D&D General Let He Who Is Without Sin Cast the First Magic Missile: Why Gygax Still Matters to Me

[payn]

I just don't like the idea that we are going to condemn great works of the past to the dustbin out of a desire for them to be as pure as we are.

Wow, you completely and utterly missed the point.

 

[Bedrockgames]

Wow, you completely and utterly missed the point.

If so I am sorry. What point were you making? My reading of your post was we don't need the originators of these ideas anymore (i.e. you can do Lovecraft without going back to Lovecraft)

 

[O-Castitatis-Lilium]

So it cannot do those things--y'know, the like dozen different cultural backdrops I referenced. How does that not explicitly reject the idea that it's a toolkit?

Shouldn't we be showing people how the toolkit type stuff can be done? Or is this another example of throwing DMs to the wolves and expecting them to come back with pelts?

So..I'm a little lost on what you are after then. I tried reading through your discussion, but it seems like you are upset that we don't have different places to explore culture wise. We use to back in the day. Kara-Tur was the Eastern influence, Maztica was the Aztec and Myan...and I think something else, Zakhara was the Middle Eastern influence, Katashaka that was the African influence, and I'm sure there are more, those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head. If you are looking for something like that, then use the old books and stuff. The only issue is, you won't get these things today, they would be considered "problematic". Anything written like that today is considered problematic it seems. I digress, If you want, use those; sure they played into some stereotypes, but you can work past those and change those to your liking, but they have been there since the beginning, it's only recently they have stopped being used. I say this hoping I understand what the argument is here. If not, disregard everything I just said lol.

 

[Micah Sweet]

So..I'm a little lost on what you are after then. I tried reading through your discussion, but it seems like you are upset that we don't have different places to explore culture wise. We use to back in the day. Kara-Tur was the Eastern influence, Maztica was the Aztec and Myan...and I think something else, Zakhara was the Middle Eastern influence, Katashaka that was the African influence, and I'm sure there are more, those are the ones I can remember off the top of my head. If you are looking for something like that, then use the old books and stuff. The only issue is, you won't get these things today, they would be considered "problematic". Anything written like that today is considered problematic it seems. I digress, If you want, use those; sure they played into some stereotypes, but you can work past those and change those to your liking, but they have been there since the beginning, it's only recently they have stopped being used. I say this hoping I understand what the argument is here. If not, disregard everything I just said lol.

I would and do definitely look to 1e and 2e for that stuff.

 

[jayoungr]

Of course it could do those things, but thats not, as you pointed out, what D&D is.

I'm confused by what you mean here. When you say "That's not what D&D is," are you referring to the fact that most monsters are from European-based folklore? If so, there's no reason you can't add new and different monsters--in fact, that's been expected ever since the early days.

 

[Scribe]

I'm confused by what you mean here. When you say "That's not what D&D is," are you referring to the fact that most monsters are from European-based folklore?

Yeah you'll have to go up a few responses between he and I, but he described what D&D is, and is then lamenting what it is not.

Which is fine, I dont like what D&D is turning into, but there's only 2 options.

1. Make what you want to see.
2. Leave and play something else.

 

[Bedrockgames]

I think D&D's drawing on folklore is pretty wide net actually. But it is usually filtered through the quirkiness of D&D and its gaming conceits (i.e. The Minotaur because minotaurs, the Rakshasa is nothing like an actual Rakshasa, etc). But I also tended to see the setting potential as pretty kitchen sink

 

[EzekielRaiden]

At least on the subject of Lovecraft, while his work remains what it was--and has some very execrable stuff in it--the man himself disavowed his earlier views near the end of his life. Whether you consider that disavowal sufficient to make up for the bad actions beforehand is, of course, up to you. What I read of his self-description came across as someone who had realized the error of his ways and regretted his past actions, but didn't feel there was much he could do about it other than try to live differently. He was still a product of his time and likely still had some racist beliefs, but he had clearly become quite a bit better--arguably about as good as one might expect in the 30s, when 9as others have noted) eugenics and such were sincerely advocated policies.

And then he died a couple years later because his pathological fear of doctors meant he'd avoided being examined for years, and by the time he finally relented, his cancer was well beyond any treatments we could apply even today, let alone in 1937.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

The only issue is, you won't get these things today, they would be considered "problematic". Anything written like that today is considered problematic it seems.

Because you don't actually understand what was wrong with the original products to begin with. Al-Qadim is the closest to being alright, but even it has some serious stumbles. There is nothing wrong--nothing inherently "problematic"--about writing a setting that is inspired by non-European cultures, mythologies, or histories. The guys who made Avatar: the Last Airbender, which is very clearly and intentionally drawing on Eastern cultures and ethnicities (the Fire Nation is fascist Imperial Japan; the Earth Kingdom is like Han Dynasty China; two of the three Water Tribes are almost explicitly Inuit peoples; and the Air Nomads are Tibetan Buddhists, alongside stuff like the Sun Warriors who are clearly Mesoamerican-like), yet both of them are middle-aged white dudes.

