Oriental Adventures, was it really that racist?

[Bill Zebub]

The thing I find about such systems is that they tend to apply in situations where social contexts don't really matter.

If I want to secretly murder my enemy in a way that no one would know about I lose honour, but that makes no real sense, because no one will know. Honour is a social thing.

And your honour follows you around when interacting with people who have no idea who you are.

Funny, I would say it’s the other way around: honor is about how you act when nobody but you will ever know.

That said, lots of people try to create a perception that they are honorable.

Off-topic, though.

 

[Bedrockgames]

That's a fair criticism I think. Ideas of honor aren't in short supply throughout western history motivating fictional and historical individuals alike but we don't often see it manifested in RPGs. When toying around with the creating a Roman type setting, I came up with Gravitas which was a measure of how seriously people took your character. Someone with a high Gravitas would find that they're generally trusted and their words given a of weight. But at the same time, they'd find themselves somewhat constrained as any perceived bad behavior or failing to live up to one's word might lower their Gravitas.

I used Auctoritas for my Roman setting. And Respectabilty in my mafia game

 

[Bedrockgames]

Actually, from what I remember they link honour to the general sense of exoticism. Western characters don't need honour scores, but eastern characters have their actions constrained in all kinds of weird ways as a means of emphasising their exotic differences.

If I remember it was that and that games set in the west don't usually have an equivalent (even though arguably there are plenty of honor systems in western cultures: the cowboy operates by an honor code centered around a specific understanding of masculinity for instance). I think they may have also brought up the way the word honor was used with asian characters in movies (especially in the 80s) even if the film was modern.

 

[Mordhau]

Funny, I would say it’s the other way around: honor is about how you act when nobody but you will ever know.

That said, lots of people try to create a perception that they are honorable.

Off-topic, though.

It doesn’t really matter. By that definition there’s no reason to track it.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

One byproduct of the way things have gone the last few years and I think one of the most prevalent takeaways we are going to see perpetuated in the near future is that creative folks are going to have a sharp tendency to stay in their lane. They will feel a need to write and create art that is solely within their personal frame of reference and not veer outside of that in the slightest, because it is safer that way.

The problem is there isn't really such a 'frame of reference'. What am I 'supposed' to write about? I'm an American of European descent. OVER 300 years ago my 14th times great grandfather immigrated to America (long before there was a US) from Germany (which actually didn't even exist as a nation at that time, and is an agglomeration of several distinct, though related, cultures to start with). What can I write about? lol. What is 'my lane'??? I mean, I'm not actually complaining, and it isn't nearly as problematic for me as it is for some.

Still, am I forbidden to touch on American cultural elements which were introduced by non-Europeans? How about Frenchmen, but not Germans? lol. The whole CONCEPT is gravely flawed. I know you're not advocating for anything like this, I just felt it needed to be pointed out and your comment touched on it. Anyway, I think there are valid questions about racial bias, certainly. I think there are valid questions about cultural exploitation too. OTOH culture mostly is a constant process of adopting things from other places, adapting them, smooshing them together with other things from other traditions, etc. It is both problematic to say that a clearly dominant (in several respects) Euro-American society is perfectly OK to just heedlessly incorporate anything we feel like from people's who are seriously harmed by our attitudes and actions, AND problematic to say that some group 'owns the right' to be gatekeepers of something. This is of course even beyond the questions of whom it is who has any right to claim to speak for a culture.

I think there isn't an answer here, there never was, never will be. We can however safely say that when other people get hurt, we should pay attention. This is simply being a good human being. Do the right thing, and to hell with theories and whatever. The past is done (but not dead, no no) and we can't revisit it, so we are simply bound to all try to be considerate people, eh?

This is the thing that racism fails at, and one way to distinguish it. You can argue a lot of theories and whatever, but IMHO, certainly in my experience, we were a good bit less considerate back in the old days (sad that a time when I was already an adult is now the old days, heh). Were things much worse 'back then'? Sure! But the notion put forward by some today that it is 'all OK now.' or that there's 'just a few bad eggs' or whatever, that's total BS. Yet that is the whole argument that seems to be put forward by these people complaining about a 'cancel culture', that somehow THEIR offensiveness is OK, because nowadays we live in some sort of mythical Age of Aquarius and its all Rainbow Unicorn Farts, and we know how sweet those are!

 

[Bedrockgames]

One byproduct of the way things have gone the last few years and I think one of the most prevalent takeaways we are going to see perpetuated in the near future is that creative folks are going to have a sharp tendency to stay in their lane. They will feel a need to write and create art that is solely within their personal frame of reference and not veer outside of that in the slightest, because it is safer that way.

And this is one of my big concerns in these conversations and about the impact I think they are having.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I have a basic issue of the critics assuming the mantle of all Asians (or Chinese or whatever) when we are talking about a Canadian guy from Toronto looking at it from their lens.

I lived in China for 5 years and if you think the stereotypes are bad in OA, you should see the historical dramas on mainstream TV in China.

I think as a RPG supplement for the time is obviously not meant to be racist but is, like most books in TRPG shallow and reliant on tropes.

I wish there was less energy spent on complaining about decades old books for a system barely played and more effort spent on modern books that are better.

hahaha, my wife is Chinese and she LOVES those shows (well, she does call some of them 'stupid' in all fairness). They really are FILLED with cultural stereotypes/myths, but oddly ones that the Chinese (I assume) hold about themselves, or at least about their society at some time in history (these are almost always set in some vague unspecified period in the distant past). I wouldn't say that makes it OK for us to perpetuate those myths and exaggerations. I guess arguably it is not so bad if they do so themselves, much like its kind of OK for Hollywood to make movies about gunfights in the Old West, etc. even though its all completely absurd.

Well, then there's the interesting point that the milieu of a lot of these shows would make kick ass RPG scenarios, lol. Maybe or maybe not employing some version of D&D, but they often have a lot of crazy action, 'magic', super heroic characters, and fairly usable scenarios too. I'm kind of thinking that the lesson there might be that "the fantasy in most RPGs is pretty shallow stuff", perhaps, though I don't want to make such broad generalizations...

 

[Bill Zebub]

It doesn’t really matter. By that definition there’s no reason to track it.

(still off-topic) Nonsense! I could imagine a powerful game mechanic based off of it.

 

[Mordhau]

(still off-topic) Nonsense! I could imagine a powerful game mechanic based off of it.

Generally the player controls their character's own self-perceptions.

In any case, the problem with such systems is not that they track someone's internal sense of their own honour, it's that they tend to confuse honour as a measure of social standing with one's sense of ones own ethical behaviour and make it both at the same time.

It's like you murdered that guy two towns back by stabbing him in the back and now it affects the way the current lord two in this town deals with you, despite the fact that he has no way of knowing that you did that thing.

 

[Bill Zebub]

And this is one of my big concerns in these conversations and about the impact I think they are having.

Yeah the parade-of-horribles argument does seem fairly popular.