After playing D&D as a kid in the 80s I've gotten back into it recently. Today there is a greater consciousness in our world around issues of race. I've read a few articles talking about the racial categories in D&D as being somewhat problematic. That what are referred to as racial characteristics, from ability scores to temperament and more should better be considered as culture.
I don't know, I think that notion is bringing too much of the construct of race in our world into a fantasy setting. What we call race in our world isn't biologically a real thing, its just a socially created category, we are all human. In the world of D&D things are much different all the "races" didn't evolve from the same source. If my memory of lore is correct many of them didn't evolve at all, they are creations of real gods that influence the world. In the very first line of one article ( https://www.wired.com/story/dandd-must-grapple-with-the-racism-in-fantasy/) it gave a quote "ORCS ARE HUMAN beings who can be slaughtered without conscience or apology." The whole article is largely based off that faulty premise that orcs are a kind of human. Again if memory serves, orcs were created or at least influenced by their god Gruumsh to act in a violent and chaotic manner. They and most other D&D "races" are hardwired for certain behaviors just like us humans in our world are hardwired towards many behaviors such as caring for our young (unlike reptiles) or groupish behavior.
I think an easy fix that avoids upending the character of the D&D game is to simply redefine character and monster categories from different races into different species.
yes they are seperate species and made by gods but those gods made the choice of giving them sentience which as any god can tell you is not a good way to get them to follow orders so on the scale of the induival their mind does not look much different then a humans plus a few minus a few key quirks.
I don't even think this is worth debating. The context of what they were going for were sentient species. I think if Tolkien had referred to them this way, it would still be correct today. We seem to be perpetuating a minor linguistic error made by the great one of fantasy lore.
So at the Beginning of the PHB it should state, there are many sentient species in this fantasy genre. Provided the DM has not excluded any of the following, select a sentient species from the list of allowable (playable) species or check with your DM.
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I agree with your sentiment but I don't think it solves the issue the article is discussing. At the end of the day Orcs, just as elves and humans and dwarfs are an intelligent species with a culture and a background and yet, throughout fantasy (not just DnD) they are the fodder that "good" races can slaughter without any recourse or concern. In fact greenskin's in general are really the only race who are universally seen as being "evil" while Elves, Dwarfs, Humans and the other player races have both good and evil counterparts (Drow and Duregar for instance). In fact to play an Orc usually you are playing only a half orc.
In my world all the intelligent races including green skins have equal capacity to be good or evil. In fact I am about to take my players on a quest where they will be discovering slavers who are trading and selling Greenskin's who have been captured, they are also going to learn that one of the great empires in my world is conducting a systematic genocide of the greenskin species that live with in it's borders, many of which are peaceful societies but happen to live on land that has things the empire wants. But then I also have good enclaves of Drow and Duregar in my world, in fact I find the Duregar are one of the most intricate and interesting of all the races, a subspecies of dwarf who have been made the way they are not only by there enslavement but also by then being ostracised by the rest of Dwarf society forced to live as the "other"
There is a problem in many fantasy tropes, that is starting to be addressed with the way Orcs are perceived, and there is no getting away from the fact that Tolkien as a white, middle aged, oxford don of the 1910's and 20's had an obvious bias in terms of his history and understanding. His main knowledge was in Northern European mythology and that influences all of his world. He actually states that Orcs have a mongoloid look and there are hints that he was inspired by the african tribes in how he created them. In addition the only dark skinned humans in his tale all fight on the side of the forces of Mordor. But that is a far larger discussion. I don't think he was overtly racist, more a creation of the time and i have no doubt the same person in modern society would write a subtly different book. But I think as DM's sometimes it is important to look at the different species throughout DnD and see lots of shades of grey instead of straight up black and white. Even Ilithids I don't see as being inherently evil, they are a parasitic predator species, if they don't do what they do they don't survive as a species so they do what they have to do to survive and thrive.
Tolkien portrayed the Orcs and Goblins as being characteristically unpleasant races which were ultimately sidelined by the "good" races of the world, which were the ones who did law & order, and tried to maintain peace. I don't believe when people say that "Tolkien was racist because he made one race bad guys and another good guys". He just made it in a style which was easy to follow (the different races of middle earth tend to keep to themselves - cities of orc, cities of dwarves, cities of men, and little mixing) and then picked one race to be the bad guys. Orcs were a good pick as they are brutal and have reasons to dislike the other races for mistreating them.
I think that a fantasy world is always much better where the race of the characters is more there for fluff reasons and isn't a driving force behind their actions. It's too one dimensional saying "orcs bad, elves good!".
As for "do all of them share a common ancestry", no, they don't. They are distinct species, though some can interbreed and as such likely share a direct ancestor (though it could be many thousands of years ago, as we found with 2 types of fish which branched apart 184 million years ago, which scientists accidentally cross-bred! Link to story).
I honestly think that anyone becoming offended by D&D's use of "Races" as a distinguishing feature of our characters has the sword backwards - the issue isn't that D&D is offensive, it's that they are getting offended. Offensive is everyone's problem, being offended is only your own problem.
>Edit<: I've just read through the article you've linked to, and when I got to the point where Wizards brought out Tasha's and said "fine, pick your own modifiers", and the article writer said "this isn't help, it's an optional rule, so it's all still racist" I found myself realising that there are people in this world who would argue that the sky was red if it meant they had a controversial opinion to build their own persona about. Some people can't not take offence.
Tolkien portrayed the Orcs and Goblins as being characteristically unpleasant races which were ultimately sidelined by the "good" races of the world, which were the ones who did law & order, and tried to maintain peace. I don't believe when people say that "Tolkien was racist because he made one race bad guys and another good guys". He just made it in a style which was easy to follow (the different races of middle earth tend to keep to themselves - cities of orc, cities of dwarves, cities of men, and little mixing) and then picked one race to be the bad guys. Orcs were a good pick as they are brutal and have reasons to dislike the other races for mistreating them.
I think that a fantasy world is always much better where the race of the characters is more there for fluff reasons and isn't a driving force behind their actions. It's too one dimensional saying "orcs bad, elves good!".
As for "do all of them share a common ancestry", no, they don't. They are distinct species, though some can interbreed and as such likely share a direct ancestor (though it could be many thousands of years ago, as we found with 2 types of fish which branched apart 184 million years ago, which scientists accidentally cross-bred! Link to story).
I honestly think that anyone becoming offended by D&D's use of "Races" as a distinguishing feature of our characters has the sword backwards - the issue isn't that D&D is offensive, it's that they are getting offended. Offensive is everyone's problem, being offended is only your own problem.
>Edit<: I've just read through the article you've linked to, and when I got to the point where Wizards brought out Tasha's and said "fine, pick your own modifiers", and the article writer said "this isn't help, it's an optional rule, so it's all still racist" I found myself realising that there are people in this world who would argue that the sky was red if it meant they had a controversial opinion to build their own persona about. Some people can't not take offence.
While I get where your coming from I do disagree slightly, the portrayal of Orcs has historically been linked to the idea of the other, which in manay cases means minorities. I don't think Tolkien was specifically racist as he was simply a construct of the era and the background of the time, along with his own educational bias of being heavily focussed in the mythology of very white nations (scandinavian, germanic, Icelandic etc).
I do agree that Tasha's went a small way to addressing the issue, but the fact remains that almost every race/species is stated as having members of any alignment with the large exception of Greenskins, which are inherently always evil and probably dirty/animalistic/savage etc. In my games I make greenskins far more nuanced and I think the next stage from Tasha's is for Wizards to consider redoing the greenskin sections of Volo's to make there own version of this species a little more 3 dimensional. The fact is that much as George Lucas and marvel decided that generic robots/aliens are better to have the heroes destroy en masse in movies, many fantasy writers have seen green skinned foes as a good harmless foil for more humanoid enemies (elves, humans, dwarves etc).
As for the It isnt offensive, the problem is your offended, that is just a silly argument, no one has the right to say anyone should not be offended by something. Saying something should automatically change or be cancelled because 1 person is offended is wrong but that individual has a right to be offended, and when you have a large section of people who look at the way fantasy has been run and written over the years (largely by white males historically) then I think it might be time to start changing some narriatives. In the past I have run full greenskin campaigns with the enemies all being non greenskins, or a mix of many things, I think if Wizards could re do the greenskin species to help DM's use them more imaginatively then just a group to carve up, it would actually make for a richer more immersive world where there are no clear cut ideas of good and evil defining species but the idea that anything can be good, evil or somewhere in between.
Wasn’t there something in LOTR lore about Orcs being half pig or something?
No, not at all. The first LOTR orcs were corrupted elves.
