snapping at people for "calling him racist" when he argued that orcs were orcs, not people, and orcs being evil had nothing to do with real-world stereotypes. He leaned hard on that bad-faith argument.
It's not a bad faith argument. D&D Orcs are not an analog for real world people, but some people keep trying to make it so.
This is from an old D&D sourcebook for the long-abandoned setting of Mystara.
If you can read that post and say that "orcs [were] never an analog for real world people in D&D", you're lying. Yes they were. Yes, they continue to be through the existence of those products and the racist stereotypes that were attached to them.
There have been depictions of Orcs and Half-Orcs in D&D that have been undeniably racist. Those products are proof. You are wrong. You may have been ignorant of this before, which isn't your fault, but there are a ton of people denying the history of the game because they don't want to get their feelings hurt over a hobby they have attached their own self-esteem to.
That depiction (and others) of Orcs in an official D&D product was racist. Orcs have been a stand-in for many different groups of real-world peoples in D&D worlds for decades. Denying that is a flat-out lie.
*cough* *Lich* *phylactery and tefillin* *cough*
Oh, and Hobgoblins in Samurai armor that are in many of the editions of D&D (including 5e). As well as the multiple racist depictions of Drow throughout the decades.
Edit: Oh, and the Vistani. Perhaps the most egregious example from modern D&D.
My only issue with people digging for racism in D&D races is that Humans in D&D come in all the shapes, sizes and tints they do here. This means anyone saying the other "races" are comparing to humans of RL is reaching and looking for something to feel bad about. How, when there are black humans in the game, someone can say Drow and supposed to represent black humans, is something I can't really follow. If Drow are supposed to be the black humans of D&D, then what are the black humans of D&D supposed to represent?
This won't have a solution, because people have triggers and those who don't have those triggers will always struggle to make these imagined connections. It's like every other facet of life, if you look long enough and hard enough, you'll find something to be offended by.
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Talk to your Players.Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.
If Drow are supposed to be the black humans of D&D, then what are the black humans of D&D supposed to represent?
I don't think anybody's saying Gygax created the Drow to be a specific and unique analogy for black people in D&D. That doesn't have to be the case for the idea that "this entirely black civilization is evil to the core" to be potentially offensive though. Offensive notions can be more subtle than beating someone over the head with an obvious metaphor. There are presumably Jewish people in the muggle world of the Harry Potterverse, but that doesn't mean the look of the goblins running the Gringotts bank didn't justify a few raised eyebrows.
Not trying to be political here, but saying you're sure there's lots of good ones in a group of people too usually means you're about to say something bad about the group nonetheless. Racism doesn't need to be internally consistent to be racism either. You're overthinking it if you're going for some rational argument to show something offensive shouldn't necessarily be. That's a moot point: whether it should be or not is immaterial, whether it can be is all that matters.
New players simply aren't interested in the Forgotten Realms. The Forgotten Realms are simply too dense, too impossible to break into, and everyone who plays games steeped in the Forgotten Realms is enormously hostile to new players. They can keep supporting the Forgotten Realms as the only setting they want anyone to play in - which Wizards has openly stated they're not going to do, they want to switch to a more versatile structure with multiple concurrently supported settings - or they can release books that people say nobody will buy because they're not Forgotten Realms books.
What's the solution? You can't hook new players into the Realms, and you can't get old players to not play in the Realms. How do you reconcile that?
I have to disagree. I love FR and the new players in my campaign are having fun in the Moonshaes, with brief trips to Amn and Candlekeep. I am willing to play anywhere, as a longtime player. I have done Greyhawk as well. I think you do a disservice when you make sweeping generalizations about the habits of millions of players worldwide.
New players simply aren't interested in the Forgotten Realms. The Forgotten Realms are simply too dense, too impossible to break into, and everyone who plays games steeped in the Forgotten Realms is enormously hostile to new players. They can keep supporting the Forgotten Realms as the only setting they want anyone to play in - which Wizards has openly stated they're not going to do, they want to switch to a more versatile structure with multiple concurrently supported settings - or they can release books that people say nobody will buy because they're not Forgotten Realms books.
What's the solution? You can't hook new players into the Realms, and you can't get old players to not play in the Realms. How do you reconcile that?
I have to disagree. I love FR and the new players in my campaign are having fun in the Moonshaes, with brief trips to Amn and Candlekeep. I am willing to play anywhere, as a longtime player. I have done Greyhawk as well. I think you do a disservice when you make sweeping generalizations about the habits of millions of players worldwide.
I really believe that part of the reason that WotC is branching out to other settings and trying separate the FR lore from the core of the game is due to all the surveys about favorite settings they posted over the past couple of years. I would be willing to bet that FR is not as popular as they would like and they are wanting to broaden the appeal of the game by stepping a back from it a little and expanding on the "Multiverse".
