D&D is the most racist, classist game on the market!

[dorchadas]

That's how the joke goes, anyway.

Today I saw an article entitled Why race is still a problem in Dungeons and Dragons and I have some Thoughts since I'm doing my own heartbreaker at the moment.


First of all, there's a lot here I agree with. For example:

But the fact that race determines whether characters get skills like bravery, the ability to use tools well, or even the inherent knowledge of specific magical spells, regardless of any backstory or class, seems absurd. There isn’t a race of people who are all naturally brave, or who all know the same language. And even in a fantasy world, being magical is one thing, but being able to automatically perform a very prescriptive magical spell just because your ears are pointy is ridiculous.

I don't like "[x] gets Light 1/day as a spell-like ability" either, because I think it's not a particularly interesting method of differentiation, and I've never liked "elves get +1 to hit with swords and bows" because you mean to tell me every single elf is trained with those weapons? Even if you try to limit it and say that it applies to elven adventurers, all elf NPCs will have those stats worked into their description regardless if they're hunters or cobblers.

But on the other hand, "There isn’t a race of people who are all naturally brave" on Earth. In a sci fi setting, we can imagine a species whose fear response doesn't work the same way that humans' does, and that would certainly seem to humans as being "naturally brave" even if it's a biochemical process. There's no reason the same thing couldn't occur in a fantasy species.

There is a major problem that comes with associating "race = culture" and then tying that back to the real world, though:

Chris Nammour, a lifelong roleplayer, described how people often codify racial dynamics onto their fantasy unintentionally. “[I’ll ask players] what does an elf sound like? What’s their accent? And people say, Oh, well, they sound British, and dwarves sound Scottish and so on,” he says. “It’s always associating historically heroic races with Western and Northern European traits. And then my immediate response to that is what accent does an orc have?” The responses, he noted, are not ‘they sound British.’

“Another problem is mechanically couching language to race at all,” said Simon Moody, a TTRPG designer. “There is still a lot of coding that goes into attaching racialized languages–like orcish or dwarvish–to backgrounds.

On the one hand, I think Nammour hasn't spoken to a lot of Warhammer fans, who will immediately tell you that orcs sound like Yorkshiremen.

Jokes aside, racial languages are weird and bad and I've never used them. In my Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom games, all languages were based on country or tribal grouping, with the closest thing to a "racial language" being called Kappa (aka "Koopa") because it's what the Kappa Tribes spoke, but kappa born outside the Kappa Wastes spoke the language of wherever they were born. Otherwise if you went to a different country, they had a different language, which is far more realistic and also does a good job of showing why D&D does not have realistic language rules--because not being able to talk to anyone is awful. Look, I used to live in Japan and when I moved there my Japanese was very bad, and living in the country where almost no one spoke English was extremely frustrating. Now imagine that you're a band of adventurers who go to a new country every month with no time to learn the local language. Just for ease of gameplay, you either come up with some sort of "Common Tongue" that everyone speaks (thus literally eliminating diversity) or just give players magical means to bypass language barriers which is basically the same as option one. As Stargate: SG1 showed, "We can't understand people and need to communicate across language barriers" is fun maybe once or twice and then becomes tedious and annoying very quickly. Are racial languages less bad because they allow a little bit of language diversity or more bad because they imply all halflings have the same culture?

I think there should be a distinction between cultural traits and physiological ones, though.

Why shouldn’t a dragonborn trance? Why can’t some orcs be naturally stealthy? Why don’t we have tieflings fly as a bonus action?

Elves don't trance because they learn how as children, elves trance because Tolkien wrote in The Two Towers that:

Legolas already lay motionless, his fair hands folded upon his breast, his eyes unclosed, blending living night and deep dream, as is the way with Elves.