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Uruk Hai I believe was Saruman mixing Orcs and Humans to create "super orcs", sort of sorcery eugenics. I think in the movies they're actually pulled out of mud fully formed (and "mud people" is a very loaded term in analysis of white supremacist organizations, in the 90s early 00s the idea coalesced in the so-called "christian identity movevement" that asserted whites were of God and non whites were "mud people" ... this idea wasn't exactly new if you track the history of white supremacist undercurrents within a lot of European and U.S. history). The books IIRC just made allusions to dark torturous magic to shape the species to Saruman's will.
In any case, the problem that's ignored in the umpteen discussions of this matter on this forum over the past year is that a lot of folks don't actually have a nuanced understanding of racism. Calling Tolkien's writing or Tolkien racist does not mean Tolkien was say Ezra Pound or T.S. Elliot whose public comments clearly denigrated non-whites (as well as engaged in the casual anti-semitism of the academic world at the time), although Tolkien being "Oxbridge" there's certain stereotypes of that set and British class power structures at the time he may well have reflected and plenty of scholars have labored to tease out.
What it means in the critique of Tolkien is that in LOTR he capitalized (which means take advantage to advance his literary fortune, and in writing that I'm not saying it was some sort of cynical calculation, it is likely he thought his "genius was advancing culture" like a lot of more high brow literary types thought they were doing at the time) tropes of "dark other = wicked bad, white light = virtuous good" (to be simplistic), tropes that had done a lot of the rhetorical labor to establish colonial empires of whites subjugating non whites as a natural order of things.
The Tolkien tropes are part of D&D's legacy, and the game goes further I'd say with a cosmology where good and evil are almost literally elemental forces with arguable direct impact upon the prime material world (as are law and chaos, which I think they swiped from Moorcock* though made a bit more rigid to go with the GvE axis). So, in a real world moment where the legacies of certain essentialist assumptions within dominant ideologies are being critiqued among the public, I'm not surprised a game that has historically taken essentialist "good / evil / right / wrong" tropes that have been used to subjugate or marginalize varieties of human experience and applied those tropes to fictional beings (as Tolkien did) might be asked to reflect on its accountability with the rest of popular culture. I think what the Wired commentator was getting at was that WotC was trying to "Burger King" "have it your way" out of the issue, a fast food solution which may or may not be a fair assessment. I think they've made some efforts, but I also pay attention to some of their critics who point at an equity issue at Wizards and a sort of notoriety for messing it up every time they try to evolve on the issue in the way they internally work on the matter. I don't think WotC is any worst off than any other business in the U.S. or the world negotiating the matter, the problem being they're all trying to negotiate the matter as businesses (which is understandable, one can't expect perfect altruism in capitalism).
It's a complicated, difficult conversation, but can by an illuminating one if you're open to thinking deeply about "what we're doing when we're playing Dungeons and Dragons". That said, this forum time and again doesn't seem the best venue for it, and I ask you to search for "race" or "racism" on the forum and check over all those locked threads to see how these conversations tend to play out. And that's all I got to say on this. I wish the rest of this thread good luck.
There's been rendering of orcs as literally "pig headed" ... another loaded term, and often evoking an inaccurate assessment of porcine intelligence, but making humans, particularly males, "piggish" as a manifestation of their "lowest" nature is thing going back to at least Circe in Odyssey. Calling someone a pig has been an insult for a long time, so assigning porcine traits to a "beastly other" is an understandable move when building "bad folk". Of course, there are also clever and cartoonish pigs, Babe etc.
Anyway, art direction on orcs when the words have been used have never been unified even within Dungeons and Dragons. I honestly thought Orcs looked like Gamoreans from Star Wars, but subsequent media rendered them differently so I went with that too. I think a lot of orcs and half orcs have been depicted as having tusks, so there's sometimes a boar assumption.
I mean kobolds have gone back and forth between draconic and canine between editions too so you're mental image is probably grounded somewhere in game.
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Uruk Hai I believe was Saruman mixing Orcs and Humans to create "super orcs", sort of sorcery eugenics. I think in the movies they're actually pulled out of mud fully formed (and "mud people" is a very loaded term in analysis of white supremacist organizations, in the 90s early 00s the idea coalesced in the so-called "christian identity movevement" that asserted whites were of God and non whites were "mud people" ... this idea wasn't exactly new if you track the history of white supremacist undercurrents within a lot of European and U.S. history). The books IIRC just made allusions to dark torturous magic to shape the species to Saruman's will.
