D&D General "Red Orc" American Indians and "Yellow Orc" Mongolians in D&D

[Dungeonosophy]

4. Here's the thing, though. You're specifically asking for this to apply to all legacy products. All of them.

Hi, I never said literally all legacy products. I suggested (based on another poster's suggestion) a crowdsourced flagging process, which would be intelligently prioritized by a standing team of Wizards cultural consultants.

I said, if there are hundreds of legacy products which have "ethnic, racial, and gender prejudices", then so be it. All of those would be specifically addressed by the Wizards cultural amends team. Why not? Wrong is wrong. Whether it's one book, a dozen, a hundred, or five hundred.

You're right that some products might have "relatively" minor amends to make, such as "sins of omission." That just means that those products would have a quick and simple DRAGON+ article...maybe only a paragraph or so, which would be perpetually linked to that product's legacy page, and there might only be one or two relevant charities.

If there are legacy products which the cultural team flips through and finds no prejudice or other problems, then voila! No further comment necessary. In fact, even the "boilerplate disclaimer" could be removed. Whew!

I imagine that after dozens or hundreds of amends reviews, the cultural team would get more and more quick and skillful at discerning what is problematic, and what is acceptable / respectful.

5. Then there's the issue of the charitable selection. You concentrated on the slurs toward American Indians and suggested (IIRC) a Lakota charity. Great! But they weren't the only ones that were insulted, were they? There are insults towards Asians, towards women, towards black Americans... there's a lot that didn't age well.

It looks like you didn't read my proposal, since I already suggested a concrete way for each specific community to be included in the "amends monies." In the case of GAZ10, that would be: Vodun, Lakota, Nakota (Assiniboine/Stoney), Kanienʼkehá꞉ka (Mohawk), Absaalooke (Crow), Mongolian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Bhutanese. There are almost certainly gender and LGBT under-representation issues as well. The quantity of "jabs" would be tallied, and the amends monies approximately divvied between them proportionately.

Furthermore, if you gave me an hour to search on the internet, I could find a worthy cultural charity for all nine cultural communities which are slandered in GAZ10. I'd imagine that the professional cultural consultants who would make up Wizards team would have even quicker ideas of where to find relevant charities, given their embedded position in various cultural communities.

So this, too, becomes yet another issue of covering the corporate behind- when everyone gets insulted, you just end up with a charitable donation to some pabulum charity, like the United Way (ugh).

I suggested that specificity is an important aspect of amends; but well, there are worse things than the United Way.

I'm not sure what your goal is. Do you really think I'm going to throw up my hands and say: "Gee, you're right! I hadn't thought about how Wizards might just give the amends monies to United Way. That would be so lame. I guess I'll just give up."

6. Now, here's the rub. Maybe you think that this specific product is so offensive it has to be dealt with- obviously, the peanuts generated by it don't really matter, and it's almost tokenism at that point, right? But there's so many products, from the ones that people keep calling attention to (GAZ10, Oriental Adventures and its progeny, Ravenloft, etc. etc. etc) to all the issues in all the books (like the casual misogyny that I mentioned above). Any review would find these issues.

You say "there's so many products." Well, an objective process would determine exactly how many products contain "ethnic, racial, and gender prejudice." There are only so many. Even if it's 300 products, that's only 300. The process would have a beginning, and an end. And, if done well (and I believe that Wizards has the capacity to do it well), an amends process could generate enormous goodwill.

Every time someone saw the link to the DRAGON+ amends article on the DriveThruRPG product page, and saw the list of specific charities which their PDF or POD purchase is fueling, there'd be a boost of interest and goodwill. This would generate goodwill for decades and decades to come. Even in D&D 7E...and D&D 12E...people are always going to be interested in the classic sources of the various D&D worlds.

So in the end, what do you think a rational company would do? Enter into an endless cycle of publicly apologizing and making amends and paying money to charities for products that don't even make them much money

The cycle is not endless. There are only so many Wizards' books with "ethnic, racial, and gender prejudice."
But even Wizards says: "this work will never end."
You could ask the same question about literally any amendatory action that Wizards has taken, such as the revision of the Vistani, the invention of two new non-Lolthian drow cultures, etc.
It seems that in your "rational" world, it's all about the lowest bottom line. What, are you a professional corporate advisor?
Why don't you get out of my way, and stop your naysaying?

or just pulling the whole thing?

Well, who cares? If that's what it comes to, then so be it. Pull the whole legacy PDF program.
Yet I never called for that.
But I'd prefer that future over continuing to identify with a bunch of snarky, congenitally negative, fannish D&D co-dependents who are afraid to speak up about (or even to conceive that there might be) prejudicial "skeletons in the closet", and who just want to "keep up appearances" and be nice, obedient wittle customers, so as to keep the PDF toy milk flowing from the Wizards' teat.

Again, I will reiterate that I appreciated the research and work you did in the OP.

Thank you.

 

[Snarf Zagyg]

It seems that in your "rational" world, it's all about the lowest bottom line. What, are you a professional corporate advisor?
Why don't you get out of my way, and stop your naysaying?