Goliaths don't get a strength bonus for cultural reasons, they get one because they're eight feet tall. Dwarves don't get Stonecunning because they're taught it as children, it's because they have a mythic connection to the earth that a human born underground will never have. Dragonborn can breathe fire (or acid or whatever) for obvious reasons that have nothing to do with their birthplace. In the comments, the author explicitly says that they think the choice of elf or human or dragonborn should be essentially like a Fortnite skin, saying nothing about a character other than their physical appearance and to me that's incredibly boring. Like all the people who play elves as either snide assholes or horny teenagers and forget that a 1st level elf is literally over a hundred years old already and would have very little psychologically in common with a human.

The article does admit that you need categories:

“Ultimately you will always be splitting characters across various lines, usually determined by traits. And while you might want to do that because you’re playing a game and you need this scaffolding to facilitate ease of imagination, there is a desire that people have to categorize others.”

As a GM, you need an easy way to stat things that the players will interact with, and you can't have every enemy have a unique set of traits because you will collapse under the cognitive load. That said, there's an option for that to be setting-defined:

Austin Taylor, a TTRPG writer and streamer, also points out that creating a core rule book and a setting book are two different things. “If they just created basic rules and then continued to put out settings and adventures, I think that would solve a lot of problems,” he said. “Removing the multiverse from the core rules would help D&D move past the issues they have created by refusing to move forward.”

I can imagine a core rulebook that just has races--or species or heritage or ancestry or stock or whatever other term that I've seen used in fantasy games for the same concept they use--as essentially a tag that attaches to the character, and then individual settings define what that means. So characters with the Elf tag trance in the Forgotten Realms, but in Dark Sun they sleep. The disadvantage there is that there's no standardized understanding of terms and a lot of overhead gets moved to the setting books, but that can easily be overcome. I'm changing a bunch of stuff in the setting I'm working on now, like giving humans inherent traits--wanderlust, the desire to see what's over the horizon, something that dwarves just don't have to the same degree.

---

All that said, my main takeaway from this comes from the Fortnite comment above and this exchange:

[commenter]: Next up: “Why is killing tolerated in D&D? It’s time for RPGs to eschew this appalling legacy and require characters to find peaceful solutions”

[article author]: i mean, why not?? like what’s so bad about creating an RPG where decisions have narrative weight??

First of all, killing people has significant narrative weight.

But second, I think what this reveals is that the author (and maybe some of the sources) want a game that's basically Marvel superheroes crossed with Monsterhearts in terms of character types, where everyone is essentially human but with superpowers and maybe scales or pointed ears or being short, but with D&D's player base, brand recognition, and pillar-of-the-hobby status. For example, in response to someone who says that in a game of D&D there need to be enemies the PCs can kill without moral issues the author says:

[article author]: "first like, just i think it’s worth saying that imo and in my games killing people shouldn’t be the default or be dismissed because ‘they’re bad’ because uhhhh moral quagmires are important, i guess. also if you need to justify murder (whew boy) just say they’re bad people because they’ve killed people, you don’t need to tie it to race at all. ‘a group of murderers has kidnapped a caravan’ and it’s literally made up of a group of people who can be any race/s."

It's fair to want no species to be kill-on-sight--I did the same in Warlords--but that entire comment evinces disdain for the literal premises of D&D, a game where most of the rules and total session time involve fantasy violence. If you want a game of moral quagmires where violence is a last resort, or often makes things worse, then there are other games that accomplish that goal as written without needing extensive modding.

Of course, the player base will be much smaller. Those games aren't D&D.

Comments

Re: Thoughts

[dorchadas]

The problem is that, without knowing the infrastructure of how a pattern develops or what it's for, the collection of species traits can wind up random.

As you say, if there's a physiological reason for it it works, but it often doesn't go that far. If elves appeared from the shed tears of the gods (or whatever), then maybe they get +1 with bows because that's what the gods want, but without divine intervention it makes more sense to develop physiological traits and extrapolate from there. If elves are good with bows because of their superior senses and hand-eye coordination, are they also good at targeting spells? What about delicate artisanship? Why is it just bows?

I mean, the Doylist reason is because Legolas used a bow. If Legolas had thrown spears elves would get +1 to that.

