This all sounds like "looking for problems". I get real-world stuff, but, I don't think I've ever met a single race of Orcs, or Goblins, Or Ogres, or dragon kind etc. These are made up. I think if we start to think too much about stuff that is NOT real and trying to paint into something that "resembles" real we will end up just neutering art altogether. I think this can go way too far to the point of losing what fantasy is. We should just play a game where all characters are lifeless Blue Lego's, you know, so we don't somehow mistake it for real life.
Just because you don't think something is a problem, doesn't mean there is no problem. This is what privilege is.
Their are racists in the real world which saddens me and many others, what WotC is trying to do is not give those real world racists ammo to use in a game they published. The work that WotC is doing isn't easy and they deserve the credit in what they are trying to do after it was brought to their attention, it is steps like this that are trying to make lives better for PoC and LGBTQ (hope that is the correct order). If you cannot understand why they are doing this, you may be part of the problem knowing or not knowing. If you are knowingly part of the problem and will quit playing the game we love due to this change then get out already you will not be missed. If you are understanding of the issue and you believe in what WotC is doing you are awesome. Lets make this game the best it can be by including everyone at our table that wants to be there with everyone else.
This all sounds like "looking for problems". I get real-world stuff, but, I don't think I've ever met a single race of Orcs, or Goblins, Or Ogres, or dragon kind etc. These are made up. I think if we start to think too much about stuff that is NOT real and trying to paint into something that "resembles" real we will end up just neutering art altogether. I think this can go way too far to the point of losing what fantasy is. We should just play a game where all characters are lifeless Blue Lego's, you know, so we don't somehow mistake it for real life.
Art reflects life and life reflects art. If we never change our vocabulary and we continue to create art where racial stereotypes are allowed to be used as excuses to kill and loot with impunity, how are the conversations going to change? Does changing our media change the people? Debatable, but it does at least change the CONVERSATION, which is a start. And sure art, media, and entertainment may be our recreational consumption, but that doesn't mean our artists don't have some sort of onus to try and make the world a better place with the tools they have at their disposal.
So then why are Orcs and Drow getting changed from being “mostly evil” but not Kobolds, Goblins, Hobgoblins, Bugbears...? Why are they not changing the Duergar? Orcs and Drow were listed as “mostly/tend toward evil.” Duergar are depicted as 100%, irredeemably evil. That’s an even more universally evil subrace. They don’t even get a quantifier like “mostly/usually/tend toward.”
Why then are Elves other than Drow, Dwarves other than Duergar, Gnomes, Halflings, Humans, etc. still going to be “mostly good?” If Ogrillon are the get of Ogres and Humans/Orcs/Hobgoblins/Bugbears, then those Ogrillon should also be considered “sapient humanoids.” And Ogres must be close the heck enough to produce fertile offspring with sapient humanoids. And since Ogres must then also be considered sapient humanoids, then so should the other Giants including Trolls.
If that is truly WotC position and intent, to ban racist ideas from their games, then why are they only changing the ones that people have complained about? How come they are only changing the two races that are adversely affecting sales? Can anyone explain that to me?
The issue is you can't "take ammo away" from a group by changing some words. That's what people who work with those with developmental disabilities have constantly watched happen going back for centuries. It used to be that they were just "a little slow", but that became an insult people would use against another. So it changed to "the village idiot", but that, too, became an insult. The dominoes keep falling all the way to today. "********" used to be a clinical term, and now it's an insult for doing something stupid. And it's currently happening, as we sit here typing about it, to "mentally ill".
<edit> See, the forums even censor the R word. It's regarded as offensive. There was a time when it was the defined clinical term for someone suffering from a mental disability. </edit>
Ironically a similar phenomenon keeps happening with minimum wage increases, too. For a while it "fixes" the problem, and the problem fades for a while. But a decade or so later (sometimes less) the same problem crops up again. You haven't done anything to address the actual problem, you've just spent a bunch of time and effort addressing the symptoms. In the case of minimum wage, you have to attack corporate greed.
Simply put, the root cause of racism is outside the bounds of WotC ability to address. You'd need to completely recreate the educational systems of many nations across the planet, as well as address issues like community values.
