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

[Crimson Longinus]

It really centers around the "Wife Reward" structure of certain tropes. "Slay the dragon and you get to marry the princess" or "Save my farm and marry my daughter" or "You rescued me! I'll do -anything- to repay you!" type material.

Far less common, today, than it was in the 70s or 80s... but there's a long history which lead to Bowsette singing "Your princess may be in another castle but I'm still here"

Yeah, I get the trope, it just isn’t in my personal experience a thing that commonly happens in games.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I understand this sentiment and to an extent agree, but think it’s just inevitable that it end up this way. Orcs are a humanoid species that has a lot of similarities to humans. To me, the only obvious outcomes is they either become an always evil barbaric race (often built on racist/colonialist tropes) or humans in funny hats. The average D&D player is not an experienced xenofiction novelist and how they roleplay Orc characters is dependent upon their own experience as a person and established lore/tropes. So you either end up with “mentally identical to humans, they just have different cultures/religions” or “Evil DNA, totally lawful good to exterminate them all.” Neither of which is ideal in my opinion, but I know that I prefer the former.

But if you're going with option 1 (which I fully understand), why bother with orcs at all? Just add more human cultures. There's practically nothing (except physical appearance, and that has as noted decreased radically as a factor) that separates orcs from humans. So why bother?

 

[Steampunkette]

Yeah, I get the trope, it just isn’t in my personal experience a thing that commonly happens in games.

COMMONLY? No. Not remotely.

But I have seen it. Mostly when I was younger, in the 80s and 90s. Though also in the early 2000s after that friend tried to pre-order a trans girlfriend. I ran a game in which his character (and others) saved a farming community from a hobgoblin army demanding grain and slave-soldiers to throw against their orcish enemies and he immediately tried to use his heroic position to get NPCs to bed down with him.

It was obnoxious, and wound up being the last D&D game I ran before I left Florida.

 

[Micah Sweet]

I guess I have more faith in the ability of an average roleplayer to offer more nuanced portrayals. Perhaps it is unwarranted. I don't expect deep xenofiction, but something on the level of the more developed Star Trek species. Like I would imagine most people who are familiar with Star Trek could play a Vulcan in a manner that would make them recognisable as one. But for this to be possible, the game should actually tell us how these species think and behave, and it really doesn't.

Not anymore at least. There used to be quite a lot written on this subject.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Yeah, I get the trope, it just isn’t in my personal experience a thing that commonly happens in games.

I think literally the only time I've seen it, having played since 1989, was in an AD&D 1E adventure which a friend of mine ran in the mid-1990s, but he hadn't even read through it and was running it "live" as it were, so he was as surprised as everyone else - I remember a general "Yikes! No thanks!" reaction. And that was from teenage boys in like, 1993 or 1994!

I feel like I'd be unsurprised to see it in a grimier OSR (i.e. LotFP or similar) adventure written in the 2010s, though. There's definitely been a side of some OSR (not most of it) where people want to roll the clock back on that kind of thing.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Isn't this necessary for it to be a toolkit, though?

What you're asking for is the game to lay down the one and only way that elves can be elves, that dwarves can be dwarves, etc. No designer in their right mind would do that for a product meant to be generic and embrace the wide variety in fantasy fiction.

You can't have a "Vulcans have a very distinctive culture" and simultaneously "you can do whatever you want and incorporate stuff from any fantastical work you know" in the same game. Either the game is made for one specific taste and everyone else has to like it, lump it, or exhaustively rewrite it; or the game has to stay vague so each table can figure out what elf-ness and dragonborn-ness means for them.

I strongly prefer the former.

 

[Micah Sweet]

This covers two of my big problems with most "but make them alien" requests.

The vast majority of fantasy races see more or less the same spectrum of light that humans do, and while low-light vision is helpful, it only works out to about 60', so it's not exactly They feel comfortable in the same range of temperatures, they eat more or less the same foods, they have more or less equivalent palates (possibly being slightly more or slightly less sensitive, but what one finds spicy, most will also recognize as spicy), they spend loosely equivalent amounts of time sleeping. They're bilaterally-symmetrical, bipedal, plantigrade, mammalian, viviparous, capable of sweating, have five digits per hand/foot, etc., etc.

The one thing that actually makes some races genuinely pretty alien compared to humans is never actually given meaningful attention in D&D, and that difference is lifespan. Lifespan differences should make dwarves and elves very different from orcs, humans, dragonborn, etc. Instead....it's basically written off as "yeah they just take life at a slower pace but are otherwise the same."

But because those two races have some of the longest history in D&D, we're never actually going to get truly alien elves and dwarves. This makes complaints that anything new (dragonborn are the commonly-cited example) is reducing D&D to "rubber forehead aliens" deeply frustrating, because it already was! It's just that the two most egregious rubber forehead aliens get grandfathered in, but anything with the temerity to not be included in Tolkien's work must jump through a dozen hoops just to get rejected anyway for not being alien enough.

Real, outright xenofiction levels of portrayal would not an interesting RPG make.

Why not? I can see a lot of potential in roleplaying and worldbuilding alike to having more of a xenofiction focus. It would definitely address some of your complaints here.

I really think this is a case of official D&D just not putting the work in. Plenty of D&D-likes have done better.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Isn't this necessary for it to be a toolkit, though?

What you're asking for is the game to lay down the one and only way that elves can be elves, that dwarves can be dwarves, etc. No designer in their right mind would do that for a product meant to be generic and embrace the wide variety in fantasy fiction.

You can't have a "Vulcans have a very distinctive culture" and simultaneously "you can do whatever you want and incorporate stuff from any fantastical work you know" in the same game. Either the game is made for one specific taste and everyone else has to like it, lump it, or exhaustively rewrite it; or the game has to stay vague so each table can figure out what elf-ness and dragonborn-ness means for them.

You can also use different settings to address this issue, instead of using them to change the color of the PCs backdrop while simultaneously ensuring that everything in the core can be shoehorned into every product.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I really think this is a case of official D&D just not putting the work in. Plenty of D&D-likes have done better.

I do tend to agree that the "xenofiction doesn't make for an interesting RPG" seems like backfill for WotC's singular failure to provide any real, uh, xeno, where other games have done much better jobs - in fact one of the common marks of a D&D competitor in the 1980s and 1990s* was that they put way more effort in on races. Honestly somehow even Shadowrun's elves seem more non-human than D&D's ones, for example. I will say some individual D&D settings have done better jobs though.

* = This is now a more mixed bag - Pathfinder 2E does a better job than D&D 5E but not by much, it's surprising how un-different their jumping-spider people are from humans, for example. Draw Steel! looks like it's doing a slightly more interesting job, and Daggerheart isn't really doing that "angle" of species differences unless the individual player wants to play it up, but does have a much more diverse set of species. Wildsea goes for bigger differences than D&D but still surprisingly small for cactus people etc.

 

[Steampunkette]

@EzekielRaiden @Micah Sweet

My big thing is...

Break culture out. (Y'all know I love A5e)

"Elf Culture" doesn't really exist because there's different kinds of elves with different societies and different cultures. What you have is Elf Perspectives within cultures.

Think of an Elf who was born, raised, lived, and died, in London England between 1300ad and 2000ad at the ripe old age of 700. What was her life like? How much variation in it, really, was there until the last 200 years of it, or so?

How would she have interacted with the society in London in 1500 compared to how she might interact with the society in London in the 1990s?

To me, that's a -far- more interesting question than "Would elves spend 12 years living in a tent while waiting for the roof of their carefully cultivated tree-home to finish growing together to the point of keeping the rain out?" or "Does Elf Culture have bland food because they're Spock-style logic robots?"