My only issue with people digging for racism in D&D races is that Humans in D&D come in all the shapes, sizes and tints they do here. This means anyone saying the other "races" are comparing to humans of RL is reaching and looking for something to feel bad about. How, when there are black humans in the game, someone can say Drow and supposed to represent black humans, is something I can't really follow. If Drow are supposed to be the black humans of D&D, then what are the black humans of D&D supposed to represent?
This won't have a solution, because people have triggers and those who don't have those triggers will always struggle to make these imagined connections. It's like every other facet of life, if you look long enough and hard enough, you'll find something to be offended by.
Except that the way that D&D has depicted orcs and drow as subhuman brutes and vile temptresses who wish to slay or enslave any human they encounter and routinely engage in cannibalism and human sacrifice is exactly the way that Europeans historically depicted Africans, Arabs, East Asians, and the indigenous peoples of North and South America and Australia and Oceania.
D&D lore was heavily influenced by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, and Edgar Rice Boroughs, and those authors were all seriously racist.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
snapping at people for "calling him racist" when he argued that orcs were orcs, not people, and orcs being evil had nothing to do with real-world stereotypes. He leaned hard on that bad-faith argument.
It's not a bad faith argument. D&D Orcs are not an analog for real world people, but some people keep trying to make it so.
This is from an old D&D sourcebook for the long-abandoned setting of Mystara.
If you can read that post and still say that "orcs [were] never an analog for real world people in D&D", you're lying. Yes they were. Yes, they continue to be through the existence of those products and the racist stereotypes that were attached to them.
There have been depictions of Orcs and Half-Orcs in D&D that have been undeniably racist. Those products are proof. You are wrong. You may have been ignorant of this before, which isn't your fault, but there are a ton of people denying the history of the game because they don't want to get their feelings hurt over a hobby they have attached their own self-esteem to.
That depiction (and others) of Orcs in an official D&D product was racist. Orcs have been a stand-in for many different groups of real-world peoples in D&D worlds for decades. Denying that is a flat-out lie.
That's a horrible thing to do to someone, forcing them to confront racism in a 30-year-old parody that's still technically a part of one of their favorite things. I hope you realized that when you did it. Oh, and you got his claim wrong; he didn't say that orcs never were an analog for real-world people, he said they aren't.
My hurt feelings (and those of everyone else to click on that damn link) aside, apparently the kobolds there were Italian. If they spoke-a like-a this-a and couldn't build a tower without it leaning, I'll assume that everything was like that and so give them a pass on the orcs and goblinoids--not that it still matters 30 years and approximately four editions later.
And now back to the post I started working on around this time yesterday.
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"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both" -- allegedly Benjamin Franklin
New players simply aren't interested in the Forgotten Realms. The Forgotten Realms are simply too dense, too impossible to break into, and everyone who plays games steeped in the Forgotten Realms is enormously hostile to new players. They can keep supporting the Forgotten Realms as the only setting they want anyone to play in - which Wizards has openly stated they're not going to do, they want to switch to a more versatile structure with multiple concurrently supported settings - or they can release books that people say nobody will buy because they're not Forgotten Realms books.
What's the solution? You can't hook new players into the Realms, and you can't get old players to not play in the Realms. How do you reconcile that?
I have to disagree. I love FR and the new players in my campaign are having fun in the Moonshaes, with brief trips to Amn and Candlekeep. I am willing to play anywhere, as a longtime player. I have done Greyhawk as well. I think you do a disservice when you make sweeping generalizations about the habits of millions of players worldwide.
Let's talk about your fidelity to the Forgotten Realms. What sources do you. use? The fan community maintained wikis? The old grey boxed set and. the huge catalog of gazeteers or whatever they called the books, Moonshae being the second one after I believe Waterdeep? Does DR _really matter_ in your game? Do you have the various iterations of the pantheon via the sunderings and god wars and what not, and do they _really matter_ to your game?
There are people who maintain a deep fidelity to the Forgotten Realms, and are willing to gulp up the settings massive retcons that have beset it over the years and editions and pretend that setting volatility is a rich history (not a diss, but a logic leap must be made to say a mess is actually consistency). There are also people who see the Forgotten Realms as a giant map, pick a spot on the map and say "I want to play there" and set up a game around a quick glance at the wiki and going off the environmental details suggested by said map (far north = cold, far south = hot, some places have more trees, others a lot of sand that get everywhere). Even the "politics" of the game represented in the five secret society "factions" ... they work best as bodies of the stereotypes they represent, rather than requiring a multi century long recitation of their various intrigues over the history of TSR / WotC game production.
