One last thing to think about is that, unless your game takes on Earth, cultures are not (and shouldn't) match up exactly with their earth counterparts. Concepts we have in our world would likely have different ways at looking at concepts we have like, like blackness for example. A black character in DnD has a different history than a black prison on earth, so the only real danger for being disrespectful in your representation is if you pull in too much earth stuff in your portrayal, which could lead to an incorporation of stereotypes or appropriation.
This is a really really good point.
If you wanted to incorporate intolerance into your home-brew cultures ( not exactly a fun theme to explore, but unfortunately it seems to be pretty common in most/all Human cultures, and an allowable point of exploration, if it suits you and your Players ), you might take a page from Star Trek where social issues are ( loosely ) disguised under different alien features or biology, or alien cultures.
I'd point to Star Trek the Next Generation's episodeThe Outcastas an example of how they handled contentious social issues in the show in a (relatively) non-offensive manner.
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Unless it's integral to the plot, diversifying NPC's isn't necessary.
But If you really feel that you need to, use it sparingly, or it will seem forced or artificial.
Technically, yeah, it's not necessary. But lots of things in DnD aren't necessary, and we do them anyway. It's not necessaryto have non-human NPCs, but I bet you do. Heck, it's not necessary to have NPCs at all - we could just have a sign post in the town center saying "this way to adventure." And every creature could just be a variation of a goblin.
Some people have players that appreciate seeing themselves represented in the NPCs. Some people play with players that find value in a world that's not entirely populated by light skinned heterosexuals (even if they are 'diversified' across straight white elf, straight white dwarf, etc...) The determination should be driven by the group, and OP has been pretty clear that their group will appreciate diversity. Can you play the game without it? Sure. But it seems OP is listening to their players in order to maximize their enjoyment.
I don't see why at least a physical description of a character - literally what the players can see with their own two eyes and know about an NPC immediately - should ever feel forced or artificial. 'Light skinned', 'dark skinned', 'olive skinned', etc... is just part of the brief physical description which happens every time you introduce an NPC. Go through the LMoP book and you already have "lean and balding", "fit, silver haired", "fat, pompous", "short, dark bearded" - if these descriptions are deemed necessary, skin tone hardly seems unnatural.
Non-visible characteristics, such as sexuality, absolutely shouldn't be described, as many others have said. If a characteristic cannot be ascertained by physical inspection, then it remains unknown unless it comes up in a natural way. I loved the blacksmith's husband Armond in the example above. Not forced or artificial at all, any more than it would be to describe a (male) innkeeper's wife - something that happens in LMoP with no real purpose beyond adding an NPC. Had the PCs not asked the NPC about armor, they'd never have met Armond and never have known anything about the smith's sexuality - as it would be in real life. The smith's sexuality matters not one jot to the quality of the weapons he is producing, but that brief glimpse into his personal life adds some depth to the character and makes him that much more believable and relatable.
In my LMoP game, Daran Edermath is gay. His husband Leonid is worried that the party is going to drag him back into his old dangerous adventuring ways, and will be a little cold, though still polite, to the players when they meet him. They've only spoken to Daran alone so far, but when they return they will meet Leonid. I know that my daughter, who is very active in her school's Gay-Straight Alliance group, will very much appreciate seeing this representation.
Unless it's integral to the plot, diversifying NPC's isn't necessary.
But If you really feel that you need to, use it sparingly, or it will seem forced or artificial.
As a counterpoint, it's also not necessary to make a world that looks, demographically, like a majority white, cis, straight world.
Did I say that?...Nope
Consider this. If you go into a weapon smiths shop to buy a sword, how is the shopkeeper's sexual orientation going to make a difference in that transaction?
If the big bad is transgender, what difference does it make if your need to kill them to save the kingdom.
What difference does it make if the guy you challenged to a drinking contest at the local tavern isn't white?
Unless it's integral to the plot, diversifying NPC's isn't necessary.
But If you really feel that you need to, use it sparingly, or it will seem forced or artificial.
As a counterpoint, it's also not necessary to make a world that looks, demographically, like a majority white, cis, straight world.
Did I say that?...Nope
Consider this. If you go into a weapon smiths shop to buy a sword, how is the shopkeeper's sexual orientation going to make a difference in that transaction?
If the big bad is transgender, what difference does it make if your need to kill them to save the kingdom.
What difference does it make if the guy you challenged to a drinking contest at the local tavern isn't white?
etc, etc, etc
I think most everyone has made it clear that this is about world-building and giving representation to people who otherwise wouldn't see themselves in these games. No one has argued that it is, or should be, a mechanical difference.
It's easy to say 'representation doesn't matter' when you see yourself well represented in near every piece of popular culture from the last forever years.
Unless it's integral to the plot, diversifying NPC's isn't necessary.
But If you really feel that you need to, use it sparingly, or it will seem forced or artificial.
As a counterpoint, it's also not necessary to make a world that looks, demographically, like a majority white, cis, straight world.
Did I say that?...Nope
Consider this. If you go into a weapon smiths shop to buy a sword, how is the shopkeeper's sexual orientation going to make a difference in that transaction?
If the big bad is transgender, what difference does it make if your need to kill them to save the kingdom.
What difference does it make if the guy you challenged to a drinking contest at the local tavern isn't white?
etc, etc, etc
I think most everyone has made it clear that this is about world-building and giving representation to people who otherwise wouldn't see themselves in these games. No one has argued that it is, or should be, a mechanical difference.
