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D&D (2024) Comeliness and Representation in Recent DnD Art

Dannyalcatraz

Schmoderator
Staff member
Supporter
Just call a style racist, and those who enjoyed it bigots, you'll be fine.
Mod Note:

You’ve been here a while, so you should know better. Reminder: we’ve had plenty of threads on this- there was definitely problematic art & writing in early TTRPGs, and your fellow ENWorlders (myself included) catalogued and presented receipts.

And to be clear, the general consensus was that only a select few offenders were likely to be actual bigots. Most instances were easily dismissed as being examples of people not being aware that X, Y, or Z was offensive, which is forgivable.

That does not mean such content should be included going forward, at least, not without extreme caution.

Asserting a position contrary when you knew or should have known? You’re done in this thread.
 

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Gradine

The Elephant in the Room (she/her)
Yeah, "gritty" to me doesn't evoke stylized gore and violence. Gritty conjures more old-west images or haggard, tough, and worn settlers, outlaws, and marshalls. In fantasy, I think of low-magic, grizzled adventurers who look like they've spent weeks/months in the wilderness.
Weird, this is what I picture when I think of "gritty" art.

1000000836.png
 

LesserThan

Explorer
"Gender and Birth: Tieflings can be of either gender, or none, or both.

Faces of Evil was published in 1997, the writer is Colin McComb who has also written for Black Isle Studios (including Planescape: Torment) and InXile Entertainment (Wasteland 2 and Torment: Tides of Numenera).
Humans can be either, none, or both as well. So I am missing what tiefling is connecting with LGBT still.

Is Colin the one that made an apology, for being a bad designer, video 20 years after writing an elf book?



This guy?

If so, I would not trust anything he did at T$R.
 

Faolyn

(she/her)
Cool, glad your desires are being met.

Shame for those who want some variation, but oh well.

Just call a style racist, and those who enjoyed it bigots, you'll be fine.
I have no idea how you got racist out of what Levistus said there. While there was racist art in the old days (Gaz 10, I'm looking at you), the vast majority of it wasn't, and there especially wasn't enough to call an entire style racist.
 

MGibster

Legend
Humans can be either, none, or both as well. So I am missing what tiefling is connecting with LGBT still.
Because back in 1997, you wouldn't hear very many people say that humans could be none or both when it comes to gender. For the most part, the popular narrative was that you were a man or woman and there's was nothing inbetween. I don't believe this statement was something you saw about humans in the game. You understand why in 1997 this might have connected with some people, right?
 

Faolyn

(she/her)
I really don't need "cheesecake" art in my D&D, but all lack of clothing isn't that.
This is very true. It's also not an idea that is commonly used in gaming books, where it was, for a very long time, rare to find an image of a scantily-armored individual who isn't thrusting, flexing, or posing sexily in some way.

Having a picture of someone whose armor has clearly been damaged to the point it counts as chain mail bikini-adjacent, but not in a sexy way, would be great, especially if that person was also clearly in a proper action sequence--it would definitely show how dungeon-delving can be a dangerous line of work.
 


LesserThan

Explorer
I mean, amorphous creatures are literally defined by not having a fixed shape. Working out what skinny or fat in their context would be practically impossible.
You cut my paragraph in half, so missed the point.

All of it, glasses, legs, skinny was about the slime monster. You can not apply human aspects to non humans.

"Humanoid" is just the outward appearance of other PC races. It does not mean their physiology is identical. Vampures regenerate, why would they need glasses? Interbreeding of PC races is silly, unneeded in the game. Maybe Elves do not have "fat". This is all setting defined, and not even getting into saying dead weight in a combat is not going to work too well. There was in the past the wizard considered dead weight as after expending spells, the adventure was on pause until it rested to regain spells and not be useless. How does this work scaling a wall with soneone extremely over weight that everyone else must hoist their petard over?

To borrow from Men in Black, adveturers should be the best of the best of the best, and art should represent the adventurer, not the gluttonious land baron overtaxing his citizens. Not in the PHB at least, nor the monster manual. Robert the Glutton, should appear as art in his adventure to show players.

To borrow again from recent fiction, "to escape the zombies, you don't have to be the fastest you only need to be faster than the next guy."

It is not about depicting what a player would look like, but what a PC should look like in its environment. D&D does not have the football so Bill the technician sit in NORAD eating Dunkin all day waiting to push a button to send the launch code approval. It has "people" that must be in decent form to actually survived.
 

LesserThan

Explorer
Because back in 1997, you wouldn't hear very many people say that humans could be none or both when it comes to gender. For the most part, the popular narrative was that you were a man or woman and there's was nothing inbetween. I don't believe this statement was something you saw about humans in the game. You understand why in 1997 this might have connected with some people, right?
Yes you would hear that. There was a famous case on TV, 60 minutes or sonething, going over people born as eunics, none, and hermaphrodites, both sets of sexual organs, and other abnonalities and birth defects like conjoined twins. People knew they existed.

Are you telling me LGBT has completely ignored these people today and abandoned those extremely small minority of people actually born with physical sex organ abnormalities? I sure hope not!
 

Humans can be either, none, or both as well. So I am missing what tiefling is connecting with LGBT still.
1997 non-binary wasn't really a concept understood by many, and I can read that sentence is ambiguous between gender identity or biological sex. Certainly one interpretation is that because Tieflings are "mutants" being Intersex is possibly more common than Humans, including the type of Intersex (Intersex can refer to people that have different chromosomes than what their body type is associated with) that's described by the no longer accepted term "hermaphrodite".
 
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