What Yurei was pointing out, I believe, is that TSR's Forgotten Realms publishing juggernaut exists in a very different form in 5e. Most 5e adventures are nominally set in the Forgotten Realms, but you don't really need to know anything about the Forgotten Realms outside the minimal context they provide. And even a setting as iconic as Candlekeep comes with the claim "this anthology could easily be reset in any other setting." This thread was started by recognizing, albeit with hostility, WotC practice of removing or at least undermining "lore" some players feel are integral to their games. There's no reason that lore still can't be integral to their games, it's just not integral to "the" game. Consequently, FR just doesn't have the level of support prior editions gave it with game resources and novels and the like.
Yet more people are buying into D&D now more than ever (Matt Colville recently speculated the "long history" of D&D and TTRPG will be split between before streaming and after streaming, as the technology allowed a much wider audience to "get it" and "get into it" than ever before). WotC is literally capitalizing on this moment by being everclear that they want to produce books that are broadly accessible and available to all players no matter their game world. It's on the DM to decide whether the tools offered in these books is worth their while.
But this business practice isn't some Orwellian silencing of the past. While there may be disclaimers about how a lot of products aren't in line with present cultural sensitivities (just like we say many tv shows, movies, and books from the 80s "haven't aged well") WotC still makes everything they and TSR published under the D&D brand (with the exception of the original copyright problematic Deities and Demigods) via DMsGuild for anyone who wants to mine the past for lore and inspiration. As I've written elsewhere since this errata, and has been explained in this thread, whatever was "lost" in the Volo's errata is easily recovered elsewhere through community support of "legacy" content and or, you know the imagination that is supposed to drive these games.
The points in those last two paragraphs have me feeling we're living in a golden age of TTRPG, particularly in regards to D&D. As a result I just don't understand BoLS reading reactionaries and their ilk taking grand offense to any editorial move by WotC to make the game accessible to broader audiences or to broaden the way the game can be played by taking down some of these precious lore parameters.
Just a general comment. There is no argument that many of our modern fantasy tropes were originally inspired by really bad takes on "foreign" cultures. As any history professor will tell you, however, you cannot judge the past by modern standards. Culture advances, and though we are still far from perfect, we have made great strides against racism as a culture. Although a particular fantasy race may once have been a representative example of a racist stereotype, I am not believer that they are still racist stereotypes. Orcs, kobolds, etc. have been developed to the point in the last 30 years that they've long left behind their racist origins.
And if you don't believe that modern society is capable of and prone to ignoring the past origin of a particular something, making it something modern and our own, let me present Christmas as an example. Although historians will tell you that Christmas is a religious observance in the Christian religion (and, yes, there is a lot of incorporation of other religious and cultural practices in Christmas), the modern take on Christmas is a very secular holiday. Most people enjoy the lights, Santa, etc. which have nothing to do with the Christian celebration. Christmas is now a modern holiday with only a small portion of people celebrating it for what it originally was.
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C. Foster Payne
"If you get to thinkin' you're a person of some influence, try orderin' somebody else's dog around."
And if you don't believe that modern society is capable of and prone to ignoring the past origin of a particular something, making it something modern and our own, let me present Christmas as an example. Although historians will tell you that Christmas is a religious observance in the Christian religion (and, yes, there is a lot of incorporation of other religious and cultural practices in Christmas), the modern take on Christmas is a very secular holiday. Most people enjoy the lights, Santa, etc. which have nothing to do with the Christian celebration. Christmas is now a modern holiday with only a small portion of people celebrating it for what it originally was.
... because Christmas is now a modern holiday, and really nothing like what it originally was. I absolutely agree people can move past some of the problematic facets of early D&D, but you're really making the argument that this will be accomplished by changing and modernizing them.
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New players simply aren't interested in the Forgotten Realms. The Forgotten Realms are simply too dense, too impossible to break into, and everyone who plays games steeped in the Forgotten Realms is enormously hostile to new players. They can keep supporting the Forgotten Realms as the only setting they want anyone to play in - which Wizards has openly stated they're not going to do, they want to switch to a more versatile structure with multiple concurrently supported settings - or they can release books that people say nobody will buy because they're not Forgotten Realms books.
What's the solution? You can't hook new players into the Realms, and you can't get old players to not play in the Realms. How do you reconcile that?
I have to disagree. I love FR and the new players in my campaign are having fun in the Moonshaes, with brief trips to Amn and Candlekeep. I am willing to play anywhere, as a longtime player. I have done Greyhawk as well. I think you do a disservice when you make sweeping generalizations about the habits of millions of players worldwide.
As a long time player, you have enough personally invested in those settings that your players can learn them through you. How much of the Realms have they learned through sourcebooks rather than through your DM'ing?
