How to address racism in a fantasy setting without it dragging down the game?

[uzirath]

Do plants count? Plants in the D&D setting can talk ('speak with plants') and are therefore sentient. If those races don't count under their racial definition, why are you allowed to murder plants and animals in order to consume them?

While I know many GMs and groups who love thinking about all of this, it's helpful to note that it is not required. I've been running "gray area" campaigns for decades and nobody has ever asked about the rights of plants. (Though I have had multiple animist PCs who routinely "thank the spirits" of plants and animals before harvesting or hunting them.)

When they are talking about "a specific race", what counts - orcs, beholders, mind flayers, red dragons, vampires, or glabrezu? Are all of those treated equally? Are all presumed innocent until proven guilty? If not, then why not?

The belief system will need to seem plausible and believable.

For many play styles, it also acceptable to build the world as you play. You could go through the bestiary and figure out the status of every creature, or you could just have a general idea in your mind and let the details emerge in play. All I need to know is that these people believe that orcs are irrevocably evil. I don't have to predetermine whether that is True. I can wait and see. When players ask a surprising question about the world, I often turn it back to the group to decide as a whole. "What do you all think? What would make the world more interesting and fun to explore?"

 

[Stoutstien]

While I know many GMs and groups who love thinking about all of this, it's helpful to note that it is not required. I've been running "gray area" campaigns for decades and nobody has ever asked about the rights of plants. (Though I have had multiple animist PCs who routinely "thank the spirits" of plants and animals before harvesting or hunting them.)



For many play styles, it also acceptable to build the world as you play. You could go through the bestiary and figure out the status of every creature, or you could just have a general idea in your mind and let the details emerge in play. All I need to know is that these people believe that orcs are irrevocably evil. I don't have to predetermine whether that is True. I can wait and see. When players ask a surprising question about the world, I often turn it back to the group to decide as a whole. "What do you all think? What would make the world more interesting and fun to explore?"

Plant rights came up for one table of mine after a player found the formula for pot of awakening. He started a side gig selling awaken house plants to the wealthy but concerns where raised of when any number of awaken plants became a race.

 

[Bohandas]

I think MST3k answered the question best:

"Repeat to yourself 'It's just a show, I should really just relax'"

 

[uzirath]

For example, you certainly could have ghouls have personhood, but you'd need to really work to make that meaningful.

This was tickling my memory for a while and I finally remembered why. The old GURPS 3e supplement, Fantasy Folk, had an awesome rendition of ghouls that could be handled multiple ways in the game world. We had a portion of a campaign focused on them that turned out to be massively fun. Two players chose to play ghouls, too.

Here are a few excerpts from the write-up:

The GM has great latitude in deciding how to play the Ghouls. They can fill any niche in the campaign . . . from an innocent, persecuted minority to slavering, man-eating monsters.

All races react to known Ghouls at a -4, except for Goblins, who react normally. Certain isolated human or nonhuman communities may also lack prejudice against Ghouls, at the GMs discretion.

Remember that individual PCs do not have to conform to racial prejudices about the Ghouls or any other race. However, any party that befriends Ghouls is well advised to keep it under its hat. Aiding Ghouls—or concealing knowledge of their existence—is a capital crime in most human lands.

I recall that in our game, the party generally supported "ghoul rights" and tried to do good by them. But, of course, there were also some vicious "evil" ghouls who made everything that much more difficult.

 

[Celebrim]

I recall that in our game, the party generally supported "ghoul rights" and tried to do good by them. But, of course, there were also some vicious "evil" ghouls who made everything that much more difficult.

Absolutely. It is possible to make ghouls into a basically benign race of beings that are no more evil than say scavenger beetles. They might even be useful, in some of the same ways scavenger beetles are useful - cleaning up filth which otherwise might become disease reservoirs. Perhaps ghouls only have a taste for carrion. Perhaps ghouls are more reclusive than they are aggressive. Perhaps ghouls aren't homogenizing at all. You might be uncomfortable to think Bob the Ghoul was eating grandma, but they didn't mean any harm by it (and most of the time, by the time it is rancid, Grandma doesn't need her body anymore anyway). In this conception, ghouls aren't inherently evil, they are just a bit disgusting (in what is likely a wholly subjective way). It would be perfectly possible for you to live in peace and harmony with the ghouls in your catacombs. It would be quite interesting to suggest that this race of ghouls was no more morally problematic than humanity. Indeed, you could even have the ghouls tend to be less vicious and aggressive in many ways than humans. Maybe ghouls never enjoy hurting anyone.

All of that is fine, but it requires drastically changing ghouls from what is normally meant by the word. Occasionally subverting expectations like that is fine, but I do personally get a little bothered when people start taking words and re-purposing them to mean whatever the like. With a word like "ghoul" for an imagined monster, there isn't really a lot of harm done. But I'd probably be even happier calling the Voblargs or some made up term, and then suggesting that "ghoul" was in fact a racial slur used against them, and that they were not in fact "ghouls" at all.

Humans are really bad at dealing with multiple words that have the same sound and spelling, and when you redefine things that's what you are actually doing. Those two tags "ghoul" point to incredibly different ideas, and the more that happens the harder it becomes to communicate or think clearly. So I would like people to think about that before just going with their clever plan. But again, "ghoul" is hardly a loaded term in the real world, so generally OK with that in this case.

 

[MichaelSomething]

Wouldn't the easiest route be to have the PCs fight the racists/bigots?

