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Are there any negative cultural traits that can’t be mapped to real-world prejudices and stereotypes? Thieving, dishonest, savage, duplicitous, greedy, gluttonous, licentious, arrogant, cowardly, stern, haughty, barbaric, decadent, cruel, lazy - all stereotypes of one group or another. If we...

Not true. The public alarm around D&D (and the first time most people had even heard of the game) started with the James Egbert disappearance and the book and movie about it, Mazes and Monsters. That case wasn’t about religion or satanism. It was about a college kid who was allegedly obsessed...

The notion that Black Americans look and act like orcs is so odious and incredible that the first time I came across it on an RPG forum a couple years ago I thought I’d stumbled onto a Stormfront forum. I’d be astonished if average Black Americans drew that analogy. I expect the few people who...

I’ve tried to explain to you that the backlash against D&D and other violent fantasy content at that time wasn’t just religious. Teachers, principals, child psychologists in my educated, urban, Canadian city had what they thought was evidence that boys indulging in this media were becoming...

Is PF2 really any more modular than other RPGs? Personally, I find it much easier to house rule simple systems like B/X than more complex ones like PF2. With all of the feats, character options, and monster actions hooked into the mechanics, I don’t have confidence I could simply strip out the...

The whole hidden/sneak/stealth/visibility system is a huge headache, and one of the things that tipped me over the edge into I'll never actually get this to the table with my group territory. When customers post flowcharts to explain one of your sub-systems, you can find multipart Youtube videos...

Because characterization is only one of the ways players can engage with the game world. A player could enjoy the setting lore and political machinations without putting much effort into making their PC distinct. Some players get most of their enjoyment from immersion in the immediate game...

There were child psychologists and mental health experts in the 80s contributing to the alarmism around D&D and fantasy. Parents were being warned that young people (let's be honest - young men) were detaching from normal, healthy society and becoming obsessed with immersing themselves in lurid...

That's a narrow characterization of the moral panic around D&D in the 80s. It wasn't just (or even mostly) about spells and religious faith. For a great many teachers and parents, depictions of demons and monsters being slain with swords was mindless and lurid violence that would rot kids'...

I don't think the distinction is at all clear-cut. An explorer in a primitive land is captured by natives who take him to a volcano to be sacrificed. Trope or stereotyping? The sorceress turned her back on humankind after she was abandoned at the altar by the king's son. Trope or...

Which means they're crude and in poor taste. It's still hard to see a realistic chain of this causing real harm today to a real person. Someone plays Curse of Strahd and is exposed to stereotypical depictions or Romani. Then what? How does this change their behaviour in real life? How does that...

But again we’re back to the issue of individuals being treated as spokespeople for a larger community. If I showed the DMG to a woman of colour and she found it offensive on religious grounds (a not unlikely outcome given the very high rates of religiousity of Black American women), would it be...

But if you're communicating with a general audience of Latinos, for every one who you make comfortable by using Latinx or Latine, you've left 20 others baffled about what you're even talking about. Tiny and unrepresentative online subcultures should not be the arbiters of wider discourse. That...

If you followed the thread, you'd see we're not talking about making people look African or Asian. We were talking about why dwarves, gnomes, etc. described as dark-complexioned in the text were drawn as white. Why do you think orcs, goblins, and ogres are 'white' in the MM rather than...

I'd wager the term is more widely adopted among extremely online, educated whites than among Latinos themselves, to the extent that there are social media sites popular with said demographic where I would be admonished for not using it. Which gives us an insight into the narrow origin of these...

It's possible. But you've seen the artwork in question, haven't you? These were mostly amateur artists who spent maybe an hour or so on each illustration. Is it more reasonable to assume they carried out their assignments in the easiest way (which is to depict humanoids as having white bodies...

"Most gnomes are wood brown, a few range to gray brown, of skin." - 1E Monster Manual "[Dwarves] skin is earth-colored, and their hair is dark brown, grey, or black." - Moldvay Basic What's actually remarkable about the early monster and race descriptions in D&D is how fantastically varied...

Gygax credited both Anderson and Moorcock as influences. In this interview he specifically cites Moorcock for the law-chaos thing. http://archives.theonering.net/features/interviews/gary_gygax.html#maincontent And Melnibonean mythos was one of only three based on fictional works (along with...

I challenge you to use pen and ink to draw a character with bronze skin. Look at the pictures in the 1E MM and the other early D&D books: all humanoids are white. Elves, dwarves, orcs, trolls, ogres, goblins. All drawn white. Even though the descriptions have their skins range from white to...

Drow aren't in the 1E monster manual. And elves are described as having a range of colourings (wood elves are tan to brown), as are dwarves and gnomes. They were drawn as white in the earliest books (as are orcs, by the way) because it's very difficult to draw dark-skinned humanoids in black and...