The difference is that they did the work to make it respectful and serious. They hired legit actual experts on many different topics, including getting people who could actually write both modern and ancient Chinese so that written documents would, in fact, be written correctly; they had an on-staff martial arts expert, Sifu Kisu, to whom they dedicated an actual in-world character (Master Piandao); and they had folks actually critically analyze their work.

In the 70s and 80s--hell, even in the 90s, albeit not quite as badly--foreign cultures were used exploitatively. It didn't matter what those people actually thought or did, what their histories or beliefs or practices actually were. It just mattered that it had the veneer of exoticism, of foreign-ness. Kara-Tur is, unfortunately, rife with Orientalist tropes and content. They were not "problematic" because they examined a culture other than the authors' own; they were inconsiderate (or, more commonly, outright disrespectful) because they treated those cultures like "exotic"/silly/strange caricatures to be pantomimed for a little while and then set aside.

I digress, If you want, use those; sure they played into some stereotypes, but you can work past those and change those to your liking, but they have been there since the beginning, it's only recently they have stopped being used. I say this hoping I understand what the argument is here. If not, disregard everything I just said lol.

My frustration is that we have a self-perpetuating cycle. FR is the most popular setting, so little to nothing gets published for anything else, so FR is the most popular setting, so little to nothing gets published for anything else, so...

D&D fans pride themselves, almost to the point of hubris, on the fact that D&D is unlike video games or even most board games, by being allegedly open to the entire panoply of human imagination. Anything you can possibly conceive! But instead we grind endlessly on the same incredibly tired repetitive concepts, with the only meaningful variation in the past 50 years being the degree to which you ascribe to cynical realpolitik or idealistic monarchism.

I want these other things to be shown off in the core books, to be actively engaged with in the DMG, to be published in core materials, because that's literally how we break this self-perpetuating cycle. We get people more interested in more diverse ideas by SHOWING them how to make use of more diverse ideas. And in the doing, we make not just D&D but TTRPGs in general richer, better, fuller--because they embrace more of what it means to be human...or something other than human.

 

[Micah Sweet]

Because you don't actually understand what was wrong with the original products to begin with. Al-Qadim is the closest to being alright, but even it has some serious stumbles. There is nothing wrong--nothing inherently "problematic"--about writing a setting that is inspired by non-European cultures, mythologies, or histories. The guys who made Avatar: the Last Airbender, which is very clearly and intentionally drawing on Eastern cultures and ethnicities (the Fire Nation is fascist Imperial Japan; the Earth Kingdom is like Han Dynasty China; two of the three Water Tribes are almost explicitly Inuit peoples; and the Air Nomads are Tibetan Buddhists, alongside stuff like the Sun Warriors who are clearly Mesoamerican-like), yet both of them are middle-aged white dudes.

The difference is that they did the work to make it respectful and serious. They hired legit actual experts on many different topics, including getting people who could actually write both modern and ancient Chinese so that written documents would, in fact, be written correctly; they had an on-staff martial arts expert, Sifu Kisu, to whom they dedicated an actual in-world character (Master Piandao); and they had folks actually critically analyze their work.

In the 70s and 80s--hell, even in the 90s, albeit not quite as badly--foreign cultures were used exploitatively. It didn't matter what those people actually thought or did, what their histories or beliefs or practices actually were. It just mattered that it had the veneer of exoticism, of foreign-ness. Kara-Tur is, unfortunately, rife with Orientalist tropes and content. They were not "problematic" because they examined a culture other than the authors' own; they were inconsiderate (or, more commonly, outright disrespectful) because they treated those cultures like "exotic"/silly/strange caricatures to be pantomimed for a little while and then set aside.


My frustration is that we have a self-perpetuating cycle. FR is the most popular setting, so little to nothing gets published for anything else, so FR is the most popular setting, so little to nothing gets published for anything else, so...

D&D fans pride themselves, almost to the point of hubris, on the fact that D&D is unlike video games or even most board games, by being allegedly open to the entire panoply of human imagination. Anything you can possibly conceive! But instead we grind endlessly on the same incredibly tired repetitive concepts, with the only meaningful variation in the past 50 years being the degree to which you ascribe to cynical realpolitik or idealistic monarchism.

I want these other things to be shown off in the core books, to be actively engaged with in the DMG, to be published in core materials, because that's literally how we break this self-perpetuating cycle. We get people more interested in more diverse ideas by SHOWING them how to make use of more diverse ideas. And in the doing, we make not just D&D but TTRPGs in general richer, better, fuller--because they embrace more of what it means to be human...or something other than human.

But the problem is (IMO) that you want someone else to do that work for your benefit. And not just anyone else, but the profit-driven market leader, who has no financial motive to do anything you're asking for.