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

[Sacrosanct]

Seems quite arbitrary to me to say that categorization is bad in some cases but not others.

For many people, alignment is handy. If you see "usually CE" for an orc or "usually LE" for duergar those two little letters have told me a lot about how most creatures of that type they approach the world.

A MM with no alignments I believe would be confusing for a lot of people.

I don't see anything new here.

Again, there is nothing saying you can't describe orcs as warlike (or whatever) in their description. That gives you the exact info you're wanting. All you're doing is no longer making the defaulted to evil murderers. What exactly are you losing? You keep saying you're losing too much, but haven't really explained what (not in any way that makes sense anyway, since it literally is zero effort to say "I want orcs to be evil in my campaign, so they are. End stop.")

I do not agree that it is confusing to people to have alignment as "any alignment." I don't buy that argument at all. How is that confusing? It's pretty clear and concise: they can be any alignment you want them to be. What part of that will confuse people?

edit Pilgrims are listed as any alignment in the same MM. Are DMs confused how to run pilgrims in their campaign? Or do they just run them as they want to run them as it fits in their campaign?

 

[Sacrosanct]

For sure it's old, or is trying to look old. Looks like a metal cover from that period.

didn't you know that all drow were based off of Tina Turner?

 

[prabe]

didn't you know that all drow were based off of Tina Turner?

They should be so lucky.

 

[Voadam]

didn't you know that all drow were based off of Tina Turner?

Down to the hand crossbows.

 

[Bagpuss]

In the US it is hard to escape the obvious, when a race of rabidly evil elves are described as having black skin. I realize that A) the drow are drawing on older legends...

So what you consider obvious you immediately admit in the next sentence is incorrect. So you are seeing racism because your conditioned to see it by US culture, not because it is actually there.

 

[Horwath]

In the US it is hard to escape the obvious, when a race of rabidly evil elves are described as having black skin. I realize that A) the drow are drawing on older legends and B) there is some thinking that the drow are so dark because the surface elves are so fair--but that opens an entirely other box of woes. It's easy enough to have evil be less-well-correlated with dark skin.

OK,

what are white supremacist idiots saying about black population?

That they are lazy, dumb, uneducated and other vile stuff that are too many to count(I have no interest in venturing to some obscure KKK sites to read more)

The Drow society in described completely OPPOSITE of the racist narrative towards black people. They are described as highly intelligent, highly trained, highly organized. They are super-elves.

If Drow are a caricature of someone, then they are caricature of National-Socialist party of Germany. They think about themselves as Drow are described. And they are evil to the core, as was the leadership of NSDAP

 

[billd91]

I didn't say all, I said many. Which is true. Looking at how many goblins and other humanoid creatures we have called monsters in our history, many of them share the same racist caricatures that we have used to degrade other people. Look at how goblins have been depicted, and look at how Jews were depicted by people who hated jews. Many of the features are exactly the same.

Re: Drow, as I mentioned upthread, when you have just about every dark skinned humanoid race = evil, that's a problem. An obvious one that I don't think needs explaining.

And in many cases, it's not because they're filling a specific stereotype as much as they're uncomfortably close to them or their own savagery or evil is reflected in descriptions that are similar to descriptions used to describe other real historical groups.

Some of that may be challenging to avoid, however, given how pervasively these terms and stereotypes have been used for racist ends. How do you describe, for example, an orcish culture as steeped in harsh brutality without drawing the parallels?

 

[Horwath]

Other than the Hair Metal style, what's the issue here?

Do not touch Glam Metal!

 

[TheSword]

I think it does cost the game something - we'd be losing a level of simplicity for those who want it. If you know nothing about Grung, right now I can look at the VGtM and see that they're LE. That gives me a starting point on their behavior. Not everyone knows what a kobold is. Now expand that to every monster in the book.

If you want to ignore that alignment it costs nothing (and again, it should be clear that you can ignore it), but take it away? Take it away and it's just one more step towards every humanoid being a human in a rubber mask.

Some things we're just going to disagree on.

Okay fair enough. Didn’t want to weigh in on you.

I just reckon the ones who would care about it already know where to look.

The new people coming in who don’t know, just don’t care.

They’re as likely to have a good Orc having played WOW as a bad one.

 

[prabe]

So what you consider obvious you immediately admit in the next sentence is incorrect. So you are seeing racism because your conditioned to see it by US culture, not because it is actually there.

The intentions may not have been racist--it's possible to make arguments they weren't, which is what my second sentence was about--but it's nigh-impossible not to look at the drow--black-skinned and cursed to be evil--and not think of the Curse of Ham (as interpreted by the founders of the LDS).