D&D General Old School DND talks if DND is racist.

[Umbran]

That in each kingdom or empire, friend or enemy is a product not of how they look or their race, but of the group/culture they belong to? So on both sides in a war you'd have races of all types?

Yep. If you want to know who to stab and kill, you can look at their battle standard, not the skin they were born in.

 

[BookTenTiger]

Have you not gotten the point that globally attaching specific function to race is the problematic thing?

Racial monoculture seems a pretty cliche notion at this point, and without mass comunication, make very little sense over significant distances. Dramatic functions can be determined locally, where the PCs happen to be adventuring now, rather than globally.



Since the position has always been that humans were the infinitely flexible ones, and could have any type of culture, you probably should have been asking yourself that question before now.

This is why I think WotC should have a default setting for their PHB. Because they are describing cultures, having no default setting communicates the idea that these cultures are endemic to the races / lineages. With a specific culture, WotC could say something like: "In the land of Dicetopia, you will encounter orcs here, here, and here. In your own campaign world, they may serve a different role."

 

[Ruin Explorer]

If I join someone else's game I have a general understanding of how the world works unless they tell me they specifically override some details. We discuss things during session 0, but 80-90% of the game is going to work just like everyone else's game. Are there exceptions? Yes. But without a baseline assumption, you can't have exceptions. If I go to drive a car the layout of the dash, exactly how the gear shifter and controls work will vary. But I'll still know how to drive the car within a few moments.

I think that's a good thing. It's a formula that's worked for half a century and continues to work. Baseline assumptions + relatively minor modifications unique to the setting is main selling point of D&D IMHO. YMMV.

I don't think that's a good analogy (to be fair, almost no analogies are, especially not the terrible ones I make!).

In D&D, if anything, the "pedals and dash" and so on are the rules, classes, and so on. Those remain consistent.

The setting is the place you're driving that car in. And yeah, sometimes it'll be open autobahns and modern cities with clear traffic signals, but sometimes it'll be dirt roads which aren't on the map, or driving on the wrong side or whatever.

It was ever thus, too, well certainly from 2E onwards. You can't make many assumptions - most settings will challenge a lot of them. Some will destroy all of them, like Dark Sun did. And that's 29 years ago.

Can't this stuff be done with like a three-sentence exposition drop if it comes up? Like, "The party sees several Orcs with bows. In this land, Orcs live in nomadic communities allied with the Northern Lords. They hunt <insert creature> and often sell their furs and wares to local markets. This may be a hunting party... or they may be bandits. What do you do?"

Exactly. It's not exactly a hard thing to manage.

I mean, I've run dozens of different settings over the years. I've literally never had someone's mind be blown because a bunch of creatures didn't have the expected behaviour for them from a corebook.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

One point that gets missed I think is that humans are very diverse. The best and worst and the average.

species are often defined in how they differ from humanity. I don’t think it’s bad to say dwarves tend to be hardier than the average human.

The difference is simple for me. If we said different humans have anything other than skills or cultural differences, I would be concerned.

I think that other species are defined by comparative difference from humanity like Neanderthals and humans and chimps.

others do not and see the other humanoids as they might ethnicities or human “races.” I just don’t and therefore the whole racism thing seems like a miss for me.

we all (I hope) don’t believe humans have relative worth and ability based on culture or ethnicity. I don’t think wicked or strong orcs changes any of that at all.

nor do I think alignment has to be hardwired either; most people believe in choice and self determination radical behaviorists probably excepted.

 

[fearsomepirate]

The "problem" is actually that Dave Arneson took things that go bump in the night and stuck them in an underground lair for players to kill and get their gold, and as the game took off, details got filled in by him and others so they'd feel more like part of a plausible fantasy world, while still maintaining enough thing-that-goes-bump-in-the-nightishness to still be things you kill to get their gold.

And now we've got people saying that monsters have been sufficiently humanized that it's immoral and hurts people for them to continue to be monsters. Because humans aren't monsters. So if monsters are still monsters while being a bit humanized, that's bad.

I don't see how this can be resolved. The best option seems to me to be to eliminate monsters entirely. However, it would then be deeply problematic to draw inspiration from the premodern human world, which was a world with things like holy wars, god-kings, chattel slavery, serfdom, helots, democidal steppe raiders, imperial conquerors, ritual cannibalism, intergenerational tribal warfare, entitled aristocrats, and so on. Good guys can't be like that, as that normalizes bad things. And if bad guys are like that, it's xenophobic.

 

[Charlaquin]

Would the bias against Mind Flayers be also misplaced?

No, because their existence is antithetical to the life and bodily autonomy of other sapient beings. This is like the fifth time I’ve had to explain something I would have thought was plainly clear.

Also if orcs are constantly attacking your nation is the bias misplaced, or based on experience?

Hostility against those orcs? Justified. Prejudice against all orcs? Not justified.

 

[Mind of tempest]

This is why I think WotC should have a default setting for their PHB. Because they are describing cultures, having no default setting communicates the idea that these cultures are endemic to the races / lineages. With a specific culture, WotC could say something like: "In the land of Dicetopia, you will encounter orcs here, here, and here. In your own campaign world, they may serve a different role."

yeah, but which setting as most would not fix the problem.

 

[Charlaquin]

It’s what makes a kingdom of noble and good orcs novel and exciting.

Maybe people of a given race not being evil shouldn’t be a novel and exciting thing. Normalizing diversity among fantasy races is kind of the point.

 

[Oofta]

I don't think that's a good analogy (to be fair, almost no analogies are, especially not the terrible ones I make!).

In D&D, if anything, the "pedals and dash" and so on are the rules, classes, and so on. Those remain consistent.

The setting is the place you're driving that car in. And yeah, sometimes it'll be open autobahns and modern cities with clear traffic signals, but sometimes it'll be dirt roads which aren't on the map, or driving on the wrong side or whatever.

It was ever thus, too, well certainly from 2E onwards. You can't make many assumptions - most settings will challenge a lot of them. Some will destroy all of them, like Dark Sun did. And that's 29 years ago.

Exactly. It's not exactly a hard thing to manage.

I mean, I've run dozens of different settings over the years. I've literally never had someone's mind be blown because a bunch of creatures didn't have the expected behaviour for them from a corebook.

Well, I disagree. It doesn't matter if I jump in a Mini, a Panel Van or a Porsche. Give me a moment and I'll know most of what I need to drive. It's the same with D&D. If we don't have basic assumptions it would be like trying go from driving a Camry to driving a tank.

The cars? Same for the most part. The tank? That would be more like jumping into a Cthulhu game. Well, if the tank was made of nightmares trying to drive you insane.

 

[Charlaquin]

yeah, but which setting as most would not fix the problem.

Nentir Vale? (takes cover)