I think it's fair to say it solved a lot of the problems facing mankind and continues to go on to solve a lot of problems facing mankind. Directly from the Enlightenment we've developed:
You know, part of my criticism of your comment was about how Eurocentric it was, but I suppose I should have been more clear about that. Geeze, this is exactly the problem of referring only to Greco-Roman philosophers as "Classics" and leaving out all the great thinkers and entire schools of thought from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa just to name a few. Western thinkers and philosophers do not have a monopoly on critical thinking and your European enlightenment period was not the origin of all social progress, thank you very much.
So then why are Orcs and Drow getting changed from being “mostly evil” but not Kobolds, Goblins, Hobgoblins, Bugbears...? Why are they not changing the Duergar? Orcs and Drow were listed as “mostly/tend toward evil.” Duergar are depicted as 100%, irredeemably evil. That’s an even more universally evil subrace. They don’t even get a quantifier like “mostly/usually/tend toward.”
Why then are Elves other than Drow, Dwarves other than Duergar, Gnomes, Halflings, Humans, etc. still going to be “mostly good?” If Ogrillon are the get of Ogres and Humans/Orcs/Hobgoblins/Bugbears, then those Ogrillon should also be considered “sapient humanoids.” And Ogres must be close the heck enough to produce fertile offspring with sapient humanoids. And since Ogres must then also be considered sapient humanoids, then so should the other Giants including Trolls.
If that is truly WotC position and intent, to ban racist ideas from their games, then why are they only changing the ones that people have complained about? How come they are only changing the two races that are adversely affecting sales? Can anyone explain that to me?
So they specifically pointed to material like Eberron. Have you read Eberron? The different folk in that setting are all very well developed and run the gamut of alignments. I think the question is kinda answered.
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I don't think they should change too much, but I some change isn't too bad. The party I adventure with is all old school gamers and we're in the Dungeon of the Mad Mage. We came across some goblins that I could tell were supposed to be comic relief. My party killed them before we got to interact with them. Why? The race is evil. Later we came across some drow who were on the other side of a magic portal from us. The female drow looked at the portal in wonder, reached out and touched it in amazement...then died as the party went nuclear and fired every spell at our disposal through the portal. Why? Drow are evil.
And both times I was sitting there thinking, "Okay. We're going to roleplay....oh, they're dead..."
So, not even considering the whole politics of it, I think a little more grey area will help the game play for me. Because when I try to object I hear, "Look in the book dude! Neutral evil alignment. Get them before they get us."
I don't think they should change too much, but I some change isn't too bad. The party I adventure with is all old school gamers and we're in the Dungeon of the Mad Mage. We came across some goblins that I could tell were supposed to be comic relief. My party killed them before we got to interact with them. Why? The race is evil. Later we came across some drow who were on the other side of a magic portal from us. The female drow looked at the portal in wonder, reached out and touched it in amazement...then died as the party went nuclear and fired every spell at our disposal through the portal. Why? Drow are evil.
And both times I was sitting there thinking, "Okay. We're going to roleplay....oh, they're dead..."
So, not even considering the whole politics of it, I think a little more grey area will help the game play for me. Because when I try to object I hear, "Look in the book dude! Neutral evil alignment. Get them before they get us."
I'd say your group takes a very narrow view of alignment, but that's not surprising given the term "evil".
The Good/Evil axis of the Alignment chart is a lot easier to work with and a lot more realistic when you start thinking about it as Selfless/Selfish instead. Maybe I'm wrong to make that mental substitution, but it's what I've been doing. It's substantially less arbitrary and sidesteps the entire problem of races being described as favoring one or the other.
If WotC were going to make THAT change, I'd be 100% for it.
So then why are Orcs and Drow getting changed from being “mostly evil” but not Kobolds, Goblins, Hobgoblins, Bugbears...? Why are they not changing the Duergar? Orcs and Drow were listed as “mostly/tend toward evil.” Duergar are depicted as 100%, irredeemably evil. That’s an even more universally evil subrace. They don’t even get a quantifier like “mostly/usually/tend toward.”