In any case, the problem that's ignored in the umpteen discussions of this matter on this forum over the past year is that a lot of folks don't actually have a nuanced understanding of racism. Calling Tolkien's writing or Tolkien racist does not mean Tolkien was say Ezra Pound or T.S. Elliot whose public comments clearly denigrated non-whites (as well as engaged in the casual anti-semitism of the academic world at the time), although Tolkien being "Oxbridge" there's certain stereotypes of that set and British class power structures at the time he may well have reflected and plenty of scholars have labored to tease out.
What it means in the critique of Tolkien is that in LOTR he capitalized (which means take advantage to advance his literary fortune, and in writing that I'm not saying it was some sort of cynical calculation, it is likely he thought his "genius was advancing culture" like a lot of more high brow literary types thought they were doing at the time) tropes of "dark other = wicked bad, white light = virtuous good" (to be simplistic), tropes that had done a lot of the rhetorical labor to establish colonial empires of whites subjugating non whites as a natural order of things.
The Tolkien tropes are part of D&D's legacy, and the game goes further I'd say with a cosmology where good and evil are almost literally elemental forces with arguable direct impact upon the prime material world (as are law and chaos, which I think they swiped from Moorcock* though made a bit more rigid to go with the GvE axis). So, in a real world moment where the legacies of certain essentialist assumptions within dominant ideologies are being critiqued among the public, I'm not surprised a game that has historically taken essentialist "good / evil / right / wrong" tropes that have been used to subjugate or marginalize varieties of human experience and applied those tropes to fictional beings (as Tolkien did) might be asked to reflect on its accountability with the rest of popular culture. I think what the Wired commentator was getting at was that WotC was trying to "Burger King" "have it your way" out of the issue, a fast food solution which may or may not be a fair assessment. I think they've made some efforts, but I also pay attention to some of their critics who point at an equity issue at Wizards and a sort of notoriety for messing it up every time they try to evolve on the issue in the way they internally work on the matter. I don't think WotC is any worst off than any other business in the U.S. or the world negotiating the matter, the problem being they're all trying to negotiate the matter as businesses (which is understandable, one can't expect perfect altruism in capitalism).
It's a complicated, difficult conversation, but can by an illuminating one if you're open to thinking deeply about "what we're doing when we're playing Dungeons and Dragons". That said, this forum time and again doesn't seem the best venue for it, and I ask you to search for "race" or "racism" on the forum and check over all those locked threads to see how these conversations tend to play out. And that's all I got to say on this. I wish the rest of this thread good luck.
And this is a far better way of writing this then I could manage so will add nothing more myself :)
I like moral complexity and nuance and would tend to view the monstrous races as having reasons behind their behavior other than they were born wearing black hats.
I remember the writers of GOT talking about how all their characters acted viciously or nobly out of human psychological motivations not because they wear white hats or black hats. I think that's a big part of what made that series so successful.
That said I think the correction to potentially racist tropes in the game goes overboard when it attempts to remove any inborn distinctions between the fantasy "races" or as I think better described, species.
Elephants have different temperaments than Hippos and parrots have different temperaments than snakes. Cheetahs are more graceful than grizzly bears which are stronger and hardier. I don't see why its problematic that orcs or goblins have more aggressive, selfish natures than PC species to the point where they are generally destructive to the welfare of others in the world. Can we not call that evil?
I like moral complexity and nuance and would tend to view the monstrous races as having reasons behind their behavior other than they were born wearing black hats.
I remember the writers of GOT talking about how all their characters acted viciously or nobly out of human psychological motivations not because they wear white hats or black hats. I think that's a big part of what made that series so successful.
That said I think the correction to potentially racist tropes in the game goes overboard when it attempts to remove any inborn distinctions between the fantasy "races" or as I think better described, species.
Elephants have different temperaments than Hippos and parrots have different temperaments than snakes. Cheetahs are more graceful than grizzly bears which are stronger and hardier. I don't see why its problematic that orcs or goblins have more aggressive, selfish natures than PC species to the point where they are generally destructive to the welfare of others in the world. Can we not call that evil?
Exactly this. I agree that half the issue is simply the word "Race" used instead of "Species", which underlines peoples inability to distinguish between a word and its meaning - if you said "pick your race of donut" instead of "pick your type of donut", people would start claiming that the fact that the jam-filled ones are more expensive is evidence of some underlying racist feelings.
