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

[Ruin Explorer]

Where I believe that became problematic is when artists and writers started to illustrate those "baser instincts" using elements of real-world ethnicities.

Which, unfortunately, dates back to the same novels that brought us Orcs - Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien’s Squinteyed Orc-men

Pondering how Frodo Baggins should at last arrive at Hobbiton, JRR Tolkien sat down one day in 1948 to plan the end of The Lord of the Rings. He decided his homecoming hobbits would see a troublin…

tolkienland.wordpress.com

And you don't have to take anyone's word for it, Tolkien himself said orcs in a movie should look like:

"squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types."

Note Mongol refers to what we'd call "East Asian" here, he's using it in the old racial sense (which even people my age may have seen in textbooks when they were very young, though it's gone now).

Worth noting that culturally the orcs aren't like that - in fact they seem to basically be the worst of human nature, as you say, albeit expressed in a peculiarly "working class soldier" kind of way. The fact that orcs basically sound like working-class southern English people, specifically maybe Cockneys is not likely to be an accident (though I think it's probably a harmless bit of classism - and I am technically a Cockney).

Years ago, I remember playing the Ultima games. For most of the games, gargoyles were viewed as "evil." However, one of the games turned that idea on its head, as it was revealed that their culture was simply different -and they had been attacking you because actions taken by the protagonist (you) had been harming them.

I wish I could remember which entry in the series that was. It's a game containing ideas which I believe would be applicable to this discussion.

EDIT: I think it was Ultima 6: The False Prophet.

Ultima VI: The False Prophet - Wikipedia

en.m.wikipedia.org

Yup, it was U6, the first Ultima game I played, and it BLEW MY TINY MIND when I realized the Gargoyles were actually being perfectly reasonable and not evil. Admittedly I was like 11 or 12, but that was powerful and effective - just because it looks scary and acts in opposition to you, doesn't make evil, pay more attention!

 

[Justice and Rule]

40K's Orks are an interesting popular take that gives orcs a fairly alien biology and reason for being violent brutes with some comedy.

I mean, "Cockney Football Hooligans with technology that works because they believe it will" is pretty damn inspired. Honest stroke of brilliance. Gork n' Mork fo'evah.

It's also worth noting one of the biggest influences on "What an Orc is" is also Warcraft, which also showed a more complicated take on Orcs way back in the mid-90s. People have been able to play these races for decades now in those games. You probably have a lot of kids who know Orcs from those games rather than D&D.

 

[Remathilis]

ideally looking into alternate foods and reproduction options and at the minimum look into making the relationship far more symbiotic which I some how have thought about.

 

[Azzy]

40K's Orks are an interesting popular take that gives orcs a fairly alien biology and reason for being violent brutes with some comedy.

I love the 40K Orks. Though I don't play 40K anymore, I had to pick up the new Ghazghkull Thraka mini (it's so awesome!).

 

[Argyle King]

Which, unfortunately, dates back to the same novels that brought us Orcs - Lord of the Rings.

Tolkien’s Squinteyed Orc-men

Pondering how Frodo Baggins should at last arrive at Hobbiton, JRR Tolkien sat down one day in 1948 to plan the end of The Lord of the Rings. He decided his homecoming hobbits would see a troublin…

tolkienland.wordpress.com

And you don't have to take anyone's word for it, Tolkien himself said orcs in a movie should look like:

"squat, broad, flat-nosed, sallow-skinned, with wide mouths and slant eyes: in fact degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least lovely Mongol-types."

Note Mongol refers to what we'd call "East Asian" here, he's using it in the old racial sense (which even people my age may have seen in textbooks when they were very young, though it's gone now).


Yup, it was U6, the first Ultima game I played, and it BLEW MY TINY MIND when the Gargoyles were revealed as actually being perfectly reasonable and not evil. Admittedly I was like 11 or 12, but that was powerful and effective - just because it looks scary and acts in opposition to you, doesn't make evil, pay more attention!