Alternatively, you can give them a master key, the Gift of Tongues; or a base language everything can understand, like Allspeak or Prime

I have seen some settings that do that, and it does make sense! It's just a personal preference for settings that don't have activist gods that makes me want another basis for a language system.

I can top that. Coyote & Crow is a game about a noncolonized Native American culture.

I remember reading your posts about it (though I didn't comment since I haven't read the book). There's certainly games I would be a little leery of playing with non-Jews--Dream Apart, for example, or anything taking place in the Dark Kingdom of Wire in Wraith: the Oblivion, but if the game is such that you would need to ban non-Jews from even playing it part of it, hmm. The solution is to find better players who will be able to properly engage with the material.

It's real, though. North America had a widespread trade language that touched all four coasts, Hand Talk or Plains Indian Sign.

You're right that there are various real-world examples of this kind of thing, like Hebrew among us and Latin among Christians for inter-cultural trade during the medieval period, or Chinese characters in East Asia (since they encode meaning, they can be adapted to other languages), but historically they're usually not a language of daily use--educated Jews knew Hebrew but they didn't speak it to each other, they wrote letters in it to people who didn't speak their local language--or they're a language imposed by some kind of empire on the populace. The fact that Common is humans' native language in D&D-land implies things about the setting that no setting designer ever seems to follow up on.

PDQ from Atomic Sock Monkey has been riffed across different settings, with very interesting results.

I've heard of it before, but to me (speaking personally) the system is too simple for me to really enjoy engaging with it. For some people that's a benefit, but I like mechanical complexity in my games and don't mind different resolution systems for different types of actions.

I had the same problem with the game Ehdrigohr, inspired by Lakota stories (I remember the author saying he took the game to a Lakota elder he knew expecting to get asked "What the hell is this?" but the elder loved the way he took inspiration without just trying to make a direct copy as an RPG) but really didn't like the way the system made every action boil down to "Attack, Defend, Overcome, Create an Advantage" which were mostly just +2 on a die roll. It was boring to play even if the setting was excellent.

Re: Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>If elves appeared from the shed tears of the gods (or whatever), then maybe they get +1 with bows because that's what the gods want,<<

Exactly. In World Tree, the spell Fire Kitten is easier than it should be for what it does, because the god in charge of it likes cats. That game also hardwires racism: there are the Prime Races, and then everything else. Which can be a point of play if people want to explore that. Because Creator Gods, that's why.

>>If elves are good with bows because of their superior senses and hand-eye coordination, are they also good at targeting spells? What about delicate artisanship? Why is it just bows?<<

Well, aim is a bit different. I can aim pretty well, but can't draw worth a crap. The targeting system is kind of its own little thing. But it works with a bow, a gun, a camera, or just alerting to movement in general. Modern computer programs drive me batshit with all their moving, blinking, whirring distractions. Imagine if elves have high targeting skills and dwarves ... fidget when they aren't making something. So much racial tension could be fixed by giving the dwarf a fidget toy and pointing the elf in a different direction!

>> I mean, the Doylist reason is because Legolas used a bow. If Legolas had thrown spears elves would get +1 to that.<<

I think that is the reason, and it is an example of a surface-in construction flaw.

>>It's just a personal preference for settings that don't have activist gods that makes me want another basis for a language system.<<

Anthropology, linguistics, sociology, neurology -- you've got lots of other ooptions. I often use a mix for languages. So for instance, if I have elves, they have clusters by broad areas; there might be a forest set, a prairie set, a mountain set, and so on each influenced by their environment.

Then too, consider whether and how much people move around. Some places really don't, and if you only have one population, they might speak all the same language. If they mix then you get a lot more variety.

I was outlining a worldbuild for a class in a poem I was writing. Three continents and an island cluster around an inland sea, several ethic variations of humans, and a couple of other humanoid races. Based on everyone traveling around that coast, there was lots of mixing there, and thus light-to-medium skin tones based on who was where -- but toward the outer edges of the continents, much less mixing and darker average tones. I was able to do that because I have an idea about how populations can move and mingle, and it makes sense because there's an explanation built right into it. Ethnic dynamics because of geopolitics.

