immersed in the esoterica of the game have any right to level complaints.

Kwan is reacting to the perfect storm of NWPs, the honor system, the Comeliness stat, orientalist language, and bad stereotypes as an Asian American gamer encountering Oriental Adventures.

To go all "well, actually . . ." after specific points like NWPs, honor, and Comeliness being developed in the pages of Dragon Magazine and/or appearing in Unearthed Arcana before being included in Oriental Adventures misses the point and tries to diminish his experience and offense.

It's certainly a fact that these three mechanical elements of the game were developed before the publication of Oriental Adventures and can be (and have been) applied to cultures other than Asian. It also is irrelevant to Kwan's experience reading through the book, it also doesn't change the highly problematic nature of the work.

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I will agree here, while with the hindsight afforded to us by having enough published works to see that these pieces Mr. Kwan is pointing out are systemic and not contained to only the aspects he has issues with, I think that does not diminish the impact on him since he had no way to know these facts without a ton of research into 1e DnD.

And, if I had purchased the book and cracked it open, even if I owned a copy of UA that included some of these other details, that does not mean I would have realized that UA came first and OA was just copying those ideas, or that later works would come out and build upon systems from OA to make them less problematic as a whole.

This really feels like a viewpoint thing. If you look just at OA, problems. If you look at all of 1e, different problems, as sometimes a problem with OA is addressed earlier before it was published and sometimes later after it was published.

Dire Bare said:

By dismissing Kwan's commentary (or parts of it) because he isn't a historical expert on early D&D, we are trying to prevent his criticism from being heard or seen as relevant and legitimate. Yes, gatekeeping. Only D&D super-nerds immersed in the esoterica of the game have any right to level complaints.

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Like...again...no one who is even engaging in this discussion is saying that. We're engaging his arguments rather than dismissing them. He has every right to level complaints, and some of them strike me as valid -- again, not that my opinion on that is particularly important. It's just that...some of the arguments he's made to support his complaints are wrong.

I think you're overreaching, and yes, being dismissive, if you turn any instance of fact-checking into "gatekeeping" (whether in bolded or standard font).

Dire Bare said:

By dismissing Kwan's commentary (or parts of it) because he isn't a historical expert on early D&D, we are trying to prevent his criticism from being heard or seen as relevant and legitimate. Yes, gatekeeping. Only D&D super-nerds immersed in the esoterica of the game have any right to level complaints.

Kwan is reacting to the perfect storm of NWPs, the honor system, the Comeliness stat, orientalist language, and bad stereotypes as an Asian American gamer encountering Oriental Adventures.

To go all "well, actually . . ." after specific points like NWPs, honor, and Comeliness being developed in the pages of Dragon Magazine and/or appearing in Unearthed Arcana before being included in Oriental Adventures misses the point and tries to diminish his experience and offense.

It's certainly a fact that these three mechanical elements of the game were developed before the publication of Oriental Adventures and can be (and have been) applied to cultures other than Asian. It also is irrelevant to Kwan's experience reading through the book, it also doesn't change the highly problematic nature of the work.

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No and again, no.

A simple google search would have found the article that has been linked several times from 2016 in which this claim was made and corrected.

No one is saying that every point raised is invalid nor that the point that Kwan badly got the argument on comeliness wrong means all his other points are wrong. It does mean he blew it on comeliness.

That is not gatekeeping, you are using a strawperson argument to dismiss it and try and claim that gatekeeping is the reason.

Chaosmancer said:

I will agree here, while with the hindsight afforded to us by having enough published works to see that these pieces Mr. Kwan is pointing out are systemic and not contained to only the aspects he has issues with, I think that does not diminish the impact on him since he had no way to know these facts without a ton of research into 1e DnD.

And, if I had purchased the book and cracked it open, even if I owned a copy of UA that included some of these other details, that does not mean I would have realized that UA came first and OA was just copying those ideas, or that later works would come out and build upon systems from OA to make them less problematic as a whole.