I completely agree that basing a (for lack of better words) "evil" version of humans on a real-world culture is bad.

So, for me (from a design perspective,) I'm curious to hear ideas concerning how illustrate something which is identifiably a branch of humanity, but without having it resemble any of the human cultures around us.

While orcs are usually pointed to as an example of getting things wrong, I think it happens with elves sometimes too. While looking through some of my older RPG stuff, I notice that the cliche sexy elf chic often seems to be given vaguely Asian features. I think that could be viewed as offensive by some, in that (much like what I mentioned earlier with Drow having sexualized African-American features) it's objectification of an ethnicity through euro-centic eyes and standards of womanhood/femininity.

 

[TwoSix]

It's also worth noting one of the biggest influences on "What an Orc is" is also Warcraft, which also showed a more complicated take on Orcs way back in the mid-90s. People have been able to play these races for decades now in those games. You probably have a lot of kids who know Orcs from those games rather than D&D.

It's tough to find a better example of "Orcs as individuals" than looking at the differences between Thrall, Garrosh, Saurfang, Nazgrim, and Draka.

 

[Justice and Rule]

I love the 40K Orks. Though I don't play 40K anymore, I had to pick up the new Ghazghkull Thraka mini (it's so awesome!).

A RAIT KRUMPAH 'E IZ! AN' LOOK, DERE'S MAKARI!

It's tough to find a better example of "Orcs as individuals" than looking at the differences between Thrall, Garrosh, Saurfang, Nazgrim, and Draka.

Yeah, while I'm a Warhammer guy forever, I do kind of wish I kept up on the lore of Warcraft. I remember playing the first two games way back in the day. Still kind of sad that adventure game didn't come out...

 

[Oofta]

I mean, the better question seems to be "Why are people so attached to an older, less interesting version than this new, cool version someone else came up with?"

Like, why don't we just go to what Eberron created as the standard? It's far more interesting and much less problematic.

So what would that amazing new standard look like? Is there any room for "generic bad guys"? Not ones I have to come up with an in depth back story. I think most of those are just as flawed as different species being different.

We don't go with Eberron because it's a very specific campaign where the details (and generic bad guys) only make sense for that setting. Good news though, if you like the way Eberron did it, do it! Congratulations! Problem solved!

 

[Mind of tempest]

So what would that amazing new standard look like? Is there any room for "generic bad guys"? Not ones I have to come up with an in depth back story. I think most of those are just as flawed as different species being different.

bandits solve that nicely.

 

[Justice and Rule]

So what would that amazing new standard look like? Is there any room for "generic bad guys"? Not ones I have to come up with an in depth back story. I think most of those are just as flawed as different species being different.

We don't go with Eberron because it's a very specific campaign where the details (and generic bad guys) only make sense for that setting. Good news though, if you like the way Eberron did it, do it! Congratulations! Problem solved!

I mean, most stuff is campaign specific to FR nowadays. If they wanted to release something generic, it wouldn't be hard to adapt the Eberron Orc. And you could always still use them as "generic bad guys": they're easy enough to simplify down for people at your table.

bandits solve that nicely.

There's never a lack of badly-intentioned whatevers when you need 'em.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Ehhhhh kind of but not quite? Similar in abstract, but not quite in severity, I would say.

I have little doubt that far more people in this world are offended by a cavalier attitude toward demons & devils than by alignment entries in the Monster Manual. Because you pretty much can't demonstrate any real-world harm caused by any D&D text, the fallback argument has become "it's immoral to imagine this, and you're poisoning young minds."

I say this as somebody who deliberately eschews "every bugbear gets the sword" campaigns, but because they're boring, not because Keep on the Borderlands by the book makes you a bad person.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

So, for me (from a design perspective,) I'm curious to hear ideas concerning how illustrate something which is identifiably a branch of humanity, but without having it resemble any of the human cultures around us.