It's easy to say 'representation doesn't matter' when you see yourself well represented in near every piece of popular culture from the last forever years.
I mean, that's a pretty monocultured (and homophilic) view of the world. It's easy to experience a life of not being well-represented if you travel to a different country. That hasn't necessarily changed my view on the matter. Korean TV shows are great: they would not be improved simply by the fact if more of their actors looked like me and not looking like me isn't really a barrier for my identifying with the characters anyways. It's a really bitter statement on humanity -- and actually our hobby in which people play elves and dwarves and demon and dragon people etc. etc.-- if that someone's physical appearance or who they outwardly show romantic interest in is a limiting factor on whether or not you can identify with a person. I mean, it's interesting that no-one talks about representation in terms of the types of people who are represented rather than the ethnicity or sexual orientation. I mean, sexuality is biological, right? Some people are just born gay. So isn't that just placing importance on the very most outer parts of a person's existence? I wouldn't want to be seen as just my sexual orientation and my heritage, so I find it interesting that people who are supposedly sensitive to those sorts of things are willing to reduce a human being down to that.
Saying that you can't feel represented by someone, because they aren't the same race as they, is saying that you can't see their humanity because their skin is a different colour. It's a denial of their humanity, and honestly? It's a denial of their humanity to balkanise the cultural space. I have lived in places where I was part of a tiny minority. I have lived in places where I was not. All I can say living in foreign countries doesn't afford you the luxury of complaining about things like this. You are confronted with reality and you can either adapt to it or you can choose to be miserable.
I think this thread is slipping away from main point, and is becoming a familiar - and well worn - battle over whether presenting diversity in popular culture is desirable, or not.
The OP was asking how, not should I, and has gotten some responses.
Maybe it's time for the mods to lock it down before it goes down the rabbit hole?
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I think this thread is slipping away from main point, and is becoming a familiar - and well worn - battle over whether presenting diversity in popular culture is desirable, or not.
The OP was asking how, not should I, and has gotten some responses.
Maybe it's time for the mods to lock it down before it goes down the rabbit hole?
Yes, thank you. I want diversity in my world. That is important to me and none of you are changing my mind there. If anyone could tell me some ways I can best and most respectfully portray diversity that would be nice.
An important thing to remember is that you're not making something for public consumption. It's a private thing for you and a few friends, so the consequences for messing up shouldn't be too dramatic. Lots of people on the internet are happy to devour some well-meaning person for making a mistake, rather than helpfully pointing out the issue so that they can improve in the future, but a tabletop group is an environment where you should feel comfortable that you'll receive the latter treatment.
A lot of the ideas people have voiced in terms of "incidental diversity" are good. If you want racial diversity, just start describing skin color when you introduce characters (make this a general rule for everyone you introduce; if it's just the non-white characters you bother to describe, you fall into the "presumption of whiteness as default" trap that someone else mentioned earlier). Be mindful of what roles these characters have and what that might mean for the racial politics of your setting. If you don't want racism to be a thing in your setting, it's not going to be the case that all the nobles are white and all the people of color are peasants.
In terms of sexuality, there are lots of situations where it's perfectly reasonable that the players characters might be meeting an entire family, rather than a single individual. Well, this family has two dads. This can be presented without comment. Straight people casually reference their significant others all the time. There's no reason to deliberately AVOID the mayor making reference to her wife.
That sort of presentation is very unlikely to be "problematic" or whatever. The only thing I would really advise caution with is if you want to actually make it a plot point. Do you want to deal with racial politics in your story? Do you want an NPC important to your adventure to be a queer teen tossed out by unaccepting parents? These are the kind of stories I would advise staying away from unless you have someone familiar with the sort of situation you can run the plot by to try and check you. It's absolutely not true that you can't tell such stories if you don't have that personal experience. But doing so requires empathy, so it's a lot easier to treat things respectfully if you can talk it over with someone who DOES have the personal experience.
Yes, thank you. I want diversity in my world. That is important to me and none of you are changing my mind there. If anyone could tell me some ways I can best and most respectfully portray diversity that would be nice.
The how is quite simple. When the players encounter a NPC, simply state their race, sexual orientation, physical challenges, and any other diversity related descriptors that can be attributed to the NPC in a matter-of-fact way.
And just another thought for your own personal contemplation. Do you want to include diversity, or do you feel obligated to do so?
I mean, it's interesting that no-one talks about representation in terms of the types of people who are represented rather than the ethnicity or sexual orientation. I mean, sexuality is biological, right? Some people are just born gay. So isn't that just placing importance on the very most outer parts of a person's existence? I wouldn't want to be seen as just my sexual orientation and my heritage, so I find it interesting that people who are supposedly sensitive to those sorts of things are willing to reduce a human being down to that.
Saying that you can't feel represented by someone, because they aren't the same race as they, is saying that you can't see their humanity because their skin is a different colour. It's a denial of their humanity, and honestly? It's a denial of their humanity to balkanise the cultural space. I have lived in places where I was part of a tiny minority. I have lived in places where I was not. All I can say living in foreign countries doesn't afford you the luxury of complaining about things like this. You are confronted with reality and you can either adapt to it or you can choose to be miserable.
Pretty sure no one said that we're boiling people down to one thing about them OR that we only identify with people who look like us. We just don't want to feel invisible and ignored because we're never seen in the worlds we inhabit for fun.
