D&D 5E Blacks in 5E Art

[Grumpy RPG Reviews]

This is a pitch for 10% of the humans in the art of 5E D&D to be black.

Please keep the discussion relevant to this issue.

 

[Dausuul]

This is a pitch for 10% of the humans in the art of 5E D&D to be black.

Please keep the discussion relevant to this issue.

Well, if the alternative is "less than 10% are black and everything else is the same," I endorse this pitch.

I do feel it's a bit overly limited, though. I mean, if you look at the art for the iconic characters in the 3.5E Player's Handbook, it more than fulfills this requirement. There are four human characters in the list: Jozan the cleric, Alhandra the paladin, Hennet the sorceror, and Ember the monk. Ember is clearly black. That's 25% of the human characters. Problem solved!

...Except, not really, since the nonhuman characters all have Caucasian skin tones. (Admittedly, Krusk has the coloring of a Caucasian who's been dead for three days.) No Asian coloring or features. No Native American. Alhandra might be considered Hispanic. It's better than nothing, but 5E can and should improve on it.

I would like to see a guideline that no more than 50% of creatures/characters who resemble a real-world ethnicity should look Caucasian. So a hezrou demon wouldn't count either way, but a succubus likely would. (I'm pretty sure that's still skewing white, considering how the population of the world breaks down, but it's hard to get exact numbers.)

 

[dkyle]

I think matching the racial proportions of the DnD player-base would be a reasonable goal. Match the world-wide ratios, and it ends up looking bizarre to the majority of customers, as the vast plurality of illustrations would be Asian or Indian (as in India). It would end up looking like a mockery of diversity.

 

[Incenjucar]

I think matching the racial proportions of the DnD player-base would be a reasonable goal. Match the world-wide ratios, and it ends up looking bizarre to the majority of customers, as the vast plurality of illustrations would be Asian or Indian (as in India). It would end up looking like a mockery of diversity.

The real-world ratios differ by country, and making it match the player-base is counter-productive to growing the product.

Instead, make it roughly equal, allowing for exceptions based on story content. There's no more reason for Sigil to have more of one skin tone than another aside from the lack of decent sunlight.

--

Edit: Also, don't limit physical appearance to generic real world groups. Someone with dark skin, red hair, blue eyes, and Malaysian bone structure could be an interesting character.

 

[Lord_Psathus]

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7HJH0IH3dc]Elaine Stritch Who Cares?!?! - YouTube[/ame]

 

[I'm A Banana]

Instead, make it roughly equal, allowing for exceptions based on story content. There's no more reason for Sigil to have more of one skin tone than another aside from the lack of decent sunlight.

--

Edit: Also, don't limit physical appearance to generic real world groups. Someone with dark skin, red hair, blue eyes, and Malaysian bone structure could be an interesting character.

I'm on board with it! We should see a huge diversity of skin colors, hair types, cultural dress, ages, genders, body types, facial structures, and other things. Not just in the humans, either -- I'd like to see diversity in my dwarves and elves and halflings and gnomes and whatnot, too.

I know D&D is vaguely pseudomedieval, and that plus the target audience might skew the odds a little "caucasian male ages 18-25"-y, but I would be super-stoked if, being aware of this tendency, the art team made a concerted effort to inject significant diversity into its depictions of heroes and villagefolk.

 

[Dausuul]

The real-world ratios differ by country, and making it match the player-base is counter-productive to growing the product.

Instead, make it roughly equal, allowing for exceptions based on story content. There's no more reason for Sigil to have more of one skin tone than another aside from the lack of decent sunlight.

Edit: Also, don't limit physical appearance to generic real world groups. Someone with dark skin, red hair, blue eyes, and Malaysian bone structure could be an interesting character.

I must spread some XP around, but all this sounds good to me.

Elaine Stritch Who Cares?!?! - YouTube

Some of us do. If you don't, why are you posting in this thread?

 

[Mattachine]

Also, it's possible to use some of the ethnicities described in various gameworlds, such as people from Calimshan, or the Suloise, and so on.

I think simply not making every PC look like a northern European is good enough. I liked the artwork in the 1e books, but I could see it being offputting to many of my students (who are non-white).

 

[El Mahdi]

I'd even like to see it go further and show different cultural representations. Like Moorish Warriors, Asian Magic Users, Mongol Archers, etc.

Like this:

 

[Recidivism]

I don't care whether the art depicts any minorities or not, but I'd prefer to keep overt propagandizing out of the game.

 

[Dice4Hire]

I would not like to see the art restricted by any attempts to be real world. When black fits, use black. When any other color scheme fits, use that.

 

[Andor]

I agree, while a single campaign might take place in some small backwater, and thus feature a single ethnic group the world at large should be diverse. Not every PC in the books needs to look like a 15th century yokel from Burgundy.

Edit: Also, don't limit physical appearance to generic real world groups. Someone with dark skin, red hair, blue eyes, and Malaysian bone structure could be an interesting character.

The real world has far more than 3 ethnic groups. A fantasy world can have all of them and more.

There are some problems however. How do you mix race in the ethnic group sense with race in the D&D demi-human sense? Are there multiple ethnic groups for all the other races? You have problems either way. If all the elves are white, and dwarves are black, that's bad. If there have to be full representations of every ethnic group for every non-human race it gets rapidly ridiculous from a would building standpoint. "Okay the Bantu Orcs are the the hills north of Greyhawk. Where are we putting the Inuit Gnomes?"

(Side note: Technically speaking if a group can interbreed, they are a single species. IE; Men, Orcs and Elves are all the same species.)

 

[the Jester]

This topic just got shut down; it's bad form to open a new thread right afterwards.

 

[Dausuul]

This topic just got shut down.

It did? I missed that.

 

[Piratecat]

When a tropic is closed by a moderator, please don't start a new thread on the same topic for at least a week or so afterward.

Thanks for keeping this thread respectful. PM me with questions.

Thread closed for now. If someone wants to remind me, I'll just reopen this thread once the topic has cooled off a bit.

 

[Umbran]

It was a discussion of the Grumpy RPG column on Blacks in Gaming, that had in part drifted into art. It also drifted into real-world politics, and was closed.

There is also currently a thread in the Media Lounge on the same thing (talking about art, among other things), that remains open as it has not gotten terribly political: http://www.enworld.org/forum/media-.../315417-grumpy-rpg-reviews-blacks-gaming.html

I think maybe one such thread on the boards is enough, though, so I'm going to close this one, just for safety's sake.

(And, personal opinion - pitching for blacks in art is nice, but pitching for non-Caucasians in art is better.)

 

[Piratecat]

Simul-mod!

 

[Dausuul]

Um, you realize this thread is not actually locked?

 

[Piratecat]

Heh. Umbran didn't see my post and by closing a closed thread it got re-opened.

I'll fix that!