What does that matter? I chose to start in the FR, particularly the Moonshaes because the people that are in my group all tend to like Celtic history or Viking history and the Moonshaes offers that pretty well. One of the players in my group is brand new, and he wants to start DMing soon. May not be in the 'Shaes but I would be willing to bet it is in FR. I could have started anywhere and found out if it was a setting to their liking. If I did a good job as DM, it probably would have turned out just as well, so to my way of thinking, the players would not have learned any more or less about any other setting, and their unwillingness to "break into" a setting would not have changed.
Just a general comment. There is no argument that many of our modern fantasy tropes were originally inspired by really bad takes on "foreign" cultures. As any history professor will tell you, however, you cannot judge the past by modern standards. Culture advances, and though we are still far from perfect, we have made great strides against racism as a culture. Although a particular fantasy race may once have been a representative example of a racist stereotype, I am not believer that they are still racist stereotypes. Orcs, kobolds, etc. have been developed to the point in the last 30 years that they've long left behind their racist origins.
They're trying to leave the racist origins behind. Threads like this one are proof of how that hasn't completely happened yet and in fact, some people are opposed to that happening.
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Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
snapping at people for "calling him racist" when he argued that orcs were orcs, not people, and orcs being evil had nothing to do with real-world stereotypes. He leaned hard on that bad-faith argument.
It's not a bad faith argument. D&D Orcs are not an analog for real world people, but some people keep trying to make it so.
This is from an old D&D sourcebook for the long-abandoned setting of Mystara.
If you can read that post and still say that "orcs [were] never an analog for real world people in D&D", you're lying. Yes they were. Yes, they continue to be through the existence of those products and the racist stereotypes that were attached to them.
There have been depictions of Orcs and Half-Orcs in D&D that have been undeniably racist. Those products are proof. You are wrong. You may have been ignorant of this before, which isn't your fault, but there are a ton of people denying the history of the game because they don't want to get their feelings hurt over a hobby they have attached their own self-esteem to.
That depiction (and others) of Orcs in an official D&D product was racist. Orcs have been a stand-in for many different groups of real-world peoples in D&D worlds for decades. Denying that is a flat-out lie.
That's a horrible thing to do to someone, forcing them to confront racism in a 30-year-old parody that's still technically a part of one of their favorite things. I hope you realized that when you did it. Oh, and you got his claim wrong; he didn't say that orcs never were an analog for real-world people, he said they aren't.
My hurt feelings (and those of everyone else to click on that damn link) aside, apparently the kobolds there were Italian. If they spoke-a like-a this-a and couldn't build a tower without it leaning, I'll assume that everything was like that and so give them a pass on the orcs and goblinoids--not that it still matters 30 years and approximately four editions later.
That link hurt your feeling? And not because you're a member of any of the communities being disparaged by it? That's on you. That's wholly and entirely your fault. If it hurts your feelings to find out that there were racist elements of D&D while you were supporting the person that said that there absolutely weren't, that is completely on you. And not only are you trying to victimize yourself due to your ignorance around the racist elements of D&D, you're trying to compare that to the harm that those racist stereotypes can have in the first place.
Being called racist is not a bad as having people be racist towards you (and let's be clear, I was not and am not calling you racist, I'm using this phrase as an example). Discovering that your hobby used to be racist is not at all comparable to the pain that those kinds of products caused to people of those marginalized communities.
You think that me trying to educate people about the racist past of D&D is a "horrible thing to do to someone"? No, it isn't. Writing those racist things were horrible, uncalled for things to do to someone. @mjsoctober was asking for me to prove them wrong. Those racist caricatures of real world people from that Mystara supplement were uncalled for. Stop trying to compare your discomfort of discovering racist caricatures in an official D&D product to the harm that those kinds of products can cause. When people say "chronic victim syndrome", this is what they mean. You are not victimized by learning those things that I posted, and your pain is not comparable to that of the people disparaged by those products.
(And, no, I'm not going to argue semantics with you. Saying "Orcs are not a stand-in for real world people", then being proven wrong, and then trying to shift the goal posts to "he never said that they never were stand-ins for real world people" is disingenuous at best, and being an apologist for racist stereotypes at worst. I will not debate the "are"/"were" semantics, because it's besides the point, and is only a red herring meant to distract away from the problem as a whole.)
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I'm thinking maybe if we nudge the discussion back into what WotC is trying to accomplish with these errata and whether past lore is essential to the game, we may continue to have a more productive conversation than debating who or what gets framed as racist, who or what isn't racist, and which articles hurt us.
Like I said, in my other posts, these errata weren't solely about "fixing" "objectionable" content, they were many about eliminating some lore parameters that seemed to assert "thou must place creature X as this" when that's never been the case. The errata just makes that a lot more clearer and supports the DMs who surprise players who think they've mastered the meta and cry foul when a monster's behavior or persona defies expectations predicated on prior lore. That's really what we're talking about, as well as cutting out some, but not all, of the "darker material" that's been stewing in the game for some time.