Why then are Elves other than Drow, Dwarves other than Duergar, Gnomes, Halflings, Humans, etc. still going to be “mostly good?” If Ogrillon are the get of Ogres and Humans/Orcs/Hobgoblins/Bugbears, then those Ogrillon should also be considered “sapient humanoids.” And Ogres must be close the heck enough to produce fertile offspring with sapient humanoids. And since Ogres must then also be considered sapient humanoids, then so should the other Giants including Trolls.
If that is truly WotC position and intent, to ban racist ideas from their games, then why are they only changing the ones that people have complained about? How come they are only changing the two races that are adversely affecting sales? Can anyone explain that to me?
So they specifically pointed to material like Eberron. Have you read Eberron? The different folk in that setting are all very well developed and run the gamut of alignments. I think the question is kinda answered.
I agree that it should be answered, but the only races* they are officially retconing are Orcs and Drow. So they can mention Eberron, but unless they also retcon every other Humanoid race in D&D to remove all racial alignments, it seems like they are only changing the couple things specifically complained about, and not actually removing the racism from D&D. In fact, the very concept of “racial languages” smacks of racism. Why are they not eliminating those?
My point is, this seems less like WotC attempting to eliminate racism from their product, and more like addressing specific complaints to boost sales. And with the current political climate, the timing couldn’t be more convenient for publicity..... Ne?
*(Vistani being a culture and not a race, and actually specifically modeled after an IRL culture.)
I agree that it should be answered, but the only races* they are officially retconing are Orcs and Drow. So they can mention Eberron, but unless they also retcon every other Humanoid race in D&D to remove all racial alignments, it seems like they are only changing the couple things specifically complained about, and not actually removing the racism from D&D. In fact, the very concept of “racial languages” smacks of racism. Why are they not eliminating those?
My point is, this seems less like WotC attempting to eliminate racism from their product, and more like addressing specific complaints to boost sales. And with the current political climate, the timing couldn’t be more convenient for publicity..... Ne?
*(Vistani being a culture and not a race, and actually specifically modeled after an IRL culture.)
So the actual portion of the statement that mentioned orcs and drow was this ..
We present orcs and drow in a new light in two of our most recent books, Eberron: Rising from the Last War and Explorer's Guide to Wildemount. In those books, orcs and drow are just as morally and culturally complex as other peoples. We will continue that approach in future books, portraying all the peoples of D&D in relatable ways and making it clear that they are as free as humans to decide who they are and what they do.
First sentence says they portrayed orcs and drow differently in recent books. Second sentence says they will continue that approach with "all peoples" in future books. Like I said, I think your concern has already been answered.
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I don't get the feel that this will be a retcon, necessarily (maybe, but not necessarily), but more of an approach they will take with future material. I'm not sure how they are going to finesse that line, but I remain hopeful.
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Orcs and Drow are particularly problematic cases just because they can easily be seen as specific analogies for particular real-world races, most of the others are less obvious (you can come up with options, but none of them are likely to have grade schoolers tag them as obvious racism the first time they hear about it, which happened to a friend of mine). It doesn't mean the other cases aren't somewhat problematic, but it's not the same sort of priority to do something about).
This is a ridiculous subject. These are not real races, thus cannot be subject to the label "minority group". There is no ethics, no rights, nor any reason to even consider equality or representation of fictive/imaginative "races". It's like people invent issues for the sake and of complaining.
Tell the Romani that Vistani are just "fictional" and aren't worth complaining about.
Tell black people that "calling orcs stupid, not people, and savages" is any different from what was done to them for literally hundreds of years.
Tell Asians that "hobgoblins just happen to wear the same armor as samurai" and it isn't worth complaining about.
Sure, they're fictional, but they draw strong similarities and inspiration from certain real world people. No one is trying to make goblins feel better about themselves, we're trying to make the game as inclusive as possible, in mechanics and racial depictions.
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If a BIPOC says "Hey, I don't like the wording WotC uses to describe x/y/z races because it is the same discriminatory language used by racists to speak poorly of minorities....
I think I figured out where the disconnect is for many people, including myself. For many it seems like the reasoning is backwards. I feel like it should be more accurate to say “Hey, I don’t like the wording racists use to describe minorities because it is the same language D&D uses to describe evil Orcs and Drow.”
