Hopping in late, sorry if this was already covered.
If 6e is going to be more inclusive; it's time to hit the third rail: classes.
Assuming we keep classes in D&D, there are a few names that need rethinking.
- Barbarian: "a person from an alien land, culture, or group believed to be inferior, uncivilized, or violent" The class has all the negative connotations that we have associated with Orcs and other "savage" humanoids.
I agree the class plays up the savage trope a bit too highly, I think Ranger and Barbarian should probably be merged but not for cultural reasons. I just don't think there is enough design space for Ranger anymore, squeezed between Barbarian, Fighter, Druid, Bard, and Rogue. It's too narrow of a design space. Nobody wants to play Davy Crockett or Daniel Boone anymore. Very few still playing grew up watching horse operas and glorifying the Indian Wars anymore, and even fewer want to relive that. That's why Ranger tends to become "the archer class" or "the pet class" or "the two weapon fighting class" and none of those are enough to make a class around. I'd rather just see a class for
a warrior from a wilderness heritage. By merging Barbarian and Ranger, you can have that and the character can choose to be either from a native tribe or otherwise.
However, I don't think the idea of "not problematic" is "no cultural references at all". I think that's the way of a generic RPG death. When you strip out everything from the setting from your classes, you risk disconnecting your campaign setting from your mechanics entirely. That will make it difficult to translate the mechanics in the book to the setting you're playing with. I think that's what made Dark Sun so compelling and interesting, while Planescape had interesting, but nearly impenetrable lore that it was almost impossible to run a campaign for. Dark Sun rewrote all the classes to fit the setting. Planescape had this massively complex world, and then took the regular classes and PCs from FR and Greyhawk and tried to fit them into this weirdly shaped box they weren't built for.
- Druid: Very culturally specific and doesn't have any connection to shapechanging nature-priests in game. In addition, it refers to a living religion (as part of the neopagan/Wiccan tradition).
Eh, I don't think so. The witch-cult hypothesis is pretty heavily discredited by historians at this point, regardless of how pervasive it remains in some Wiccan circles. Wicca is an early/mid 20th century religion. I'm not saying we don't have to respect modern Wiccans or that it's not a legitimate religion, but Druid isn't trying to represent modern Wicca.
Furthermore, even if that weren't the case I don't think that Druid is a disrespectful treatment. Druid, Bard, and all the other elements from Celtic and Gaelic traditions are portrayed positively even if it's not exactly how every historical record presents them. It doesn't portray druids as evil, savage, etc. It's portrayed as a
different tradition, and not one that is any less valid. They don't include human sacrifice or any of the depraved things the Romans accused them of.
Simply put, I think if Druid is problematic in it's presentation, then Cleric is as well.
- Monk: Obviously, a stand-in for Shaolin/Eastern mysticism, it is a sliver of all the OA troublesome tropes put in a single class.
- Paladin: Probably the least offensive of the list, but very specific to a certain time/era and deserves to remain a class about as much as samurai, cavalier/chevalier, and any other single order of warriors does.
Again, I don't find these disrespectful. Merely stating that they were inspired by pop culture tropes isn't enough to
remove the class entirely.
Orcs as inherently evil is disrespectful because it portrays a race using the same dehumanizing terms and tropes that were used to dehumanize countless people in human history. It's problematic because it's dehumanizing, race-based violence. The problem is the dehumanization and the violence. We shouldn't accept dehumanization as a passe element of our games. We should not accept race-based violence justified by dehumanization from ostensibly good characters. But there needs to be something that problematic to actually be problematic. "That's from a different culture" isn't enough. "That's potentially offensive to some theoretical group" isn't enough. It's got to actually portray the culture negatively (e.g., Vistani portrayal in CoS) or misappropriate it to an extent that harms the original cultural.
Monk might be based on the Kung Fu TV series, and Paladin based on Three Hearts Three Lions, but that doesn't mean that it's impossible to have a wuxia-inspired class, or impossible to have Song of Roland inspired knights. It's not like depictions of wuxia from Chinese pop culture (or Japanese depictions of ninja or samurai) are particularly devoid of tropes, either. Arguably, the inclusion of Monk makes D&D
more inclusive because it means that characters from wuxia have a place in the D&D setting. The key is whether or not you're respectful about it.
If it's not disrespectful, I find it hard to discard it due to cultural misappropriation. If
merely using a historical culture's traditions is reason enough to stop using something, then
the entire speculative fiction genre falls apart. Indeed, much of
fiction and non-fiction starts to fall apart if we start to require perfect cultural authenticity from creators. If we're going to require perfect authenticity in order to create any form of art, then that's a real problem. It's got to be more toxic than "that's not explicitly from the creators' personal heritage." We're not doing cultures any favors by
not incorporating their beliefs or ideas or expressions. It's putting them on a pedestal like a museum piece and letting them rot. It's excluding them from being an acceptable part of other cultures. We must accept that there is a healthy and positive way to include elements from other cultures in our creative works. Look at the response to
Ghosts of Tsushima. Toshihiro Nagoshi goes out of his way to talk about decisions that Sucker Punch were able to make as an American company which a Japanese company wouldn't make. This is the value of adapting material from other cultures. If you do it respectfully, you can create something of value to
both cultures in ways that neither could accomplish alone.
And I don't think we actually want to use things without changing anything. I think we would reject a game that only included cultural elements if presented as accurately as possible. For example, how do we balance the fact that women were historically not included in the ranks of knighthood with our modern ideas of gender equality? There's no way you're going to publish a game in 2020 that says "women can't be knights in this fantasy world." Obviously, we already know that it's acceptable to adapt that part of historic culture to fit ours. It's possible to do that and
still be respectful. It's certainly possible to do the same elsewhere.
Improving the game going forward is not a game of "I can identify cultural influences" combined with whack-a-mole to eliminate every single one. That's just a reactionary response. It's missing the point of inclusivity. Missing the point of progressivism. It's going through the motions without caring about the meaning or context of what you're looking at. It's saying, "Mike Mearls isn't an Asian so he can't make a Monk. He's a Christian so he can't make a Druid or a Bard," etc. That's not progressive. It's just proscriptive. It does exactly what it shouldn't: boil down the author into
what they are and use that as the only lens for determining the authenticity of their creation. Authenticity in art is important, but cultural authenticity is not the only kind of authenticity there is. It's not the sum total of who a creator is or what a creation is. Authenticity is extraordinarily complex. Boiling it down to judging the race, nationality, religion, and personal heritage of the authors is just as problematic as taking real world races, nationalities, religions, and personal heritages and essentializing them in a work without any respect paid beyond the stereotypes and surface level trappings.