I don't know why anyone has a problem with someone playing in a game whose world works differently than yours. It's sorta like 40k players who insist paint schemes need to be up to certain standards, but 40k sort of encourages that. WotC, if it ever did encourage that mindset, has moved away from it, if not before definitely in D&D, and I'd argue that it's been good overall for the hobby.
Just a general comment. There is no argument that many of our modern fantasy tropes were originally inspired by really bad takes on "foreign" cultures. As any history professor will tell you, however, you cannot judge the past by modern standards. Culture advances, and though we are still far from perfect, we have made great strides against racism as a culture. Although a particular fantasy race may once have been a representative example of a racist stereotype, I am not believer that they are still racist stereotypes. Orcs, kobolds, etc. have been developed to the point in the last 30 years that they've long left behind their racist origins.
Sounds nice, but this is not what I've experienced as a person of color in modern society. This sounds like the same kind of argument I heard after Star Wars: The Phantom Menace came out and people dismissed the idea that the Nemoidians were a racist stereotype. Sure, they weren't called Asians, but when you have the stereotypical accent, the stereotypical mannerisms, and the stereotypical tropes all put together it's basically the old Yellow Peril racism in alien drag. It hurts just the same, but it's insidious because it's hidden juuuuust enough that people, usually people who haven't and don't suffer from harmful stereotypes, can dismiss you as being hysterical or accuse of looking to be offended. As if that's what I want to spend my time doing.
I'm pretty sure you'll find that your experience of the game is not going to change significantly. Making things more accessible to people that normally would be hedged out, whether due to physical obstructions or mental trauma, does nothing to bar those people who already had access in the first place.
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Canto alla vita alla sua bellezza ad ogni sua ferita ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Just a general comment. There is no argument that many of our modern fantasy tropes were originally inspired by really bad takes on "foreign" cultures. As any history professor will tell you, however, you cannot judge the past by modern standards. Culture advances, and though we are still far from perfect, we have made great strides against racism as a culture. Although a particular fantasy race may once have been a representative example of a racist stereotype, I am not believer that they are still racist stereotypes. Orcs, kobolds, etc. have been developed to the point in the last 30 years that they've long left behind their racist origins.
Sounds nice, but this is not what I've experienced as a person of color in modern society. This sounds like the same kind of argument I heard after Star Wars: The Phantom Menace came out and people dismissed the idea that the Nemoidians were a racist stereotype. Sure, they weren't called Asians, but when you have the stereotypical accent, the stereotypical mannerisms, and the stereotypical tropes all put together it's basically the old Yellow Peril racism in alien drag. It hurts just the same, but it's insidious because it's hidden juuuuust enough that people, usually people who haven't and don't suffer from harmful stereotypes, can dismiss you as being hysterical or accuse of looking to be offended. As if that's what I want to spend my time doing.
I'm pretty sure you'll find that your experience of the game is not going to change significantly. Making things more accessible to people that normally would be hedged out, whether due to physical obstructions or mental trauma, does nothing to bar those people who already had access in the first place.
Yup. It's exactly the same argument. If you look up debates online about whether or not the Neimoidians were racist, you'll find people making the exact same goddam argument as those arguing against the recent changes to D&D's races. "They can't be racist because those races/species don't exist in the real world". It's full of BS, especially because all racism is rooted in a false premise, but it's extremely frustrating that it's so pervasive of an argument and it seems impossible to change anyone's minds about this.
(If anyone wants a historical example of racism in the fairly-recent real world, look up the Tokio Monster from American Propaganda during World War 2, as well as the Nazi Propaganda's depictions of Jews. Racism is always rooted in dehumanizing other people. It's kind of, you know, the definition of racism, so it should be no surprise to anyone that racists will use fantasy/sci-fi species to perpetuate their racist views. That's where you get stuff like Mystara's Gazetteer Number 10, the Neimoidians, and similar examples.)
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To say that it makes a lot of people uncomfortable is a massive assumption to make at best. Has WoTC surveyed their audience to see if these changes would be well received? Do they actually care what their players think about their game? It seems to me that they love to make these changes on behalf of people without their consent to pose for political points, not to improve their product. Every single TTRPG community I have played with has been overwhelmingly welcoming to people from every category you can sort people by. Wizards are the only company that try to showboat their "Diversity" without actually showing respect to their players.
Who honestly feels that way? To say that it makes a a lot of people uncomfortable is a massive assumption to make at best. Has WoTC surveyed their audience to see if these changes would be well received? Do they actually care what their players think about their game? It seems to me that they love to make these changes on behalf of people without their consent to pose for political points, not to improve their product. Every single TTRPG community I have played with has been overwhelmingly welcoming to people from every category you can sort people by. Wizards are the only company that try to showboat their "Diversity" without actually showing respect to their players.
