Diversity & Dungeons & Dragons

My apologies to WotC and anyone it may offend, but my drow (an imaginary race in an imaginary world) are and will remain neutral evil as a whole. There are individuals who can overcome the natural inclination towards evil, but by and large, they are neutral evil (yes, I am well aware that they were originally chaotic evil).

Likewise, there will be imaginary races in this imaginary world who keep slaves. I'm sorry, but slavery has existed (and continues to exist) in some form for as long as anyone remembers. It was not unique to America, and even African tribes kept slaves, the Aztecs kept slaves, the Asian peoples kept slaves. It's a horrible thing, yes, and I never portray it as anything else, but it does happen.

Gnolls are savages; not because they are primitive (though they are), but because they eat sentient beings. That is an inherently evil thing. Therefore, gnolls are evil. And as far as referring to barbarians or Chultan/Amedio tribesmen as savage, let's look to the definition of the word savage: one of the (admittedly several) definitions is "lacking complex or advanced culture". Savage doesn't necessarily mean that they are inherently less than human, or lesser beings, it just means that they lack advanced culture.

Weird how "advanced culture" in DnD always seems to be analogous to medieval European culture

This.

The lack of historical awareness and perspective in this discussion is disheartening.

It is the baseline culture established for the world at large.

Again, in an imaginary world.

Right, exactly. The baseline culture established for the imaginary world of DnD at large is modeled after white, European, medieval culture. That is literally the point. Exactly what you just said.

With all the prejudices and skewed perspectives on non-white cultures that entails.

So change that. It's your world. No one is going to come to your house and take away your rule books because you decide that African culture is predominant, or Native American culture, or Chinese culture, or Inuit culture. It happens that in my campaign world, the analog to Africa considers the rest of the world to be barbaric savages because they are not civilized. Perspective.

I was about to say, these arguments are always somewhat stupid anyways because no one is forcing you to remove problematic tropes or racist stereotypes from your games if you don't want to. They're just making it a little easier for players who don't want those tropes shoved in their faces by default to find a table to play at.

But obviously you do you, no one cares what kinds of games you want to run except your own players.

European colonialism was bad and I don't think anyone is arguing about that.

What I believe Qralloq is trying to say is that not all evil and racism is about european colonialism. Saying all racism boils down to white supremacy is already a limited and, I risk saying, somewhat "american/european-centred" point of view in itself! This is why I mentioned the japanese empire: widely known and pretty "evil" if you ask any of the occupied peoples, but not white european. Obviously this interesting discussion would benefit greatly from the input of non-north Americans/europeans :D

In support of Qralloq, lets consider one of the core issues here: the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. Horrible stuff that forced more people than my mind can even perceive out of their homes. This lasted about 3 centuries. In comparison, the Trans-Saharan slave trade lasted ... 9 centuries. The only association with europeans (besides they being sometimes the slaves!) was that a little country most won't be able to name noticed the amount of gold flowing and sent a couple of ships into the sea... effectively making it the precursor to the Atlantic slave triangle.

Also, and this is mighty uncertain, the numbers I found was 20 million africans displaced. Interestingly, the larger proportion of African slaves did not end in the US from what I could find! Mexican cartel violence is estimated to have displaced 740 million... I wouldn't trust these numbers blindly, but just to say that the full picture is bigger than "european white man" is evil ;)

I could not agree with you more

By that same token, if WotC decides to make their material less geared toward historical white European attitudes and prejudices, there's no reason you can't perpetuate them in your own games, regardless of what's published.

Strangely enough, one of my PbP groups over on the Paizo forums is currently struggling with this exact issue; is a monstrous being inherently evil and not to be trusted? We're playing through the Caves of Chaos and it has come to some frank discussion between party members (and players) whether a baby orc must be slaughtered lest it grow up to be evil.

Most recently, they had dealings with kobolds and the question was asked of me if kobolds could be taken at their word. I told them that it depends on the individual. Like any intelligent race, kobolds have free will. MOST kobolds are lawful evil, but this particular tribe was open to peaceful negotiation instead of rampant slaughter.

I'd say these are very interesting moral questions and will made a great campaign simply because they are there. It would be interesting to see how players will react to having the stereotypes reenforced or dispelled. However, these have been asked throughout the world during the entire human history, whenever there was a conflict or trust was essential.

I'll add another question to this. Orcs are evil from the "civilised" perspective, because they raid and pillage and rape border towns. There is indeed and assumption that players will play a "civilised" humanoid race of somewhat goodish alignment. But orcs are not bad from their own perspective right? So if players play a party of orcs under a regular tribal chieftain and not the "usual type" of campaign, this should turn things around no? Human are now evil and not to be trusted, no?

The oft-used statement "Google is your friend" works well for acquainting oneself with specific facts and statistics that one might otherwise have gotten wrong in a discussion. It is, however, not as useful for providing crucial cultural context and historical perspective on how facts and statistics fit into the overall picture, particularly on a topic that one hasn't really read about a great deal.

I already said I agree with what they are doing (first thing I wrote), but I'd have to say that this argument works the other way around 😅

By that same token, if WotC decides to make their material more geared toward historical white European attitudes and prejudices, there's no reason you can't ignore them in your own games, regardless of what's published.

It works the other way around because I literally wrote it as the inversion of WhtKnt's own statement, as an ironic rebuttal.

Sure, except if WotC decided to do that it would be an incredibly shitty thing to do, and what they're doing now is hurting absolutely no one. Key difference

😅 right... I may have missed that ;)

This is irrelevant. D&D, as the example here, was written by mostly white males. So the question is mostly on what influenced them, culturally. No ones talking about BLM in India, because it's not a revelant componet of the culture there. But it's very easy to see that western culture has ingrained components seeing non-white folks as lesser. Yes, other cultures do that too (India v Pakistan for example), but that doesn't matter to the question of TTRPGs written mostly by western, white males. It's a question of if we rise above that.