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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Zappo" data-source="post: 509262" data-attributes="member: 633">Re: Re: Re: Re: Does DnD encourage racist thinking?I understand your position. But I think that, conversely, it could be argued that D&D discourages "RL racism" because it shows very clearly that its "correct racism" is based in objective facts that any adventuring party can easily verify.Thus teaching the players that you need facts to back a stereotype, or drop it.This leads to another problem, as you noted. Many people take racist thinking as objective facts. IMO, that is part of a much wider problem, bigger than racism, probably bigger than anything else, that will likely plague humanity forever, ie. lack of independent thinking, lack of desire for proof when we're afraid to be proven wrong. But that's an entirely different problem. And D&D and RPGs in general encourage independent thinking.Because D&D has too many exceptions, making the whole thing messy. Some outsiders crossbreed with almost anything, for example; dragons too; polymorph spells allow anything to crossbreed with anything; and in general with magic you can throw all rules out of the window.In any case, it doesn't matter at all whether orcs are technically a different species from humans or not; IRL, racism existed much before classification. What matters is that orcs can be clearly distinguished from humans by physical features, and orcs are objectively evil in the vast majority of cases (of course, it could be argued that killing something that just might be good is a bad thing - but that's another matter entirely).</blockquote>

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