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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!
To preserve my own time and energy, I will steer my answer mostly to the OP's question.
A DM who desires to add more diversity into their game world can approach D&D like a choose-your-own story novel from the 80s and use minor NPCs to add "color" or non-hetero relationships into the world. That is a valid approach. Frankly, as a storyteller who thinks a lot about how institutions exist as they do IRL and who is also neither white nor cisgender, I find that kind of thing dull after a while. IMO, what would be more interesting would be to tease out the elements from the real world that are oppressive and find ways to create mirrors of them in a fantasy world. It would take more extensive world-building and might make some players uncomfortable, of course, but art that exists for the sake of more than decoration and mere idle amusement is supposed to get people to think about themselves and the world they live in. And before people start jumping on my case, let me emphasize that the method for doing so is not by having NPCs give lectures to the Pcs, but rather by mirror-to-real-life-events happen in your game and make it very relevant to the larger plot.
A good fictional way to do this can be found in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The in-world plot spans multiple years and the characters have to deal with the past, in which one group of people - the Cardassians - put another group of people - the Bajorans - into work/concentration camps, killing thousands to keep the planet-wide resource-generation operation alive. While the most horrible aspects of that period ended a few years ago, the repercussions are still felt throughout the series. As the audience, we meet a variety of Cardassians and Bajorans: former freedom fighters/terrorists, militarists, peacemakers, orphaned children, mixed race children who are the result of economically coercive sexual relationships, guilty-feeling ex-administrators of the concentration camps as well as those who gloat about the "generosity" of the Cardassians, ambitious grubbing priests, and spies of various moral inclinations. All this goes on while an economic/scientific opportunity opens up, literally, via a stable black hole that can shunt people from one side of the universe to an entirely different one where an entirely different group controls things. Competition for use of the black hole ("worm hole" in Trek-speak) and finding out how to deal with the highly xenophobic dominant species on the other side become magnetic threads that drive various political factions into rethinking and reconfiguring their former allegiances. What made the series memorable even today is that, most of the time, these issues were explored with nuance. No race was simply evil nor simply good. Villains sometimes helped the protagonists and sometimes harmed them. Protagonists (the Federation) sometimes used very questionable means themselves to get what they wanted.
So how does one pull off creating a world of complex diversity rather than one that is merely diverse, with no consequences to that diversity? Research. Understanding history from multiple points of view - both the so-called victors and the so-called victims. Talking to people from different walks of life. Reading literature, paying attention to the perspective of the protagonists and their antagonists. Are the protagonists really Good? Are the antagonists really Bad? Asking questions. Disturbing some people. Apologizing. Asking more polite questions. Writing. Sharing. Create worlds with multiple shades of grey and see how your players react. Don't spoon-feed them. Give them difficult choices, but reward them for taking emotional risks. Make your main villains have believable motivations. Arrange it so that killing their enemy NPCs isn't always an option. Give them a variety of story hooks and see which ones get their attention. Then build further from there.
I mean, it's interesting that no-one talks about representation in terms of the types of people who are represented rather than the ethnicity or sexual orientation. I mean, sexuality is biological, right? Some people are just born gay. So isn't that just placing importance on the very most outer parts of a person's existence? I wouldn't want to be seen as just my sexual orientation and my heritage, so I find it interesting that people who are supposedly sensitive to those sorts of things are willing to reduce a human being down to that.
Saying that you can't feel represented by someone, because they aren't the same race as they, is saying that you can't see their humanity because their skin is a different colour. It's a denial of their humanity, and honestly? It's a denial of their humanity to balkanise the cultural space. I have lived in places where I was part of a tiny minority. I have lived in places where I was not. All I can say living in foreign countries doesn't afford you the luxury of complaining about things like this. You are confronted with reality and you can either adapt to it or you can choose to be miserable.
Pretty sure no one said that we're boiling people down to one thing about them OR that we only identify with people who look like us. We just don't want to feel invisible and ignored because we're never seen in the worlds we inhabit for fun.
And yet saying that you feel ignored because you can't see people who have, arguably superficial, traits in common with you is saying precisely all of that. That's the logical destination of that line of thought. And how can you feel invisible in a society as a minority? By definition, you are basically wearing a blinking neon sign around your neck. My experience is that you feel like people are always looking at you and, often, people will come up and comment about how you are different than them. Going anywhere in East Asia with my friend Chris is a treat: the locals will not fail to tell him that he's a giant. Even in Western cultures, I am very aware of how my clothes don't fit in with the locals. I currently live in Germany and I feel hyper-visible. People look at me and I don't look that much different for the average German. I don't have weird hair or extravagant clothes, but they still look at me. I don't see myself reflected in the advertisements, the TV shows or whatever in society. That's just part of cosmopolitanism. We aren't the wave, we are flotsam on the wave. It is not ours to decide where the wave heads, but only to if the wave is to be ridden.
And yet saying that you feel ignored because you can't see people who have, arguably superficial, traits in common with you is saying precisely all of that. That's the logical destination of that line of thought.
Nope. The experience of of being LGBT, a minority even within one's own family, is not superficial. We're not talking just about the accident of birth, we're talking about a lifetime of discrimination. I don't think you know how it feels to be a minority, no matter how much you've traveled, because even when you were surrounded by people who were not your ethnicity you still traveled with privilege. You speak as someone who has never experienced habitual, lifelong, discrimination based on who you are, even if you may have occasionally been singled out. I know I don't know you, but I would bet I'm correct.
