D&D 5E The word ‘Race’

[Celtavian]

Here's the not-surprising thing. You make an effort to include others, and they show up.

Are you telling me most groups don't? That they activity discourage others from gaming with them?

The problem is that you're ignoring the fact that there are women who love working on cars, playing poker, and playing sports, even with the guys. D&D has female players, and if it makes an effort to be more open to them, the player base will grow. That's a good thing for all involved.

Sometimes men like being with other men. I don't see why this is a problem. There is never any discussion by women allowing for the fact that men sometimes want a night out with boys. That might be D&D night. Football Sunday. Whatever. If women want to game, they can have their gaming groups or sports groups. Sometimes men want to be with other men. I don't get why that is a problem, especially for social activities for fun.

Yes, yes it was exclusionary. Dwarven females in early games were specifically writen to huddle in kitchens in fright and cry. The only matriarchal society in the game generally is the drow. The overwhelming majority of games take place using the Middle Age European as a default, with an overwhelming number of white characters being the default. Those who had non-white skin were invariably monsters. That's kind of exclusionary. Anyone who wanted to game had to deal with a game based around white male power fantasies. Is it any surprise the game was predominantly played by white males when it was designed that way?

Unless of course you were playing in some other region or don't find other cultural types interesting. I don't find a lot of ancient South American or Native cultures interesting. I don't find Southern African culture that interesting. I tend to prefer Medieval European ancient cultures whether Southern or Northern Europe. I like Vikings and Knights. I like Asian cultures as well, preferably China and Japan. I enjoy some Northern African and Middle Eastern Cultural tropes. Nearly every single one is patriarchal when it comes to rulership and warfare.

That has more to do with a predominantly patriarchal culture. Plus, when would most non-white people have the resources to dedicate to becoming professional poker players?

Plenty of non-whites have the means. You think there are only poor Latins, blacks, and the like. That is not the case. Worldwide there are plenty of wealthy people that can get involved in poker. They just don't want to do it for reasons other than the game or they do it locally rather than in America or internationally. Some groups don't involve themselves in certain things and it has nothing to do with economics or prejudice. That is liberal falsehoods spread in nations like Europe and America to guilt people into feeling bad for being successful.

Celtavian, so-called "traditional male games" are only that because there's an active . Were you aware that women's sports actually has as large of a viewing as men's sports, but they're actually being deliberately sidelined in favor of more men sports despite viewership being roughly equal? That a lot of the viewership directly relates to the "assumption" that women must do the cooking and cleaning, even when they are a primary breadwinner? Being a woman in our society is not easy. Would the women rather sit down and watch a game and just let the others do the work? Hell yes.

What women's sports? Please provide that information. I do not hear of women sports having as active a viewing as say the NFL or MLB. What women sports are you talking about? Making a general statement like that requires some serious proving. I know women's tennis and soccer have pretty high viewership rates. The WNBA not so much. Rondy Rousey has been one of the few to raise women fighting sports to a higher viewership.

Surveys show that white men show less and less interest in playing or reading of protagonists that match their race and gender, while women and other ethnicities show a greater importance of media showcasing women and non-white leads.

Probably because women and non-whites have been underrepresented in mainstream fiction for quite some time. Whereas a white male has read about every book there is involving his particular ethnic and gender-type ever made. Gets kind of boring reading the same old stuff.

Oh gods. Gamergate is so, so much worse than that. The gaters weren't slamming people. They were actively attacking them. We're talking about claling the police and SWAT on them, delivering bomb threats to businesses that allowed female game designers to speak, harassing not only the women themselves, but attacking their friends and family. They've lost their jobs, friends, and more because of this bullcrap. Their accounts were hacked, "games" that involved beating up pictures of famous women gamers were circulated, DOS attacks were launched, money stolen, fake accounts to try and get people to think they were someone else. Threats of rape and murder were common.

Gamergate went out of its way to physically, socially, financially, and business-related attack any one that represented a female view when it came to games. And not just video games, but table top game writers and novel authors. It was so bad that the FBI classified gamergate as an active hate group and is searching out its members for hate crimes and acts of terrorism.

Think about that for a minute. Gaming culture has its own KKK for non-white male members. Is it any wonder women aren't consider a majority in gaming when their very lives and wellbeing are at stake?

I would never participate in that garbage. I'm raised on old school American values where a man is supposed to protect and encourage women. I don't mean the ones practiced by pigs that call themselves men. I mean the ones practiced by men that cared about their daughters, wives, grandmas, aunts, and mothers. The ones that believed in values like "Women and children first" in hard times and did whatever it took to provide for them. I don't understand males that make it hard on females. It's not something personally practice. Threatening a female is an utterly foreign idea to me.

And that doesn't touch on the fact that, in gaming, a lot of the higher positions are a boys-only club were women are often deliberately excluded based solely on gender.

Boy's only club? This is the part that drives me nuts because it does not take into account the biology of the situation.

