D&D (2024) How did I miss this about the Half races/ancestries

[Faolyn]

As a matter of clarity I agree it should be in those entries. But I don't think it is a question of blame: they are fictional races. I don't need the books to tell me how to feel about elven bigotry, just to tell me it exists.

Why do they need to tell you it exists? You can't decide that for yourself? RPGs are all about the imagination; use yours to decide if one species hates another one for stupid, bigoted reasons.

Look, if companies are doing this with marketing in mind, people will naturally wonder how much of it was a decision based on the marketing potential. That isn't a good scenario for the people hired, and it is a problem if you are genuinely interested in advancing diversity and increasing empathy. If companies simply don't make it a point of the marketing (and to be clear I don't mean hide the fact that they have hired minority designers, but simply not make that the point or the focus of the marketing), then that doubt will not exist. I am saying market them like they would any other book

IF they are doing this with marketing in mind. Why do you assume that it's the case?

You keep trying to claim that "some people" will think this, but why should you care what "some people" think? After all, "some people" are going to think that if they don't show that they're hiring a diverse team, it's suspicious. Do you care what those people think? Or do you only care about the opinions of people who think "the writer for these chapters is Ms. <Non-American Name>" is a turn-off?

When you keep saying "if", then--whether you mean to or not--what you're saying is that you think that the only reason a company would hire "those people" is to show them off.

So come up with a reason to not talk about the creative team that doesn't involve what "some people" may or may not think about it. I asked you to, even, and you wouldn't.

And what's really silly about this whole thing is that I'm pretty sure there's only been one book put out by WotC where they made a point of talking about the non-white writers--and that was Radiant Citadel, which was all about adventure locales not based on Faux Medieval Europe, but instead was about places based on other cultures. They were literally saying "we got people who know something about these cultures to write about them."

Which, I recall, is something you said should be done. "Turn the sensitivity editors into developers."

 

[Faolyn]

I haven't played Theros so I don't know. But it doesn't sound like the harsh post apocalyptic strong social fiction messaging setting that Dark Sun was (where I think you lose it's essential if you take out those ugly elements). Again though why can't we have these things? Not every setting is going to include them. But why take them off the table entirely here, or insist on a particular way of doing them? No one is using Dark Sun as an argument for slavery being a good thing. It is obviously not meant to be a moral good in that setting.

Dark Sun has, in addition to slavery, a lack of necessary resources--including water--magic that destroys the environment, incredibly powerful sorcerer-kings who demand complete obedience from their citizens, and tons of monsters with psychic abilities. That sounds pretty darn harsh to me, even without the slavery.

 

[Guest 85555]

And what's really silly about this whole thing is that I'm pretty sure there's only been one book put out by WotC where they made a point of talking about the non-white writers--and that was Radiant Citadel, which was all about adventure locales not based on Faux Medieval Europe, but instead was about places based on other cultures. They were literally saying "we got people who know something about these cultures to write about them."

Which, I recall, is something you said should be done. "Turn the sensitivity editors into developers."

I wasn't even thinking of that book actually. And I wasn't just thinking of WOTC. You see it frequently in online marketing (I don't think it is helpful to call out specific companies or books because I don't think it is fair to the designers and readers who worked on them---who aren't in charge of the marketing). But you see this when they hire sensitivity consultants and make a production of it, or when they hire writers from different groups and make that the focus. I am all for hiring people from different backgrounds, ethnicities and races. I think that is a good thing. But I think that gets watered down and is more likely to produce a sense that it wasn't done for the right reasons when the marketing prioritizes it so heavily

But again this was just an assumption I proposed at your request. You don't have to agree with it. If you disagree, fair enough. I would just ask that you not try to paint me in a light that isn't accurate to what I said.

I am under no illusion that I am certain to be correct here. This is just based on you asking for me to provide alternative assumption (which I pointed out I didn't think was really the point of what I was originally saying).

 

[Guest 85555]

Dark Sun has, in addition to slavery, a lack of necessary resources--including water--magic that destroys the environment, incredibly powerful sorcerer-kings who demand complete obedience from their citizens, and tons of monsters with psychic abilities. That sounds pretty darn harsh to me, even without the slavery.

Sure those are all environmental harshness, but I think the reaction slavery gets in these threads demonstrates it is the ultimate in terms of what humans can inflict on one another. So I would still say it adds a tremendously important aspect to the setting

 

[Chaosmancer]

Okay, I'm not playing the "break every post into a five posts" game anymore.

I would say the increasing focus on purifying language and media, and on seeming to only prioritize these issues. I would also say a framework that increasingly reads things which aren't the glorifications you describe as such.

