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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Marandahir" data-source="post: 8486820" data-attributes="member: 6803643">Going to assume good faith from all of ya. Vistani was a mistake made decades ago as they were trying to lean into gothic horror and Bram Stroker's Dracula featured Romani people in an offensively stereotypical way and the original module was literally a paint by the numbers adaptation of Dracula with new names for each faction and elves thrown in (but they're DUSK elves! see! Edgier!!). (FYI, I think Dusk Elves are cool. The 4e write-up suggested a close connection with the original people who became Drow but being the ones that didn't leave with Lolth, which I think is a very interesting CULTURAL narrative to lean into while keeping with them being Drow, or even Wood Elves if you want to stick with the strict earlier interpretation that Drow are darkskinned because of the curse of Lolth, an idea that may of us including myself I abhor for being reminiscent of the racist concept of the Curse of Ham). D&D is trying to fix this. But Oofta is right: Factions are not necessarily a solution to problematic elements of the game. There's a reason the word Barbarian is being wiped from Storm King's Thunder and other places. Honestly, I'm surprised the class hasn't been renamed to Berserker yet (though that would probably require 2024's refresh of 5e to make the primary subclass the class's name and give a new name to the primary subclass). The word has historical and current racist usages towards the nomadic peoples of the Sahara, and been used as a slur-gloss for any otherized people on the fringes of the viewpoint's society. The Uthgardt are a nomadic tribe from the north of Faerûn. This is a faction. It's mainly a faction of Humans. Calling them the "Barbarian Faction" is otherising and problematic. Vistani are not bad for existing. They are bad because they were written as tropes that used Romani people as props for a western narrative. They can be good if they serve a similar narrative purpose without outright being cut and paste Romani, and they can also be good if they aren't accompanied with all the racist storytelling casting aspersions on Vistani because they're Vistani and nobody can trust a Vistani. That leans into and props up racist stereotypes of their inspiration because everyone knows that Vistani is just code for Romani. That's the problem. It's not a "Race" in the game's terms, it's a Faction! But it's racist nonetheless, and had to be fixed. And I still think it's not fixed enough. Nobody is saying that we can't use cultural shorthands in our games. D&D thrives on shorthand depictions since the game is played on the fly in real time, and the DM has to be able to come up with mannerisms on the spot if the Players approach the NPC the DM didn't spend 10 hours writing a backstory for (and completely ignore the plotline the DM had actually prepared). Using shorthands is not racist, but it can become that when all anyone ever thinks of a particular lineage or faction is that one trope and plays it to death, and then that one trope is actually standing in for a real person (because its the one lineage or faction in the game with dark skin, or with a different facial structure, or that doesn't have the same gender roles, etc). What we're saying is that WotC has the opportunity to reach a wider audience than our home games do by necessity, so they have an incentive to figure out how to make their published books anti-discriminatory by default. And that goes beyond race vs faction, because factionalism in game can still be racist in real-life if done poorly. Factionalism in game, however, COULD be PART of a solution to racist caricatures in the game's core assumptions. And if so, then it COULD be worth leaning into. I think Oofta is right to warn us that the issue is not just simply solved by replacing Elves with Forest People Faction and Dwarves with Mountain People faction.</blockquote>

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