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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Faolyn" data-source="post: 8553212" data-attributes="member: 6915329">It's easy to treat racist beliefs as facts if you believe that society is the same as innate biology. As an example--and I apologize to the mods if this is getting into real-world politics too much; let me know and I'll delete this--in the real world, some racist people think that the reason Black people are inherently criminal in nature, which is why there are so many of them in prison. These people are either unaware or choose to ignore how many real-world legal systems treat Black people really, really badly and much more harshly than they treat white people, which is the actual reason for the numbers disparity. If you believe that Black people are inherently criminal, then you can also say that orcs are inherently criminal (murderous bandits, in D&D terms) as well, by using that as "real world biology" to back it up. Because gamers, in general, like having real-world precedents because of verisimilitude.No, it's just dumb because you are leaping to conclusions about a specific individual, which I wasn't doing. I didn't single out your friend as being "an awful DM" like you did mine because he used bigotry. In fact, I didn't bring up your friend at all--you did, in response to my post. Which is odd; if your friend isn't using real-world bigotry endemically in-game, why would it upset you that I said some DMs do?Here, I'll give you another example. Imagine a DM who decides that, in his world, women are treated as second-class citizens and any female PCs are going to be harassed frequently by NPCs because they're female, because it's "realistic" for a Medieval game (and this DM would probably look the other way if a male PC harassed a female PC for the same reason). But at the same time, the DM doesn't include, or tones down, "realistic" things that would affect male PCs. This is an example of the type of bigotry I was talking about. Or <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/rpghorrorstories/comments/swefjn/there_are_no_black_people_on_the_sword_coast/" target="_blank">this one</a>, from a recent post on r/rpghorrorstories. To save you a click-through, a person left a game after being told he couldn't play a dark-skinned character because "there are no black people on the Sword Coast."Would you like to support this claim that I've made "ten thousand" (which I know you mean as a generically large number) posts on the subject of bigoted DMs using "realism" as an excuse for bigotry?Would you also care to explain why you think it's "inflexible" to be against using real-world bigotry in-game, or as an excuse for in-game bigotry?Are you saying that every DMs would treat slavery appropriate in game, because their heart is in the right place?</blockquote>

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