I am not saying that these aren't important issues or that flagrantly offensive speech is something to give a pass. Just we have reached a point where fairly mild things are now being flagged as entirely unacceptable (potentially to the point that the things which are fundamental to the core play of the hobby are being problematized)

Vague statements are vague. "Purifying language" can be anything. I could "purify language" by not cussing. Most of the things I've seen you react to are things that are... slurs? So are you saying that it is bad to remove slurs from the game? Nope, because you follow that up with talking about "flagrantly offensive speech" and how removing that is fine. So, just slurs that you don't think are slurs, like the earlier discussion about "savage".

But, see, the term savage is often really unhelpful. For example, I recently learned that the "savage" native american tribes, who didn't like in big fancy stone cities like the "civilized" europeans had a trade network stretching half the continental US, to get stone from a specific mountain in the Northeast to people who used it. But, things like that don't get talked about in games that depict "savage tribes". No one talks about expansive trade networks, highly complex social structures, or anything else. Because by using the word "savage" they immediately lessen them into being less than the "civilized folk" who get trade netorks and complex social structures and all that. And the effect of that is pretty darn clear, because the "savage races" in DnD like Goblins, Orcs and Lizardfolk... have basically no culture to speak of. Most tribal societies in DnD are isolated, with no functioning economics, and no structure more advanced than "everyone listens to the chief". The term has actively harmed our ability to actually explore what these cultures could be like.

And, no, it isn't "just now" that people are noticing that the colonial themes in DnD are a problem. They've noticed it for a long time. There are just only now enough people noticing it that they aren't shouted down and ignored. And, again, shockingly it isn't very difficult to make perfectly fine games that don't fall into those problematic tropes.

No it really isn't. It is about controlling art, controlling RPG content and deciding for others what constitutes terrible (and it often seems that bar is set ridiculously low)

You can't control art. No one here can do that. What we can do is protest art that is stuck in the past and continuing to be terrible. No one has ever stopped a tribute band to Taylor Swift by saying that they find pop music derivative, uninspiring and bad.

And the bar is low. The bar is to stop using tired, old, and problematic terms and tropes. It isn't hard. And no one saying "WoTC shouldn't do this" really cares if a little 3rd party creator does. So no one is trying to control all RPG content online, they are talking about how the biggest company with the furthest reach should be more mindful. That's it.

I don't think anyone is advocating for this at all. If anything the people who are arguing against you would just want to see homosexual characters get to be full range of interesting choices any other group gets to be (including villains and degenerates because those are interesting but not limited to those). Obviously if someone makes a game that is essentially a diatribe against homosexuality that is a bad thing. The problem is things that aren't that are getting interpreted that way. And in the RPG space, things are getting extremely difficult for creatives to navigate because it is all about optics, not about intent, not about nuance.

You want them to have the full range... as long as we explicitly call out the bad part of the range.

Orcs can totally be heroes... just make sure you call them out as savage monsters who rape and pillage across the countryside, after all, we have to be fair and balanced. Meanwhile, how many elf, dwarf or halfling groups are called out as savage monsters whose only goal in life is to rape and pillage across the countryside?

And sure, maybe in a few decades we will feel the need to rebalance and depict everyone with negative lights, but right now? Right now there are some groups that almost never get depicted in a negative light because of who they are as a group, and there are some groups that have been depicted in a negative light because of who they are for decades. You don't clean up a flooded room by getting a mop. You get a sump pump and aggressively equalize the situation before you even start cleaning. That's the stage we are at. We aren't saying you can never have a homosexual villain, we are saying let's stop having homosexual villains who are vague enough in their reasons that they can be interpreted as being villains because they are homosexuals, since we had them explicitly evil because they were homosexuals for decades. Because you can't show that you are no longer falling into these same stereotypes by doing the exact same thing, but just being quieter about it.

Again, I never said the only way to do a good story or the only way to do a dark story was to have it be about racism and slavery. I said taking those things off the table as a choice is bad, and that they can be very interesting and effective choices. Not that they should be in everything.

But we take plenty of things off the table. There are many vile things we don't include in the core books. And slavery and racism are the go-to options for the books. We traditionally have, what? A dozen slaver races?

Drow, Duergar, Mindflayers, Genies (good and evil), Goblinoids, Giants, Dragons (only the evil ones), Aboleths, Neogi, Orcs, Yuan-Ti, Devils, Beholders. And most of the intelligent species I didn't mention either just eat people, are former slave races, or BOTH. Basically, if it isn't a player race and is intelligent, they are either slavers or former slave or just eat people.

So... can we reduce that? Can we take the slave stories down to like... Mindflayers, Dragons, Devils, Aboleths and Beholders? Can we reduce the number of former slave races? Because THAT is what people are asking for. Not that you can never depict slavery ever, but that maybe we could have less of it so we can have something more interesting? I think we could get rid of baked in racism entirely, the setting doesn't need to note "and all elves hate mixed-breed people" to be good or interesting. You could just have some NPCs do that and be fine.

