Reaction to WotC announcements re: Vistani (Drow, orcs, etc.

[Mistmaster]

I think that all is a matter of common sense; if there are person who feels offended theyr feelings should be addressed, not necessarily with changing of the settings or the books but, maybe with disclaimers. In your example lynching was a thing in southern states not so long ago, so, while in this case was a bit of paranoia, it could have been a legitimate threat. At a game table, DMs can address theyr players individually and explain.

[Mischief]

You could also say that Orcs were reframed as racial caricatures by some people way back in the 1950s, who then raised their 'concerns'.

I suggest you edit to clarify this comment, because given the context of the prior conversation, I'm reading "some people" as "black people and/or supporters of civil rights", which would make this comment extremely thickheaded. The 'concerns' of black people in the US 1950's were doing away with laws that singled them out for discrimination. I understand you are not from the United States and thus probably don't know much US history, but in this decade, miscegenation laws were still on the books in over half US states, black people were segregated to certain schools and parts of town, many doctors refused to serve them or used worse equipment, they had to use different doors and public facilities, and were run out of all-white towns after nightfall. Emmett Till's murder and acquittal of his killers happened in the 50s.

Edit: Oh, Geez. Whelp, you ruined any credibility you might have.

Wizards hires a consultant to deal with the 5e Vistani misstep which will likely result in minimal changes to CoS, is apparently doing away with a negative intelligence modifier, and maybe reapproaching some of the evil playable races, and that’s enough to summon the internet mephits to vomit all over this thread about how minorities are being too uppity for suggesting a few minor changes and that being "sensitive" and doing right by newer players in fact threatens the entire future of Dungeons and Dragons.
How disappointing.

For everyone who commented in this thread: You might be the villain if you sincerely believe “social justice warriors” - who in the case of the WotC staff are genuinely well-adjusted and likeable people - are the enemy. You might be the villain if you sincerely believe the nihilism that content-creators are never motivated by the desire to do right by others and speak out for moral causes they believe in and instead always have an inauthentic ulterior motive such as finance or popularity (“virtue signaling”). Decent folk don't believe DnD and the world are a zero sum game, where making a concession to one demographic means subtracting from the others.

Edit: WotC's DnD staff has had an army of playtesters over the decades and has heard the experiences of probably close to ten-thousand players and DMs. They are drawing down on a wealth of experience. If the staff think something is a problem, I'm inclined to believe them.

Mod Note: Be VERY careful when implying people are villains. This is a friendly forum of peers.

[Mistmaster]

Mishief I agree with you.

[Jester of the FoS]

I will trust that I won't be banned for answering your question. The downside is that your hobby is going in the direction of the comic book industry. The material produced will be much like the New Warriors, as subtle as a sledgehammer and pedantic too. Hasbro/WotC is in a purity spiral of endless escalation and gaslighting. If you think the slippery slope is a logical fallacy, wait until you see what happens next.

I'm aware of that comic and rolled my eyes as well. But here's the thing: those character's weren't bad because their names were based on social causes. They were just bad. And the non-political characters in that team were just as silly, if not moreso in the case of the superhero that was basically Dora the Explorer.

The social awareness of a product and the quality of a products are unrelated. Good products will continue to be good and bad products will continue to be bad.
For every New Warriors out there, there are a dozen excellent books that approach the same topics and do so with excellence and nuance.

Really, comics have always been socially conscious. The '70s were huge for political themes in comics, especially Green Lantern & Green Arrow and Spider-man. To say nothing about the themes of the X-Men. But even the first few issues of Action Comics in the late '30s dealt with worker exploitation.
The comic industry is suffering now not because the comic industry is more socially conscious but just because it is a greying hobby that is stuck in a cycle of endless reboots while also being difficult for new readers to pick-up and dependant on poorly managed hobby stores.

Meanwhile, D&D has been pushing tolerance and acceptance just as hard as the comic industry and if blossoming. It's bigger than ever. "Get woke, go broke" doesn't seem to be applying in the least. And there's really no reason reducing the number of negative stereotypes in the game will affect the adventures they write, the rules they publish, the video games they licence, or the stories people can tell at their own game table.
(Arguably, a big reason for D&D's current success is that it's no longer ignoring the half of the population lacking a penis, dramatically increasing its pool of players.)