Well, who cares? If that's what it comes to, then so be it. Pull the whole legacy PDF program.

But I'd prefer that future over continuing to identify with a bunch of snarky, congenitally negative, fannish D&D co-dependents who are afraid to speak up about (or even to conceive that there might be) prejudicial "skeletons in the closet", and who just want to "keep up appearances" and be nice, obedient wittle customers, so as to keep the PDF toy milk flowing from the Wizards' teat.

Sometimes. people say a lot more than they meant to. Adam McKay had a falling out with Will Ferrell. This is what McKay said-

McKay also admitted that they have not spoken since they dissolved their creative partnership and production company.
He says he has reached out to Ferrell, who he first met when they auditioned for Saturday Night Live together, but received no response: “I f***ed up on how I handled that. It’s the old thing of keep your side of the street clean. I should have just done everything by the book.”
McKay concluded by saying he never thought he and Ferrell would fall out permanently over their disagreements, saying: “In my head, I was like, ‘We’ll let all this blow over. Six months to a year, we’ll sit down, we’ll laugh about it and go, It’s all business junk, who gives a s***? We worked together for 25 years. Are we really going to let this go away?’”
He states that Ferrell “took it as a way deeper hurt than I ever imagined and I tried to reach out to him, and I reminded him of some slights that were thrown my way that were never apologized for”.

Hard to imagine Ferrell not getting back in touch after a heartfelt apology like that!

I think you just McKay'd. I understand now- thanks.

 

[Zardnaar]

I'm glad that I never bought any of the Gazetteers if this sort of thing is common in them. And especially glad that I don't have #10.

It's very common in BECMI splat material.

The adventures are reasonably grounded but I bought things like Book of Wondrous Inventions.

It does lean a bit towards Looney toons here and there.

The product line was aimed at kids. The RC not so much.

 

[Mordhau]

It's very common in BECMI splat material.

The adventures are reasonably grounded but I bought things like Book of Wondrous Inventions.

It does lean a bit towards Looney toons here and there.

The product line was aimed at kids. The RC not so much.

By all accounts Gygax's original games were a bit silly. Melf (male Elf) - Zagyg the wizard, Drawmij (Jim Ward backwards). The material components for Fireball are bat guano and sulfur and for Gust of Wind it was a legume seed (beans).

So that particular kind of silly humour was somewhat there from the start.

 

[Thomas Shey]

I'm thinking the post I made here at least edged up closer to Danny's admonition earlier in the thread (that I hadn't seen when I posted it) than is probably a good idea, so I've gone back and edited it out.

Edit: Oops, little too late.

 

[Yaarel]

The second least appreciated person in a game system or setting related forum is an insider who comes along with serious criticism of that system or setting (the first, of course, is an outsider who does the same).

Minor criticism is, of course, tolerated as just variation in view, but the moment it gets at all serious, it becomes heresy. I've seen this on more fora than I can remember.

There is something about "getting defensive" that also gets irrational.

 

[Zardnaar]

By all accounts Gygax's original games were a bit silly. Melf (male Elf) - Zagyg the wizard, Drawmij (Jim Ward backwards). The material components for Fireball are bat guano and sulfur and for Gust of Wind it was a legume seed (beans).

So that particular kind of silly humour was somewhat there from the start.

It cranks it up from there though.

 

[CleverNickName]

It cranks it up from there though.

Like, way up.

GAZ10 is not "that particular kind of silly humour" that @Mordhau is describing. It drives miles past "humour" all the way to "blatantly racist," and when it gets there it starts revving the engine and doing donuts.

 

[Zardnaar]

Like, way up.

GAZ10 is not "that particular kind of silly humour" that @Mordhau is describing. It drives miles past "humour" all the way to "blatantly racist," and when it gets there it starts revving the engine and doing donuts.

I was referencing the rest of the Mystara line.

 

[MGibster]

Every time someone saw the link to the DRAGON+ amends article on the DriveThruRPG product page, and saw the list of specific charities which their PDF or POD purchase is fueling, there'd be a boost of interest and goodwill. This would generate goodwill for decades and decades to come. Even in D&D 7E...and D&D 12E...people are always going to be interested in the classic sources of the various D&D worlds.

Have you ever been to California? It's a beautiful state with so much to see and do that I cannot recommend it highly enough. Anyway, I went up there around 2005 and it seemed like everywhere I turned I would see a warning label. The first hotel I stayed out had a little placard near the front door declaring that some of the material used during the construction of the hotel was known to the state of California to cause cancer. If you went to the store, you could see similar labels slapped on wide variety of products and even Disneyland couldn't escape.

Here's the thing. After a few days, all those Prop 65 signs became invisible. They were still everywhere, but they were just background noise that I filtered out subconsciously. And that's what the disclaimer on legacy D&D products has become. Background noise that nobody pays attention to. And your warnings will eventually turn into background noise as well.

But after reading your replies to Snarf I've got to ask, is this really about making amends? Because it seems more about making WotC and the authors' crawl on their bellies begging for forgiveness than it is about correcting any past harms associated with Gaz10.