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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!
And yet saying that you feel ignored because you can't see people who have, arguably superficial, traits in common with you is saying precisely all of that. That's the logical destination of that line of thought.
Nope. The experience of of being LGBT, a minority even within one's own family, is not superficial. We're not talking just about the accident of birth, we're talking about a lifetime of discrimination. I don't think you know how it feels to be a minority, no matter how much you've traveled, because even when you were surrounded by people who were not your ethnicity you still traveled with privilege. You speak as someone who has never experienced habitual, lifelong, discrimination based on who you are, even if you may have occasionally been singled out. I know I don't know you, but I would bet I'm correct.
You're not. I've had to fight and claw every step of the way to justify my existence at all to an uncaring world and I haven't had anyone to point my finger at and blame for all my hardships. You may think you had been discriminated against, but try being ostracised -- actually being persona non grata in society-- instead. Try growing up expecting every interaction between you and other people will result in violence, violence that society will not only turn a blind eye to but tell you that you deserve it. Try having no one, I mean no-one to talk to: not "I can't talk about who I really am", I mean literally having another person who is willing to talk to you. When a lover touches me when I'm not expecting it, almost jump to my feet because my brain says that I'm in danger. Go through that and try to come out the other side as something people recognise as a person and then maybe we can talk. Because you talk like someone who has never had to run in fear of their life: I did. I was eight years old when I learned what mob justice means. So don't talk to mean about systematic discrimination. What do you know about discrimination?
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You're not. I've had to fight and claw every step of the way to justify my existence at all to an uncaring world and I haven't had anyone to point my finger at and blame for all my hardships. You may think you had been discriminated against, but try being ostracised -- actually being persona non grata in society-- instead. Try growing up expecting every interaction between you and other people will result in violence, violence that society will not only turn a blind eye to but tell you that you deserve it. Try having no one, I mean no-one to talk to: not "I can't talk about who I really am", I mean literally having another person who is willing to talk to you. When a lover touches me when I'm not expecting it, almost jump to my feet because my brain says that I'm in danger. Go through that and try to come out the other side as something people recognise as a person and then maybe we can talk. Because you talk like someone who has never had to run in fear of their life: I did. I was eight years old when I learned what mob justice means. So don't talk to mean about systematic discrimination. What do you know about discrimination?
Sure, I can admit when I'm wrong. Like I said, I don't know you. Before we get too deep into oppression olympics, if you're so familiar with discrimination then maybe can you understand how some people want to make the world a more compassionate and welcoming place for everyone? I mean yeah, toughen up and go with the flow can be good advice for people to survive this world, but there's also the other side of things where those of us who have already suffered can try and let others know that "We see you. We're not glossing over your struggle, your struggle in particular and not just generic struggle."
If I knew your story in more detail, I would probably wish that you could see yourself represented in media, too, so that you could have stories that speak to you and your life.
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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!
Saying that you can't feel represented by someone, because they aren't the same race as they, is saying that you can't see their humanity because their skin is a different colour. It's a denial of their humanity, and honestly? It's a denial of their humanity to balkanise the cultural space. I have lived in places where I was part of a tiny minority. I have lived in places where I was not. All I can say living in foreign countries doesn't afford you the luxury of complaining about things like this. You are confronted with reality and you can either adapt to it or you can choose to be miserable.
I'm just going to respond to this bit here. Actually, my experience and larger impression of societal conundrums for under-represented people is not so simple as that we cannot see ourselves in stories told from the perspective of the majority. We often do in fact. However, it's also, simultaneously, and repeatedly, being told and being treated as though we are not human enough or not human at all while also being told we should just be like everyone else when we are, in actuality, treated as more extinguishable, expendable, and/or essentially less than the majority population. A large part of how majority-minority oppressive systems prop themselves up is by dehumanizing the minority, spreading the idea far and wide that the minority group simply does not deserve to be treated as "normal," as legitimate "citizens" within the modern rubric of nation-states. One of several ways this has happened is by denying that said minorities have been treated badly (see the justifications of the South for slavery prior to the U.S. Civil War). Another way is to deny that said minorities have legitimately traumatic feelings about being treated badly (past or present). By restricting the broadcast and/or production of honest stories about social minorities, the reality of being treated like 2nd class, or worse, as not human, by the majority over time becomes a publicly taboo subject. This not only makes it harder to find sympathetic people in the majority willing to critically question the dehumanizing social system, it also can slow or lock down the feelings of individual minority members towards understanding and emotionally working through the trauma, which often has multi-generational consequences of re-traumatization even when some aspects of former brutal dehumanization are, at least legally, over and done with.
I am also wondering how to create a more representative world. I'm a new DM, and I've had some trouble describing characters in general simply because there is so much going on as a DM. What I've noticed about myself(as a cis white man) is that when I describe a character, my mind unintentionally defaults to white skin. It's part of my ingrained racial bias, something I'm uncomfortable with, and I'm working on changing. I'm DMing for a group of white folks.
It's dawned on me that my campaign is not very diverse at all, so I wanted to start including folks with different skin tones. I was going to describe somebody as having dark skin(as well as what kind of clothing, etc.), but I realized, if I describe this character with dark skin, while I haven't introduced anybody else with skin color as an identifier, that that is putting forward the notion that whiteness is the norm. If I describe somebody with dark or tan skin, I should be describing light-skinned characters as having light skin.
What I'm finding is that I want to challenge myself not to assume anything about a person as a default. These ideas of normal or default could be: able-bodied, in "good" shape, gender assumptions, white, and more.
I think consistency in description is one key to respectfully portraying all types of people.
I think it sounds like you're more focused on the how, not the why, so I'm going to address the deeper levels than making sure traits are mentioned- which is important, like making sure skin color and sexuality are not only mentioned if they're not white or straight, but not the end all be all. One thing recommended by many writers on this topic is expanding the type of media you read. You'll grow more comfortable depicting experiences from different groups if you read things they write and learn about them.
Make sure that you aren't playing into stereotypes, including "positive" ones. A smart, nerdy person read as Asian and a druid who reads as Native American is still sterotyping. Make sure that the NPCs of different backgrounds have positive and negative traits as well. If most of your major NPCs who are good guys are white/straight/able bodied, that's also problematic, especially if the bad guys are not. Make sure that if you exclude antagonists like a rival who isn't technically bad but is really annoying from the good guys category that it doesn't change your composition.
Some of the different outlooks can come up in conversation. For instance, in the real world, studies have found women more often give directions based on landmarks. "Go down the street until you reach the orange house and turn left, turn right at the grocery store," while men more often give directions like "Go down the street and turn left on Main Street, turn right at Pine Avenue." Also note that those are on average, not a rule for everyone. Keep in mind that a lot of the differences that wouldn't show up in a police description may be subtle and may not be revealed at first glance. Don't introduce all the things that make somebody different at once, let them come up naturally. Also, don't make the differences bigger than they should be. For example, in my current campaign two of the characters in a covert faction that the players interact with are lesbians and in a relationship. The party had met the two once and seen them behave warmly towards each other but they were on the clock so they were acting professionally. After a couple more run-ins, the party was hanging out with one and need to talk to the other- at which point she pulled out her sending stone and let them borrow it. She sighed wistfully at missing a daily check-in and said she hated the long-distance parts of their relationship. The party generally agreed with that briefly. They then moved on because it wasn't relevant to the plot and they had a time crunch.
I want to emphasize not addressing mental illness if you do not have experience with it or a foundational knowledge. That includes being neuroatypical (people whose brains are not wired the way people consider average or normal), like depression, generalized anxiety disorder, or even ADHD (although the last isn't diagnostically mental illness). Too often it is used as short hand for "of course the big bad is evil, they're ___."
Lastly, you are going to make mistakes. It happens! I do, people who study the various fields do. Apologize for the error, correct it, and strive to do some more research on the topic to improve. Don't get bogged down in a "but I'm a good thoughtful person and not a bigot" argument, especially if the person who calls you out has to appease you for it. (I'm not trying to say you would, but it's better to be clear about it). Also don't go, "Hey X, you're a ___. Could you tell me what it's like?" The Internet, books, and academic articles exist for a reason. Don't ask individuals to represent their people to you.
Good luck!
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This is a really really good point.
If you wanted to incorporate intolerance into your home-brew cultures ( not exactly a fun theme to explore, but unfortunately it seems to be pretty common in most/all Human cultures, and an allowable point of exploration, if it suits you and your Players ), you might take a page from Star Trek where social issues are ( loosely ) disguised under different alien features or biology, or alien cultures.
I'd point to Star Trek the Next Generation's episode The Outcast as an example of how they handled contentious social issues in the show in a (relatively) non-offensive manner.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
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As a counterpoint, it's also not necessary to make a world that looks, demographically, like a majority white, cis, straight world.
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!
Technically, yeah, it's not necessary. But lots of things in DnD aren't necessary, and we do them anyway. It's not necessary to have non-human NPCs, but I bet you do. Heck, it's not necessary to have NPCs at all - we could just have a sign post in the town center saying "this way to adventure." And every creature could just be a variation of a goblin.
Some people have players that appreciate seeing themselves represented in the NPCs. Some people play with players that find value in a world that's not entirely populated by light skinned heterosexuals (even if they are 'diversified' across straight white elf, straight white dwarf, etc...) The determination should be driven by the group, and OP has been pretty clear that their group will appreciate diversity. Can you play the game without it? Sure. But it seems OP is listening to their players in order to maximize their enjoyment.
I don't see why at least a physical description of a character - literally what the players can see with their own two eyes and know about an NPC immediately - should ever feel forced or artificial. 'Light skinned', 'dark skinned', 'olive skinned', etc... is just part of the brief physical description which happens every time you introduce an NPC. Go through the LMoP book and you already have "lean and balding", "fit, silver haired", "fat, pompous", "short, dark bearded" - if these descriptions are deemed necessary, skin tone hardly seems unnatural.
Non-visible characteristics, such as sexuality, absolutely shouldn't be described, as many others have said. If a characteristic cannot be ascertained by physical inspection, then it remains unknown unless it comes up in a natural way. I loved the blacksmith's husband Armond in the example above. Not forced or artificial at all, any more than it would be to describe a (male) innkeeper's wife - something that happens in LMoP with no real purpose beyond adding an NPC. Had the PCs not asked the NPC about armor, they'd never have met Armond and never have known anything about the smith's sexuality - as it would be in real life. The smith's sexuality matters not one jot to the quality of the weapons he is producing, but that brief glimpse into his personal life adds some depth to the character and makes him that much more believable and relatable.
