Pretend isn’t always just pretend. I won’t play with people who gleefully enact horrific acts in game and take pleasure in playing out racist fantasies, for example.
Sure, pretending to burn a cross in D&D isn’t the same thing as actually burning a cross. But I will nonetheless judge you, taking the circumstances of the game and the context of the players into account.
“It’s just pretend” is not a free pass for everything. There are limits.
Sure, and i totally agree with you. In fact, the one time I dm’d, i wouldn’t let a player play an evil character, because i didn’t want to participate in that game.
That being said, the traditional “hack the bad races” game is more like
Welcome, adventurers, our town has been troubled by nearby orcs who are raiding us and killing and raping and stealing and destroying. Can you help us?
Followed by the adventurers going to the orcs caves and killing them and maybe destroying the cave so the ones who fled don’t return.
It’s not typically about adventurers seeking out orcs in the middle of nowhere and torturing them.
The first is shallow and arguably encourages racist and nationalistic feelings. Or it may be a safe way to dispel them. I’m not a psychologist. The latter is a game i want no part of on many levels.
From Burlew/OotS:
I’m sure he’s made at least one person think about it so mission accomplished. I’m going to admit that I never once thought “Wow, Redcloak is really making me think about real world things” aside from “Look at this comic, making callouts to the ancient ‘killing goblin babies’ RPG debates…” Which, yeah, I used to read the Goblin Baby debate in old issues of Dragon back in the 80s and it’s older than that in game stores and basements, just didn’t have a national outlet to share it in.
Something to be said for that. I’m sure some difference of opinion comes from whether you lean more towards Beer & Pretzels D&D or if you think of your gaming as Very Important Things. There’s a good deal of overlaps and B&P style isn’t “Hurr I roll dice n kill the things” and VIP doesn’t require you to wear elf ears and adopt a thespian accent at the table, but a lot of people are playing the game for friendship and laughs for a few hours, brought together by some plausible-enough make believe and random number generation. They’re not trying to create deep multifaceted worlds of moral complexity, much less take home important lessons about our own world.
I’ve done both and these days lean more towards B&P for reasons ranging from “Less leisure time to spend futzing around” to the simple truth that most 2Deep4u campaigns are pretty awful because the people making/running/playing them don’t really have the chops. I’m not denying that good campaigns of that nature exist, just saying that (in my experience) they’re 95% bad Salvatore fanfic acting circles and I don’t have the enthusiasm to spend hunting for a good one. Almost anyone of basic competence can pull together “Orcs be bustin’ up our shit, go stop it” and, building off that, a lot of people can put together an enjoyable heroic campaign of “You’re the good guys, there’s some bad guys; go save the world”. And that’s cool with me. That’s what I want on a Thursday night after putting in my eight hours. I don’t need to follow up the show with a one hour roundtable on the real-life racial-economic lessons of Rrgrwath the Bloodthirsty and his Hobgoblin Slave Pits. Petty Escapism? Awesome.
I love that you say you don’t want this, as post 303 in a thread on this topic!
I pretty much consider the whole of D&D to be petty escapism. It’s a game.
Trying to change how color is used to communicate ideas in literature or fiction is an… ambitious idea. I also highly question your assertion that it affects our perception of human beings as opposed to literary characters or situation.s
I’m also unimpressed that you dismissed my argument by handwaving it as “Well, Actually.” This is not Twitter ; I made a relevant point and you have not actually stated any evidence or argument against it. That you don’t like the point is not relevant. The Drow are just a poor example for how you wish to use it; Contrarily, orcs and goblins have often been to used with distinctively racist overtimes. Orcs, for example, are often depicted as sub-humans but may be implicitly identified with a non-white ethnic group. Goblins have sometimes been combined with anti-Semitic imagery in a way that makes me very uncomfortable. This does not mean they are universally depicted that way: Warhammer 40K orcs were inspired by British football hooligans, for example.
There are things I dislike about the Drow are presented, although a full explanation would take a long time. But their origins in DnD (excluding other fantasy depictions because I HATE what Pathfinder did as it’s more ethically questionable) they were both not universally evil, and numerically more oppressed by their leadership than oppressing others. They were a people in need of aid, not monsters to be killed, and at the same time were capable of great feats of craftsmanship beyond. They weren’t depicted as subhuman in any way, and less-capable writers just focused on the evil and completely ignored everything that wasn’t “Cool”.
