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Bob Quixote posted:Does this make any sense? To add to what folks say above, some of this stuff comes out whether you mean it to or not. Take the Drow, for example. In traditional mythology, the "Trow" are fairies or trolls that sneak into your house and do poo poo to you while you're asleep, like a ton of other creatures. In D&D, they are a dark-skinned matriarchal society that live underground, created basically whole cloth by Gygax and expanded on by Salvatore. They are innately evil, worship an evil spider goddess who was cast out by the light-skinned good elf god, consider men to be utterly and innately inferior to women, are paranoid and backstabbing as a matter of both course and religious devotion, and believe that they should be in charge of everything. Now, were you to ask Salvatore or Gygax, "Hey, do you have a problem with powerful black women?" they'd almost certainly answer "No, of course not. I'm not racist." They almost certainly didn't sit down to say "Now how can I settle my grudge with all those races I hate today? I know! A D&D manual/novel!" But what they wrote is nevertheless quite easily readable as very racist and sexist. There is no ambiguity to the drow's portrayal. They are literally a race of evil black women who want to dominate and enslave you for their weird god. No amount of jockeying is going to make "And as punishment, the good god turned all the evil people's skin black to show how evil they were" into something that isn't troublesome. That's a pernicious racist trope that has a long history, dating back to the mark of Cain. Tolkien had a similar problem with Lord of the Rings. In one very uncomfortable reading, it is a book about how we shouldn't allow the evil brown skinned folks (The Haradrim) from the middle east and their black skinned orc friends to take over White Europe. When this was pointed out to Tolkien, he was appalled. He hadn't realized that he had written something that could be taken as racist, as it was certainly not his intention. He was a devout Christian who believed all men were brothers, and he hated racists utterly and completely. He was very troubled by his portrayal of the orcs, and his letters spend a great deal of time discussing back and forth how to resolve the problem. But a lot of RPG people don't do that. They bury their heads in the sand and pretend that the Drow, for example, aren't even slightly awkward or in need of fixing. Doesn't mean people are racist for having made a mistake, or for playing a game. But pretending that these things haven't happened, or that we shouldn't correct them?
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Mar 12, 2015 21:39
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JerryLee posted:Apologies if I'm misunderstanding anything as I cut into this conversation, but... I think this would be fantastic if it were done correctly. Rather than "inherently greedy and evil," a broader discussion of different value priority and alternate logic would make for a fascinating role play experience. At a certain point there will always be commonalities (i.e. my dog is very different from me, but she still wants food, a warm place to sleep, companionship, etc.), but it would be interesting to play someone who doesn't have a concept of separateness from other people, or experiences the world mainly through electrolocation rather than visually, or (to steal an example from online) will never take off his bird mask under any circumstances. But pulling it off? That's the trick. That's always the trick.
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Mar 12, 2015 22:32
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