Throw men and women back into the wild. Nothing different will happen. Why? Men and women have different biological functions whether they like it or not. They can't just be socialized away.

Women biologically are built to carry children. It takes them 9 months to carry a child and birth it. During that period they are extremely vulnerable and require careful protection if the human race is to survive. The females basic biological job is breed, nurture, protect, and feed children, control the male encouraging him to protect her and her offspring until they reach adulthood.

Thus enters the male. Biologically the male can breed in minutes. After he has done so he develops an attachment to the female. This causes him to seek to control and protect the female. What does he do when controlling and protecting the females? He controls territory, kills breeding competitors, and kills threats to the pregnant female. This is his basic biological job. Breed, protect, dominate, control. You see these traits manifested in the history books in spades.

So you have a modern society where women suddenly were forced to compete for jobs and resources with males bred to control and dominate be it territory, businesses, sportsfields, gaming tables, etcetera. The entire male mindset is competitive, combative, and interested in domination at various levels.

Do you think it will ever be easy for a human female to compete against a human male that has literally been bred to it for thousands of years to the point that humanity is the most dominant species on the planet with the only real threat to our destruction is the human male? I keep wondering if many females discussing the so called boys club ever step back and go, "What is the male's purpose biologically? Wait a minute. These guys are psychopaths that we have to compete against. They will literally at some point burn the world to cinders rather than submit to even each other. How do we get this group of psychotic human males to stop doing what they've been doing for several thousand years? No one has killed or enslaved more people than this psychotic creature we have been breeding with."

I have to chuckle at the lack of awareness of why these things occurred. It has next to nothing to do with prejudice or socialization and a lot more to do with biology that manifests as culture and socialization leading to things like the boy's club, patriarchal society, and the general psychotic nature of the human male leading them to make wars, go on shooting sprees, and generally act like an aggressive, insane beast on occasion. If females can ever figure out how to get men to give up that part of their nature, we'll have a much more equal world.

I keep waiting for a female to write a book called "Living and breeding with the biggest threat to human existence: The Psychotic Human Male...How to talk these idiots into long-term survival."

 

[PnPgamer]

This thread makes me want to race to nearest track for some track competition...
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Nobody? Yeah okay ill let myself out...

 

[Mallus]

Look at the recent pictures from Gen Con and the gaming rooms. I've seen Klan meetings with more diversity.

Does a lack of diversity in a space equal exclusion? In my mind, there are very different things, and the way they get conflated in some contemporary social justice critiques makes me uncomfortable.

I'm a non-white American nerd. Been a science fiction & fantasy reader/viewer my entire life. Been a participant in the RPG hobby since high school. In my personal experiences, I've never felt excluded from the community. In fact, the idea I *wasn't* included had never occurred to me -- not until very recently, and never IRL, always in online discussions. Obviously my experiences aren't universal, but I'll say they match those of the non-white nerds I know. It's possible we've just been lucky.

I know what it's like to be the only person who looks like me in a room. Happens all the time, despite me living & working in a diverse, metropolitan area. You learn there is a huge difference between being the only person like you in a room, and being denied entrance. Or being let in only to face naked hostility/racial animus.

So images of a lily-white Gencon don't really say anything meaningful about inclusivity without more context. Heck, my gaming group would be all white, middle-aged men if it weren't for me.

(also, the Klan joke *was* funny!)

 

[Cristian Andreu]

I don't think D&D in and of itself was exclusionary.

I agree. If it was exclusionary, it wouldn't have expanded in markets in which what constitutes a minority in the US is actually the majority. For example, here in Chile the game has primarily expanded among the middle-lower classes since the 80's (in the 70's it had very little exposure, since the books had to be bought abroad and weren't available in Castilian), and makes absolutely no distinction based on skin colour (our population is more homogenous than that of the US, however, with about 40% white, 50% mestizos of varying degrees, and 10% others). I have never heard of anyone here complaint about feeling excluded or left out by the game in any capacity, beyond "It's hard to translate names like Thunderbeard Ironshelves or Nightwind Silvermoon into Castilian without sounding absolutely ridiculous".

That leads me to believe the reason white males make up the majority of the players in the US has more to do with how and where it first got introduced than any specific exclusionary barriers within the game itself.

Oh gods. Gamergate is so, so much worse than that. The gaters weren't slamming people. They were actively attacking them. We're talking about claling the police and SWAT on them, delivering bomb threats to businesses that allowed female game designers to speak, harassing not only the women themselves, but attacking their friends and family. They've lost their jobs, friends, and more because of this bullcrap. Their accounts were hacked, "games" that involved beating up pictures of famous women gamers were circulated, DOS attacks were launched, money stolen, fake accounts to try and get people to think they were someone else. Threats of rape and murder were common.

Gamergate went out of its way to physically, socially, financially, and business-related attack any one that represented a female view when it came to games. And not just video games, but table top game writers and novel authors. It was so bad that the FBI classified gamergate as an active hate group and is searching out its members for hate crimes and acts of terrorism.