Which is basically the long way of me seeing I agree with the OP, more or less.
“Dark-skinned versions aren’t uniformly evil” is a very easy place to start. The system has in fact started down that path already. So, taking a small step isn’t all that ambitious.
Dwarves are swarthy too.
Well, my tabletop gaming time is limited by various factors. My internet babbling time is much more fluid 
Not in this particular book. (AD&D 2nd edition Player’s Handbook, copyright 1989) There aren’t all that many pictures, but there are two that I think are dwarves. One looks like a tanned Scotsman, and the other looks like a pale Scandinavian, to my best guess.
The orcs have a bit of a green cast, and are darker.
1e orcs were pale and piggish. Drow never looked African, just dark skinned.
Problem with D&D is it was started by all white people who read older Fantasy Books that were pretty close to all white. Heavily influenced by Norse & Greek mythology and so again, almost all white.
It was less racist and more just ignorant/isolated from non-white culture.
Sure, but “dark-skinned” is a defining trait for African in our culture. There’s a reason why more work goes to lighter-skinned Black actors or photos of criminals get manipulated in the media to look darker and not with changing their nose/mouth shape. Or, you know, why we refer to African-Americans as “Black”. It’s especially weird when they exist in a world where they’re the only canonical dark skinned PC race and in a book full of white elves, dwarves, gnomes, halflings and maybe the token Black human now and then.
That part I agree with. I don’t think Drow were devised to be “African-American stand-ins” or that Gygax (or whoever first created Drow) hated Black people. It was just tone deaf white Wisconsin nerds in the 70s and 80s and they never gave it a thought. Here and now though, it’s pretty cringey.
No, but tell me you’ve never seen someone do something in game that influenced your perception of them as a person? For example, I’ve noticed a pretty strong correlation between people who play sexist creeps at the table, and people who are sexist creeps in real life.
But the reverse isn’t true: not all dark-skinned people are African. I have no idea what Pacific Islanders are treated like, but dark-skinned subcontinental people are not treated as Black here in America. I mean I obviously could be wrong, but it would be really stunning to me if there is a cultural tradition here in America of attributing to them all the negative and positive stereotypes of African Americans. Which isn’t to say that they don’t face their own problematic stereotypes.
As for dark-skinned Drow, I was never reminded of human skin tones, since the few pictures I remember of them they were literally black, without any hint of ruddiness or brownness one would notice on a human of any background.
But just calling them “dark elves” and having them have dark skin and be evil is bad enough, even if they aren’t otherwise a close analog to any humans. Because even if it doesn’t reinforce a way of thinking on a literal skin tone level, it does reinforce the tradition of “light = good” and “dark = bad” which we should shy away from.
I don’t see how that’s supposed to matter. Pacific Islanders aren’t considered “Black” in America. African-Americans are. “Black” in US Culture means African-American. This has been true for a long, long time and certainly for far longer than D&D has been around. Stuff like “But there’s other dark-skinned people” and “But they don’t really look African…” sounds like weird academic excuses to handwave away the fact that the PHB has one canonical dark-skinned race and they are literally color coded Black = Evil in the lore. And the only real runner up (half-orcs) aren’t a hell of a lot better.
I’m not sure what part of my post implied that I don’t believe that we should shy away from supporting things that imply Black = Evil. Just that a dark skinned humanoid race that doesn’t look at all like Africans, even in skin tone, shouldn’t by default be a proxy for Africans.
To be clear, I wasn’t trying to directly analogize “kicking real puppies” to “killing imaginary orcs.” I was suggesting there’s a continuum of behavior a person could engage in, in a private setting, for fun, that would color my impression of them. Definitely “kicking puppies” is at a different place on that continuum than “killing imaginary orcs”, and I apologize if my unclear writing suggested otherwise.
But a person who slaughters orc babies as a way to role-play heroism? Not gonna think highly of that person.
nm …
Untrue on the “pale” part:
As a nasty little side note:
For some fun, here are a few others:
But at least: