Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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As I mentioned earlier, I include gender parity in my games. Women in the real world do face challenges getting certain jobs. You can look up General Vance if you want an example of the challenges women face. Most of my friends and I are trying to enter male-dominated fields. We can get all the sexism we want in reality, so I do not include it in my games. To some that may break immersion, but to me it is as important to my fantasy as the magic and the elves. I am using my imagination to imagine a world with a little less prejudice. Some people may feel the same way when it comes to racism. If people have to put up with unpleasant racism in real life, maybe they would also like to use their imaginations to create a world where racism is not as big a deal. People who see things my way are not wrong for eliminating something troubling because it exists in the real world. And people are also not wrong for trying to touch on real topics, if everyone playing is comfortable with that.
And I would be wary of tackling issues which are sensitive. I can think of watching stuff on television where a show written by men tries to tackle the issue of sexism. The episodes often still contain sexism. I am extremely white, so I avoid telling stories that I worry would be problematic to my non-white players. I know what it is like to sit there while someone unknowingly does something which makes me uncomfortable, so I try to avoid putting other people in that situation. I use my imagination on other stuff I know my players are into.
To sum up, I am not saying it is wrong to have fantasy racism. I would just make sure everyone is on board and comfortable. Neither of out ways of doing things are wrong, they are just better suited to different people.
As a DM I often add a racist element to my villains as it is a trait that all of my players can agree is bad. Sometimes I like a sort of anti hero, or villain that can be understood. However I have found when that isn't my goal that a good way to make a villain much more villainous and evil is to make them racist or give them some other irrational trait.
First (only?) sensible post I saw in this thread. If people don't want racism in their game because they get enough of it in real life, then that's perfectly ok. And if people want it in their game, because it creates context then that's ok. I think the one thing we all agree on is consent for whatever is at hand - I would be leery of someone using it as a recruiting strategy, in either direction (see following).
My one concern about avoiding sensitive topics is that it polarizes and divides people. Rather than engaging in dialogue and learning to live with our differences, we turn a blind eye to them, which can be dehumanizing. which is ironic for a principle of inclusivity. I think one person we could all learn from is Daryl Davis; google him, he is an inspiring individual.
P.S. yes many people are intransigent in their views, and a duty to engage only goes so far. But imo the intransigence is born from or facilitated by a lack of dialogue, and I think our fantasy worlds are safe places to explore the consequences of racism and how to address it. And, as fantasy game, maybe that sometimes means simply beating the bleep out of the racists. It's your game.
It seems to me that it is rather odd to bring racism into a game.
Maybe it is just my jaded experience coming to DnD and gaming, but my gaming experience started when I was 8 years old. Racism back in the 80's wasn't as largely a talked about topic in the Tampa area where I grew up. I grew up in very mixed areas, so growing up it never occurred to anyone I was playing with that race was an issue. We had much bigger problems to consider, like finding other like minded people who would play DnD without calling us outcasts or nerds. None of us cared who you were, as long as you were willing to play. Our games were based off of lore we could find, and included some novels. But again there was no real racism with the exception that almost no one liked playing humans.
The fact that people in more recent years felt the need to bring it up in games, and to somehow make it a part of game play is pretty sick. It is like they needed victims and drama to give meaning to their lives. It wasn't until I was in my 30's that anyone even brought up racism in games around me, and most intelligent people I knew just ignored it, as that is just something we don't think about. Had people just let it go away, we wouldn't have this thread today. I would challenge people to go to the San Diego Comic Con back in 1997. It was fun, it was exciting, we didn't have celebrities taking it over, and activists didn't even exist in our world of Comic Con. It was simpler times. It amazed me that people felt the need to bring racism into an arena that was challenged enough just to have acceptance of the people playing it, Period.
I am not sure what my Spirit Animal is. But whatever that thing is, I am pretty sure it has rabies!
