WotC Dungeons & Dragons Fans Seek Removal of Oriental Adventures From Online Marketplace

[Jack Hooligan]

It seems RPGs in general are on shaky ground if we, as a society, decide to keep going down this path where identity is our defining trait. I mean, by nature RPGs are games where the participants play with identities. How identities are used by the players is drawn from the players' experience and imagination. This is all going to vary widely from table to table and player to player. It seems almost impossible to assign any sort of definitive rules to operate under this cloud. Everything will need to be optional. I don't envy RPG companies in the coming years, but hopefully my read on all this is wrong.

 

[SkidAce]

It seems RPGs in general are on shaky ground if we, as a society, decide to keep going down this path where identity is our defining trait. I mean, by nature RPGs are games where the participants play with identities. How identities are used by the players is drawn from the players' experience and imagination. This is all going to vary widely from table to table and player to player. It seems almost impossible to assign any sort of definitive rules to operate under this cloud. Everything will need to be optional. I don't envy RPG companies in the coming years, but hopefully my read on all this is wrong.

Interesting thought.

 

[Lanefan]

This, please! Put your vikings in the east, braving monsoons and air dragons! ... Work out the implications, and you might get something original.

You might, but they wouldn't be Vikings any more.

In the days before air conditioning and central heating, a culture was heavily influenced - if not outright defined - by the land it lived on and the climate it lived in. Land and climate set the look of their buildings, the manner and style - and material - of their dress, their cultural habits, and in many ways influenced their language among many other things.

The Norse, who lived on a harsh land in a cold climate, had little real choice other than raid-and-trade (and-or explore) if their culture was to survive and perpetuate. So, they became very good at raiding and trading; and were arguably among the best-ever explorers (the Polynesians being the other) particularly in both cases given the ships they had to work with.

And note what happened when Norse did find a more forgiving land and climate in which to settle, in what's now northern France: they very quickly became Normans, an almost completely different culture whose only real connection with Vikings was ancestry.

 

[Bohandas]

Four examples of specific power dynamics are put forward:

• Law and Violence: if an adopter can freely perform a cultural expression while its originator faces legal persecution for doing so, that's appropriation
• Ceremony and Sanctity: if an adopter uses a cultural expression in a way that would be considered profane by its originator, that's appropriation
• Choice and Necessity: if an adopter doesn't understand the history behind the cultural expression they're performing, that's appropriation
• Money and Exposure: if an adopter can make more money or earn more fame off of a cultural expression than an originator can due to social privilege and better connections in society, that's appropriation

• 
  I would think the issue most likely to actually come up would be dumbing down. Like, a cheap knockoff of some cultural element becomes popular, causing authentic expressions to become difficult to locate amid the sea of schlock.

 

[Bohandas]

It's from the shared Latinate (aka Romance) languages. Amerique latine.

Then why aren't the French referred to as Latin? That's in the same family of languages.

 

[Chaosmancer]

But at what point is something a generally recognized and incorrect new thing, and at what point is it a terrible stereotype?

SNIP

Life is always more complicated. And no matter how complicated and nuanced you want to make something, I can guarantee you that someone, somewhere, can make it even more complicated and nuanced.

I can agree with that last statement, and I don't have an answer for the first. Honestly, if I did, I would be solving massive global problems and I ain't that smart.

But, just because I don't have a perfect answer and we can't be perfect, doesn't mean we shouldn't try to be better. And it doesn't mean that we can't recognize when something still needs to be worked on and improved.

I'd agree with you fully if this were a book on actual Asia. But it's not. It's a book on a fantasy stereotyped movie Asia

It's not art's or entertainment's job to educate people. It's school. If at school you did not learn enough after primary school to know that not all Asians have long thin moustaches and leap from tree to tree fighting, then it's due to improve the school system, not to rely on a comics, movies or a RPG supplement to learn things.

Dude, I work as a substitute teacher. School doesn't teach almost anything about the Far East.

I think they teach that the Great Wall of China exists, and that china had a lot of wars and emperors. Then the Dutch brought guns to Japan and they fought World War II.

Everything I've learned about Far East history beyond that (even on the history test I took to get my license) was from self-research. And not even good self-research, I will fully admit.


But, to stop complaining about the American School system for a second, while I don't think it is the job of the entertainment industry to educate us, I also don't think they should be excused for lazy writing or bad stereotypes. We can hold entertainment to a slightly higher standard than that.

Of course I'm happy that things change and are no longer done the way they were, be assured by this. i keep seeing a battle over a fictional product made 35 years ago a hollow battle. A wrong battle, maybe, when a virtuous one is to encourage new material that will of course be more fit to the modern world.

That is literally what people are talking about. That we should encourage new, better material.

 

[Enevhar Aldarion]

Do you guys remember that great Occidental Adventures campaign sourcebook released during the heyday of AD&D? Oh man, that was a great book.