Cultures? I dunno if that's possible, someone will always see something as something, though equally one might say it was quite easy, just use fairly generic cultures - Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea stuff is like that that. If you mean a race of humans that's not an identifiable one? That's been done many times - usually just by having hair/skin/eye colours which don't correlate with existing human groups, and where they do, you have the culture not match up instead. Earthsea again has some of this, but countless authors have done it. You see it in RPGs with Exalted, where some races have pink hair and so on. You also see a particularly flashy variant in modern fantasy in Brandon Sanderson's Stormlight Archive series, where a lot of humans have multi-coloured hair naturally, and unusual eye colours (bright yellow for example), and where the point of racism/classism is the tone of your eye-colour. Dark eye colours = lowly people, bright eye colours = posh people.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

So what would that amazing new standard look like? Is there any room for "generic bad guys"? Not ones I have to come up with an in depth back story. I think most of those are just as flawed as different species being different.

We don't go with Eberron because it's a very specific campaign where the details (and generic bad guys) only make sense for that setting. Good news though, if you like the way Eberron did it, do it! Congratulations! Problem solved!

You keep trying this "good news" thing but you have the best news!

You want Orcs to have this ultra-generic template which needs literally no description at all! "Generic Barbarian" - no culture, no ideas, no background, just violent raiders who come screaming over a hill, burn your town, and run off with your stuff. It doesn't get simpler than that! However complicated they make Orcs, whatever advanced and cool backstory they gave them, there is nothing easier than forgetting all that and making them into brutes with axes.

You're really being hoist very high in the air by your own petard here lol. Flipping over and over through the sky as we marvel at how much gunpowder must have been in that thing.

 

[Justice and Rule]

I have little doubt that far more people in this world are offended by a cavalier attitude toward demons & devils than by alignment entries in the Monster Manual.

Maybe?

Because you pretty much can't demonstrate any real-world harm caused by any D&D text, the fallback argument has become "it's immoral to imagine this, and you're poisoning young minds."

I mean, I think the critique is more along the lines of "This stuff can be taken badly largely because it was created 30 years ago, trying to continue on with it just keeps building on bad tropes and there's just no reason to keep it around when we can just change it."

I say this as somebody who deliberately eschews "every bugbear gets the sword" campaigns, but because they're boring, not because Keep on the Borderlands by the book makes you a bad person.

No one says that anyone is a bad person for enjoying stuff like Keep on the Borderlands. You can like problematic media and not be a bad person, but at the same time not being a bad person doesn't make the media any less problematic.

 

[TwoSix]

So what would that amazing new standard look like? Is there any room for "generic bad guys"? Not ones I have to come up with an in depth back story. I think most of those are just as flawed as different species being different.

We don't go with Eberron because it's a very specific campaign where the details (and generic bad guys) only make sense for that setting. Good news though, if you like the way Eberron did it, do it! Congratulations! Problem solved!

Well, that is an interesting question. If orcs become more interesting (more Eberron and Warcraft, less GRRR), what can fill in as a generic bad guy? (I think generic bad guy is still a necessary role in D&D.)

Maybe something like grimlocks? Gnolls would seem to fill that role well too.

 

[Oofta]

You keep trying this "good news" thing but you have the best news!

You want Orcs to have this ultra-generic template which needs literally no description at all! "Generic Barbarian" - no culture, no ideas, no background, just violent raiders who come screaming over a hill, burn your town, and run off with your stuff. It doesn't get simpler than that! However complicated they make Orcs, whatever advanced and cool backstory they gave them, there is nothing easier than forgetting all that and making them into brutes with axes.

You're really being hoist very high in the air by your own petard here lol. Flipping over and over through the sky as we marvel at how much gunpowder must have been in that thing.

There's quite a bit written about orcs right now. I don't think of them as generic barbarians myself. I just don't see how you can have multiple cultures per monster and not have the page count explode and someone somewhere still finding a problem with it.

In any case, I gave my reasons for why I don't have a problem with (almost) always evil orcs back in post #232

I think the game needs bad guys. Orcs, as written, fill a role. Strip away everything that makes them orcs and I don't see a reason to even have them.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

No one says that anyone is a bad person for enjoying stuff like Keep on the Borderlands. You can like problematic media and not be a bad person, but at the same time not being a bad person doesn't make the media any less problematic.

Quite. I like plenty of problematic media, but I'm pretty sure I'm not a bad person, well not in that way, and yet that media remains problematic. And that's why we say "problematic", not "evil" or whatever.

I mean, Lovecraft is the #1 poster-boy for this. Plenty of modern authors have engaged with his stuff, and clearly see some value at least in the wild-ness and weirdness of it, not all of them white, but they've done so in ways that don't repeat the racism, but rather interrogate it or come at from a different angle.

 

[Warpiglet-7]

Frankly, I don’t really care. Drizzt is a boring character anyway. Maybe if he hadn’t been able to use the novelty of being a good drow as a crutch, he would have needed to be an actually interesting character in his own right. Would that have been such a terrible thing?

Look, if you want simple, uncomplicated good vs evil games, no one is stopping you. Do whatever you want in your own game. But it’s much easier to remove nuance if you don’t want it than to add it where it doesn’t exist, and having a default where there aren’t entire races of inherently evil people makes the game more inclusive.

Ok. Sure. But I don’t think having a general description with a caveat is necessarily making a less inclusive game in any way that effects the world or large groups of players.

consequently, I am more interested in what makes a better game. It is and has always been a game with character classes and stat blocks with alignment and general inclinations of different species related behavior. Leaving it alone now is “less work.”

as to your assessment about drizzt, I don’t know what to tell you. I am sorry you don’t like him? I tired of him after a good many books and his endless exposition. However he has been a force in D&D fiction over many years. I don’t think WOTC wants to disown him anytime soon.

it is undeniable that a lot of his appeal is that he played against type and crushed expectations.

I support inclusiveness and treating people well but do not think dismantling pretend species does anything to further things in that regard. At all. I also don’t think it’s any sin to enjoy shared expectations and fiction in fantasy which can be modified.

further it’s all purely opinion based. Do we have to have disclaimers and no alignment or behavioral tendency for any monsters? Or is it just the bipedal ones? Or just the ones that aren’t undead? Or just the ones that can be PCs?

do we need to get rid of aliens in fiction when we only see the ones that want to conquer earth? If we don’t are we making a less inclusive movie experience that alienates (pun intended) the audience?

I don’t expect nor desire any answers here because it is pointless. We get what WOTC produces. Then we decide if we like it and buy it or not.

but to reduce the choice to “a simple game” vs something desirable seems uncharitable at best. Many of us have been using stat blocks and alignment for decades. How many would say their game is simple?

is it really just black and white? We either do away with alignment and species typical behavior (that can and is modified campaign to campaign) or we have a “simple” and “uninclusive” game?

I prefer alignment in games and general species typical behavior describes without making statement about the quality of games that do otherwise. I like the shared nature of the fiction, the ease of use and the familiarity that can help create novelty and the unexpected. It is as simple as that.

 

[Mind of tempest]

Well, that is an interesting question. If orcs become more interesting (more Eberron and Warcraft, less GRRR), what can fill in as a generic bad guy? (I think generic bad guy is still a necessary role in D&D.)

Maybe something like grimlocks? Gnolls would seem to fill that role well too.

bandits and raiders

 

[Ruin Explorer]

I don't think of them as generic barbarians myself.

But they are... they barely have anything distinctive about them. Even their god is boring and basically generically evil, and could be replaced by any other evil violent god.

As for "you need bad guys", sure, but why do you need a race that is just humans barbarians in a scary masks? I mean literally human barbarians in scary masks would be interesting than Orcs, because at least you'd have the question "Why are they wearing scary masks?".