So you're the member of the necromantic cult reviving this thread who sees necromancy as an avenue to time travel? That's ... pretty cool world building, going to note that for my own games. But if people succeed in this challenge, those Artificers are in no way obligated to share their time travel technology with you. As such this time travel challenge is a text book illustration of the problems of winner take all capitalism. Whoever gets back to 1997 first can shape the world so that all competitors are either frustrated or even thwarted in their endeavors. The notion of a single Time Lord is too frightening a project and I strongly encourage you to dissolve this challenge.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
I'm sure this has been mentioned by others, but rural communities might not know what a tiefling is, and orcs, well depends on location and setting, as some settings Orcs are actually kind of rare and may only inhabit a single mountain range or coastal region half a continent away. (Toril/Forgotten Realms). If there is bias against a race, urban regions where one race has absolute dominance is where racism thrives.
example: I'm Jewish I look very typically Jewish, I live in the USA, and we still have people in this country who are biased against people of my ancestry. If I go to Cities in the "Bible belt" I will face discrimination for being Jewish looking, I will face discrimination for my other born traits as well. But if I go to West Virginia, where they usually can not identify me as a minority at all. They treat me as white. Mostly because they don't know what a Transgender Jewish woman would look like. BTW, I use to drive OTR, and experienced this first hand.
Rural people would be more likely to be untrusting of a common race that they interact with but have negative experiences with. Orcs and Tieflings are rare usually.
wonderfully worded.
to OP, and others ...
Even at the worst times of D&D inclusion (1990), racism was very limited, and usually only associated with specific settings, or societies which were. ie Thay, Dragonlance, Darksun... Generally Forgotten Realms along the sword coast there isn't a real majority race, and typical racism isn't a thing. Some races were antagonistic to each other due to long histories of the races being at war with each other, but generally humans were the least likely race to be racist. It was more common for an Elf and Dwarf to kind of hate each other, than for a human to be racist to anyone. (There is a meme about Bards, back in the AD&D days, it was a Human bard meme)
1991 .. while I was in the USMC. It was a small event. Kind of pleasant, I only visited for an afternoon with a friend of mine who was really excited about the collector covers from Marvel. Oh, and D&D back then was nothing like it is today. For one thing in my gaming group we had 1 out very gay guy (Hispanic), one very straight body building beer drinking tanker with tattoos (our DM & White), me a very closeted trans person and bisexual who wore Goth as my defense for all my outward "gay" stuff (Jewish), a drunk metal head who believed every game had to start with Misty Mt Hoop (Portuguese), and the other metal guy who played bass, got me into thrash metal (Black South Central LA).
Racism is a good story building mechanic which can further player input and add major plot points to a well written narrative. (I DO NOT SUPPORT RACISM) In the campaigns I run, i like to mix a sense of homebrew "**** it, X hates Y because Z" and some based off of the grudges held in official dnd/fantasy elements. This not only adds interactions for characters, but it can help with the creation of whole plotlines if done correctly.
I have the opposite approach to this: There is no automatic racism. Larger settlements will have markets where everyone comes to trade - orcs, tieflings, ogres, gnomes, elves. I like the feel of a multi ethnic, multi racial melting pot.
A few races aren't included. Not because of racism, but because they literally eat other sentients: No trolls, no mindflayers. But otherwise, a minotaur isn't out of place at the market. And everyone knows that humans fight more wars against humans than against all other races combined.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
"Common sense" is just shorthand for expecting everything to have the same biases.
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.
With regards to the analogy, "horns, fangs, claws, cloven hooves, and a tail" are rather more distinctive than one variant within the Caucasian genotype, and are associated with beings who would feature prominently in "these are the really evil things that do especially nasty stuff to us given half a chance" stories one can reasonably expect to be widely promulgated in a culture of a typical fantasy setting. The point of a Tiefling's appearance is to be very clearly fiendish and other; consider how many monsters in myths have appearances that can be described as "like humans, but with...". Should every single village have the same reaction to them? No. But there's plenty of points for why an appearance that's a much larger departure from a baseline that "different ear shape, height, and/or exact proportions" is going to draw negative impressions from people who are aware there's stuff that doesn't just go bump but eviscerates in the night, particularly when the appearance is coded to resemble the beings who are literally embodiments of Evil.
