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

[Ruin Explorer]

Nigh on impossible? I‘d hazard that the great majority of people who have played D&D over the years have never made that connection. Most people don’t even know what the Curse of Ham is (I had to look it up).

I think people who travel in a very particular American cultural and political milieu vastly over-estimate how many others see the world through the same lens.

I think some people think that because they're outside the US, the same forms of racism, or very close relatives of them, do not exist, which is patently untrue. Anti-black racism in the 20th century and later, for example, is largely based on American and British (but mostly American)-originated ideas, stereotypes, and iconography - even in countries like Russia. It's kind of fascinating actually.

And the idea that one American "milieu" sees this simply hilarious nonsense.

Also, you can fail to "make a connection" and still essentially reinforce racist ideas. That seems pretty obvious to me. Indeed arguably racist ideas are more effective when they operate at a subliminal level rather than a conscious one where they can be interrogated and examined.

 

[HJFudge]

This is a deeply flawed analogy for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that no one is saying that changing the alignment in a monster manual will how minorities in real life are treated or viewed.

Then perhaps I misunderstand: Why change it then? To what end?

 

[Oofta]

the assumption that they are made to be killed for xp the reason they were put in the game.
why have a thing made only to be used in that way if they are sufficiently civilised to have half breed kids who are more or less fine?
it seems slightly strange given how different orc are now in modern fantasy.

the closet orc you seem to be describing is called a dark spawn and they are closer to zombies or a bioweapons than a person.

I'm just repeating the lore from the book. As far as how I or anyone else runs their game, it's up to them. I don't do murder hobo dungeon crawls, but if that's what people enjoy I don't see why anyone cares.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

You know drow are based in large part on Melniboneans, right? As are pale, decadent Targareans.

This is just a thing you’ve read into their origins, with no particular backing. It’s also completely irrelevant

It's one of those heads you lose, tails I win kind of paradigms. Evil group is dark-skinned? Racism. Non-evil group is dark-skinned? Irrelevant. White group is good? Racism. White group is evil? Irrelevant.

D&D giants. Fire giants are black, because they're black in Norse mythology, where black is associated with the earth and with fire. Frost giants are pale because they're associated with ice and snow. What inferences can we draw about racism and culture from these depictions? None.

This is just weird behavior. Fire and Frost giants aren’t culturally opposed ethnic groups within a race of playable humanoids, one of whom is Good and the other Evil. Neither of them have ever been said to be black or skin as part of a punishment for their evil ways.
It’s very obviously not a like case.

it comes across as intentional absurdity with no intention of genuine engagement.

There's no reason to believe the discourse of twitter is representative of widely held beliefs either. Twitter is the farthest thing from a window into social norms.

It brings to mind efforts to use the term "Latinx." You may well use social media where it's the norm. But it's anything but the norm among Latinos, among whom only 23 per cent have even heard of the term, and only 3 per cent use it.

About One-in-Four U.S. Hispanics Have Heard of Latinx, but Just 3% Use It

The term Latinx has emerged in recent years as a gender-neutral alternative to the pan-ethnic terms Latino, Latina and Hispanic. However, awareness of Latinx is relatively low among the population it is meant to describe.

www.pewresearch.org

If those numbers surprise you, it could be because you spend a lot of time on social media platforms that bear no resemblance to the general population.

No one is surprised that a fairly new term (that originated in activist circles in Mexico) isn’t widespread in the fairly conservative general Latin American and Hispanic American communities.

I challenge you to use pen and ink to draw a character with bronze skin.

Look at the pictures in the 1E MM and the other early D&D books: all humanoids are white. Elves, dwarves, orcs, trolls, ogres, goblins. All drawn white. Even though the descriptions have their skins range from white to bronze to read to purple. Because black and white pen art literally has to be black and white, and you can't make out features on a purely black figure.

You know there has been several decades of game art since then, yes?

 

[Levistus's_Leviathan]

Approaching this from a different angle. Hopefully this amounts to something . . .

Does this even matter? Seriously, does it matter at all whether or not I think D&D is "racist" or not? If you're playing the game, having fun as a group, and are not actively harming someone physically or emotionally, why should you care about this at all? So many of you old school players are getting riled up and trying to make a panic about the new kids that are playing the game and that are trying to make it something that they like. Who cares?!?! You have 5+ editions of D&D that you have played and enjoyed up until this point with no problem, besides other people being jerks and taking away/burning your D&D books 30ish years ago. That has stopped, and it won't happen again. If people try to take away your books and burn them, tell them to go away and report them to the respective authorities for harassing you. Whether or not orcs are evil at your table is no one's business except for your table and you. If they're being naughty words and telling you that you're racist/sexist/bigoted, ignore them and return to your table playing the game that all of us know and love. Seriously. There's no problem. If people are trying to convince you that you're playing the game wrong and being rude about it, that's just a pesky distraction that can be solved through the click of a button.

Furthermore, why does it matter if D&D officially changes to be more inclusive? You probably have older editions and groups of players already, you likely know the mechanics of multiple editions of the game, and a place to play any edition of D&D that you want. Why not sit back, take it easy, and let the newer people take the wheel for a bit? A lot of people want this change (no one will ever convince me that some Twitter mob is making a second Satanic Panic, that is plain BS, as many, many people on this forum, D&D Beyond's, Reddit's, and many others truly and honestly want this change), so let them have it. You're not losing anything, can go about freely playing D&D in the style that you like, and the other side gets a win. Our win does not equal your loss. We're evening out the field and letting people who want this style of D&D to play it easily and officially (and, yes, officiality does matter. It matters for D&D Beyond, Roll20 and other VTTs, Adventurer's League, and other tables/platforms that are strictly RAW).