I see people using examples from Starwars, in which aliens have racial stereotypical accents. He's talking about a movie created through the direction and vision of a few people, if not a single man. I saw no examples from d&d, or any traditional fantasy product for that matter. If your DM puts on a racist accent to portray a race in one of your games by all means, call them out on it. I've called people out for more serious offences in my games.
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Oh, and Hobgoblins in Samurai armor that are in many of the editions of D&D (including 5e). As well as the multiple racist depictions of Drow throughout the decades.
Edit: Oh, and the Vistani. Perhaps the most egregious example from modern D&D.
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Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
My only issue with people digging for racism in D&D races is that Humans in D&D come in all the shapes, sizes and tints they do here. This means anyone saying the other "races" are comparing to humans of RL is reaching and looking for something to feel bad about. How, when there are black humans in the game, someone can say Drow and supposed to represent black humans, is something I can't really follow. If Drow are supposed to be the black humans of D&D, then what are the black humans of D&D supposed to represent?
This won't have a solution, because people have triggers and those who don't have those triggers will always struggle to make these imagined connections. It's like every other facet of life, if you look long enough and hard enough, you'll find something to be offended by.
Talk to your Players. Talk to your DM. If more people used this advice, there would be 24.74% fewer threads on Tactics, Rules and DM discussions.
It's simple, really. If you want someone to be evil, make them do evil things.
Villains are not born, they are made.
“I will take responsibility for what I have done. [...] If must fall, I will rise each time a better man.” ― Brandon Sanderson, Oathbringer.
I don't think anybody's saying Gygax created the Drow to be a specific and unique analogy for black people in D&D. That doesn't have to be the case for the idea that "this entirely black civilization is evil to the core" to be potentially offensive though. Offensive notions can be more subtle than beating someone over the head with an obvious metaphor. There are presumably Jewish people in the muggle world of the Harry Potterverse, but that doesn't mean the look of the goblins running the Gringotts bank didn't justify a few raised eyebrows.
Not trying to be political here, but saying you're sure there's lots of good ones in a group of people too usually means you're about to say something bad about the group nonetheless. Racism doesn't need to be internally consistent to be racism either. You're overthinking it if you're going for some rational argument to show something offensive shouldn't necessarily be. That's a moot point: whether it should be or not is immaterial, whether it can be is all that matters.
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I have to disagree. I love FR and the new players in my campaign are having fun in the Moonshaes, with brief trips to Amn and Candlekeep. I am willing to play anywhere, as a longtime player. I have done Greyhawk as well. I think you do a disservice when you make sweeping generalizations about the habits of millions of players worldwide.
I really believe that part of the reason that WotC is branching out to other settings and trying separate the FR lore from the core of the game is due to all the surveys about favorite settings they posted over the past couple of years. I would be willing to bet that FR is not as popular as they would like and they are wanting to broaden the appeal of the game by stepping a back from it a little and expanding on the "Multiverse".
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
Except that the way that D&D has depicted orcs and drow as subhuman brutes and vile temptresses who wish to slay or enslave any human they encounter and routinely engage in cannibalism and human sacrifice is exactly the way that Europeans historically depicted Africans, Arabs, East Asians, and the indigenous peoples of North and South America and Australia and Oceania.
D&D lore was heavily influenced by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, and Edgar Rice Boroughs, and those authors were all seriously racist.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
That's a horrible thing to do to someone, forcing them to confront racism in a 30-year-old parody that's still technically a part of one of their favorite things. I hope you realized that when you did it. Oh, and you got his claim wrong; he didn't say that orcs never were an analog for real-world people, he said they aren't.
My hurt feelings (and those of everyone else to click on that damn link) aside, apparently the kobolds there were Italian. If they spoke-a like-a this-a and couldn't build a tower without it leaning, I'll assume that everything was like that and so give them a pass on the orcs and goblinoids--not that it still matters 30 years and approximately four editions later.
And now back to the post I started working on around this time yesterday.
"Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both" -- allegedly Benjamin Franklin
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Let's talk about your fidelity to the Forgotten Realms. What sources do you. use? The fan community maintained wikis? The old grey boxed set and. the huge catalog of gazeteers or whatever they called the books, Moonshae being the second one after I believe Waterdeep? Does DR _really matter_ in your game? Do you have the various iterations of the pantheon via the sunderings and god wars and what not, and do they _really matter_ to your game?