The race selection in the game is a game mechanic - its purpose was to offer restricted choice so that you don't just min/max for your own benefits. You want high dexterity and a breath weapon? Sorry, that's not how a Dragonborn works, but now it does thanks to "unlimited choice". I like being able to decide, but the fact that you can take a tiefling and say "I want these benefits but not those benefits, so I'll change charisma for intelligence so I get free cantrips and improved spellcasting!" is a bad direction for the game to go in. Whilst character creation is only one part of the game, giving people 100% choice is A: overwhelming and B: bad for balance.
As for "they come out of the mud so they are mud people and mud people is a racist term", sorry, I'm not buying it. I'm not denying that racism exists, or that people can be offended by things, but I am not buying that a made-up species of humanoid which was made solely to be the bad guys in a fictional tale is racist because they come out of the mud and that's been used in the past for racist terms. You might as well say that Saruman being killed was promoting racism because he was "Saruman the White" and white people are being killed in racist attacks in south Africa. It's nonsense!
Anyway, I'm backing out lest my running mouth gets me into trouble.
They really should. However "race" has been used for so long, and using fantasy races to symbolize and comment on real life race relation is an old and common motif, that I don't think that cat is getting back in the bag any time soon. And characterizing them with real life stereotypes is a bad idea no matter which term you use.
Reminds me of the debate in Western Civ "Could Neanderthal and Cro Magnon have procreated?" and if the answer was no then Neanderthal was a separate species. This is what happens when anthropologists and biologists debate the same topic ;)
Reminds me of the debate in Western Civ "Could Neanderthal and Cro Magnon have procreated?" and if the answer was no then Neanderthal was a separate species. This is what happens when anthropologists and biologists debate the same topic ;)
That's a good perspective. I don't remember reading anywhere if the half-species in D&D can procreate or if they are sterile. It also seems to be that one half is always human, so maybe there is something about humanity's ability to procreate with other species that the others don't share?
Reminds me of the debate in Western Civ "Could Neanderthal and Cro Magnon have procreated?" and if the answer was no then Neanderthal was a separate species. This is what happens when anthropologists and biologists debate the same topic ;)
That's a good perspective. I don't remember reading anywhere if the half-species in D&D can procreate or if they are sterile. It also seems to be that one half is always human, so maybe there is something about humanity's ability to procreate with other species that the others don't share?
Reminds me of the debate in Western Civ "Could Neanderthal and Cro Magnon have procreated?" and if the answer was no then Neanderthal was a separate species. This is what happens when anthropologists and biologists debate the same topic ;)
That's a good perspective. I don't remember reading anywhere if the half-species in D&D can procreate or if they are sterile. It also seems to be that one half is always human, so maybe there is something about humanity's ability to procreate with other species that the others don't share?
Or humans are just not picky :)
Humans are the poodles of the D&D world; they'll mate with anything!
After playing D&D as a kid in the 80s I've gotten back into it recently. Today there is a greater consciousness in our world around issues of race. I've read a few articles talking about the racial categories in D&D as being somewhat problematic. That what are referred to as racial characteristics, from ability scores to temperament and more should better be considered as culture.
I don't know, I think that notion is bringing too much of the construct of race in our world into a fantasy setting. What we call race in our world isn't biologically a real thing, its just a socially created category, we are all human. In the world of D&D things are much different all the "races" didn't evolve from the same source. If my memory of lore is correct many of them didn't evolve at all, they are creations of real gods that influence the world. In the very first line of one article ( https://www.wired.com/story/dandd-must-grapple-with-the-racism-in-fantasy/) it gave a quote "ORCS ARE HUMAN beings who can be slaughtered without conscience or apology." The whole article is largely based off that faulty premise that orcs are a kind of human. Again if memory serves, orcs were created or at least influenced by their god Gruumsh to act in a violent and chaotic manner. They and most other D&D "races" are hardwired for certain behaviors just like us humans in our world are hardwired towards many behaviors such as caring for our young (unlike reptiles) or groupish behavior.
I think an easy fix that avoids upending the character of the D&D game is to simply redefine character and monster categories from different races into different species.
yes they are seperate species and made by gods but those gods made the choice of giving them sentience which as any god can tell you is not a good way to get them to follow orders so on the scale of the induival their mind does not look much different then a humans plus a few minus a few key quirks.
