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

[Justice and Rule]

Are there any negative cultural traits that can’t be mapped to real-world prejudices and stereotypes? Thieving, dishonest, savage, duplicitous, greedy, gluttonous, licentious, arrogant, cowardly, stern, haughty, barbaric, decadent, cruel, lazy - all stereotypes of one group or another. If we excise these from the game, aren’t we left with a bunch of generic, undifferentiated communities?

Maybe it's that certain combinations of those come up more often than others, and that (as @Scribe says) simply mapping them onto an entire race is just a bad idea in general? The whole "Race of Hats" method of race creation has a lot of pitfalls.

 

[Voadam]

I think most of us see a difference between ritual cannibalism as part of funerary rites and actually killing a human or an elf to get at their delicious, nutritious brains. If someone wants to argue that mindflayers aren't evil, well, go ahead, but I think that's a tough row to hoe.

A lot of orc and gnoll D&D descriptions had them as eating sentient humanoids for their flesh and not as a funerary rite.

From the 1e MM: "Orcs are cruel and hate living things in general, but they particularly hate elves and will always attack them in preference to other creatures. They take slaves for work, food, and entertainment (torture, etc.) but not elves whom they kill immediately."

 

[Remathilis]

Ok. Well I can point you towards lots of references in D&D to gnolls as tribal desert raiders.

Can you point to examples where Succubi aren’t what I described?

I specified the 5e gnoll, which they intentionally expanded the animalistic and demonic elements to remove them from "desert raider" that existed before. The irony is that fans hated these low-level demon-hyneas and wanted the old lore only to have the old lore be described as racist. I guess gnolls are going to have to settle down and take up farming...

As for succubi, I already pointed out that they are a true breeding race who produce offspring and not Abyssal, so I recommend cracking your MM before continuing.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Fiends are created from the souls of evil creatures, to further the spread of evil.

Mindflayers torture and dominate slaves to eat the living brains for sustenance.

Succubi take advantage of their alluring appearance to drag souls back to the abyss for consumption.

Hags enchant ( read rape) men to procreate and murder and eat human flesh.

Beholders genetically believe all creatures that don’t look identical to them are abominations deserving of destruction or enslavement.

If it’s uninclusive to have these creature default to evil then I really don’t know what to say.

Exactly. Cosmic forces given shape are not analogous to mortal species of sentient animals.

This is all just retcon or revision by Wizards though.

Tieflings absolutely were of 'fiendish blood', and where do they get that? From a long enough family tree going to a Fiend. So like, the Succubus that isnt 'people' enough.

The existence of Dhampyr doesn’t necessitate that vampires have free will. The existence of Genasi does not necessitate that fire has free will.

Take a moment to read the description of succubus/incubus in the 5e MM. Then read the gnoll entry. One is a humanoid the other a fiend. One is spawned by feasting on demon flesh, one is born of sexual union with it's own kind. One has an average int of 6, the other 15. One can make long term plans and keep up elaborate ruses, the other are barely controlled instruments of destruction nobody willingly associates with.

One of them can be any alignment, the other is nearly uniformally evil. Which is which and why?

.

If succubi can bear children with others of their own kind, frankly, why the hell are they fiends?

And again, this has nothing at all to do with racism in D&D .

If you knew much about certain Cultures, you would see that the description of Tieflings could actually be seen as EXTREMELY racist, especially once people draw the similarities between certain minority groups in the world today and the Tiefling description.

Including things such as being swindlers, thieves, etc...and being minorities among minorities or living in the slums is actually very similar in the type of phrasing that people look back on Orcs as being representative of racism today.

I am not going into detail here (edit explanation: partly because to do so could be construed as racist even as pointing it out regarding how it could be seen as racism towards certain groups, and that's an area I really don't want to get into at this point), but you could see direct parallels between how people look at how Orcs were portrayed in prior editions and how Tieflings are being portrayed today, even in 5e.

Read the PHB Tiefling description. It is actually quite comparable to the Vistani's older descriptions, even if the "appearance" is slightly different in description.

And if Romani or any other group were starting a public discussion about that description and saying, “this is harmful to my people”, I’d support them and demand reasonable change.

Is it OK to kill Warforged on sight?

I'm not asking this to be flippant, but what you are saying is fundamental to discussion around AI/Robots that has been under moral discussion for decades.

Warforged have no history in any published world that would justify doing so, and in the world they come from are considered by experts to be about as likely to have a soul as a human is.

Which you should feel free to ignore or change if you are using them and want to tell that morally ambiguous AI story, but the actual game info suggest that they are genuinely sentient people with souls and free will.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

Have you read Logan's Run or the Lottery? I don't think either one of those were what we'd call a benevolent society.

I'd guess that from within the society, most would say that the society is, if not benevolent, at least justified.

It's pretty unusual for someone to admit, "Yeah, we're the baddies."