 

[Guest 85555]

And what's really silly about this whole thing is that I'm pretty sure there's only been one book put out by WotC where they made a point of talking about the non-white writers--and that was Radiant Citadel, which was all about adventure locales not based on Faux Medieval Europe, but instead was about places based on other cultures. They were literally saying "we got people who know something about these cultures to write about them."

It is about relevance to the quality of the material I think. I don't think mentioning a person's expertise or relevant experience is bad for the marketing at all in a case like that (though it can be done in better and worse ways). I do have some discomfort with a tendency that has arisen to equate a persons skin tone with the culture in question or familiarity with it (not everyone who looks like people from a given place has experience with that place). But I think if someone grew up in a culture (or if their parents did and raised them in it), that could be relevant to a topic. I do worry about it becoming a requirement that people only write about the culture they can be said to represent (that is I think the dark turn this could take if people aren't careful).

 

[Faolyn]

I think it is pretty clear. I mean not reading peoples posts in the worst possible light. For example when I said they should do diversity but not make it part of the marketing (with a few sentences explaining what I meant). I think it was uncharitable to characterize my post as "So basically, keep the minorities in the background so it doesn't lower the property game's value."

I don't think so. You say you want there to be minorities working on these games, but at the same time, you don't want people to know it. You claim it's because of marketing, but who cares about that? WotC often talks about the writers and artists for their books, no matter who they are. Why should they not talk about people who just happen to not be white or male or straight?

No they are in fact frequently accused of it for things like saying orcs are not racist,

Did you ever read the description of orcs in Volo's?

See, nobody is saying orcs are racist. They're saying the way that orcs are depicted is frequently racist, that it uses the same terminology that many racists use.

or for not agreeing that orcs are stand ins for mongols,

Since that's how Tolkien described them...

or for disagreeing with points about how systemic racism operates in society (and to what degree).

Yes, I see how someone can be called a racist if they claim that certain modern inequities are not the result of systemic racism.

Or they are called such for saying something like "I think we can still include slavery in an RPG" (to which they may be accused of racism because the argument goes they are not welcoming).

Nope. At least in none of the arguments I saw, nobody said "you want slavery; ergo, you are a racist."

What I saw was people showing how it was harmful to real people, and also unnecessary, and other people saying "but they're fictional so it doesn't matter," which is incredibly dismissive.

 

[Guest 85555]

You can't control art. No one here can do that. What we can do is protest art that is stuck in the past and continuing to be terrible. No one has ever stopped a tribute band to Taylor Swift by saying that they find pop music derivative, uninspiring and bad.

People control art all the time. And protest is one of the more frequent methods to control art. I think people have a right to protest because that too is free expression, but if you are calling for art to be changed, stopped, censored, not published because you find it terrible, I think you are part of a process that can stop art or make it less accessible to people.

No music is going to be stopped by a mild criticism like it is derivative and uninspired. But if a musician earnestly tries to write a song about a racial topic, and lets say they are coming at it from a good angle, but it gets misperceived and people protest saying its racist...if that gains traction it could ruin the persons career, it could get it taken off the radio. I still remember the protests of the piss christ. I am religious. But I understood he had a right to express himself that way, and that he was making a point all the critics didn't seem to understand. The photograph I believe is still on display so it wasn't stopped by the protests but the artist received death threats, lost grant money, etc.

And the bar is low. The bar is to stop using tired, old, and problematic terms and tropes. It isn't hard. And no one saying "WoTC shouldn't do this" really cares if a little 3rd party creator does. So no one is trying to control all RPG content online, they are talking about how the biggest company with the furthest reach should be more mindful. That's it.

Again, a lot of these tropes, not everyone agrees they are problematic or tired. Many people find them useful, resonant, and misunderstood. I don't think a half elf is the problem people are making it out to be. I suspect lots of people agree with me on that. Same with slavery in dark sun, or killing monsters and taking their stuff, and evil orcs.

 

[Guest 85555]

I don't think so. You say you want there to be minorities working on these games, but at the same time, you don't want people to know it. You claim it's because of marketing, but who cares about that? WotC often talks about the writers and artists for their books, no matter who they are. Why should they not talk about people who just happen to not be white or male or straight?

Again, this isn't what I said. I never said they shouldn't mention it, and I specifically stated the designers shouldn't have to hide. If you want to keep talking about this point, keep going, but I have already explained to you that you are not accurately characterizing what I am saying in that post or what I believe.

 

[Guest 85555]

Since that's how Tolkien described them...

That doesn't make it racist to not see the trope as a stand in for mongols. At worst, it makes it inaccurate. I don't want to relitigate what Tolkien said as we covered that in a long closed thread, but for a lot of people what orcs mean doesn't stop with Tolkien.