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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8481280" data-attributes="member: 18">It's also worth noting that Gygax absolutely did believe it was totally right and proper to slaughter the women and children of "evil races", and went as far as to quote a genocidal ultra-racist writer in support of this viewpoint.So when you say it's "just painting with a broad brush", and "people don't think beyond that", I would strongly question that at least in as far as applies to the whole deal where D&D (unlike a lot of RPGs), has a bunch of "evil races" which have non-supernatural reproduction and growth and so on. I think that Gygax absolutely did think beyond that and was totally happy with that situation.When people merely carry on this "tradition", yeah I think that tends to be an unconscious replication of the situation, and indeed, if the person is forced to think it through, they may well rejected the Gygaxian "genocide is the answer" approach. But not always. There's an incident I've talked about before early when I was playing D&D, when we had just such a scenario inflicted on us by a 1E DM who had moved to 2E. We fought and killed some orcs and there were orc toddlers, who were just cowering. We the players were all like "Awww sad, we need to take these lil orphans to a monastery or something", and the DM had his DMPC be all like "No thou mustest killst them!" (why the DMPC talked like that I have no idea but there was certainly a lot of "thou") and explained that unless we did we weren't being Good. There was a lengthy argument of all players vs the DM. We all thought he'd gone completely mad, and the DMPC got told "try and stop us", and whilst he could have wiped the group, the DM wisely chose not to, knowing that would be the last time he ever got to DM (spoiler: it was anyway). What we didn't know at the time of course that, according to EGG, he was completely right! Which is funny given a major pillar of our argument was that there was no way D&D was intended to be interpreted that way because it wasn't written by genocidal lunatics (half the group being Jewish probably didn't lay fertile ground for "genocide is cool" either, one might note).Being online in the early 1990s I saw similar viewpoints promulgated frequently by some DMs, particularly those who still played 1E, or only reluctantly had switched. The majority viewpoint was clearly against them, but I saw lengthy arguments, which clearly were thought-through, about how it was totally righteous to slaughter defenceless women and children.So whilst I agree that most people who have "evil races" aren't intentionally promulgating some well-considered pro-genocide view, there definitely have been some, including EGG, who absolutely did see it that way. As such it's not surprising that WotC have come out so strongly against this view that they're actually changing how D&D is presented so this view can no longer be attributed to them. They're honestly lucky that some of the stuff EGG said didn't come out nearer the start of 5E, and it still isn't well-known, because the backlash could have been... bad.</blockquote>

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