For many people, it seems perfectly reasonable to be offended by the offensive language used to describe any actual people. But changing the description of Orcs and Drow appears to do little to change the diatribes of racists. Some posts in this thread are evidence of that. If the racists didn’t use that language to describe people, then the descriptions of Orcs would not have the parallels.
So changing Orcs does nothing to change the racists, but changing the racist makes the language used to describe Orcs no longer relevant. So why are we changing Orcs and not racists? I think that is what is confusing so many people. Does that make sense?
There are people working on doing just that, but everyone works with the tools they have and in the realms which they inhabit. It just so happens that RPG creators have at their disposal tools of creation and they inhabit realms of collaborative storytelling. Racism, and bigotry in general, are not small or simple issues. They are problems that invade many aspects of our lives, including the art and games we consume. As such, these issues are topics that need to be tackled on many different fronts by the people who work on those fronts. Activists and politicians and social workers and teachers are all working on their respective fronts ... why are you objecting to artists and creators working on their own fronts?
And if you're saying that racism in fiction is the result of real life racists rather than the other way around ... well you wouldn't object to people erasing the touch of such people from their art, would you?
That's not an argument for change, that's an argument for the status quo. Orcs are already evil and what's being argued is that they should be good. Using your own argument, wouldn't it mean that we don't need to change them at all? I mean, in your game they don't need to be brutal raiders and servants of a dark god, but as of right now, they're listed as having chaotic evil as an alignment. Changing that doesn't make the game more open. You already have access to them as a player race through Volos, so how does changing how orcs behave make the game more open? It provides players and GMs with zero new tools to express their agency. D&D doesn't even force core rules onto your campaign and there is no one policing settings or modules (quite the opposite. They encourage players to make those worlds their own), so it has stopped exactly zero people from playing or creating a world with good orcs.
If the players are gaining no new options or paths, how does it make D&D more open to change this?
Shouldn't the status quo match the game? I'm not arguing that Orcs should be good, I'm arguing that they shouldn't be evil, there's a difference. I think they should be like other humans, not inclined to being evil. Changing it does make most games more open, especially when people don't have E:RftLW or EGtW for the variant orcs.
It doesn't make the game any more creative or open to have "completely" evil races. No one is policing the games, the DM makes their rules, but the core rules and races should be as open as possible, with the DMs restricting things how they want.
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That's not an argument for change, that's an argument for the status quo. Orcs are already evil and what's being argued is that they should be good. Using your own argument, wouldn't it mean that we don't need to change them at all? I mean, in your game they don't need to be brutal raiders and servants of a dark god, but as of right now, they're listed as having chaotic evil as an alignment. Changing that doesn't make the game more open. You already have access to them as a player race through Volos, so how does changing how orcs behave make the game more open? It provides players and GMs with zero new tools to express their agency. D&D doesn't even force core rules onto your campaign and there is no one policing settings or modules (quite the opposite. They encourage players to make those worlds their own), so it has stopped exactly zero people from playing or creating a world with good orcs.
If the players are gaining no new options or paths, how does it make D&D more open to change this?
Shouldn't the status quo match the game? I'm not arguing that Orcs should be good, I'm arguing that they shouldn't be evil, there's a difference. I think they should be like other humans, not inclined to being evil. Changing it does make most games more open, especially when people don't have E:RftLW or EGtW for the variant orcs.
It doesn't make the game any more creative or open to have "completely" evil races. No one is policing the games, the DM makes their rules, but the core rules and races should be as open as possible, with the DMs restricting things how they want.
Part of the issue is that the good/evil spectrum in DnD is described from our point of view, as humans, likely from the Mediterranean to the Pacific for the most part. From the point of view of the Orcs, they are the ones who are Good, and everyone else is Evil.
I happen to agree, however, that the base rules have no reason to call a given race either good or evil (honestly this should extend to Lawful/Chaotic as well). That is a job for the settings, to talk about those races within the context of that given setting. Reasons for a race to be one alignment or another should be a part of worldbuilding, not inherent to the race itself.