Think about that for a minute. Gaming culture has its own KKK for non-white male members. Is it any wonder women aren't consider a majority in gaming when their very lives and wellbeing are at stake?

Hmm. I believe we have radically different experiences and views regarding GamerGate.

No offense intended, but I absolutely abhor the Scottish dwarf. It gives me bad flashbacks to the Hobbit movies. It totally breaks immersion for me for a member of a fantasy race to have a regional accent that has nothing to do with the constructed history of the world in which that race exists. Of course this isn't as bad as putting dwarves in kilts and having them play bagpipes as well. You get the idea.

Due to linguistical constraints, when we play Dwarfs over here they always end up acting and sounding like Spanish pirates. "¡Pardiez!", "¡Voto a bríos!", "¡Por las barbas de mi abuelo!" and all that.

 

[epithet]

No offense intended, but I absolutely abhor the Scottish dwarf. It gives me bad flashbacks to the Hobbit movies. It totally breaks immersion for me for a member of a fantasy race to have a regional accent that has nothing to do with the constructed history of the world in which that race exists. Of course this isn't as bad as putting dwarves in kilts and having them play bagpipes as well. You get the idea.

But the dwarves in the Hobbit have Old Norse names in connection with the northern land of Dale and the humans they live among. It would have made way more sense for the dwarves and the men of laketown to have had a shared Scandinavian culture if there had to be a real world cultural analog, but no, Peter Jackson had to have Scottish dwarves. I don't even know where this comes from.

As far as making the game fun, I'm sure your accents are very charming, so I have no objections on that count.

EDIT: I blame Poul Anderson, and R. A. Salvatore for copying him!

None taken. I'll agree with you that Nordic dwarves make a lot more sense from a literary and mythological perspective, but my orcs are viking-inspired and have a Schwarzenegger accent, so... I don't think my various Germanic accents are nuanced enough to pull it off.

 

[aramis erak]

And probably the biggest reason, it's an archaic hobby that caters to people who have lots of disposable income and time. Look at who has the money in the world right now. Then look at who among those people are into, and has time for, "dead-tree" entertainment. Not a very big list, and minorities are heavily weighted out of it.

The groups at the local high schools are pretty diverse. (So are the high schools.) But most of the people I know who still play are poor white folk.

Lots of people with plenty of disposable time but little disposable income. High school and college students, the disabled, the underemployed. These are the people I'm seeing playing. The minority who are affluent? They often subsidize the others' games by snacks and supplements.

I've seen pathfinder groups where everyone chips in to buy the GM the latest book. I've run D&D games that way - players XYZ wanted book Q in play, so they pooled their money and bought me a copy of book Q. (2E era... Complete Psionics, Complete Fighter's, Complete Mage's and Complete Book of Dwarves handbooks.)

In high school, I bought a bunch of used games - ElfQuest, Star Trek, Toon, TFT supplements, D&D books.
In College, I tended to buy more - I was on disability and student loans, plus working 10 hours a week - so I had surplus income. More than I do now. I bought a lot more used, and clearanced. Now, I buy in PDF when I can. Much as I'd love the hardcovers for The One Ring, I can't afford them. So I save my scratch and buy PDFs.

At the high schools in my district, the gaming groups are equally as diverse as the schools now. They weren't back in the day... well, my Traveller group senior year - Tony was native, Nick is African American, and Mark a swarthy Jew, but the other 5 were caucasians.

What I don't see is most of the ethnic kids STAYING with it in college. Different work and social ethic.

 

[Scrivener of Doom]

Ahhh, American English.

In real life, I am involved in political reform and 75% of the battle for reform is actually explaining to people that, no, those political or economic terms do not mean that anywhere in the world except the USA.

I like the word "race". I use it in real life the same way I do in D&D. When I am asked about my views about race I always say this: "I believe in Tolkien's view about races: there are humans, elves, dwarves, orcs etc... and only humans are real. That's the only race: human."

But getting hung up on the word "race" in the context of an RPG? Now that's a new definition of a first world problem.

 

[Mephista]

Hmm. I believe we have radically different experiences and views regarding GamerGate.

There's no "different experiences and views." With the sole exception of the KKK comparison, everything I said is an objective fact. Especially the investigations and arrests by the FBI for hate crimes and terrorism. There are full logs and investigations into this.

 

[Remathilis]

There's no "different experiences and views." With the sole exception of the KKK comparison, everything I said is an objective fact. Especially the investigations and arrests by the FBI for hate crimes and terrorism. There are full logs and investigations into this.

"Listen and believe"

 

[Cristian Andreu]

There's no "different experiences and views." With the sole exception of the KKK comparison, everything I said is an objective fact. Especially the investigations and arrests by the FBI for hate crimes and terrorism. There are full logs and investigations into this.

I meant to say I disagree on the veracity and/or precision of those claims, as well and their exact relationship regarding GamerGate users.

However, I apologise for commenting on the subject, which I believe Morrus asked to avoid debating on the forums. I'm sorry.