This really feels like a viewpoint thing. If you look just at OA, problems. If you look at all of 1e, different problems, as sometimes a problem with OA is addressed earlier before it was published and sometimes later after it was published.

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No, in the world today, google exists. This article comes up immediately.


Look at the comments from 2016.

Explain that? Kwan made the claim that something was used for the first time for a bad reason. He did not do even the most basic of checking?

Dire Bare said:

It's certainly a fact that these three mechanical elements of the game were developed before the publication of Oriental Adventures and can be (and have been) applied to cultures other than Asian. It also is irrelevant to Kwan's experience reading through the book, it also doesn't change the highly problematic nature of the work.

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There are some great short videos out on explaining the idea of privilege to folks (especially folks who have it).

It almost feels like there needs to be a set of short videos on how to hear criticism of the past that one identifies with. It feels like that has a lot more nuance, and ties in to a lot of current other things besides just entertainment (holidays, statues, base names, etc...). The part that feels similar might be that it's clearly possible for someone who was even doing a bit better than the median back then to be careful to have produced something that is offensive today. So that doesn't have to mean we're judging that creator down as a human being, because just about everyone who made things 30 years or more ago feels like they have a good chance of having missed on something. And you acknowledging that this thing you like rubs other folks the wrong way doesn't necessarily mean it's awful and you have to shun it, but maybe you can actually reflectively think about why you use it, and if you still do you can disclaim things that are problematic (say there's one of those things in the Looney Tunes cartoon, you can make sure explain to your kid why it's not something we would do today). If the people hearing that the things they like are offensive to others started in a bit more understanding place, it might make it easier to not feel like they had to pedant every error in the argument without first granting the main thesis of the work being insensitive (or worse) to some folks. And it might make it easier to take harsher action than a label and explanation when the creator was worse than average for their time and/or the work was even more egregious. If we were in a place that happened, then it might make it easier to either decide it isn't important to point out the flaws in the argument of the person hurt right at that moment, or to do so in a constructive way that they wouldn't feel like was yet another dismissal of the whole thing.

Dire Bare said:

By dismissing Kwan's commentary (or parts of it) because he isn't a historical expert on early D&D, we are trying to prevent his criticism from being heard or seen as relevant and legitimate. Yes, gatekeeping. Only D&D super-nerds immersed in the esoterica of the game have any right to level complaints.

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I think it's fair to dismiss parts of anyone's argument when they're predicated on a misunderstanding of the facts. This isn't gate keeping and it isn't an effort to prevent his criticism from being heard and to believe this is a gross misunderstanding of how dialogue works. Kwan isn't Moses descending from the mountain with two tablets.

To go all "well, actually . . ." after specific points like NWPs, honor, and Comeliness being developed in the pages of Dragon Magazine and/or appearing in Unearthed Arcana before being included in Oriental Adventures misses the point and tries to diminish his experience and offense.

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Kwan's criticisms are not unassailable, they are not sacrosanct, and, like any argument, should not be taken uncritically.

It's certainly a fact that these three mechanical elements of the game were developed before the publication of Oriental Adventures and can be (and have been) applied to cultures other than Asian. It also is irrelevant to Kwan's experience reading through the book, it also doesn't change the highly problematic nature of the work.

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Fair enough. I can't argue against what Kwan feels. But if he's arguing that Comeliness was added to feminize Asian men, well, he's wrong no matter how he feels.

Haldrik said:

Incidentally, the weapons table should say "knife", not "dagger". A dagger is just one of the many types of knives. A dagger specifies a double-edged blade. A "longsword" can be single-edged or double-edged. There is no need for the weapons table to distinguish them. Besides, as far as I know, modern militaries fight with single-edged knives, not daggers, because the knife is just as effective (maybe more effective) and more utilitarian for other uses.

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It says both, two different entries. The historical description doesn't really matter, what matters is that they're different mechanically, and the knife is less effective. We all know that D&D doesn't go in for full simulation with weapons and weapon types.