With WotC's recent statement on making the game more inclusive in regards to racial issues, I should have predicted this would happen next.
Dungeons & Dragons Fans Seek Removal of Oriental Adventures From Online Marketplace
The 1st Edition "Oriental Adventures" is probably one of the worst titles in the back catalog for its treatment of race and culture, but it is far from the only problematic title. Should WotC remove the 1E "Oriental Adventures" rulebook from the DriveThruRPG.com marketplace? How about the 3E version? Other products that built on Oriental Adventures? What other titles?
Personally, I don't feel that the book should be removed entirely, but something does need to be done to acknowledge the problematic aspects of the title. I'd take a page from the HBO Max streaming service. HBO Max temporarily removed the movie "Gone with the Wind" recently due to the world's current focus on racial issues. However, they have restored the film to the catalog with an introductory disclaimer basically saying the film is important in a historical context but, yeah, pretty racist.
I would like to see WotC do something similar with "Oriental Adventures" and other problematic titles. Add a disclaimer at the beginning of the digital book explaining explicitly the problematic elements of the book. I would also have all profits from the book's sales go to a charity, preferably some charity dealing with Asian American racial issues.
What do you think?
Well unfortunately I do not have either the AD&D Oriental Adventures book, nor the time to go through their whole 26 hours commentary/criticism on it, at least not at the moment but I can try eventually watch at least part of it. So far I watched only an hour or so between the first episode and the 3rd edition Oriental Adventures
artwork commentary, too little for a meaningful opinion but at least I can share my first impressions.
The group's criticism seems to be particularly focused of the facts that Oriental Adventures is:
- far from a realistic depiction of asian people, histories and cultures
- a jumbled mish-mash of different unrelated asian cultures
I don't know if they realize that these 2 are, and have always been, characteristics of D&D as a whole and certainly not limited to Oriental Adventures.
D&D Clerics are nothing about western religious clergy. Paladins are utterly terrible if taken as a representation of crusaders, templars or whatever someone might think they were originally inspired by. Warlocks are not realistic example of historical witchcraft. Bards? Druids? Barbarians? Many weapons and armors of the game are not really realistic. The economy, demographics, ecology of the game are bordering the miseducational, if a kid ever tries to think about learning something about "european life in the middle ages" from D&D, they will seriously mess up their school results. It would be nice to sometimes play a more historically realistic RPG, but D&D has never been it, it's a
fantasy inspired by popular tales and folklore rather than history.
As for the mish-mash, again D&D is a blatant kitchen sink of everything they could think about... not even folklore from different countries but even from different
millennia. There's monsters from greek mythology to celtic tales to 20th century horror. We also know some weapons and armors are from different historical periods.
Both of these characteristics can bother a lot of people, it's a very legitimate criticism, but they are not about Oriental Adventures exclusively.
Now where the group is definitely right, is in the fact that Oriental Adventures was clearly designed for a US/European audience. Perhaps TSR wasn't even thinking at that time that they would have sold the book in China or Japan or Korea. That is why the book emphasises so much the "elsewhere", already in the preface talking of taking the players to "exotic" places, and failing to acknowledge that already at that time of the publication there were lots of people in the US with chinese/korean/etc. origin by the way. Now times are different, and I can totally support the idea of RPG books being (re)written for a truly
global audience, not just for the prototypical white american straight male, but that certainly doesn't mean it must abide to historical realism.