Furthermore, D&D has always been evolving in how it present material in its world. In earlier versions, women couldn't be as strong as men. For much of the game, female characters were portrayed in sexist bikini-chainmail, if they were presented in the art at all. All the characters were typically white males. Drow were brown skinned in 1st Edition. Races had hard limits on what classes they could be, forcing them into certain tropes.

Again and again over the last forty years, D&D has evolved to try to be more tolerant and less offensive.

This could be considered sarcasm if I didn't believe that you meant it. Would you stake your livelihood or freedom on it? There was a recent incident at NASCAR where a driver saw a noose in his garage are, which as an African American he took to be racial intimidation. He perceived it as offensive, as a threat. NASCAR started investigating, and there was a panic. It turns out the 'noose' was garage door pull-down with a hand loop, and all the garages at NASCAR have them.

One false alarm doesn't negate actual problems. If the fire department shows up at a house and it isn't burning, they don't ignore calls for the next few days.
Yeah, a NASCAR driver overreacted. After there was a surge of racism over the banning of Confederate flags on their cars AND a half-dozen black men being found hanging from tress and being dismissed as "suicide" with zero investigation. Silly, but not entirely unwarranted.

This is where context matters. If I see a noose hanging by my home or a big cross on my lawn it doesn't mean anything to me. Because I'm Scottish-Canadian. If I were of African descent the cultural context means a lot more. In the exact same way a PoC were called a cheap, drunken sheep shagger it would be amusing and not all that offensive, but if someone actually called me that it would be much more of a directed insult and hateful.

We have to be smart and make informed decisions. And when people are upset we should listen and see if they have a case. To see if we can modify our behaviour.
In exactly the same way we don't swear in front of elementary school kids. Or blow cigarette smoke at pregnant women. Or keep telling dead baby jokes around someone who lost their child. It's basic human decency. Because we don't need to be a-holes if we can help it, and should try to be better.

So we listen. And we decide if a complaint is reasonable or not. And if it's remotely reasonable, we modify our behaviour.
Because why not?
Who wants to be that person dropping eff-bombs in front of a five-year-old even after being politely told to watch our language?

[Strahdsbuddy]

Toning things down is not the end of the world. In your game, you can have all the stereotypes you want, and because you have selected your players you know your audience better and know what is offensive and what is not. If I as a DM have to put the racism back into the game myself at my own table, so be it. If it doesn't fit my gme, I won't.

A little subtlty isn't the end of the world. Consider Hazlik, whose sexuality had only been hinted at for the majority of the setting, and it wasn't until THIRD EDITION the writers just came right out and said he was gay. And I admit, I stopped and reread the sentence, scratched my head, reread the old material, and saw the subtext had been there all along.

Alternatively, shoehorning things like Halfling Vistani into EtCR jumps right off the page as bashing me over the head with "We're gonna promote diversity"...and just like the changes coming in the announced modules, if it doesn't work in my game, I'll ignore it!

[Gonzoron of the FoS]

https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/dungeo ... rrata-2020

FWIW, the actual changes are incredibly minor. Just small phrasing changes you'd never blink twice at if they had changed them before printing. The only one I slightly object to is making one character no longer drunk. Removing offensive descriptions I'm all for, and showing diverse behavior within the race, but I don't think that has to mean Vistani have to be saints with no vices. (Unless excessive drinking is a Romani stereotype I'm not aware of)

[Mischief]

(Arguably, a big reason for D&D's current success is that it's no longer ignoring the half of the population lacking a penis, dramatically increasing its pool of players.)

Ding ding ding. The easy-entry design of 5e, online support, streamers like Critical Role, and the Stranger Things surge ensured enough there were enough well run tables so women didn't have choose between bad DnD or no DnD as often.

Really, comics have always been socially conscious. The '70s were huge for political themes in comics, especially Green Lantern & Green Arrow and Spider-man. To say nothing about the themes of the X-Men. But even the first few issues of Action Comics in the late '30s dealt with worker exploitation.