In my LMoP game, Daran Edermath is gay. His husband Leonid is worried that the party is going to drag him back into his old dangerous adventuring ways, and will be a little cold, though still polite, to the players when they meet him. They've only spoken to Daran alone so far, but when they return they will meet Leonid. I know that my daughter, who is very active in her school's Gay-Straight Alliance group, will very much appreciate seeing this representation.
Did I say that?...Nope
Consider this. If you go into a weapon smiths shop to buy a sword, how is the shopkeeper's sexual orientation going to make a difference in that transaction?
If the big bad is transgender, what difference does it make if your need to kill them to save the kingdom.
What difference does it make if the guy you challenged to a drinking contest at the local tavern isn't white?
etc, etc, etc
I think most everyone has made it clear that this is about world-building and giving representation to people who otherwise wouldn't see themselves in these games. No one has argued that it is, or should be, a mechanical difference.
It's easy to say 'representation doesn't matter' when you see yourself well represented in near every piece of popular culture from the last forever years.
I mean, that's a pretty monocultured (and homophilic) view of the world. It's easy to experience a life of not being well-represented if you travel to a different country. That hasn't necessarily changed my view on the matter. Korean TV shows are great: they would not be improved simply by the fact if more of their actors looked like me and not looking like me isn't really a barrier for my identifying with the characters anyways. It's a really bitter statement on humanity -- and actually our hobby in which people play elves and dwarves and demon and dragon people etc. etc.-- if that someone's physical appearance or who they outwardly show romantic interest in is a limiting factor on whether or not you can identify with a person. I mean, it's interesting that no-one talks about representation in terms of the types of people who are represented rather than the ethnicity or sexual orientation. I mean, sexuality is biological, right? Some people are just born gay. So isn't that just placing importance on the very most outer parts of a person's existence? I wouldn't want to be seen as just my sexual orientation and my heritage, so I find it interesting that people who are supposedly sensitive to those sorts of things are willing to reduce a human being down to that.
Saying that you can't feel represented by someone, because they aren't the same race as they, is saying that you can't see their humanity because their skin is a different colour. It's a denial of their humanity, and honestly? It's a denial of their humanity to balkanise the cultural space. I have lived in places where I was part of a tiny minority. I have lived in places where I was not. All I can say living in foreign countries doesn't afford you the luxury of complaining about things like this. You are confronted with reality and you can either adapt to it or you can choose to be miserable.
I think this thread is slipping away from main point, and is becoming a familiar - and well worn - battle over whether presenting diversity in popular culture is desirable, or not.
The OP was asking how, not should I, and has gotten some responses.
Maybe it's time for the mods to lock it down before it goes down the rabbit hole?
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
Yes, thank you. I want diversity in my world. That is important to me and none of you are changing my mind there. If anyone could tell me some ways I can best and most respectfully portray diversity that would be nice.
An important thing to remember is that you're not making something for public consumption. It's a private thing for you and a few friends, so the consequences for messing up shouldn't be too dramatic. Lots of people on the internet are happy to devour some well-meaning person for making a mistake, rather than helpfully pointing out the issue so that they can improve in the future, but a tabletop group is an environment where you should feel comfortable that you'll receive the latter treatment.
A lot of the ideas people have voiced in terms of "incidental diversity" are good. If you want racial diversity, just start describing skin color when you introduce characters (make this a general rule for everyone you introduce; if it's just the non-white characters you bother to describe, you fall into the "presumption of whiteness as default" trap that someone else mentioned earlier). Be mindful of what roles these characters have and what that might mean for the racial politics of your setting. If you don't want racism to be a thing in your setting, it's not going to be the case that all the nobles are white and all the people of color are peasants.
In terms of sexuality, there are lots of situations where it's perfectly reasonable that the players characters might be meeting an entire family, rather than a single individual. Well, this family has two dads. This can be presented without comment. Straight people casually reference their significant others all the time. There's no reason to deliberately AVOID the mayor making reference to her wife.
That sort of presentation is very unlikely to be "problematic" or whatever. The only thing I would really advise caution with is if you want to actually make it a plot point. Do you want to deal with racial politics in your story? Do you want an NPC important to your adventure to be a queer teen tossed out by unaccepting parents? These are the kind of stories I would advise staying away from unless you have someone familiar with the sort of situation you can run the plot by to try and check you. It's absolutely not true that you can't tell such stories if you don't have that personal experience. But doing so requires empathy, so it's a lot easier to treat things respectfully if you can talk it over with someone who DOES have the personal experience.
The how is quite simple. When the players encounter a NPC, simply state their race, sexual orientation, physical challenges, and any other diversity related descriptors that can be attributed to the NPC in a matter-of-fact way.
And just another thought for your own personal contemplation. Do you want to include diversity, or do you feel obligated to do so?
Pretty sure no one said that we're boiling people down to one thing about them OR that we only identify with people who look like us. We just don't want to feel invisible and ignored because we're never seen in the worlds we inhabit for fun.
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!
To preserve my own time and energy, I will steer my answer mostly to the OP's question.
