And Conan (Wikipedia link) as well!
And they had all that unlicensed stuff from Michael Moorcock and HP Lovecraft in the first edition of Deities and Demigods
James Ward maintains that the “unlicensed” story is a mischaracterization.
When I was given the assignment for that book I listed the various pantheons that I wanted to use. Gary noted that maybe the Lovecraft and Elric sections might be a problem. He gave me the Arkham House and Michael Morcock addresses and I immediately wrote them explaining what I was doing and asking for their permission to include their material. Wonder of wonders I got two letters back giving me permission to use their work. I foolishly gave those two letters to the lawyers at TSR. They might still be in some lost file at Wizards. I would kill for them now.
Anyway we printed up the book and it sold great. We then got a cease and desist letter from Chaosium. I don’t blame them a bit, however they didn’t know about the two letters. TSR would have won a court case hands down. However, the company wasn’t rich at that point and Brian Blume didn’t want to go to California, get a California lawyer, and spend time and money winning the case.
[…]
Now, when people talk on line about TSR in copyright violation it presses my maximum angry button. Maybe some of my facebook friends can pass along this word as time goes on so that my blood pressure levels can stay in the normal range.Now this might seem like a rant and it is. However, when people say TSR was in infringement they are calling me a plagiarizer. I consider myself a very honorable man. I would never, ever steal material that was not my own. I will not put up with that moniker. Thanks for listening.
That’s a little over the top. Nobody who bought that book ever thought for a second that James Ward had invented Cthulhu. At worst, people thought they were a bunch of over-enthusiastic fantasy geeks who didn’t properly understand copyright law. God knows, the early gaming field was littered with folks like that.
I suppose a couple decades of people commonly repeating “TSR stole the Lovecraft and Moorcock stories for their books and got in trouble” as gospel eventually gets to you. For what it’s worth, I’m not saying his word on it is the totally accurate one either…
Further down, Margaret Weis mocks the TSR legal department for trying to make her use the term “dragonlance Dragonlance” because TSR had trademarked it as an adjective, someone else posts an account saying that Moorcock’s estate gave permission to TSR but Chaosium (who had the license to an Elric game) didn’t know when they sent the cease & desist and someone who is supposedly Moorcock via online pseudonym claiming that he never gave permission but also alluding to a lack of control over his own materials so it seems plausible that his lawyers did without consulting him. In other words, yeah, a total mess of legal knowledge within the early industry.
Sent to me by a friend who’s a longtime AD&D player:
…AD&D imposed a number of ability score restrictions on a number of races and sexes, but only halflings received a flat -1. The upper limit on female human strength was not 17 but 18, the same as anyone else, except that a character who was a fighter, paladin or ranger also rolled percentile dice for exceptional strength, and on this exceptional strength check women were restricted to a maximum of 50 while men could go all the way to 100. Granted, most players who rolled 18 for strength probably would play one of these classes, but the odd cleric or thief who happened to have an 18 strength incurred absolutely no gender-based disadvantage. Barring unusual and at that time unauthorised means of generating ability scores, there was a mathematical 1 in 216 chance of rolling an 18 strength, and of course a 1 in 2 chance of then legitimately rolling 01 - 50% anyway, meaning (with a little allowance for those 18 strength non-warriors) about 1 in 500 female human characters would be disadvantaged by having their strength capped at 18(50%). That meant, also, that about 1 in 500 men were stronger than any women in the campaign… and for the rest, there was absolute equality; the average man was as strong as the average woman, the 80th percentile man was as strong as the 80th percentile woman, even the 99th percentile man was only as strong as the 99th percentile woman; which, to my way of thinking, is giving women much the best of it.
From this tiny molehill a number of people, for reasons which presumably seem good to them, want to build a mountain and scream “sexism!” from the rooftops, ignoring the fact that in any adventuring party rolled according to the rules there would be almost exactly a 50% chance that the character with the highest strength would be a woman, and that the kind of magic items most PCs considered essential by the time they reached mid to high levels ( girdle of giant strength, gauntlets of ogre power ) worked just fine no matter the sex of the wearer. Wherever countervailing measures are proposed, they almost invariably advocate a “compensating” advantage that benefits all women or even, as the still more egregious example mentioned above does, penalises all men; and some of this is built on straight-up misinformation such as the “-1 to STR” rumour referred to.
My own modest proposal hinged around the fact that the AD&D exceptional strength table split at 51%, 76%, 91%, and 100% IIRC, and would simply state: On rolling exceptional strength and being capped at 50%, a female human fighter/subclass character receives one of the following benefits for every category her bonus strength is adjusted downwards: +1 on saving throws versus mental effects; +1 on saving throws versus physical damage from blast spells or breath weapons; +1 on saving throws versus poison. (These days they would be Will, Reflex and Fortitude saves respectively.) So for instance a player who rolled 78% and was adjusted down to 50% has dropped two categories (76% - 51% - 50%) and receives two benefits. That would offer proportionate compensation to those who had suffered loss, and only those. Still, later editions dropped the cap altogether so this suggestion became obsolete by 1990.