I would note that early adventures are problematic for reasons other than racism. For example, I'm looking at B2 (Keep on the Borderlands). The basic thrust of the adventure is that you have a pair of fortified positions (the Keep and the Caves) facing one another across a border, and the PCs are heavily armed raiders who are crossing the border in search of 'experience' and loot (there is very little evidence of the inhabitants of the caves doing the reverse -- prisoners in area 24 are about it). Other than one of the sides being nonhuman, this is a perfectly normal border dispute and a credible enough place for an adventure game, but it's certainly not heroic.
I would note that early adventures are problematic for reasons other than racism. For example, I'm looking at B2 (Keep on the Borderlands). The basic thrust of the adventure is that you have a pair of fortified positions (the Keep and the Caves) facing one another across a border, and the PCs are heavily armed raiders who are crossing the border in search of 'experience' and loot (there is very little evidence of the inhabitants of the caves doing the reverse -- prisoners in area 24 are about it). Other than one of the sides being nonhuman, this is a perfectly normal border dispute and a credible enough place for an adventure game, but it's certainly not heroic.
Is the non-human faction the one that's being invaded and colonized? Because ...
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So, I've seen some people post about how D&D settings are "worlds of absolute extremes." Let's clear some things up. What are "absolute extremes?" Here is what I'm interpreting them as:
They're absolutely true, in all cases.
You are this, or you aren't. There's no scale.
So, basically they're saying that creatures of X type are evil, always evil, and absolutely 100% evil.
Now, here's why this isn't correct:
If absolute wrongs exist, then absolute rights have to. So, creatures can be absolutely evil, or absolutely good. This makes a question: Why do fallen angels exist, then? I mean, if they're absolutely good, how did they fall? This clearly shows that "absolute extremes" don't exist in D&D.
The typical creatures that are absolutely evil or absolutely good have been shown to have range in books. In BG:DiA, there's a chaotic good chain devil. Drizzt exists, showing that drow don't have to be absolutely evil, and that it's just a matter of how they're raised that determines if they're good or not, like in the real world.
People who serve good gods don't have to be absolutely good all the time, so why do evil god worshippers?
Half-Orcs and Half-Drow exist. They don't have to be evil or chaotic, so why should their parent races?
Absolute extremes don't exist in D&D playable races, which drow are, orcs are, goblinoids are, and yuan-ti are.
D&D is a world of near-absolutes and a world of near-extremes. Zariel can fall and be redeemed. A goblin baby can be raised to be nice. Dwarves can use arcane magic, and gnomes can be chaotic evil.
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Just because you don't think something is a problem, doesn't mean there is no problem. This is what privilege is.
Their are racists in the real world which saddens me and many others, what WotC is trying to do is not give those real world racists ammo to use in a game they published. The work that WotC is doing isn't easy and they deserve the credit in what they are trying to do after it was brought to their attention, it is steps like this that are trying to make lives better for PoC and LGBTQ (hope that is the correct order). If you cannot understand why they are doing this, you may be part of the problem knowing or not knowing. If you are knowingly part of the problem and will quit playing the game we love due to this change then get out already you will not be missed. If you are understanding of the issue and you believe in what WotC is doing you are awesome. Lets make this game the best it can be by including everyone at our table that wants to be there with everyone else.
Art reflects life and life reflects art. If we never change our vocabulary and we continue to create art where racial stereotypes are allowed to be used as excuses to kill and loot with impunity, how are the conversations going to change? Does changing our media change the people? Debatable, but it does at least change the CONVERSATION, which is a start. And sure art, media, and entertainment may be our recreational consumption, but that doesn't mean our artists don't have some sort of onus to try and make the world a better place with the tools they have at their disposal.
Also again take a read of this fantasy author who is grappling with this exact topic in their writing: http://nkjemisin.com/2013/02/from-the-mailbag-the-unbearable-baggage-of-orcing/
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!
So then why are Orcs and Drow getting changed from being “mostly evil” but not Kobolds, Goblins, Hobgoblins, Bugbears...? Why are they not changing the Duergar? Orcs and Drow were listed as “mostly/tend toward evil.” Duergar are depicted as 100%, irredeemably evil. That’s an even more universally evil subrace. They don’t even get a quantifier like “mostly/usually/tend toward.”