 

[MGibster]

I have seen Logan's Run—never read the book—and read The Lottery way back in high school. I meant the concept of ritual sacrifice as an analogue not the entire society.

In a way, Mind Flayers used to be into the whole sacrifice for the sake of the colony. It used to be that at a certain point the brain colony would end up devouring the individual mind flayers. I don't know if they continued that with 5th edition.

 

[Mannahnin]

It was absolutely absorbed into the greater fixation on Satanism at the time. It's not hard to find, but if you want to try and keep distracting from the actual argument to just try and dismiss it with a bad comparison, I'm not sure what else we can talk about.

It was both. It was a wing of a moral panic spread out geographically and over several years. Much of the criticism of D&D was almost completely secular, as in the absurd episode of 60 Minutes Gygax got interviewed on. Radecki and Pulling pretty much always framed their complaints and objections in secular terms.

There was significant overlap with the Satanic Panic (I did a paper on Jeffrey Victor's excellent book of that title back in college), but it wasn't just a subset thereof. Though it does seem that in the last 15-20 years pretty much the only remnants of anti-D&D sentiment are among Fundie/Evangelical crazies and televangelists, and the occasional old person who heard the nonsense back in the 80s and never learned that it was nonsense.

 

[Oofta]

Maybe it's that certain combinations of those come up more often than others, and that (as @Scribe says) simply mapping them onto an entire race is just a bad idea in general? The whole "Race of Hats" method of race creation has a lot of pitfalls.

D&D has always (and I think will continue) vastly simplify things in order to make things work. If you have a world with 10 types of creatures that are intelligent, you can have a lot of variety for each type of creature.

But D&D? We dozens of races, even hundreds. The presentation we get in any book is going to be limited whether that's a gnome or a goblin. Which, yes, can cause issues.

 

[Wishbone]

In a way, Mind Flayers used to be into the whole sacrifice for the sake of the colony. It used to be that at a certain point the brain colony would end up devouring the individual mind flayers. I don't know if they continued that with 5th edition.

Yeah, it was deeply ironic—likely intentionally so—that a massively intelligent and predatory monster like the mind flayers were subject to a massive grift by their leaders.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Nothing I've said has been rhetorical. (And let's be honest, we're on a message board, so whatever attempt is being made to seem tough is laughable.)

What on earth are you talking about?

So, with that in mind, I'll ask what I've said elsewhere: how does the construction of the fantasy world intersect with trying to adhere to real-world concerns?

Personally, I agree with your espoused view that the in-game workings of a fictional world should be considered when looking at how that world works.

Though, I would also add the caveat that I do not believe that gives a designer an excuse to write racism into the game. For example, I do not believe that a game should be able to be designed a world based around saying Nazis were actually the good guys and expect that to be palatable to the real-world audience; something like that should (imo) be shunned.

We agree so far.

So, as I understand it, that means there is somewhere that a line is drawn between real-world and the narrative world. For you, that line (as I understand it) is drawn at beings made from other elements. For others, there has been a position taken which seems to imply that saying sentient beings -even those with no real world analogy- who are categorically bad or "evil" means racism.

It’s not even that. A being made of elemental evil isn’t even alive in a sense that is vaguely comparable to a mortal animal. An orc is. The two aren’t even remotely in the same category of items.

I'm inclined to believe many of those things exist on a spectrum. However, there seems to be little consensus concerning where the generally acceptable ballpark of drawing the lines is.

So, I ask questions: questions which aren't rhetorical. Sometimes that may mean bringing up an example which you (or someone else) feels is silly. But it may not be silly to someone else, and a lot of this thread has revolved around offensive elements existing in the game exactly because questions weren't addressed.

At some point, people write a piece of media need to sit down and create the product. In the context of a game, this includes creating the fictional world and the components contained within.

So, looking back at my questions, my point has been (consistently) to explore how the design of a TTRPG (D&D in this case) addresses real-world concerns while also acknowledging that the product includes a fictional world.

In my opinion, dismissing those questions or acting as though they are somehow beneath a value required to consider them is why most of the threads about this topic go in circles.

I want to know what ideas people have for steps forward. I want to hear thoughts concerning when it's acceptable to draw inspiration from the real world and when it isn't. I want to explore what actual tangible steps are involved in moving forward. That's likely going to include questions which make people uncomfortable, but change often is uncomfortable.

So, for you -for you personally- where do you place lines concerning what is acceptable?

I honestly just find this very...navel-gazey and not useful.

We are discussing racist elements in D&D because D&D has elements that make many marginalized people uncomfortable in a way that we all generally recognize as experiencing racism. Demons aren’t part of that discussion. Orcs are.
Because orcs make significant numbers of people feel that way and demons don’t.

Probably because demons aren’t written in a way that reminds anyone of how racists have written about their people, but also partly because demons are so obviously not a people in any rational sense of the word.