It had Vikings, Charlemagne's Paladins, Arthurian lore woven with Celtic myth, Europe's Elizabethan age, Ancient Rome, Ancient Greece, the Crusades, even the colonization of North America. Everything I wanted in a sourcebook about the exotic and savage Sunset Lands of the Occident! All in 144 pages. Can you imagine? No need to publish, say, eight 96-page sourcebooks detailing each topic. That would be crazy. It's all in here, covered accurately and sensitively, of course. It's like 700 pages condensed down into gaming goodness, pandering to the stereotypes we know and love, without getting bogged down in any icky nuance.

Sounds like Forgotten Realms, or several other settings for various game systems, just by a more generic name. And yes, Oriental Adventures is a generic, fairly boring name. I wonder what it would have been called if it had not come out in the glory days of martial arts and samurai movies?

 

[Sadras]

Ancient Rome isn't the monopoly of just their Italian descendants, you know. There is a reason there's a "Latin" in Latinoamerica...

Nope!
Like other posters said it is about the commonality of the romance languages and the religion.

And if you want to play this angle (which is factually incorrect) then any Italian, Spaniard, Romanian....etc can stereotype the crap out of Latinamerica and doesn't need sensitivity readers since hey everyone is Roman now! You really cannot have it both ways.

 

[Voadam]

I posted this link before in the thread, but it kind of got lost in the boise, and after giving it another read, I feel that it's a lot more relevant to this discussion than simply just as a footnote. So have it again:

How to Change Your Conversations About Cultural Appropriation — James Mendez Hodes

This article discusses cultural appropriation. More precisely, it discusses discussions about cultural appropriation, which stress me out more than any other cultural consulting topic. The question of whether a given expression is or is not cultural appropriation, and the corollary question of wheth

jamesmendezhodes.com

In particular, note the distinction between cultural exchange and cultural appropriation:



It's the presence of this power imbalance that separates exchange from appropriation. When cultural expressions are respectfully exchanged and syncretized between two groups of relatively equal sociocultural standing, that's completely fine, something to be celebrated even. It's the introduction of a sociocultural power imbalance that starts making the exchange questionable, and thus appropriation.

Four examples of specific power dynamics are put forward:

• Law and Violence: if an adopter can freely perform a cultural expression while its originator faces legal persecution for doing so, that's appropriation
• Ceremony and Sanctity: if an adopter uses a cultural expression in a way that would be considered profane by its originator, that's appropriation
• Choice and Necessity: if an adopter doesn't understand the history behind the cultural expression they're performing, that's appropriation
• Money and Exposure: if an adopter can make more money or earn more fame off of a cultural expression than an originator can due to social privilege and better connections in society, that's appropriation

I'd say that Number 4 is the big one when it comes to discussing cultural exchange and appropriation in print media, including tabletop RPGs. This Oriental Adventures kerfuffle is but one example of this. When an adopter -- in this scenario, White American game designers at big companies -- can be more successful selling products that borrow another culture's expression than a creator of that originator culture -- in this scenario, BIPOC game designers at smaller studios -- can hope to do, that's cultural appropriation.

It's a problem, but it's not a big problem if the creators are respectful of the roots of their work, and give credit where credit is due. I'm not gonna hate on Elvis just because Black artists were doing rock and roll before him. But if that respect and appreciation isn't being given, and instead the appropriative work is mocking or profaning that oppressed originator, then we have a big problem.

So I read the linked article.

I'd say number 2, ceremony and sanctity is potentially the most significant one where the appropriator can do harm. Active offensive caricatures that otherize the originator group such as the former chief Wahoo logo for the Cleveland Indians. I disagree that it needs to be Sanctity based though, I would say any large scale racist adoption and degradation would be problematic in this way, regardless of the level of sanctity feeling.

The others only show unfairness through privilege (which can be more serious, but because of the violence on the underprivileged, not because the privileged are doing them active wrong).

For instance the wrong in the racial disparity of violence against teens wearing hoodies is not that White teens are not at a significant risk of getting attacked for wearing them, it is that Black ones are. The universality of hooded sweatshirts is a good thing. The cultural exchange is generally good. The only harm of the appropriator is in making the underlying existing privilege disparity visible and so more felt by the originator.

The underlying harms of 1, 3, and 4 are not really made better by having appropriators not appropriate under this definition. The only apparent good of not appropriating would be in papering over the visibility of the disparity. The underlying problem is the oppression of the originators in these situations, not the cultural appropriation here.

I was also quite put off by the author's hypothetical

If I were at a party at your place, and a song were playing that I didn’t like, and I told you as much—not telling you what the reason was, maybe I thought it was overplayed, maybe I just thought it was annoying—you’d probably skip to the next track without a thought. If instead I told you that I didn’t like the song because I thought it was offensive, and you strongly disagreed, then you might be less likely to skip to the next track. I might have to beat you in a tiny debate first. I dunno.

Telling the host of a party that you do not like a song they are playing and then expecting them to literally stop the music for everybody no questions asked does not seem a reasonable expectation.

It comes across as an entitled and self-centered expectation.

 

[Sadras]

By definition, generalizations are convenient, mutable, and generally harmless, whereas stereotypes are lazy, stubborn, and harmful.

Have you ever heard the phrase
You are generalizing?

I'd say that would be lazy and harmful, and possibly reflect some stubbornness.