A DM who desires to add more diversity into their game world can approach D&D like a choose-your-own story novel from the 80s and use minor NPCs to add "color" or non-hetero relationships into the world. That is a valid approach. Frankly, as a storyteller who thinks a lot about how institutions exist as they do IRL and who is also neither white nor cisgender, I find that kind of thing dull after a while. IMO, what would be more interesting would be to tease out the elements from the real world that are oppressive and find ways to create mirrors of them in a fantasy world. It would take more extensive world-building and might make some players uncomfortable, of course, but art that exists for the sake of more than decoration and mere idle amusement is supposed to get people to think about themselves and the world they live in. And before people start jumping on my case, let me emphasize that the method for doing so is not by having NPCs give lectures to the Pcs, but rather by mirror-to-real-life-events happen in your game and make it very relevant to the larger plot.
A good fictional way to do this can be found in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. The in-world plot spans multiple years and the characters have to deal with the past, in which one group of people - the Cardassians - put another group of people - the Bajorans - into work/concentration camps, killing thousands to keep the planet-wide resource-generation operation alive. While the most horrible aspects of that period ended a few years ago, the repercussions are still felt throughout the series. As the audience, we meet a variety of Cardassians and Bajorans: former freedom fighters/terrorists, militarists, peacemakers, orphaned children, mixed race children who are the result of economically coercive sexual relationships, guilty-feeling ex-administrators of the concentration camps as well as those who gloat about the "generosity" of the Cardassians, ambitious grubbing priests, and spies of various moral inclinations. All this goes on while an economic/scientific opportunity opens up, literally, via a stable black hole that can shunt people from one side of the universe to an entirely different one where an entirely different group controls things. Competition for use of the black hole ("worm hole" in Trek-speak) and finding out how to deal with the highly xenophobic dominant species on the other side become magnetic threads that drive various political factions into rethinking and reconfiguring their former allegiances. What made the series memorable even today is that, most of the time, these issues were explored with nuance. No race was simply evil nor simply good. Villains sometimes helped the protagonists and sometimes harmed them. Protagonists (the Federation) sometimes used very questionable means themselves to get what they wanted.
So how does one pull off creating a world of complex diversity rather than one that is merely diverse, with no consequences to that diversity? Research. Understanding history from multiple points of view - both the so-called victors and the so-called victims. Talking to people from different walks of life. Reading literature, paying attention to the perspective of the protagonists and their antagonists. Are the protagonists really Good? Are the antagonists really Bad? Asking questions. Disturbing some people. Apologizing. Asking more polite questions. Writing. Sharing. Create worlds with multiple shades of grey and see how your players react. Don't spoon-feed them. Give them difficult choices, but reward them for taking emotional risks. Make your main villains have believable motivations. Arrange it so that killing their enemy NPCs isn't always an option. Give them a variety of story hooks and see which ones get their attention. Then build further from there.
And yet saying that you feel ignored because you can't see people who have, arguably superficial, traits in common with you is saying precisely all of that. That's the logical destination of that line of thought. And how can you feel invisible in a society as a minority? By definition, you are basically wearing a blinking neon sign around your neck. My experience is that you feel like people are always looking at you and, often, people will come up and comment about how you are different than them. Going anywhere in East Asia with my friend Chris is a treat: the locals will not fail to tell him that he's a giant. Even in Western cultures, I am very aware of how my clothes don't fit in with the locals. I currently live in Germany and I feel hyper-visible. People look at me and I don't look that much different for the average German. I don't have weird hair or extravagant clothes, but they still look at me. I don't see myself reflected in the advertisements, the TV shows or whatever in society. That's just part of cosmopolitanism. We aren't the wave, we are flotsam on the wave. It is not ours to decide where the wave heads, but only to if the wave is to be ridden.
Nope. The experience of of being LGBT, a minority even within one's own family, is not superficial. We're not talking just about the accident of birth, we're talking about a lifetime of discrimination. I don't think you know how it feels to be a minority, no matter how much you've traveled, because even when you were surrounded by people who were not your ethnicity you still traveled with privilege. You speak as someone who has never experienced habitual, lifelong, discrimination based on who you are, even if you may have occasionally been singled out. I know I don't know you, but I would bet I'm correct.
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!
You're not. I've had to fight and claw every step of the way to justify my existence at all to an uncaring world and I haven't had anyone to point my finger at and blame for all my hardships. You may think you had been discriminated against, but try being ostracised -- actually being persona non grata in society-- instead. Try growing up expecting every interaction between you and other people will result in violence, violence that society will not only turn a blind eye to but tell you that you deserve it. Try having no one, I mean no-one to talk to: not "I can't talk about who I really am", I mean literally having another person who is willing to talk to you. When a lover touches me when I'm not expecting it, almost jump to my feet because my brain says that I'm in danger. Go through that and try to come out the other side as something people recognise as a person and then maybe we can talk. Because you talk like someone who has never had to run in fear of their life: I did. I was eight years old when I learned what mob justice means. So don't talk to mean about systematic discrimination. What do you know about discrimination?
OK - thread has now officially Jumped the Shark and become an ideological pissing match.
Since the mods aren't locking it down, I'm un-subscribing.
My DM Philosophy, as summed up by other people: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1rN5w4-azTq3Kbn0Yvk9nfqQhwQ1R5by1/view
Disclaimer: This signature is a badge of membership in the Forum Loudmouth Club. We are all friends. We are not attacking each other. We are engaging in spirited, friendly debate with one another. We may get snarky, but these are not attacks. Thank you for not reporting us.