Why then are Elves other than Drow, Dwarves other than Duergar, Gnomes, Halflings, Humans, etc. still going to be “mostly good?” If Ogrillon are the get of Ogres and Humans/Orcs/Hobgoblins/Bugbears, then those Ogrillon should also be considered “sapient humanoids.” And Ogres must be close the heck enough to produce fertile offspring with sapient humanoids. And since Ogres must then also be considered sapient humanoids, then so should the other Giants including Trolls.
If that is truly WotC position and intent, to ban racist ideas from their games, then why are they only changing the ones that people have complained about? How come they are only changing the two races that are adversely affecting sales? Can anyone explain that to me?
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The issue is you can't "take ammo away" from a group by changing some words. That's what people who work with those with developmental disabilities have constantly watched happen going back for centuries. It used to be that they were just "a little slow", but that became an insult people would use against another. So it changed to "the village idiot", but that, too, became an insult. The dominoes keep falling all the way to today. "********" used to be a clinical term, and now it's an insult for doing something stupid. And it's currently happening, as we sit here typing about it, to "mentally ill".
<edit> See, the forums even censor the R word. It's regarded as offensive. There was a time when it was the defined clinical term for someone suffering from a mental disability. </edit>
Ironically a similar phenomenon keeps happening with minimum wage increases, too. For a while it "fixes" the problem, and the problem fades for a while. But a decade or so later (sometimes less) the same problem crops up again. You haven't done anything to address the actual problem, you've just spent a bunch of time and effort addressing the symptoms. In the case of minimum wage, you have to attack corporate greed.
Simply put, the root cause of racism is outside the bounds of WotC ability to address. You'd need to completely recreate the educational systems of many nations across the planet, as well as address issues like community values.
You know, part of my criticism of your comment was about how Eurocentric it was, but I suppose I should have been more clear about that. Geeze, this is exactly the problem of referring only to Greco-Roman philosophers as "Classics" and leaving out all the great thinkers and entire schools of thought from Asia, the Middle East, and Africa just to name a few. Western thinkers and philosophers do not have a monopoly on critical thinking and your European enlightenment period was not the origin of all social progress, thank you very much.
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!
So they specifically pointed to material like Eberron. Have you read Eberron? The different folk in that setting are all very well developed and run the gamut of alignments. I think the question is kinda answered.
Canto alla vita
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To pain and to strife, but all that dances through me
The rise and the fall, I've lived through it all!
I don't think they should change too much, but I some change isn't too bad. The party I adventure with is all old school gamers and we're in the Dungeon of the Mad Mage. We came across some goblins that I could tell were supposed to be comic relief. My party killed them before we got to interact with them. Why? The race is evil. Later we came across some drow who were on the other side of a magic portal from us. The female drow looked at the portal in wonder, reached out and touched it in amazement...then died as the party went nuclear and fired every spell at our disposal through the portal. Why? Drow are evil.
And both times I was sitting there thinking, "Okay. We're going to roleplay....oh, they're dead..."
So, not even considering the whole politics of it, I think a little more grey area will help the game play for me. Because when I try to object I hear, "Look in the book dude! Neutral evil alignment. Get them before they get us."
I'd say your group takes a very narrow view of alignment, but that's not surprising given the term "evil".
The Good/Evil axis of the Alignment chart is a lot easier to work with and a lot more realistic when you start thinking about it as Selfless/Selfish instead. Maybe I'm wrong to make that mental substitution, but it's what I've been doing. It's substantially less arbitrary and sidesteps the entire problem of races being described as favoring one or the other.
If WotC were going to make THAT change, I'd be 100% for it.
I agree that it should be answered, but the only races* they are officially retconing are Orcs and Drow. So they can mention Eberron, but unless they also retcon every other Humanoid race in D&D to remove all racial alignments, it seems like they are only changing the couple things specifically complained about, and not actually removing the racism from D&D. In fact, the very concept of “racial languages” smacks of racism. Why are they not eliminating those?
My point is, this seems less like WotC attempting to eliminate racism from their product, and more like addressing specific complaints to boost sales. And with the current political climate, the timing couldn’t be more convenient for publicity..... Ne?
*(Vistani being a culture and not a race, and actually specifically modeled after an IRL culture.)
