When Fantasy Racism gets stupid

[Yora]

I think we agree that killing a beholder or manticore is only justified when they do something to threaten others the PCs want to protect. Just walking into a beholder city and killing everyone just on principle is as wrong as going into an orc village and killing all the civilians. Or like just going into the forest hunting for bear-shaped XP.

 

[I'm A Banana]

My problem with "Monsters are people too" is, where doe we draw the line.

Different places for different campaigns. In most games, demons and devils are probably irredeemably "made of evil." But that's not the case in Planescape, which traffics in tropes of cosmic morality and where demons and devils are both just extremes of a particular philosophy. Not everyone thinks that is fun or awesome, so that needn't be true in every campaign, but it can be true in PS.

The flip side of "monsters are people too," is, of course, "people are monsters, too." The implication being that any person has in them the capacity to be eeeeevil, and so those elves can be slavers and colonists and bigots, and those dwarves can be terrorists and war-mongers, and those halflings can be greedy, petty, and cruel...

It jives more with a greyer morality in the setting, which can create a lot of interesting conflict, and helps mitigate the heavy-handed morality of D&D's alignment system: Alignment becomes less about what you are and more about how you act.

That's not always desirable, of course, but for a lot of games, that's stuff they like to play with. For some games, the question of "what can we kill? under what circumstances?" is something they want to explore. Not all games, but certainly some!

 

[Derren]

My problem with "Monsters are people too" is, where doe we draw the line.

Why should there be a line?
Why should the default of the game be "we have sacks of HP everyone can kill at sight" instead "We have alien races who's culture and motivation often lead to conflict" which DMs can ignore if they want to run something more simple?

Imo D&D should aim high, not low.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Apart from that, to be honest, I want both aproaches in my games

That's a perfectly reasonable desire, but consider that by making the 'monsters are people too' approach universal you will inevitably end up with both. This is because the PCs' culture, assuming it's not highly sophisticated, will almost certainly regard some sentient beings as monsters. Also, beings who attack the PCs, or threaten them, are very likely to become regarded as monsters to be killed, at least in that moment. It's kill or be killed.

Our own world contains only people. But at many times and in many situations, ordinary human people have treated other ordinary human people as monsters to be shunned, denied basic human rights, ethnically cleansed, or killed. If that can happen in our world, how much more easily could it happen (even without alignment) in a D&D-style world, where physical and cultural differences are greater?

 

[Vikingkingq]

My problem with "Monsters are people too" is, where doe we draw the line. Manticores have a decent int score as well, as do Beholders and Othyoughs. Are all these people too? If so, what about Demons and Devils? Pretty damn intelligent, wise and intelligent, some of those buggers.

But I like my always evil creatures, all the time creatures to. You meet a drow, gnoll, minotaur, goblinoid or Troll. You bet that being will be evil, no exception. It's good to have some groups of clear villains, it creates conflict in the gaming world, areas devoid of human civilisation and allows me as DM to explore all shades of evil without having a human psychopath on every street. Pragmatically, it also allows me to use Drow as DM and having a damn good reason to not have them as PC race.

I think there's two separate things here:

One is the difference between hostile and evil. A Drow might want to capture me, sell me into slavery, and then sacrifice my heart to Lloth - that makes the drow hostile, but does it make the drow inherently evil? After all, plenty of human cultures with good, evil, and neutral people in them practiced slavery and human sacrifice. Was every Aztec evil, or every Gaul or Carthaginian?

The other is the difference between what we might call moral evil and what we might call metaphysical evil. A human psychopath we might describe as morally evil, as someone who's doing bad things because they want to, because they can. Whereas a demon or zombie is an aberration of the natural order by its very nature, something that should not exist but is being brought into the world by some perversion of the laws of nature.

One fantasy system that I think has a really good handle on this is Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying. A Chaos demon or the Undead are metaphysically evil - they are matter twisted by a force outside of the physical realm into something otherwise impossible. A Chaos cultist by the contrast made the moral choice to sell their soul for power.

 

[Kichwas]

I can see your point, the idea of regarding a whole species of sentient beings as inherently evil is pretty distasteful, and resembles the propaganda used to justify genocide in the real world.

It goes beyond just this - many of the traits given to the 'evil' races of this brand of fantasy are taken from real world propaganda wars used to justify race wars. Orcs of D&D in some books of the 80s on into 3E had traits taken not from Native Americans, but from how Native Americans were depicted in 19th century propaganda to justify 'removal' campaigns, and early cowboy movies up into the 1960s. In at least one book, the reason Drow had black skin was the same as the reason churches used to give for Africans being dark to justify slavery in the US and West Indies. Other parallels to Asian exclusion or campaigns against Jews make a person really begin to wonder... who wrote this stuff like this, and why? What kind of 'escapism' was that for those authors?

Otoh, sometimes rpgs are played purely for escapism. It can be good fun to kill hordes of imaginary bad guys, without worrying about whether they're people too.

If they all used very inhuman traits, like monsters in horror movies, it'd be easier to see that escapism. But when they are given traits that come from propaganda of some very bad parts of recent western history... it can get very uncomfortable being in a room of gamers enjoying that form of 'escapism' when you yourself -ARE- a Native American and are keenly aware of how similar those Orcs are to the posters that used to be used to motivate attempts to wipe out your ancestors.