A bunch of racists humans (or whatever race is appropriate for your campaign) are gonna attack the Orc's improvisational jazz concert to benefit the local museum! Can a group of adventurers save the day?

 

[uzirath]

Humans are really bad at dealing with multiple words that have the same sound and spelling, and when you redefine things that's what you are actually doing. Those two tags "ghoul" point to incredibly different ideas, and the more that happens the harder it becomes to communicate or think clearly. So I would like people to think about that before just going with their clever plan. But again, "ghoul" is hardly a loaded term in the real world, so generally OK with that in this case.

Yeah, I've played in annoying campaigns where it feels like every word has been redefined: "trolls" are small winged fairies and "pixies" are hulking green brutes. Definitely obnoxious. As you allude to here, though, it's important to separate the meaning of words from whatever meaning D&D has ascribed to them. Dragons, for example, aren't necessarily "evil" in world mythology, so they have a broad range of plausible ethical outlooks. Maybe that's not a great example because there are also "good" dragons in D&D. How about goblins? Traditionally, they are evil in D&D, but that's not always true in common parlance and certainly not in folklore. In those cases, I enjoy mixing things up.

Perhaps this is connected to our conversation about the Yuan-Ti in the Consequences of playing "EVIL" races thread. Since the term "Yuan-Ti" doesn't have any existence outside of D&D (AFAIK), I don't think of the term having a firm definition beyond "snake people." I hadn't ever internalized the fluff. They featured in multiple AD&D campaigns that I played in after the publication of Dwellers of the Forbidden City, and they were usually evil, but not universally so. We definitely had subplots with "good" Yuan-Ti. Since so many GMs rewrite the fluff for races, and alignment has no crunchy bearing anymore, it seemed easy enough to envision them in alternate ways. After rereading the latest treatment in the Monster Manual, I can see why they seemed like an odd choice for moral rehabilitation.

 

[Celebrim]

Wouldn't the easiest route be to have the PCs fight the racists/bigots?

Absolutely! And, further, it would be even easier if you didn't complicate the discussion by introducing different species. By introducing different species, you are complicating the narrative by introducing potentially reasonable reasons why a race would be distrusted. You are also introducing the possibility that you are suggesting that a real world ethnic group is monstrous.

A bunch of racists humans (or whatever race is appropriate for your campaign) are gonna attack the Orc's improvisational jazz concert to benefit the local museum! Can a group of adventurers save the day?

Like for example, that particular association between jazz and orcs: I would not go there in my fiction.

Besides, orcs like Heavy Metal, as everyone knows.

 

[Celebrim]

Perhaps this is connected to our conversation about the Yuan-Ti in the Consequences of playing "EVIL" races thread. Since the term "Yuan-Ti" doesn't have any existence outside of D&D (AFAIK), I don't think of the term having a firm definition beyond "snake people."

Yes, I think it is.

Where I'm drawing the line here is the idea that we can keep the same origin or heritage of any given species, and the same biology of any given species, and the same modes of behavior of any given species, and then just suggest that there is no rational basis for describing that species as "Evil" in the setting.

I realize what some people are stumbling over is that they are moral relativists, so they don't believe good or evil or right or wrong have objective reality, so I have tried on occasion to move that discussion from the realm of fantasy to the realm of science fiction. In science fiction, we don't tend to treat good and evil as things having material reality, but we can still take an idea for a fantasy "evil race", move that idea to a science fiction setting, and end up with a moral problem where - regardless of whether you want to label that race objectively "evil" - the moral dilemma involved in killing orcs still applies and still has the same discussion around it. If Krogan (from Mass Effect) are Space Orcs, they are still probably "usually Chaotic Evil", and while there are example of noble Krogan there is still an important discussion in the game (and worth thinking about) with respect to how you deal with Krogan as a species. And we can follow this discussion further and further, by having science fiction species that aren't just equivalent to "space orcs", but "space vampires", "space dragons", "space demons" and what have you, where no peaceable accommodation is possible. If a hegmonizing nanite swarm is sentient, it doesn't imply that gives it the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

 

[gepetto]

The whole question is kinda silly and arbitrary no matter how you decide it really.

Firstly racism isnt even the right word. Racism is hating other ethnicities or cultures of your same species. These are different species. The analogy isnt mexicans and chinese, its dogs and cats, or sometimes even farther out, dogs and alligators.

If someone hates cats you dont say he's racist against cats.

With that out of the way if you get rid of always evil creatures, or even hint that they arent all evil you still have a problem with where you draw the line. Humanoid form? Societal instincts? knowledge of morality? mortality? sentience? Check with the AI people, or philosophers, we dont even have a good understanding of what sentience is. Much less morality. One persons good and true course of action is another persons abomination. So there you just have people killing each other over assumed worldviews rather then species directly.

There are god only knows how many creatures in the vast collection of monster manuals that have been printed. And you open the door to having to potentially re-define all of them. And how are the players to know which are which? Should every encounter begin with a parley flag to see if they can chat it out? Sounds lame as a game.

As for any organization preaching this philosophy. It would require monsters and monstrous races to be very rare in your world. Otherwise there wouldnt be any confusion about their nature. If something is common and no good ones are ever found then a group saying they might be good is just delusional, or stupid. And if good ones are known to be found then there wouldnt be any controversy in the idea and people proclaiming a different idea would be seen as the monsters. But if they're rare, maybe so rare as to be basically myth then there can be all kinds of debate about their nature and its perfectly reasonable.

So you definitely cant introduce it into the middle of a campaign without the peaceniks just looking like comic relief out of touch with reality.