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So the actual portion of the statement that mentioned orcs and drow was this ..
First sentence says they portrayed orcs and drow differently in recent books. Second sentence says they will continue that approach with "all peoples" in future books. Like I said, I think your concern has already been answered.
Canto alla vita
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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!
I don't get the feel that this will be a retcon, necessarily (maybe, but not necessarily), but more of an approach they will take with future material. I'm not sure how they are going to finesse that line, but I remain hopeful.
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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!
Orcs and Drow are particularly problematic cases just because they can easily be seen as specific analogies for particular real-world races, most of the others are less obvious (you can come up with options, but none of them are likely to have grade schoolers tag them as obvious racism the first time they hear about it, which happened to a friend of mine). It doesn't mean the other cases aren't somewhat problematic, but it's not the same sort of priority to do something about).
Tell the Romani that Vistani are just "fictional" and aren't worth complaining about.
Tell black people that "calling orcs stupid, not people, and savages" is any different from what was done to them for literally hundreds of years.
Tell Asians that "hobgoblins just happen to wear the same armor as samurai" and it isn't worth complaining about.
Sure, they're fictional, but they draw strong similarities and inspiration from certain real world people. No one is trying to make goblins feel better about themselves, we're trying to make the game as inclusive as possible, in mechanics and racial depictions.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
There are people working on doing just that, but everyone works with the tools they have and in the realms which they inhabit. It just so happens that RPG creators have at their disposal tools of creation and they inhabit realms of collaborative storytelling. Racism, and bigotry in general, are not small or simple issues. They are problems that invade many aspects of our lives, including the art and games we consume. As such, these issues are topics that need to be tackled on many different fronts by the people who work on those fronts. Activists and politicians and social workers and teachers are all working on their respective fronts ... why are you objecting to artists and creators working on their own fronts?
And if you're saying that racism in fiction is the result of real life racists rather than the other way around ... well you wouldn't object to people erasing the touch of such people from their art, would you?
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!
Shouldn't the status quo match the game? I'm not arguing that Orcs should be good, I'm arguing that they shouldn't be evil, there's a difference. I think they should be like other humans, not inclined to being evil. Changing it does make most games more open, especially when people don't have E:RftLW or EGtW for the variant orcs.
It doesn't make the game any more creative or open to have "completely" evil races. No one is policing the games, the DM makes their rules, but the core rules and races should be as open as possible, with the DMs restricting things how they want.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms
Part of the issue is that the good/evil spectrum in DnD is described from our point of view, as humans, likely from the Mediterranean to the Pacific for the most part. From the point of view of the Orcs, they are the ones who are Good, and everyone else is Evil.
I happen to agree, however, that the base rules have no reason to call a given race either good or evil (honestly this should extend to Lawful/Chaotic as well). That is a job for the settings, to talk about those races within the context of that given setting. Reasons for a race to be one alignment or another should be a part of worldbuilding, not inherent to the race itself.
I would note that early adventures are problematic for reasons other than racism. For example, I'm looking at B2 (Keep on the Borderlands). The basic thrust of the adventure is that you have a pair of fortified positions (the Keep and the Caves) facing one another across a border, and the PCs are heavily armed raiders who are crossing the border in search of 'experience' and loot (there is very little evidence of the inhabitants of the caves doing the reverse -- prisoners in area 24 are about it). Other than one of the sides being nonhuman, this is a perfectly normal border dispute and a credible enough place for an adventure game, but it's certainly not heroic.
Is the non-human faction the one that's being invaded and colonized? Because ...
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!
So, I've seen some people post about how D&D settings are "worlds of absolute extremes." Let's clear some things up. What are "absolute extremes?" Here is what I'm interpreting them as:
So, basically they're saying that creatures of X type are evil, always evil, and absolutely 100% evil.
Now, here's why this isn't correct:
D&D is a world of near-absolutes and a world of near-extremes. Zariel can fall and be redeemed. A goblin baby can be raised to be nice. Dwarves can use arcane magic, and gnomes can be chaotic evil.
Please check out my homebrew, I would appreciate feedback:
Spells, Monsters, Subclasses, Races, Arcknight Class, Occultist Class, World, Enigmatic Esoterica forms