That's not the form of escapism I'd want to pass on to my children, nor to the children of the people across the table from me who frankly, I and my kin have not been at war with for over 100 years.

I sometimes end up wandering down dark lines of thought with this though - wondering what motivated the writers of early D&D to tread this path. They were writing in the early 1970s, at a time when the USA was just coming out of very harsh parts of the Civil Rights movement - less than a decade away from the end of segregation, and at a time when some of my kin were in 'resistance' (Wounded Knee II, and Alcatraz). And it almost feels like they wanted to 'keep the conflict going'.

There have been various points in time as a player of fantasy games when I have simply had to get up and walk away - unable to explain to my friends at the table why, without starting an argument that would end in racial slurs getting thrown back and forth... thankfully because so many of them no longer -have- these tendencies in them, but also sadly because so few of them are aware of their own recent history.

I want escapism too... But some things are not good paths to tread into escape. Simplifying races into lines of good and evil is actually a complexity added on, when it so closely parallels the recent real world past.

Some forms of morality are not at all simple, and are best left as dead in the past.

 

[Gentlegamer]

But as for a more "modern" take on most of the "evil races," yeah, the idea is usually more that their cultures impose pathology on their members, mostly in the form of dogma from "evil gods."

The highly civilized and wealthy Carthaginians burned their infants in ovens to gain favors from their gods, for example.

The leaders of this culture were astonished when their enemy, so clearly defeated, kept fighting, even though there was no 'profit' in it, except to defend their fatherland and the household gods.

 

[Bluenose]

Why should there be a line?
Why should the default of the game be "we have sacks of HP everyone can kill at sight" instead "We have alien races who's culture and motivation often lead to conflict" which DMs can ignore if they want to run something more simple?

Imo D&D should aim high, not low.

I'd love to see D&D do something as good as Traveler's Alien Races books, most of which were excellent. Getting something as good as Runequest's Trollpak would be even better. Even the Mystara Gazetteer series dealing instead with different races/cultures would be nice to see.

The highly civilized and wealthy Carthaginians burned their infants in ovens to gain favors from their gods, for example.

The leaders of this culture were astonished when their enemy, so clearly defeated, kept fighting, even though there was no 'profit' in it, except to defend their fatherland and the household gods.

Greeks used to expose unwanted children on the nearest hill, instead. Some of their "barbarian" neighbours were horrified by the practice.

 

[Dire Bare]

I sometimes end up wandering down dark lines of thought with this though - wondering what motivated the writers of early D&D to tread this path. They were writing in the early 1970s, at a time when the USA was just coming out of very harsh parts of the Civil Rights movement - less than a decade away from the end of segregation, and at a time when some of my kin were in 'resistance' (Wounded Knee II, and Alcatraz). And it almost feels like they wanted to 'keep the conflict going'.

I think being aware of the real world racism that has creeped into our favorite game from the very beginning is a good thing, and modifying your home game to try and remove those elements is worthwhile.

But don't be too harsh on Gygax, Arneson, and other early D&D authors. I highly doubt their intentions were racist, but that simply they were products of their own upbringing. I have many friends raised in conservative areas of the US, in conservative households, that do not consider themselves racist, have friends from other racial backgrounds (and religious, and gender orientation), but yet unknowingly harbor some incredibly racist ideas that they don't even understand are racist.

I had a friend use the term "n****-knocking" in front of a black co-worker, who then was astonished the black co-worker took offense and reported her to HR. "It's just a phrase, we use it all the time!" was her defense, and she in turn was highly offended that the black co-worker (as well as other friends) accused her of using racist, harassing speech. It's not the only example I can come up with.

Real-world mythology is chock-full of racist ideas, but that are so common to certain segments of society that it can be hard to see them as racist, and even to accept them as racist once pointed out. And in large part, D&D takes that real world mythological racism and incorporates it into the game.

I was totally cool with the whole drow thing for most of my life, fair elves cursed with dark skin for being evil, until much later as an adult it was pointed out to me and directly compared to the similar racist ideas some cultures have/had towards African people. The D&D novels have tried to pull the drow race away from this concept (the "pre-cursed" drow already had darker skin, in current Realms lore), but it is so much a part of the D&D canon this has been difficult . . . as many fans would be pissed at a major change is a classic D&D race and refuse to see the change as a move away from racism.

I wouldn't mind seeing the D&D Next team, once they get to world-building, make some bold moves to remove some of these long-standing racist elements of the game, but in doing so I feel they would alienate a lot of long-time fans who don't see those elements as racist, or accept the importance of making some positive changes.

 

[Derren]

I wouldn't mind seeing the D&D Next team, once they get to world-building, make some bold moves to remove some of these long-standing racist elements of the game, but in doing so I feel they would alienate a lot of long-time fans who don't see those elements as racist, or accept the importance of making some positive changes.

Sadly as you can see here and in similar threads, many people are violently opposed to giving monsters more personality because that prevents them from killing them on sight without any moral problems.

Imo this is the biggest problem D&D has. That it is in the end "just" a dungeon crawler and it is not really possible to make it "more" because neither the designers nor many players want a deviation from the simple "adventurers kill monsters for loot" core of D&D.
And even giving people the options (without needing to houserule everything) to do more in the game seems to be a big No for some players as that might take up space which could be used by more murder weapons or HP bags to kill.