DnD addresses racism.
- Thread starter Worgen
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I do think there's a place for some one dimensional bad guys. Just there's implications to what you decide the intractable evil is and how you choose to portray them, what trappings you use. If it's just 'the dumb race that listens to their evil god and uses all stuff from this exotic real world culture' that's uh mmm. Let's just say it's different from a being of pure evil and destruction like a demon, or the mindless undead.
Yeah definitely, was agreeing with you. There is a place for plain simple evil that exists to be an opponent but when it comes to Orcs and the like it falls flat and has somewhat different implications
Each edition is its own thing the way I see it, you can still run campaigns in an older edition, they don't get removed when a new one comes out. When you change something fundamental that exists everywhere, and when you change an edition already out (as opposed to just releasing a 6th edition with these changes, which would be more acceptable) then you cause problems to arise like I described.
You're not comparing like to like.
Nerds/Gamers are not the characteristics you describe, those are like a negative stereotype caricaturing them.
Orcs literally are those things, and for the most part not much else. Hence it is fine to depict them thus.
You are trying to make it be the case that orcs are mainly fine and have a couple outliers who are dumb and savage and like to eat people for fun, when that's actually the vast majority of them.
Also, your hypothetical Nerd race sounds hilarious as a satyrical ironic take, like how the Jew was a class in the Southpark rpg, so I'd love to play it since I don't take myself so seriously so as to be unable to laugh at myself.
That's not something people do for themselves though.
If you have brown skin, and you live in a society full of white people, people will assume things about your cultural background based on the colour of your skin. The reverse is also true, of course. If you move to Japan and you don't look east Asian, people will assume things about your cultural background based on the way you look. You can have literally grown up in a place, you can know nothing else and have no other culture, and yet you will always remain bound to the culture you look like you belong to.
Even if you feel no deep personal connection with the culture you come from, that culture becomes very important in those situations because it becomes the thing that marks you out. The way people interact with you and the things they associate with you become influenced by their perception of your culture. Culture and race are not clearly distinct, because your race is part of how your culture is read and interpreted.
The thing about ancient greek myths is that they are not accompanied by a reductive, racialized idea of the ancient greek culture that produced those myths. For anglo-Americans, ancient Greece is a part of our own cultural history. It's not foreign in the way Chinese mythology is foreign, for example, despite the fact that the culture that produced those myths is incredibly foreign to any culture that currently exists.
People, even classicists, have also tended to sanitize Greek myths when they don't fit in with the prevailing sensibilities of the time. Patroclus and Achilles in the Iliad are lovers. Narcissisus' punishment is not due to him being vain, but because he cruelly refuses to submit to the sexual advances of older men who want to fuck him. The abduction of Persephone isn't just a cute story about why the seasons exist, it's the story you tell your 9 year old girl to comfort her as she's about to be married to an adult man.
The idea that ancient Greek culture that produced these myths in any way resembles the default culture of fantasy settings is laughable. (White) people in fantasy settings are just modern people, not ancient Greeks. They aren't tied to a mangled, exoticized idea of a foreign culture at all. The same is often not true of non-white people, or non-human races that are stand ins for non-white people. Fantasy is structured a lot like the study of mythology used to be structured, with a normal, default interior culture which just conspicuously resembles our own, and a lot of exotic "variations" on the outside.
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I think we're shifting the goalposts a bit here. The topic is about what culture you actually identify with and seek representation of in your games, not what culture others think you belong to and how they treat you as a result. I'm sure that because I look white and don't wear weird traditional garb or what have you, people who just pass me by think that I'm just a generic white American who can't speak a single word of Greek (never mind converse in Japanese), which is not true, but I also don't care about that one bit. If I was acting the way you're suggesting, I'd be seeking that type of representation, the generic brown haired white guy you see too much of in games because that's what the world is most likely to see me as here, but as I think I described sufficiently already, I do not. I suggest the same to others.
Hell, I legit had people confuse me for a native american at a mall once, cause I have long hair and while I'm pretty pale I am not Anglo but rather from the Mediterranean so I guess it's hard to place my features. Do I now have to look for native american chars to identify with? Is it bad to just like my dragons and ninjas and keep having fun? lol
Any art that is the cultural artifact of a particular people has a "default" person. Ethnocentrism is the word for that. If you draw a stick figure like you do in Hangman and ask a Japanese person if the figure is white or asian they'll say Asian whereas a European will say it's white. Every society has that, it's normal, and as a result you get anime chars who to us seem white but who are intended to be the way Japanese people view and represent their own race instead. There's nothing wrong with any of this. To try to tell people not to do this thing that comes naturally to them and is purely innocuous is highly absurd.
The solution here is for the Astecs/mexicans and whoever else to just come up with their own thing and mold it how they like, not to change the one the Americans and Britons created. And if the reason they feel entitled to change it is that they too are americans and should be represented, well, they already are! Only the non-american Astecs and Mexicans aren't represented. The issue is not those people's representation, the issue is identifying with them when you just stated you're in fact American. Even if you're a dual citizen like me, the part of you being American which is being represented should suffice. But what you have here is people who are behaving as if they're not at all American and only their country of origin could possibly represent them. You legit don't have to fall in that thought pattern simply because other people are doing that (and in the process wronging you since you're actually just an American).