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I don't even think this is worth debating. The context of what they were going for were sentient species. I think if Tolkien had referred to them this way, it would still be correct today. We seem to be perpetuating a minor linguistic error made by the great one of fantasy lore.
So at the Beginning of the PHB it should state, there are many sentient species in this fantasy genre. Provided the DM has not excluded any of the following, select a sentient species from the list of allowable (playable) species or check with your DM.
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I agree with your sentiment but I don't think it solves the issue the article is discussing. At the end of the day Orcs, just as elves and humans and dwarfs are an intelligent species with a culture and a background and yet, throughout fantasy (not just DnD) they are the fodder that "good" races can slaughter without any recourse or concern. In fact greenskin's in general are really the only race who are universally seen as being "evil" while Elves, Dwarfs, Humans and the other player races have both good and evil counterparts (Drow and Duregar for instance). In fact to play an Orc usually you are playing only a half orc.
In my world all the intelligent races including green skins have equal capacity to be good or evil. In fact I am about to take my players on a quest where they will be discovering slavers who are trading and selling Greenskin's who have been captured, they are also going to learn that one of the great empires in my world is conducting a systematic genocide of the greenskin species that live with in it's borders, many of which are peaceful societies but happen to live on land that has things the empire wants. But then I also have good enclaves of Drow and Duregar in my world, in fact I find the Duregar are one of the most intricate and interesting of all the races, a subspecies of dwarf who have been made the way they are not only by there enslavement but also by then being ostracised by the rest of Dwarf society forced to live as the "other"
There is a problem in many fantasy tropes, that is starting to be addressed with the way Orcs are perceived, and there is no getting away from the fact that Tolkien as a white, middle aged, oxford don of the 1910's and 20's had an obvious bias in terms of his history and understanding. His main knowledge was in Northern European mythology and that influences all of his world. He actually states that Orcs have a mongoloid look and there are hints that he was inspired by the african tribes in how he created them. In addition the only dark skinned humans in his tale all fight on the side of the forces of Mordor. But that is a far larger discussion. I don't think he was overtly racist, more a creation of the time and i have no doubt the same person in modern society would write a subtly different book. But I think as DM's sometimes it is important to look at the different species throughout DnD and see lots of shades of grey instead of straight up black and white. Even Ilithids I don't see as being inherently evil, they are a parasitic predator species, if they don't do what they do they don't survive as a species so they do what they have to do to survive and thrive.
Now Aboleths, them is just plain evil :).
Tolkien portrayed the Orcs and Goblins as being characteristically unpleasant races which were ultimately sidelined by the "good" races of the world, which were the ones who did law & order, and tried to maintain peace. I don't believe when people say that "Tolkien was racist because he made one race bad guys and another good guys". He just made it in a style which was easy to follow (the different races of middle earth tend to keep to themselves - cities of orc, cities of dwarves, cities of men, and little mixing) and then picked one race to be the bad guys. Orcs were a good pick as they are brutal and have reasons to dislike the other races for mistreating them.
I think that a fantasy world is always much better where the race of the characters is more there for fluff reasons and isn't a driving force behind their actions. It's too one dimensional saying "orcs bad, elves good!".
As for "do all of them share a common ancestry", no, they don't. They are distinct species, though some can interbreed and as such likely share a direct ancestor (though it could be many thousands of years ago, as we found with 2 types of fish which branched apart 184 million years ago, which scientists accidentally cross-bred! Link to story).
I honestly think that anyone becoming offended by D&D's use of "Races" as a distinguishing feature of our characters has the sword backwards - the issue isn't that D&D is offensive, it's that they are getting offended. Offensive is everyone's problem, being offended is only your own problem.
>Edit<: I've just read through the article you've linked to, and when I got to the point where Wizards brought out Tasha's and said "fine, pick your own modifiers", and the article writer said "this isn't help, it's an optional rule, so it's all still racist" I found myself realising that there are people in this world who would argue that the sky was red if it meant they had a controversial opinion to build their own persona about. Some people can't not take offence.
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Wasn’t there something in LOTR lore about Orcs being half pig or something?
Mystic v3 should be official, nuff said.
While I get where your coming from I do disagree slightly, the portrayal of Orcs has historically been linked to the idea of the other, which in manay cases means minorities. I don't think Tolkien was specifically racist as he was simply a construct of the era and the background of the time, along with his own educational bias of being heavily focussed in the mythology of very white nations (scandinavian, germanic, Icelandic etc).