There are people who maintain a deep fidelity to the Forgotten Realms, and are willing to gulp up the settings massive retcons that have beset it over the years and editions and pretend that setting volatility is a rich history (not a diss, but a logic leap must be made to say a mess is actually consistency). There are also people who see the Forgotten Realms as a giant map, pick a spot on the map and say "I want to play there" and set up a game around a quick glance at the wiki and going off the environmental details suggested by said map (far north = cold, far south = hot, some places have more trees, others a lot of sand that get everywhere). Even the "politics" of the game represented in the five secret society "factions" ... they work best as bodies of the stereotypes they represent, rather than requiring a multi century long recitation of their various intrigues over the history of TSR / WotC game production.
What Yurei was pointing out, I believe, is that TSR's Forgotten Realms publishing juggernaut exists in a very different form in 5e. Most 5e adventures are nominally set in the Forgotten Realms, but you don't really need to know anything about the Forgotten Realms outside the minimal context they provide. And even a setting as iconic as Candlekeep comes with the claim "this anthology could easily be reset in any other setting." This thread was started by recognizing, albeit with hostility, WotC practice of removing or at least undermining "lore" some players feel are integral to their games. There's no reason that lore still can't be integral to their games, it's just not integral to "the" game. Consequently, FR just doesn't have the level of support prior editions gave it with game resources and novels and the like.
Yet more people are buying into D&D now more than ever (Matt Colville recently speculated the "long history" of D&D and TTRPG will be split between before streaming and after streaming, as the technology allowed a much wider audience to "get it" and "get into it" than ever before). WotC is literally capitalizing on this moment by being everclear that they want to produce books that are broadly accessible and available to all players no matter their game world. It's on the DM to decide whether the tools offered in these books is worth their while.
But this business practice isn't some Orwellian silencing of the past. While there may be disclaimers about how a lot of products aren't in line with present cultural sensitivities (just like we say many tv shows, movies, and books from the 80s "haven't aged well") WotC still makes everything they and TSR published under the D&D brand (with the exception of the original copyright problematic Deities and Demigods) via DMsGuild for anyone who wants to mine the past for lore and inspiration. As I've written elsewhere since this errata, and has been explained in this thread, whatever was "lost" in the Volo's errata is easily recovered elsewhere through community support of "legacy" content and or, you know the imagination that is supposed to drive these games.
The points in those last two paragraphs have me feeling we're living in a golden age of TTRPG, particularly in regards to D&D. As a result I just don't understand BoLS reading reactionaries and their ilk taking grand offense to any editorial move by WotC to make the game accessible to broader audiences or to broaden the way the game can be played by taking down some of these precious lore parameters.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Just a general comment. There is no argument that many of our modern fantasy tropes were originally inspired by really bad takes on "foreign" cultures. As any history professor will tell you, however, you cannot judge the past by modern standards. Culture advances, and though we are still far from perfect, we have made great strides against racism as a culture. Although a particular fantasy race may once have been a representative example of a racist stereotype, I am not believer that they are still racist stereotypes. Orcs, kobolds, etc. have been developed to the point in the last 30 years that they've long left behind their racist origins.
And if you don't believe that modern society is capable of and prone to ignoring the past origin of a particular something, making it something modern and our own, let me present Christmas as an example. Although historians will tell you that Christmas is a religious observance in the Christian religion (and, yes, there is a lot of incorporation of other religious and cultural practices in Christmas), the modern take on Christmas is a very secular holiday. Most people enjoy the lights, Santa, etc. which have nothing to do with the Christian celebration. Christmas is now a modern holiday with only a small portion of people celebrating it for what it originally was.
C. Foster Payne
"If you get to thinkin' you're a person of some influence, try orderin' somebody else's dog around."
... because Christmas is now a modern holiday, and really nothing like what it originally was. I absolutely agree people can move past some of the problematic facets of early D&D, but you're really making the argument that this will be accomplished by changing and modernizing them.
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What does that matter? I chose to start in the FR, particularly the Moonshaes because the people that are in my group all tend to like Celtic history or Viking history and the Moonshaes offers that pretty well. One of the players in my group is brand new, and he wants to start DMing soon. May not be in the 'Shaes but I would be willing to bet it is in FR. I could have started anywhere and found out if it was a setting to their liking. If I did a good job as DM, it probably would have turned out just as well, so to my way of thinking, the players would not have learned any more or less about any other setting, and their unwillingness to "break into" a setting would not have changed.
They're trying to leave the racist origins behind. Threads like this one are proof of how that hasn't completely happened yet and in fact, some people are opposed to that happening.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
That link hurt your feeling? And not because you're a member of any of the communities being disparaged by it? That's on you. That's wholly and entirely your fault. If it hurts your feelings to find out that there were racist elements of D&D while you were supporting the person that said that there absolutely weren't, that is completely on you. And not only are you trying to victimize yourself due to your ignorance around the racist elements of D&D, you're trying to compare that to the harm that those racist stereotypes can have in the first place.
