WotC WotC's Chris Perkins On D&D's Inclusivity Processes Going Forward

Over on D&D Beyond, WotC's Chris Perkins has written a blog entry about how the company's processes have been changed to improve the way the D&D studio deals with harmful content and inclusivity. This follows recent issues with racist content in Spelljammer: Adventures in Space, and involves working with external cultural consultants.

The studio’s new process mandates that every word, illustration, and map must be reviewed by multiple outside cultural consultants prior to publication.

Leveling Up Our Creative Process: Learnings From Spelljammer

In this blog post, I'll talk about how we in the D&D Studio are changing our review process following the problematic content that appeared in Spell...

www.dndbeyond.com

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

The whole idea of gendered nouns scares me. I can't get my head around everything having a gender.

Welcome to French 101, where everything as a pretty arbitrary gender and we got no real ''neutral''.

 

[Staffan]

The whole idea of gendered nouns scares me. I can't get my head around everything having a gender.

That was one of the more annoying things as I recall back when taking French. I mean, sure, man/woman, son/daughter, husband/wife, etc are all pretty clearly gendered. But randomly assigning gender to inanimate objects? That's just silly.

 

[LuisCarlos17f]

In German languange there are three genders. In Spanish only two. The Italian doesn't S for the plural. The French sounds wonderful (but they don't pronounce the S for the plural), but IMO the pronunciation is hardest among the Latin languages. Russian is harder than German. Korean has got a different alphabet, the Japanese is a syllabary, sign for each syllable, but the Chinese is a different sign for each word, and not the native Chinese know it all. And in the age of internet and keyboards people would rather languages with alphabet.

The Arabian alphabet hasn't letters for the vocals, but special signs under or over the consonants, and they are too small to be readen confortablely. Orally when they speak I am not safe if he said B or D.

Sometimes there are misunderstandings among natives speaking the same language but different slangs.

I don't know if the translated working for WotC are from Spain or Iberoamerica, but I guess it will be "neutral" style for all the Spanish-speaker countries.

Other point is about the colloquial expressions. For example if I say "the thin cows arrive" it means we are going to suffer bad economic years.. (Do you remember the pharaon's dream about seven fat and seven thin cows in Jospeh's stroy from the Bible?).

* I guess a possible strategy for Chinese market is to hire an outsourcer to create a new IP, and later this to be acquired, and rebooted with the necessary retouchs.

 

[Tales and Chronicles]

but they don't pronounce the S for the plural

we dont pronounce most of the letters in the word. Its like the Olympics of silent letters. And even when a letter is there and is pronounced, there's nothing guaranteeing that the letter will be pronounced the same way as the same letter in another word.

My own name nearly has more silent letters than actual pronounced ones!

Sweet chaos.

 

[AnotherGuy]

That was one of the more annoying things as I recall back when taking French. I mean, sure, man/woman, son/daughter, husband/wife, etc are all pretty clearly gendered. But randomly assigning gender to inanimate objects? That's just silly.

I'm not convinced it is completely random, that is a common misconception amongst solely English speakers, and as for silly that is a matter of perspective.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

The whole idea of gendered nouns scares me. I can't get my head around everything having a gender.

It's because you associated gender with sex, growing up with a language where those words are synonymous (well, they seem synonymous to me, at least). Gender is just a grammatical class. Sure, female persons and animals are (generally, there are some exceptions) associated with the feminine gender and male persons and animal with the masculine gender, but it's more an inheritance of Latin language (three genders) than a link to sex. Some animals are designated with a single gender, both for male or female. I can understand easily how it is a difficulty when learning French (but unless you're speaking to a complete moron, a native will understand you even if you don't use the correct gender, even in the few cases where a word changes meaning with gender) but we aren't the worst offender out there: wikipedia list languages by number of genders and there, they have examples up to 20. They are clearly "classes of words" and not related to sex. Masculinity is feminine.

 

[Alzrius]

That was one of the more annoying things as I recall back when taking French. I mean, sure, man/woman, son/daughter, husband/wife, etc are all pretty clearly gendered. But randomly assigning gender to inanimate objects? That's just silly.

I blame that on a lackluster American education system.

 

[GMforPowergamers]

That sounds pretty much like it'd describe most typical dungeon crawls; and I've been running those a very long time now.

this seems so odd to me, I have played not just with my group but in stores at cons and then discussed with other groups at both and that style of play not only seemed rare, but looked down on.

The most recent 3-part adventure I just got done running, they were

a) asked to go into a house and find the previous group that went in there and never came out, they looted what the previous group had missed; then
b) sent through a teleport trap that put them in a cell in a dungeon under a castle, they killed everything alive in the place and looted it; then
c) they invaded a dragon's lair, killed her, and looted the place.

Nothing unusual there. (oh, and during part b they found what was left of the original group)

A is the only part I get... and even then I assume there had to be a reason to go to the place for the original group you were following, but I fear you are going to either say no, or worse the reason was to make money...
was the dragon from C doing something, was there a REASON to kill them?

 

[billd91]

But how do you reconcile that with calling people "African Americans" "Asian Americans" (and so on) and mentionning their purported ethnicity along with their nationality? In France it would be considered racist and, unless the intent was harmless (like an honest misunderstanding), it would even be prosecuted (expression like that are only used by the far right whenever there is some crime reported, asking "was he French or a French who comes/descent from X or Y?" to cast suspicion on the origin of the perpetrator and it is causing grief to "second generation immigration persons (ie, persons who weren't immigrant themselves but their sons and daughters)" who feel totally integrated yet are rejected by racists to be confronted with their ancestors origin). Now that you know that, in my cultural framework, it is rather offensive to divide citizens of a country on a racial axis, will you stop using "African Americans"? Certainly not (and I am far for asking that from anyone) since it's totally accepted in your cultural perspective. How is Japan different?

One huge difference here is that many of the hyphenated American labels are self-selected and their development was largely opposed by racist and/or nativist ideologies in their anti-immigrant campaigns. Moreover, use of the hyphenated-American terms highlights the diversity of the US as a nation of immigrants and not as a homogeneous culture.
There are cases in which the terminology hasn't been self-selected as in the case of Native Americans. And that probably helps explain why the term is a relatively controversial one. And there are cases in which they can be used in a problematic way. But, in the main, the terms are not considered problematic in the same way that Hussar considers half problematic.

 

[Umbran]

Mod Note:
Hey, folks!

The linguistics discussion is not really a problem, but it is very off-topic for this thread. Please take it to the Geek Talk forum, please and thanks.