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This is empty First Draft Culture bullshit. I can say with some degree of certainty that I have more experience in world building than you do, and your attempts to sanctify it are frankly embarrassing.
But it's not set in stone, so it's not a problem.
You're only proving that your complaining is empty, pointless and petty by agreeing with this. I still have yet to see any of you complainers address the fact that you can just house rule your stat penalties back in. I'll let you in on a little secret: I'm old enough to have played AD&D and I did away with race-class restrictions at my tables because I thought it was arbitrary. No one ever complained.
You literally just asked me to replace Greek with gamer culture, so I did. I'm not sure why you're criticizing me for doing what you asked. Shouldn't you damn yourself for asking me to do as I did instead?
That's just a case of you looking to find something and seeing it. Like those people who see Jesus on a piece of toast and Mary on a tree hump. They're pretty damn invested to commune with the divine so they find a way to feel like they did. I watched LOTR when I was like 12 living in Greece where there were almost no black people at all and you'd only see em in foreign movies and it never even crossed my mind that Orcs had anything to do with them. They were just generic evil scary monsters. The fact that any sorts of people were likened to monsters is an indictment of the society that did that, not of the society that came up with the monsters in the first place.
I mean, you can do it seriously in-world, but the mood outside of the game would be ironic and hilarious, so that'd permeate the experience, even while being completely dry and playing it straight in the game.
I'm sorry, I know this conversation is between you and Drieko, but I have to jump in.
From an absolute standpoint, a fictional world is, well, fictional. So of course, the rules of the setting are technically free to be adjusted by the creator(s) as they desire. For instance, I could create a setting/write for a setting where it's a rule that vampires burst into flames if exposed to sunlight. I could then write as part of the story where a vampire walks around in daylight with no repercussions. People who are aware of the setting's rules would point out, correctly, that I've broken one of the setting's rules. I could then retort that the setting is fictional, the rules are fictional, and ergo, I can change the rules as I so desire.
Problem is, this isn't a very good argument. I'm not only insulting the readers' intelligence, but I'm also breaking verisimilitude. It's self-defeating to the setting itself, because if the setting's lore can be so easily altered, why bother be invested in it? I can't answer for everyone, but I can answer for myself, being someone who edits wikis (moreso in the past than these days admittedly), and who still posts stuff on FFN, including multi-chapters where I try and ensure the lore stays accurate to canon as much as possible. Breaks in the lore are irritating from both a worldbuilding and writing standpoint. Worldbuilding, because it weakens the foundations of the setting.
And you can point out that there's few, if any fictional settings where the lore is completely airtight, where there's no internal contradictions. And yes, you'd be correct. But some worlds are built and maintained better than others, and it's usually indicative as to how much the writers give a shit. So while I can't comment on DnD, if someone secured the rights of Lord of the Rings and said "all orcs were actually good guys," I'd tell them to eff off. Even if it was out of supposedly good intentions, it would show utter contempt for the setting. If the creator doesn't respect the setting, why should the audience?
As a side topic, does anyone know an RPG setting that does precolumbian Mesoamerica really well and in depth? I know a couple that use it but still are a bit shallow or otherwise not that good.
Any official setting that is intended to host complete campaigns there with PCs from there and is recommandable quality wise ?
Any official setting that is intended to host complete campaigns there with PCs from there and is recommandable quality wise ?
That is a fair point. It does require though that one establish that disrespect has taken place. In the case of DnD removing racial stat penalties, I don't think I'm taking a particularly controversial stance in saying that doesn't quite clear the bar for disrespect.
Most of them aren't religious nuts, they're like, random people who are maybe a little dumb and were indoctrinated their whole life to look for Jesus that one day they found him in their breakfast lol.
And I was relating my first experience with Orcs which happened to be LOTR ones, you will find some posts discussing Tolkein in this topic a couple pages back too. I don't think it's as much of a stretch as you're making it out to be.
If you don't like a change to an rpg setting, one of the basic tenets of tabletop roleplaying offers a very fast and laughably easy solution.
Rule 0. The GM is the ultimate arbiter of all things in the game.
The GM can arbitrarily change, create or remove any rule or bit of lore or whatever at any time. You don't have to have anything in your game you don't want. You want classic always CE orks? They are. You want to get rid of alignment restrictions instead? They're gone. You want the MLP ponies to be the deific pantheon in your setting? They are. And as GM you need no more justification for it than Rule 0. Homebrewing has been a fundamental part of this hobby since the very beginning, it's how tons of game systems came to be in the first place. Whether what you homebrew is any good does nothing to diminish that you can if you want to.
Rule 0. The GM is the ultimate arbiter of all things in the game.
The GM can arbitrarily change, create or remove any rule or bit of lore or whatever at any time. You don't have to have anything in your game you don't want. You want classic always CE orks? They are. You want to get rid of alignment restrictions instead? They're gone. You want the MLP ponies to be the deific pantheon in your setting? They are. And as GM you need no more justification for it than Rule 0. Homebrewing has been a fundamental part of this hobby since the very beginning, it's how tons of game systems came to be in the first place. Whether what you homebrew is any good does nothing to diminish that you can if you want to.
Nope.
Most RPGs don't have this Rule 0. It is specifically a D&D thing. Elsewhere important decisions tend to be done by the whole group, not just the GM and that works far better.