>>but if the game is such that you would need to ban non-Jews from even playing it part of it, hmm. The solution is to find better players who will be able to properly engage with the material.<<

Exactly. You need players who can handle challenging topics, or you need at simpler game. There's nothing wrong with "I just wanna blow shit up" as long as everyone's on the same page. I had very insightful gamers, usually.

>> but historically they're usually not a language of daily use--educated Jews knew Hebrew but they didn't speak it to each other, they wrote letters in it to people who didn't speak their local language--or they're a language imposed by some kind of empire on the populace.<<

Usually the lingua franca is either that of the most influential military culture, or it is a trade language. The third, rather farther behind, is a scholars' language like Latin, Hebrew, or French (which was at different times also an imperial and a trade language). Wikipedia used to have a fantastic historic list of world languages with notes about that stuff, but it got edited out. >_< I'd been using it to list languages that my immortal (from human stock) characters would know, or at least a subset illustrating those. It's in the Wayback Machine though.

>> The fact that Common is humans' native language in D&D-land implies things about the setting that no setting designer ever seems to follow up on.<<

I think they just did it because they're humanocentric and it's easy. They want to play, not think about worldbuilding itself as a hobby. Me, I got pulled into gaming because my friends wanted to play in my storyworld. AD&D was a kludge for that, but we were determined enough that it mostly worked.

>>I've heard of it before, but to me (speaking personally) the system is too simple for me to really enjoy engaging with it. For some people that's a benefit, but I like mechanical complexity in my games and don't mind different resolution systems for different types of actions.<<

It's vital to find a game engine that fits how your brain works and what you enjoy doing. The only thing I really love about game statistics is the different-shaped dice and their probabilities. Complex tables are not my thing. But this is why we need different games. You'd have more fun with some miniature-inspired, detailed game engines. World Tree has some interesting complexities too. Me, I like an elegant and flexible system without too many numbers for me to fuck up.

>>but really didn't like the way the system made every action boil down to "Attack, Defend, Overcome, Create an Advantage" which were mostly just +2 on a die roll. It was boring to play even if the setting was excellent.<<

Alas!

This is why I recommend a team build if possible. Get a linguist, a scientist, a game theory expert, at least one mathematician, an artist, a writer -- you'll be pretty well set up. The worldbuilding class I was writing about typically aims for a balance of 3 artists, 3 writers, and 3 random other specialties (or similar for different sizes of groups). It's the random ones that influence the build because if you have a linguist you'll get languages, if you have a geologist you'll get a cool map that makes sense, if you have a biologist you'll get extra-awesome monsters, etc. Credit to Coyote & Crow, they assembled a brilliant team of writers, artists, and game experts who did a fantastic build. But in trying to anticipate and solve certain social problems, they created a lot of others.

Re: Thoughts

[dorchadas]

Me, I got pulled into gaming because my friends wanted to play in my storyworld. AD&D was a kludge for that, but we were determined enough that it mostly worked.

It really seems like there were a lot of people who that was the case for--Forgotten Realms, Birthright (the AD&D setting), and Glorantha were all worldbuilding exercises for their creators before they become RPGs. I wonder if the increase in fanfiction's popularity has reduced the world->RPG pipeline--I have a friend who does a lot of freeform online RP with no rules necessary.

The only thing I really love about game statistics is the different-shaped dice and their probabilities. Complex tables are not my thing. But this is why we need different games. You'd have more fun with some miniature-inspired, detailed game engines

I do really love rules design for its own sake, trying to make the rules match my preferred mode of play. In the aforementioned Warlords of the Mushroom Kingdom game, I used a chassis of Exalted 2e and tweaked the rules trying to get a game where the players 1) understood that fights were dangerous and so did not choose violence as a first resort and were willing to run from battle but 2) won most of their battles without significant personal cost. It worked, so I count that a success.