Sure, I can admit when I'm wrong. Like I said, I don't know you. Before we get too deep into oppression olympics, if you're so familiar with discrimination then maybe can you understand how some people want to make the world a more compassionate and welcoming place for everyone? I mean yeah, toughen up and go with the flow can be good advice for people to survive this world, but there's also the other side of things where those of us who have already suffered can try and let others know that "We see you. We're not glossing over your struggle, your struggle in particular and not just generic struggle."
If I knew your story in more detail, I would probably wish that you could see yourself represented in media, too, so that you could have stories that speak to you and your life.
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!
I'm just going to respond to this bit here. Actually, my experience and larger impression of societal conundrums for under-represented people is not so simple as that we cannot see ourselves in stories told from the perspective of the majority. We often do in fact. However, it's also, simultaneously, and repeatedly, being told and being treated as though we are not human enough or not human at all while also being told we should just be like everyone else when we are, in actuality, treated as more extinguishable, expendable, and/or essentially less than the majority population. A large part of how majority-minority oppressive systems prop themselves up is by dehumanizing the minority, spreading the idea far and wide that the minority group simply does not deserve to be treated as "normal," as legitimate "citizens" within the modern rubric of nation-states. One of several ways this has happened is by denying that said minorities have been treated badly (see the justifications of the South for slavery prior to the U.S. Civil War). Another way is to deny that said minorities have legitimately traumatic feelings about being treated badly (past or present). By restricting the broadcast and/or production of honest stories about social minorities, the reality of being treated like 2nd class, or worse, as not human, by the majority over time becomes a publicly taboo subject. This not only makes it harder to find sympathetic people in the majority willing to critically question the dehumanizing social system, it also can slow or lock down the feelings of individual minority members towards understanding and emotionally working through the trauma, which often has multi-generational consequences of re-traumatization even when some aspects of former brutal dehumanization are, at least legally, over and done with.
I am also wondering how to create a more representative world. I'm a new DM, and I've had some trouble describing characters in general simply because there is so much going on as a DM. What I've noticed about myself(as a cis white man) is that when I describe a character, my mind unintentionally defaults to white skin. It's part of my ingrained racial bias, something I'm uncomfortable with, and I'm working on changing. I'm DMing for a group of white folks.
It's dawned on me that my campaign is not very diverse at all, so I wanted to start including folks with different skin tones. I was going to describe somebody as having dark skin(as well as what kind of clothing, etc.), but I realized, if I describe this character with dark skin, while I haven't introduced anybody else with skin color as an identifier, that that is putting forward the notion that whiteness is the norm. If I describe somebody with dark or tan skin, I should be describing light-skinned characters as having light skin.
What I'm finding is that I want to challenge myself not to assume anything about a person as a default. These ideas of normal or default could be: able-bodied, in "good" shape, gender assumptions, white, and more.
I think consistency in description is one key to respectfully portraying all types of people.
I think it sounds like you're more focused on the how, not the why, so I'm going to address the deeper levels than making sure traits are mentioned- which is important, like making sure skin color and sexuality are not only mentioned if they're not white or straight, but not the end all be all. One thing recommended by many writers on this topic is expanding the type of media you read. You'll grow more comfortable depicting experiences from different groups if you read things they write and learn about them.
Make sure that you aren't playing into stereotypes, including "positive" ones. A smart, nerdy person read as Asian and a druid who reads as Native American is still sterotyping. Make sure that the NPCs of different backgrounds have positive and negative traits as well. If most of your major NPCs who are good guys are white/straight/able bodied, that's also problematic, especially if the bad guys are not. Make sure that if you exclude antagonists like a rival who isn't technically bad but is really annoying from the good guys category that it doesn't change your composition.
Some of the different outlooks can come up in conversation. For instance, in the real world, studies have found women more often give directions based on landmarks. "Go down the street until you reach the orange house and turn left, turn right at the grocery store," while men more often give directions like "Go down the street and turn left on Main Street, turn right at Pine Avenue." Also note that those are on average, not a rule for everyone. Keep in mind that a lot of the differences that wouldn't show up in a police description may be subtle and may not be revealed at first glance. Don't introduce all the things that make somebody different at once, let them come up naturally. Also, don't make the differences bigger than they should be. For example, in my current campaign two of the characters in a covert faction that the players interact with are lesbians and in a relationship. The party had met the two once and seen them behave warmly towards each other but they were on the clock so they were acting professionally. After a couple more run-ins, the party was hanging out with one and need to talk to the other- at which point she pulled out her sending stone and let them borrow it. She sighed wistfully at missing a daily check-in and said she hated the long-distance parts of their relationship. The party generally agreed with that briefly. They then moved on because it wasn't relevant to the plot and they had a time crunch.
I want to emphasize not addressing mental illness if you do not have experience with it or a foundational knowledge. That includes being neuroatypical (people whose brains are not wired the way people consider average or normal), like depression, generalized anxiety disorder, or even ADHD (although the last isn't diagnostically mental illness). Too often it is used as short hand for "of course the big bad is evil, they're ___."
Lastly, you are going to make mistakes. It happens! I do, people who study the various fields do. Apologize for the error, correct it, and strive to do some more research on the topic to improve. Don't get bogged down in a "but I'm a good thoughtful person and not a bigot" argument, especially if the person who calls you out has to appease you for it. (I'm not trying to say you would, but it's better to be clear about it). Also don't go, "Hey X, you're a ___. Could you tell me what it's like?" The Internet, books, and academic articles exist for a reason. Don't ask individuals to represent their people to you.
Good luck!