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

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.