Being called racist is not a bad as having people be racist towards you (and let's be clear, I was not and am not calling you racist, I'm using this phrase as an example). Discovering that your hobby used to be racist is not at all comparable to the pain that those kinds of products caused to people of those marginalized communities.
You think that me trying to educate people about the racist past of D&D is a "horrible thing to do to someone"? No, it isn't. Writing those racist things were horrible, uncalled for things to do to someone. @mjsoctober was asking for me to prove them wrong. Those racist caricatures of real world people from that Mystara supplement were uncalled for. Stop trying to compare your discomfort of discovering racist caricatures in an official D&D product to the harm that those kinds of products can cause. When people say "chronic victim syndrome", this is what they mean. You are not victimized by learning those things that I posted, and your pain is not comparable to that of the people disparaged by those products.
(And, no, I'm not going to argue semantics with you. Saying "Orcs are not a stand-in for real world people", then being proven wrong, and then trying to shift the goal posts to "he never said that they never were stand-ins for real world people" is disingenuous at best, and being an apologist for racist stereotypes at worst. I will not debate the "are"/"were" semantics, because it's besides the point, and is only a red herring meant to distract away from the problem as a whole.)
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Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
I'm thinking maybe if we nudge the discussion back into what WotC is trying to accomplish with these errata and whether past lore is essential to the game, we may continue to have a more productive conversation than debating who or what gets framed as racist, who or what isn't racist, and which articles hurt us.
Like I said, in my other posts, these errata weren't solely about "fixing" "objectionable" content, they were many about eliminating some lore parameters that seemed to assert "thou must place creature X as this" when that's never been the case. The errata just makes that a lot more clearer and supports the DMs who surprise players who think they've mastered the meta and cry foul when a monster's behavior or persona defies expectations predicated on prior lore. That's really what we're talking about, as well as cutting out some, but not all, of the "darker material" that's been stewing in the game for some time.
I don't know why anyone has a problem with someone playing in a game whose world works differently than yours. It's sorta like 40k players who insist paint schemes need to be up to certain standards, but 40k sort of encourages that. WotC, if it ever did encourage that mindset, has moved away from it, if not before definitely in D&D, and I'd argue that it's been good overall for the hobby.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
Sounds nice, but this is not what I've experienced as a person of color in modern society. This sounds like the same kind of argument I heard after Star Wars: The Phantom Menace came out and people dismissed the idea that the Nemoidians were a racist stereotype. Sure, they weren't called Asians, but when you have the stereotypical accent, the stereotypical mannerisms, and the stereotypical tropes all put together it's basically the old Yellow Peril racism in alien drag. It hurts just the same, but it's insidious because it's hidden juuuuust enough that people, usually people who haven't and don't suffer from harmful stereotypes, can dismiss you as being hysterical or accuse of looking to be offended. As if that's what I want to spend my time doing.
I'm pretty sure you'll find that your experience of the game is not going to change significantly. Making things more accessible to people that normally would be hedged out, whether due to physical obstructions or mental trauma, does nothing to bar those people who already had access in the first place.
Canto alla vita
alla sua bellezza
ad ogni sua ferita
ogni sua carezza!
I sing to life and to its tragic beauty
To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
Yup. It's exactly the same argument. If you look up debates online about whether or not the Neimoidians were racist, you'll find people making the exact same goddam argument as those arguing against the recent changes to D&D's races. "They can't be racist because those races/species don't exist in the real world". It's full of BS, especially because all racism is rooted in a false premise, but it's extremely frustrating that it's so pervasive of an argument and it seems impossible to change anyone's minds about this.
(If anyone wants a historical example of racism in the fairly-recent real world, look up the Tokio Monster from American Propaganda during World War 2, as well as the Nazi Propaganda's depictions of Jews. Racism is always rooted in dehumanizing other people. It's kind of, you know, the definition of racism, so it should be no surprise to anyone that racists will use fantasy/sci-fi species to perpetuate their racist views. That's where you get stuff like Mystara's Gazetteer Number 10, the Neimoidians, and similar examples.)
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
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To say that it makes a lot of people uncomfortable is a massive assumption to make at best. Has WoTC surveyed their audience to see if these changes would be well received? Do they actually care what their players think about their game? It seems to me that they love to make these changes on behalf of people without their consent to pose for political points, not to improve their product. Every single TTRPG community I have played with has been overwhelmingly welcoming to people from every category you can sort people by. Wizards are the only company that try to showboat their "Diversity" without actually showing respect to their players.
Did you read post #213 or 214?
She/Her Player and Dungeon Master
I see people using examples from Starwars, in which aliens have racial stereotypical accents. He's talking about a movie created through the direction and vision of a few people, if not a single man. I saw no examples from d&d, or any traditional fantasy product for that matter. If your DM puts on a racist accent to portray a race in one of your games by all means, call them out on it. I've called people out for more serious offences in my games.