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.

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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

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

>>That's how the joke goes, anyway.<<

Well, you have to realize that most gamebuilders only sort of know what they're doing. That is, they can see that certain patterns exist, but they usually don't know why. Without knowing why, they're trying to worldbuild from the surface in rather than the core out, and you see problems like this.

Patterns can be things like "hummingbirds are fast" or "Pacific Islanders tend to be rotund" or "Mexicans have siesta." These are examples of physical and cultural evolution. Compare this to gaming and you can see that, perhaps, elves have a genetic predisposition to good aim in the same way that a mongoose does: it's a survival trait. Not all individuals are equally good at it, but on average a mongoose has better aim than animals that don't routinely hunt snakes, and an elf has better aim than a human.

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. Then it looks dumb, and maybe doesn't play as well as a better-thought-out one.

>> 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 <<

In a good build, you'll see things like each species having a theme, and its features fit that theme. Say we have ljosalfar (light elves) and svartalfar (dark elves), aligned with elemental forces of day and night. It might go something like:

Ljosalfar:
* cast light X times/24 hours
* +1 during daylight, -1 during night
* pale colors of skin, hair, and eyes
* cannot be dazzled by light effects

Svartalfar:
* cast dark X times/24 hours
* +1 during night, -1 during daylight
* deep colors of skin, hair, and eyes
* cannot be disoriented by darkness

All consistent and logical, balanced, without touching on moral or personal aspects. I can riff that off the top of my head because I know mythology, metaphysics, biology, and game design. When I'm worldbuilding for real, I go into more detail and do actual research. Some gamebuilders are into that, others aren't.

>>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.<<

In fact, it's been done: see Pierson's puppeteers. Good build, too.

>>“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.<<

It's another effect of half-knowing what they're doing. Humans are hardwired to learn human languages, although they don't come preprogrammed with a language, just the tools to acquire it. But in a fantasy setting, it's easy for a creator deity to skip the uploading if they feel like it, and just make a language part of the base build. What gamebuilders don't know is that usually results in a species that can learn other languages, because they haven't got the toolkit for it! Alternatively, you can give them a master key, the Gift of Tongues; or a base language everything can understand, like Allspeak or Prime.

If you want to get away from previous associations, the most effective approach is to start from scratch and pick a different framework to guide the build. I did that with one setting where I jotted down clusters of traits for each of the four classical elements, then gave each species two elements from which to draw traits. All unique species, not reiterations of established ones. Sorting characters into a framework has been suggested in some writing resources, so for instance, the Fantastic Four are also an elemental set -- by another creator with a pretty good grasp of infrastructure.

The infrastructure that most gamebuilders do well is math. Nowadays most games are well built in terms of statistical balance. The trouble comes in where they do a character thing right, but then can't figure out how to balance it in the mechanics or in play, so they change the character back to what they do know how to handle. This famously happened with Warforged because people didn't understand how to balance them in play, and the things that made them unique and interesting were written out in later editions. But the balance is there in the original build if you know how to use it: they don't bleed out if injured, but they don't heal naturally, they require someone to repair them. It depends a lot on how savvy you expect your players to be.

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

I can top that. Coyote & Crow is a game about a noncolonized Native American culture. It's a brilliant worldbuild, gorgeous book, with some beautiful and unique game concepts. But the player's race determines some of what they are allowed to do in the game with their characters. I found that appalling. I can trace it directly to the institutionalized racism of the "certificate of Indian blood" that the designers all grew up with. It's normal for them for race to determine access to resources. But they didn't stop to think about how that starts horrific fights in tribes, let alone how unfun it'd be at a mixed-ethnicity gaming table. :/

Conversely, when I read a piece about how nobody bases evil races on white people, my response was to sit down and make a setting where the normal humans are African-based and they are threatened by white demons, whose features match the kinds of unflattering descriptions that historic black people said of white people. What would it look like if we flipped this technique around? And it made for a cool sword & soul setting.

>>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.<<

Go you!

>>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. <<

Suzette Haden Elgin said that authors will put characters through any horrible experience, except learning a foreign language. But for me, that's one of my favorite motifs both as a reader and a writer. To be fair, while I have studied various languages and visited places where I didn't speak much of the local one, I have a dedicated coprocessor for language in my head that makes the experience different for me than average.

>>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. <<

It's real, though. North America had a widespread trade language that touched all four coasts, Hand Talk or Plains Indian Sign. And it's the least abstract, most intuitive language I've seen on Earth. I watched a Native American performer do a lesson for an audience of mostly-white people, and they had no trouble understanding some of the signs without translation. Fascinating. It really relies a lot on the language hardwiring in humans, but it's more sophisticated than "try gesturing wildly." So if I were making a common tongue, it would either be something like that, or it would be a "world language" type of pidgin or dominant language such as seen in history here.

You can get fascinating stories and gameplay from language barriers, but you have to know what you're doing and have the right set of players for it to be fun.

>>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.<<

... but probably still has the language acquisition window open as an adolescent while the 20-year-old human does not.

>>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's what stock characters are for.

Best game engine I've found is PDQ, which allows character building based on choosing a small set of traits that can be anything at one of several levels of power. You can build anything by hand, but it only takes a few minutes, and you can use the same stats for cookie-cutter thugs etc.

>>“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.<<

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

>>[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”<<

Because some people find violent games fun and others don't. Some people find peaceful games fun and others don't. We need all kinds of games. You want one where the game mechanics reward peace and discourage violence, check out Dead Inside.

>>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.<<

LOL I just used the worldbuilding for vague inspiration and the mechanics to decide outcomes, and did the rest by the seat of my pants. It's all we had in high school. Better things have come along since.

[fiachairecht]

Yyyeah, I agree with a lot of your thoughts. I feel like in the post-5e/post-Critical Role world we've ended up in a situation where the majority of articles critiquing D&D are like 10% actual critique and 90% 'I wish everyone was playing a different, better game' which is ... not really conducive to Discussions About D&D, unfortunately.

(And that 'elves sound British and dwarves sound Scottish' quote gave me like three separate types of psychic damage lmao.)