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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 5114685" data-attributes="member: 2205">Well, as I alluded to in the comments on the blog, Tolkien's a much more subtle writer than a lot of people give him credit for, and just because they made a facile and shallow interpretation of what he wrote doesn't mean that's actually what he wrote.  There are a lot of hints (and in other, external texts, these aren't hints, they're outright statements) that a lot of the groups of creatures and people that are described as "evil" by some of the characters are victims of bad PR; i.e., the Gondorians and Rohirrim won the war, and the victors write the history books.  The Dunlendings in particular are described as being subject to thousands of years of persecution by the Gondorians and Rohirrim, and even the Numenoreans before that, before being exploited and manipulated by Saruman, without actually being evil at all.  There's others, but that was probably the most clear-cut example I could think of off the top of my head.But the point is, I think the idea of D&D races as flat stereotypes is boring much more than I think it's offensive.  It's only offensive in the sense that it offends me that the designers think their audience is so shallow.  I'm not offended on behalf of the orcs that they're stereotyped as brutish, evil thugs, incapable of organizing enough to amount to anything politically, and incapable of achieving anything other than brutal military victories on occasion.  When they get lucky.  There aren't any real orcs to be offended by that stereotype, and D&D orcs aren't metaphors for any real world peoples, so there's no one to be offended either way.The other point is, again, that the Star Wars cantina is not characterized by it's Otherness, or alien-ness or whatever.  Star Wars aliens are very clearly just people in funny suits.  For example, other than the fact the Chewbacca speaks in a language that makes him sound like a combination of a grizzly bear and a walrus, personality wise, he's completely human.  Jabba the Hutt is a legless slug, yet he's based on a bad stereotype of Al Capone and Genghis Khan.  The Star Wars cantina paradigm does not really allow for roleplaying "the other"; it's about thin stereotypes being hammed up for quick and dirty effect.  Races in Star Wars are very much human, with just a few bizarre quirks (mind tricks don't work on Toydarians, only money, etc.)  Same thing for races in D&D.  They're not about deep immersion in alien-ness, they are about extremely human characteristics turned up to 11 and made into a defining trait.</blockquote>

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