Racism in RPGs, especially related to fantastic races

[howandwhy99]

People "Humans" average 10.5 for all 6 Ability Scores.
As they are the scale from which everything else in the game is measured, they are considered "average".
But there are humans with all 3s. And humans with all 18s.

And then there are other races with different averages, spreads, distributions, and so on.
And there are plenty of those above or below the average human because their race is different.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Racism = Specism in my D&D, and yes, it exists in the game world. Why wouldn't it? If there's a real risk of your species being exterminated by another intelligent species, the occasional (ir)rational hatred is to be expected.

Racism within a race is mostly rare, though -- with all the elves, dwarves, and orcs around to hate, hating on another human with different ethnicity just seems silly. Unless the race in question is drow, though -- everyone hates them.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

While my campaigns vary in how serious vs light I want them to be, I tend to assume that the same sorts of prejudices exist as have existed for most of real world history, but throw fantasy races into the mix.

I don't tend to have many humanoid races that are inescapably evil. A typical orc is evil because of a combination of inborn tendencies (lack of empathy, a short fuse) and his upbringing in a society filled with people with the same tendencies. There are good orcs, they just have to try a lot harder, and are consequently very rare.

That's how I handle most good or evil races. To relate to the real world, many traits we would associate with alignment in D&D can be mapped to areas of the brain. Certain parts of the brain have an effect on empathy, for instance. If you image that evil races tend to have the D&D equivalent of low function in that part of the brain, while good races tend to have very high functions in that area (with humans somewhere in the middle and varying significantly by individual), it makes sense how free will can exist, but some species can be overall good or evil.

That causes some serious problems with race relations.

Amongst the races, and cultures of any particular species (including humans) I tend to maintain whatever prejudices make sense. In some cases that means they are less pronounced than in real history, while in others they are just as strong.

I also tend to have less integration amongst the species. So even a city like Waterdeep is probably at least 80% human.

I really wouldn't have much patience with PCs being racist jerks, since I tend to want parties of heroes, but I have no problem with a bit of friction in the world and the party. The thing about adventurers is that they aren't the norm. They tend to have unlikely allies, and to have seen enough of the world that petty squabbles between human societies or between humanoid races aren't all that important to them anymore.

 

[Sword of Spirit]

I forgot to mention that I also like to bring moral dilemmas into the game from an attitude of "orcs are people too." If you wouldn't butcher human bandits who surrendered, then butchering orcs captives isn't any different.

 

[WayneLigon]

Depends on the tone and theme of the campaign, really. Mostly, I don't have a problem with it. I don't have a huge problem with it even if our primary enemy might be human, such as 'Easterlings'. If they've taken service with an evil master, then they reap the consequences of it. I don't have a huge problem with nonhuman races 'born evil' or even 'born good'. Yeah, I know that doesn't happen in the real world, but this is another reality where we can have things like an absolute morality, or any sort of other thing the setting want to use.

I'd be fine with a campaign world where that was NOT the fact, but I'd certainly want to know that from the get-go. Any GM should really realize that such as thing isn't part of the 'default setting' of D&D or most other games, and needs to make sure his players are on board with any changes to that notion before chargen.

 

[Zhaleskra]

I didn't start out caring about it, but over the years I came to view "you can kill beings of race X with impunity with no questions asked because they're all evil" as disgusting. This lead me to my belief that "even against evil, genocide is evil". After experiencing many systems, I am more comfortable with subjective morality than morality as an absolute force. An example that goes with my views from the World Tree RPG is that while the Primes might consider it okay to kill "monsters", the nonprimes will not, and outside of Prime territory it's their courts, not the Primes' that you'll have to deal with. Or as the female author put it "it's murder".

 

[mythago]

Racism within a race is mostly rare, though -- with all the elves, dwarves, and orcs around to hate, hating on another human with different ethnicity just seems silly.

Please note that I'm not commenting on what you "should" do in your campaign, I'm just addressing this particular sentiment. Other groups of humans compete for resources, territory, etc. - why wouldn't The People hate those-across-the-river and their strange, barbaric ways?

Going back to the Discworld quote, while (as is only to be expected from any multibook series) Pratchett isn't 100% consistent with that - William de Worde makes a reference to his bigoted father extending nasty remarks to people from Howondaland - while the humans don't care much about skin color, there is plenty of bigotry standing in for it, deliberately so. The anti-Klatchian sentiment and cultural conflict in Jingo has nothing to do with the Klatchians' skin color. This is true in the real world, as well; we tend to think of skin color as THE dominant factor in 'race' and people's bigotry, but keep in mind that it wasn't very long ago in the US that being Irish or Italian or Jewish mean you weren't "white". Certainly I'm sure we're all familiar with the long history of seeing people from Over Thataway as being an entirely different class of humans because of their customs or geography.

Rambling back to D&D, as I said in the other thread, I suspect a lot of the whole thing with entire races being evil comes from Tolkien's orcs, which are more or less demons and in some variants are actually created by Sauron. So there's not a developed concept of orc children, orc communities or orc individuality; their monstrosity and evil is baked in.

 

[Olgar Shiverstone]

Please note that I'm not commenting on what you "should" do in your campaign, I'm just addressing this particular sentiment. Other groups of humans compete for resources, territory, etc. - why wouldn't The People hate those-across-the-river and their strange, barbaric ways?

Oh, I'm sure that would happen. It's just that with other sentient races around, you can extend the history of human conflict from "me against my brother; me and my brother against my cousin; mme my brother and cousin against the village; my village against other villages; our region against other regions, etc" to include "all humans against not humans" ... all of which would tend to reduce the influence of internal racism in favor of specism. On the other hand, if a campaign is human only, or has very limited contact with sentient non-human species, I'd expect human racism to be all the rage.

(BTW -- aside from demons and devils and the like, I'm not a fan of "race X is evil because they are" ... I prefer the "from a certain point of view" approach to evil for non-human races. D&D relative and comparative morality can be fun!)

 

[Derren]

Oh, I'm sure that would happen. It's just that with other sentient races around, you can extend the history of human conflict from "me against my brother; me and my brother against my cousin; mme my brother and cousin against the village; my village against other villages; our region against other regions, etc" to include "all humans against not humans" ... all of which would tend to reduce the influence of internal racism in favor of specism. On the other hand, if a campaign is human only, or has very limited contact with sentient non-human species, I'd expect human racism to be all the rage.

(BTW -- aside from demons and devils and the like, I'm not a fan of "race X is evil because they are" ... I prefer the "from a certain point of view" approach to evil for non-human races. D&D relative and comparative morality can be fun!)

Strange thing about psychology. People do feel a lot more threatened by slight differences than big changes, especially when those changes include your core values (aka religion).
Its much more easy to accept that those strange ash skinned short fellows from the mountain worship a different god than those humans from the other side of the forest.

 

[Lwaxy]

Its much more easy to accept that those strange ash skinned short fellows from the mountain worship a different god than those humans from the other side of the forest.

Yeah, good point. I'll keep that in mind for my next world to build.