I do agree that Tasha's went a small way to addressing the issue, but the fact remains that almost every race/species is stated as having members of any alignment with the large exception of Greenskins, which are inherently always evil and probably dirty/animalistic/savage etc. In my games I make greenskins far more nuanced and I think the next stage from Tasha's is for Wizards to consider redoing the greenskin sections of Volo's to make there own version of this species a little more 3 dimensional. The fact is that much as George Lucas and marvel decided that generic robots/aliens are better to have the heroes destroy en masse in movies, many fantasy writers have seen green skinned foes as a good harmless foil for more humanoid enemies (elves, humans, dwarves etc).
As for the It isnt offensive, the problem is your offended, that is just a silly argument, no one has the right to say anyone should not be offended by something. Saying something should automatically change or be cancelled because 1 person is offended is wrong but that individual has a right to be offended, and when you have a large section of people who look at the way fantasy has been run and written over the years (largely by white males historically) then I think it might be time to start changing some narriatives. In the past I have run full greenskin campaigns with the enemies all being non greenskins, or a mix of many things, I think if Wizards could re do the greenskin species to help DM's use them more imaginatively then just a group to carve up, it would actually make for a richer more immersive world where there are no clear cut ideas of good and evil defining species but the idea that anything can be good, evil or somewhere in between.
No, not at all. The first LOTR orcs were corrupted elves.
All stars fade. Some stars forever fall.
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Homebrew (Mostly Outdated): Magic Items, Monsters, Spells, Subclasses
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If there was no light, people wouldn't fear the dark.
and I think corrupted humans, or is that the Uruk Hai?
Uruk Hai I believe was Saruman mixing Orcs and Humans to create "super orcs", sort of sorcery eugenics. I think in the movies they're actually pulled out of mud fully formed (and "mud people" is a very loaded term in analysis of white supremacist organizations, in the 90s early 00s the idea coalesced in the so-called "christian identity movevement" that asserted whites were of God and non whites were "mud people" ... this idea wasn't exactly new if you track the history of white supremacist undercurrents within a lot of European and U.S. history). The books IIRC just made allusions to dark torturous magic to shape the species to Saruman's will.
In any case, the problem that's ignored in the umpteen discussions of this matter on this forum over the past year is that a lot of folks don't actually have a nuanced understanding of racism. Calling Tolkien's writing or Tolkien racist does not mean Tolkien was say Ezra Pound or T.S. Elliot whose public comments clearly denigrated non-whites (as well as engaged in the casual anti-semitism of the academic world at the time), although Tolkien being "Oxbridge" there's certain stereotypes of that set and British class power structures at the time he may well have reflected and plenty of scholars have labored to tease out.
What it means in the critique of Tolkien is that in LOTR he capitalized (which means take advantage to advance his literary fortune, and in writing that I'm not saying it was some sort of cynical calculation, it is likely he thought his "genius was advancing culture" like a lot of more high brow literary types thought they were doing at the time) tropes of "dark other = wicked bad, white light = virtuous good" (to be simplistic), tropes that had done a lot of the rhetorical labor to establish colonial empires of whites subjugating non whites as a natural order of things.
The Tolkien tropes are part of D&D's legacy, and the game goes further I'd say with a cosmology where good and evil are almost literally elemental forces with arguable direct impact upon the prime material world (as are law and chaos, which I think they swiped from Moorcock* though made a bit more rigid to go with the GvE axis). So, in a real world moment where the legacies of certain essentialist assumptions within dominant ideologies are being critiqued among the public, I'm not surprised a game that has historically taken essentialist "good / evil / right / wrong" tropes that have been used to subjugate or marginalize varieties of human experience and applied those tropes to fictional beings (as Tolkien did) might be asked to reflect on its accountability with the rest of popular culture. I think what the Wired commentator was getting at was that WotC was trying to "Burger King" "have it your way" out of the issue, a fast food solution which may or may not be a fair assessment. I think they've made some efforts, but I also pay attention to some of their critics who point at an equity issue at Wizards and a sort of notoriety for messing it up every time they try to evolve on the issue in the way they internally work on the matter. I don't think WotC is any worst off than any other business in the U.S. or the world negotiating the matter, the problem being they're all trying to negotiate the matter as businesses (which is understandable, one can't expect perfect altruism in capitalism).