And, finally, if we trust WotC's most recent UA, your opinion doesn't matter. Wizards of the Coast has already made up their mind. Races are now lineages, and thus will no longer have racially assigned ASIs, alignment suggestions, and cultural mechanics. They have made up their minds and stated that they want D&D to be inclusive. They have changed Vistani in Curse of Strahd (even if it was just a few small changes), have published TCoE's Customize your Origin feature, and will likely be officializing the Gothic Lineages in the soon-to-be-announced D&D book.

No one is calling you bigoted/racist/sexist/transphobic/anything-ist for disliking/not-incorporating these changes, no one is forcing you to use these rules and options, and no one is burning your prized D&D books. Stop painting us as crazed, deranged idiots that don't understand the game and have no interest in it. It's not polite, and is likely one of the major reasons why this ongoing debate will not end.

P.S. If you do find people who are calling you bigoted or otherwise harassing you for any opinion you have on this matter, feel free to tell me about it, and I will happily call them out. I am more than willing to criticize people on "my side" when they are being jerks and spouting BS. If they are doing that, they aren't on my side and don't represent me or my opinion.

Got it?

 

[Scribe]

And, finally, if we trust WotC's most recent UA, your opinion doesn't matter. Wizards of the Coast has already made up their mind. Races are now lineages, and thus will no longer have racially assigned ASIs, alignment suggestions, and cultural mechanics.

Bingo.

Anyone that does not agree with the direction of the game is already on borrowed time. Its only going to continue, whether or not one believes that ASI are inherently racist (and for folks who believe they are being called bigots, feel free to look over the mega thread on this UA for some real examples) and Alignment and Culture will just be next until everyone is just playing in a world where one's lineage is mostly irrelevant anyway.

So while we all navel gaze here, its ultimately irrelevant. Wizard's has already demonstrated where the game is going.

 

[Alzrius]

Clearly people thought it was problematic on a couple of levels (both incorrect and potentially a bit racist) early on in D&D's history. Yet the same people published plenty of material that made closer passes to Drow = black people.

Do you have a basis for that second assumption (i.e. that the picture was changed due to concern over racism)? That is, can you cite anything suggesting that was the state of mind for anyone involved in making the change?

 

[Mind of tempest]

I'm just repeating the lore from the book. As far as how I or anyone else runs their game, it's up to them. I don't do murder hobo dungeon crawls, but if that's what people enjoy I don't see why anyone cares.

okay if you do not care what the books say nor how people play their home game why do you even have an opinion on this topic?
it sounds like you should not care so why do you?

 

[Charlaquin]

Then perhaps I misunderstand: Why change it then? To what end?

To make the game more inclusive. See this excellent post:

To bounce off of this: if there's a problem in representation, it's going to first manifest as anti-inclusion. (in hobbies, inclusion comes before diversity.) In other words, the main way it happens is people of a certain group taking a look in the book and deciding they will not be welcome in the hobby.

The first impression isn't going to come from a deep dive into the lore. Nor will it come from a paragraph on how variable alignment is within a species... it'll come from people flipping through the book, looking primarily at the pictures, and either thinking "this looks like fun" or thinking "this isn't for me." Some of the later category will be people who aren't into fantasy in the first place.

But for some people, it'll be them seeing a bunch of unwelcoming stereotypes played out in the art and wondering if the people okay with this stuff will be honestly okay with them, as people. If ever dark-skinned character in the books looks like a villain, that might be a red flag to dark-skinned people who are taking a look at the game. If all the women are depicted in a sexualized manner, women might feel like they'd be subjecting themselves to being objectified by showing up. Etc.

But, of course, it's not as simple as that, even: having inky-black skin isn't necessarily enough by itself, especially if the rest of the picture looks Caucasian (like many drow, but not all). And if the pattern doesn't exist, the individual picture might not matter: if there's obviously heroes and villains of all skin tones, then a dark-skinned villain might not read as a racial thing at all. And the order and prominence of any given piece of art can make it weigh differently (ie the villain on the front cover being coded as POC is a big problem, while one in the MM might not be.)

The only way to get objective about it would be to do surveys, but those surveys need to account for the groups you're worried about excluding. If you want to know if Asians feel like the game has anti-Asian racism in it, you need to ask a bunch of Asians and collect the data. (Or, at the very least, check with trained experts like sociologists and anthropologists, but they'd probably just tell you how to design the study, and maybe point out some glaring stuff if there's any such issues.)

And with respect to actual 1e DnD - I'm not sure even that's worth doing, since it's not being made anymore. Anyone buying those books now wants them for nostalgia or historical context, so the most we could do is put a disclaimer in the front and preserve them as they were for posterity. If we're talking about Dungeons & Dragons as an IP going forward, or OSR in general, the best we can do is let the creators know we'd like them to think about these issues and try to be as inclusive as possible.

 

[Ruin Explorer]

Do you have a basis for that second assumption (i.e. that the picture was changed due to concern over racism)? That is, can you cite anything suggesting that was the state of mind for anyone involved in making the change?

Obviously unless we had the people involved to interrogate, or they recorded, in detail, their motivations for the changes, it's all assumptions. But the fact that the change did eliminate the highly-unusual tightly-curled hair of the original illustration (at least in the close up, it's hard to tell in the zoomed out version) suggests that there might have been a concern.

If we assume that the hair is still meant to be tightly-curled in the zoomed-out picture (which would be valid), then that wasn't a concern, but then it is still showing the racial influence then, because nothing about the Drow says they have tightly curled hair.

By picking this example you've kind of placed your argument in a lose/lose position, unfortunately.