I think people who haven't lived the times don't realize exactly how ahead of the curve some of the popular sci-fi and fantasy genre shows were in general. I'm a younger cohort, but my parents recently reminded me that Star Trek: The Original Series aired a few years before Archie Bunker and All in the Family.

The comic industry is suffering now not because the comic industry is more socially conscious but just because it is a greying hobby that is stuck in a cycle of endless reboots while also being difficult for new readers to pick-up and dependent on poorly managed hobby stores.

Non-web graphic novels in general have been having a rough ride. On the other side of the pacific, manga publishers have been folding and hemorrhaging cash like crazy for a decade now and nobody can blame that on social issues. Comics are definitely fighting to find a viable business model in the age of the internet.

https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/dungeo ... rrata-2020

FWIW, the actual changes are incredibly minor. Just small phrasing changes you'd never blink twice at if they had changed them before printing. The only one I slightly object to is making one character no longer drunk. Removing offensive descriptions I'm all for, and showing diverse behavior within the race, but I don't think that has to mean Vistani have to be saints with no vices. (Unless excessive drinking is a Romani stereotype I'm not aware of)

Quite the molehill I predicted rather than the mountain.

Hey, they fixed Strahd's bite, and he now cuts people with his nails instead of fisticuffs. And they buffed the haunted one background with an extra language. Cheers all around.

[Wolfglide of the Fraternity]

And in this case it's the people of colour who have been told their entire lives that they're less smart than white people, or more suited to physical labour, or are less able to control their temper. Who then see the same things said about orcs.

The intelligence penalty to certain races is a hard thing for me to satisfactorily justify. I can make excuses, but I can't seem to be happy with them. I can also think of changes, but I have a hard time liking those too.

Even without linking the orcs to a specific real race or ethnicity, a -2 to INT has some disturbing implications for how we view race. We could say that orcs are biologically different from humans, and their brains are made to different specifications (and the simplistic, single-number rating of intelligence forces us to choose between the unfortunate options "made better" and "made worse"), but even if that makes the issue less troubling (which it doesn't quite do for me), it doesn't address why wild and wood elves also have -2 INT. Why are these specific subtypes of elves less intelligent on average than normal elves? For that matter, why are gray elves predisposed to be smarter? Worse yet, why do the less intelligent breeds of elf have more primitive cultures? That sounds like it could have come from unintentional bias toward a more modern/western standard.

Removing such penalties may be the easiest answer. In addition to evading some hard questions, I found that ability score penalties were major inhibiting factors to me choosing a particular race, especially if it affected the character's intelligence. I am not sure I realized at the time what this little mechanical change in 4e and 5e resolved, even unintentionally. However, for everyone like me who won't let go of 3.5e, the penalties are still there, giving us something to think about.

Aside from rules rectifications, there is the opportunity for looking at these issues in the campaign itself. Perhaps a good story can arise. What if orcs are having their mental faculties actively suppressed to control them? What if long ago they were ravaged by a mind-altering disease created specifically to cause discord between them and other races? Perhaps humans are even the ones at fault for these depredations (like the Alliance creating the reavers in Firefly). There is a lot of potential in thinking seriously about these issues, both for being more conscientious, and for forging more compelling tales.

[Jester of the FoS]

The comic industry is suffering now not because the comic industry is more socially conscious but just because it is a greying hobby that is stuck in a cycle of endless reboots while also being difficult for new readers to pick-up and dependent on poorly managed hobby stores.

Non-web graphic novels in general have been having a rough ride. On the other side of the pacific, manga publishers have been folding and hemorrhaging cash like crazy for a decade now and nobody can blame that on social issues. Comics are definitely fighting to find a viable business model in the age of the internet.

Here's the thing though... many comics are doing just fine. Specifically the comics by Dav Pikey and Raina Telgemeier. The later is so phenomenally successful she launched a whole wave of imitators and secondary creators doing their own graphic novels.

How did she do it? Well, she's a women who writes for young girls and produces graphic novels sold by Scholastic at Book Fairs directly to students. Which is a HUGE market. Pilkey does much the same with his Dog Man books.
Whenever there's a new Dog Man, it sells circles around the best selling comics by DC and Marvel.