It's a complicated, difficult conversation, but can by an illuminating one if you're open to thinking deeply about "what we're doing when we're playing Dungeons and Dragons". That said, this forum time and again doesn't seem the best venue for it, and I ask you to search for "race" or "racism" on the forum and check over all those locked threads to see how these conversations tend to play out. And that's all I got to say on this. I wish the rest of this thread good luck.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
A’ight, I must’ve been thinking of something else.
Mystic v3 should be official, nuff said.
There's been rendering of orcs as literally "pig headed" ... another loaded term, and often evoking an inaccurate assessment of porcine intelligence, but making humans, particularly males, "piggish" as a manifestation of their "lowest" nature is thing going back to at least Circe in Odyssey. Calling someone a pig has been an insult for a long time, so assigning porcine traits to a "beastly other" is an understandable move when building "bad folk". Of course, there are also clever and cartoonish pigs, Babe etc.
Anyway, art direction on orcs when the words have been used have never been unified even within Dungeons and Dragons. I honestly thought Orcs looked like Gamoreans from Star Wars, but subsequent media rendered them differently so I went with that too. I think a lot of orcs and half orcs have been depicted as having tusks, so there's sometimes a boar assumption.
I mean kobolds have gone back and forth between draconic and canine between editions too so you're mental image is probably grounded somewhere in game.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
And this is a far better way of writing this then I could manage so will add nothing more myself :)
I like moral complexity and nuance and would tend to view the monstrous races as having reasons behind their behavior other than they were born wearing black hats.
I remember the writers of GOT talking about how all their characters acted viciously or nobly out of human psychological motivations not because they wear white hats or black hats. I think that's a big part of what made that series so successful.
That said I think the correction to potentially racist tropes in the game goes overboard when it attempts to remove any inborn distinctions between the fantasy "races" or as I think better described, species.
Elephants have different temperaments than Hippos and parrots have different temperaments than snakes. Cheetahs are more graceful than grizzly bears which are stronger and hardier. I don't see why its problematic that orcs or goblins have more aggressive, selfish natures than PC species to the point where they are generally destructive to the welfare of others in the world. Can we not call that evil?
Exactly this. I agree that half the issue is simply the word "Race" used instead of "Species", which underlines peoples inability to distinguish between a word and its meaning - if you said "pick your race of donut" instead of "pick your type of donut", people would start claiming that the fact that the jam-filled ones are more expensive is evidence of some underlying racist feelings.
The race selection in the game is a game mechanic - its purpose was to offer restricted choice so that you don't just min/max for your own benefits. You want high dexterity and a breath weapon? Sorry, that's not how a Dragonborn works, but now it does thanks to "unlimited choice". I like being able to decide, but the fact that you can take a tiefling and say "I want these benefits but not those benefits, so I'll change charisma for intelligence so I get free cantrips and improved spellcasting!" is a bad direction for the game to go in. Whilst character creation is only one part of the game, giving people 100% choice is A: overwhelming and B: bad for balance.
As for "they come out of the mud so they are mud people and mud people is a racist term", sorry, I'm not buying it. I'm not denying that racism exists, or that people can be offended by things, but I am not buying that a made-up species of humanoid which was made solely to be the bad guys in a fictional tale is racist because they come out of the mud and that's been used in the past for racist terms. You might as well say that Saruman being killed was promoting racism because he was "Saruman the White" and white people are being killed in racist attacks in south Africa. It's nonsense!
Anyway, I'm backing out lest my running mouth gets me into trouble.
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
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They really should. However "race" has been used for so long, and using fantasy races to symbolize and comment on real life race relation is an old and common motif, that I don't think that cat is getting back in the bag any time soon. And characterizing them with real life stereotypes is a bad idea no matter which term you use.
Reminds me of the debate in Western Civ "Could Neanderthal and Cro Magnon have procreated?" and if the answer was no then Neanderthal was a separate species. This is what happens when anthropologists and biologists debate the same topic ;)
That's a good perspective. I don't remember reading anywhere if the half-species in D&D can procreate or if they are sterile. It also seems to be that one half is always human, so maybe there is something about humanity's ability to procreate with other species that the others don't share?
Or humans are just not picky :)
Humans are the poodles of the D&D world; they'll mate with anything!
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
DM's Guild Releases on This Thread Or check them all out on DMs Guild!
DrivethruRPG Releases on This Thread - latest release: My Character is a Werewolf: balanced rules for Lycanthropy!
I have started discussing/reviewing 3rd party D&D content on Substack - stay tuned for semi-regular posts!