Of course, Gygaxian complexity applied more severe strength maxima to females of other races, but then, if you were playing a fighter of some race other than human in 1st Ed AD&D (or in Original D&D) you were already restricting yourself severely – not so bad for a dwarf or half-orc but even they were going to top out long before the humans…
And in dnd 3e and later, gender has absolutely no mechanical effect. Why do we need to bend over backwards just to include women being occasionally weaker than men? In a setting that’s got flying fire-breathing lizards no less?
Exactly. That whole mess of calculations is entirely unnecessary.
Oh for fuck’s sake. Nobody was saying, “One tenth of one percent [or whatever] of female fighters are disadvantaged by these rules!” People were saying, “These rules are unnecessary in a fantasy scenario and send a gross message about gender in a situation where things could be equal instead.”
The author of that tedious screed should have saved their electrons. Their analysis of the odds of this scenario arising are, not 99.9%, but 100% irrelevant.
The percentile Strength system was actually a terrible idea from the start and broken without the racial and gender mods and/or limitations.
I mean you could work with it but it made Strength like no other stat.
Indeed–and as I said earlier, I can pretty much guarantee that far more than 1/2,160 played human male fighters had an 18/00 strength. You can’t possibly dangle a prize like that in front of a bunch of young gamers and expect everyone to follow the dice-rolling guidelines fairly; and if folks are angling for every advantage, they’ll be discouraged from considering a female character (by this and by lots of other aspects of the game).
1st Ed had such a dearth of female characters, I dangled a +1 to any stat for any female character just to keep some diversity. It was a little embarrassing when even the woman players were indeed hesitant to play a female character.
More importantly, I can pretty much guarantee that more than 80% of players read the rules that said, “women can’t be as strong as men”, in a game where there are flying lizards and magical floating eyeballs, and there was never any particular reason for women to be weaker than men.
Now that I think about it there ARE a few places in 3e where gender makes a difference. For example a Drider (a drow cursed by Lolth to be a sort of centaur-like being with the top half of a drow and the bottom half of a giant monstrous spider) can cast cleric spells if it’s a female drider and wizard spells if male.
Due to the culture Drow come from this makes sense internally. And it’s presented as a guideline - exceptional individuals may be the exception.
I’ve watched very little of TOS, but I find that fascinating. I assumed that it was the Romulans, despite the whole Roman thing on the surface, who were supposed to be culturally like the communist Chinese.
I originally skipped reading this post because I was getting frustrated. But since Discourse loves to show you all the posts you miss, I now see the post and regret not responding. I apologize if this post is seen as too distracting from the current thread that conversation has taken.
None of that is actually an argument about the subject I was talking about. The comment chain we were discussing was about an image and whether or not it was racist in its depiction in having a darker skinned brute go after the lighter skinned woman.
Your arguments on that front were that you didn’t see them as particularly dark, and that your wife didn’t notice any racism when you showed her.
On the other hand, the other poster pointed out the history of colorism and showed that many other pictures of similar design are in fact seen as racist. Thus they made the better argument on this one point.
One of those arguments is clearly better than the other. The one that cites history is better than the one that is just the opinion of two people. Maybe if the two of you were experts on the subject it would matter. (That would include having lived experience.)
I’m not sure why you keep bringing up that you personally are not convinced. You aren’t the target audience for any changes. Wizards of the Coast has and continues to make changes to appeal to those very people you disparagingly label “woke.”
It seems really weird that you can see why people would see sexism in the image, but can’t then also see why people would see racism in it. As I originally said the same logic applies—it’s due to history.
It’s not because people want to believe they are “enlightened” or “woke.” It’s the fact they have the white damsel in distress and the darker skinned brute—a common racist and sexist trope. If you can’t see that, then it is I who don’t know what to say.
It’s a little more obvious if you see their earliest designs. They have the whole fu manchu and slanted eyes thing going on.
I’m not remotely invested enough to take this back up six weeks later so go ahead and call it the final word or whatever.
I fixed that in one game I was DMing. One youngish guy said “females should have a STR penalty”, it’s realistic.
I said Ok, but males get a - to wis, cha, dex and int.
He shut up.
Yes, but in some other book they had something like that for Dex, iirc, and other stats could go to 20, iirc.
Mind you this was long ago. Maybe my memory is playing games.
We called the Str18 d100 roll “the Conan roll” and we ignored the female part.