[Mistmaster]

I have always considered intelligence as tied to academic, memory, calculation excetra excetera. In classic D&D orcs are created by Gruumsh, and, as he doesn't value intellectual prowless stands to reason he did not make them smart. Even his good aligned brother ,that I ude in my campaigns underestimates brain value. Wild Elves and Acquatic Elves are similaryly anti-intellectually inclined because both Rillifane and Sashelas valued instinct andspontaneity above intellectual prowless. Grey Elves instead were made more intelligent because they were meant to be scholars.

[Wolfglide of the Fraternity]

I have always considered intelligence as tied to academic, memory, calculation excetra excetera.

In Call of Cthulhu, a character's INT is separate from its Education (EDU), so a character can be smart without much formal instruction. EDU determines skill points for occupation skills, while INT determines skill points for personal interests. I like the idea, though I am not about to add a new base statistic to D&D.

[Joël of the FoS]

Interesting thread. 55 years old white male here, who think of himself as progressist and very open minded.

I really think some institutions needs to be changed to remove systemic racism found in them. Really, things needs to change.

That said...

Who really believes a fantasy game is to be similar - and that it needs to be judged - with real life values?

Who really thinks the goal in life is to ruin all your friends and take all the cash ? (Monopoly)

Who really believes you need to always flee from your enemy instead of fighting back? (Pacman)

Who really think Guess Who? is a game that wrongly uses stereotypes?

Who really think that Cards Against Humanity will make you evil, a serial killer or dictator?

Are you also offended by some Halloween dressing up?

These are just games, playing them is not in any way changing how I really think.

*sigh*

---

These are just games, folks. If that becomes a problem, I'm too old for this. D&D (and especially Ravenloft) is about the fight of good vs evil, and Ravenloft even more about stereotypical gothic Shakespearian tropes.

Angels are good and demons are bad. Do we need to change that? What's the use of drow elves or Menzoberranzan in D&D if half of them are good aligned and make pink cup cakes on Sunday?

I once designed a depraved priest that was the founder of an orphanage so he could get his fresh meat. Do I think all priest are pedophiles? Of course not, I was playing on an extreme and ugly rare case, but I never thought that was reality. I never thought people reading that article would think so either.

Hazlik is gay and evil, is that too a combination that needs to be fixed? Do we need to make him good, or woman-loving? That would be silly, of course, as nobody think the two are related.

I do not mind adjustments as we go along over time, as it was said about women in D&D over the years, but when Strahd is suddenly everything-sexual (which anyway is a position many people can relate to, as you all know ), or similar strange changes, just because the idea is in fashion, or to gain cheezy respect points for purity, they loose me.

Vistani ? Put a disclaimer that real life wanderers are absolutely not like this, and perhaps change a few things to make them more sympathetics, if needed. First the idea to turn them into halflings (well known thieves) was a bad one, anyway. As for other humans, there are good and helpful vistanis, as well as crooked and thieving ones, but they are always mysterious and they should makes you feel uneasy as you do not know where they really stand (as the game explored well in the various ways vistani were portrayed in Ravenloft).

You are really offended by orcs and drows? Really ? Get out of my fantasy game. I do not think black skinned people are depraved, or that people close to the wild are brute and idiots that have nothing to teach me. (If drows are green or fushia, is that OK? )

If you are eventually offended by something, or do not like something, just edit it from your game.

[tomokaicho]

Interesting thread. 55 years old white male here, who think of himself as progressist and very open minded.

This is basically the problem. The tabletop gaming demographic does not reflect racial (or gender or sexual orientation) demographics broadly. It skews heavily towards White males, and in the current atmosphere, any White male dominated (meaning popular with) area is deemed to be tantamount to a manifestation of white supremacy. If you can redefine the game up until this point as white supremacy, then guess what all the players have been all this time - you guessed it - white supremacists.

Its tedious.

[Drinnik Shoehorn]

Who really believes you need to always flee from your enemy instead of fighting back? (Pacman)

To be fair, it also says taking drugs is a good way to fight back

[Joël of the FoS]

Who really believes you need to always flee from your enemy instead of fighting back? (Pacman)

To be fair, it also says taking drugs is a good way to fight back

Ah ah ah, same with Mario's mushrooms.

But please do not focus too much on this silliness instead of the whole pic