But those "literal embodiment of evil" are based on a single real-world religion cluster. A world where those specific religions don't exist doesn't automatically regard those traits as being the mark of evil.
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.
Except the official iterations of Fiends share the look. Yes, you can retool a setting from the ground up to eliminate the association, but the narrative point of the appearance chosen for Tieflings is to look fiendish.
And, as I pointed out, in a setting where monsters are most definitely out there in the dark and everyone is aware of this, it’s entirely possible for anything that looks monstrous- say by having horns, claws, and fangs- to catch a lot of suspicion by association. Plus there is the fundamental “Not Like Us” issue.
I’m not saying everyone should be automatically racist against Tieflings, but there’s a lot more that goes into it than simply the “familiarity breeds contempt” argument presented above.
If we're trying to be realistic (which is... entirely optional in D&D), the factors that create racism in the real world would presumably also exist in D&D. Common reasons include:
Let's assume for the moment that this belief of yours is universally or even widely held. This is very much a setting-dependent thing. Which communities in, say, the Forgotten Realms, or Eberron, would count as "more rural and superstitious" in your eyes, exactly? And if you're referring solely to your own personal setting rather than any of the printed ones, what responsibility do the rulebooks have to flesh out something that will only matter to your table?
In most published settings, when "orc raids" even existed, they're largely seen in the present time as an artifact of the distant past. D&D settings might have roots in Tolkien's works, but ultimately they are not Middle-Earth; Orcs were never a monolith of fiend-adjacent marauders like they are in that setting, are especially not that in the assumed present time.
In a more general sense, 'orc raids' are just raids on a contested border (which we have plenty of historical examples of where both sides are straight up humans, and often involve raids going in both directions) and fall under what I called 'factionalism' above. Contested borders are certainly a possibility in a fantasy setting (Keep on the Borderlands is an archetypal example... and yes, you can quite easily invert that whole module and play the brave orc defenders fending off the raiding humans... that might actually a fun campaign idea) but aren't especially common in recent publication.
What is racism anyways? I mean, really - in the real world, racism is prejudice, right? There's more to it than that, it's essentially a hydra. But work with me here.
So in D&D, is it racist to say 'all gnolls are evil'? Assuming it's true, I don't think so. Same for mind flayers. 'All mind flayers are evil and eat brains and have slaves and are really mean and bad'. All true, not racist. I know there's a not-evil mind flayer in BG3, but you know what I mean.
Is it racist to say 'the Zentharim are evil'? I mean, there could be good Zenths, right? Not many! But we don't know for sure.
Blanket disclaimer: I only ever state opinion. But I can sound terribly dogmatic - so if you feel I'm trying to tell you what to think, I'm really not, I swear. I'm telling you what I think, that's all.
Actually, that proves the falsity of the generalization. In any case, there's a fundamental problem calling any involuntary group evil: in general we only assign the term evil to things with free will (things that are destructive but lack free will, such as diseases and natural disasters, we generally still class as neutral) and the ability to understand the difference between good and evil (thus, beasts are generally neutral as well), and a creature that has both free will and the intelligence to know the difference between good and evil... must be able to choose not to be evil.
Now, this doesn't apply to voluntary groups, which arguably applies to both fiends and greater undead (it also applies to Zhentarim; the Zhentarim are an organization that you can join or leave).
The distinction is that natural disasters or non-fantastic plagues are something that just happen- or at least can just happen, depending on how involved the pantheons are. They occur simply as a byproduct of nature ticking along without any fantastic elements involved, and cause casualties as an incidental byproduct. Beings like gnolls, zombies, etc always involve some fantastic inciting force, and specifically desire to kill and destroy as a part of that force. Going by the 5e MM iteration, saying gnolls are evil is factually correct; they are objectively an unnatural force that exists solely to perpetrate evil deeds.