Thanks for the link.
Are there still rot grubs in this game?
was shown it, once, the one time I peeked at this, in '81.
I just checked, and they are indeed.
Ah, thanks.
The chap who intro’d it to me had a bunch of books and funky-sided dice, but he was maybe not the best candidate to open up this new world to me, considering all he could really rhapsodize about was rot grub, being a 14th-level monk as soon as possible, and…whores! (which he pronounced as WHO-reez).
Yeah, so this is really off-topic, so I’ll just Emily Latella my way on outa here.
I played D&D from the late 1970s on. Prostitutes were not a common feature of gaming amongst children.
However, Gary Gygax seemed to have some sort of completeness mania and if you read every little bit of the Dungeon Master’s Guide, you might come across a very brief entry on random harlot encounters.
Looking back at it now, the random harlot generation table is kind of a brilliant work of genius in that it’s sooooo silly and soooo unnecessarily detailed and … not at all erotic.
I see a very clear path between that one table and F.A.T.A.L. Even the writing style is somewhat similar.
I think when placed within the context of a random table of possible encounters one might have in an urban setting, the random harlot table isn’t so bad. AD&D was frequently the first placed I can recall encountering certain words including trollop, doxie, and trull. Thank you, TSR!
No, it’s still pretty sucky. There’s no beggar random sub-table with chances and delineations of kinds of beggar, only one entry for all beggars, and encountering one of those is even more likely. This is clearly just put there for the cheap titillation.
And why are there no rent boys, gigolos or hustlers?
PC: Excuse me (rolls 2d10) randomly generated Expensive Doxy who’s name has not been randomly generated yet, what’s an around the World of Greyhawk?
ED: Two gold and a saving throw at -2, same as in Blackmoor.
Because it was 1979 and homosexuality wasn’t acceptable to mainstream American society at the time? You’ll notice we didn’t see a lot of trans or non-binary representation either. But in the interest of fairness, the first RPG I can remember with gay people was Cyberpunk, in the Rockerboy sourcebook published in 1989. It featured a lesbian standup comedian named Maz Despair who was on the run from corrupt Texas politicians who framed her for murder. In Tales from the Forlorn Hope, a sourcebook for Cyberpunk 2020 published in 1991, the owner of the Forlorn Hope, a bar where mercenary types hang out in Night City, is married to a transwoman. And then there was the Cyberpunk 2020 main rulebook which mentions a poser gang made up of drag queens and gay people who used cosmetic surgery to make themselves look like The Brady Bunch.
Can you imagine Patricia Pulling on 60 Minutes having a field day with TSR’s inclusion of rent boys, gigolos, and hustlers?
But prostitutes were?
They were more acceptable than homosexuals.
I think you’re just doing special pleading.
And I think a criticism of a product from 1979 for not having the same representation we might expect in 2022 is myopic.
It was developmentally-delayed schoolboy “I said strumpet out loud!” wink-wink idiocy in 1979, just as much as it is today. The fact that it was in the past doesn’t magically make it good writing. I knew that it was adolescent male fantasy crap when I first encountered it, in the 80s.
I don’t expect to see the same representation in an artifact of its time, no. That would be useless. Doesn’t mean I can’t point out the flaws it did have. One of which is the decidedly heteronormative nature of the whole enterprise. I’m not saying I think Gygax was capable of writing that better version, though. That’s not what my criticism is.
What I do hope for is for people today to not give it a pass because “Oh, well, it was a different time”. Calling it out now isn’t an attempt to erase its existence or the social milieu it was written in . It’s saying this is shitty, inappropriate writing, whenever it was written, and we can and should do so much better now.
Prostitutes had been a common feature of a lot of popular culture for centuries even. We’re talking the 1970s here.
Even if it might have occurred to a group of heterosexual men playing games with other heterosexual men to include homosexual prostitutes (or even heterosexual male prostitutes), it would have been particularly daring to publish a game with that as a playable feature, far more daring than heterosexual female prostitutes.
So had homosexuals (if not in any positive way)
So, that would be after Midnight Cowboy, then…
I don’t dispute this at all. Of course, they could just not have included prostitutes at all.
FWIW, didn’t White Dwarf publish a ‘Houri’ class in 1979 that explicitly (a) included a ‘gigolo’ option and (b) made reference to homosexuality?
If I had to pick three words to describe D&D, I don’t think I could do much better than adolescent power fantasy. Personally, I think a little idiocy is perfectly fine.
Fair enough. I’ve got no objections to pointing out the flaws. While I don’t think the random harlot table was that bad, it’s not like I want to see it return to the DMG.
I think people are still trying to figure out how to come with the terms with the things they love from the past that contain problematic elements today. And I do think a lot of people who call it out are attemping to erase its existence, but pointing it out in order to avoid the same problematic elements today is fine.
I don’t think most Americans had access to White Dwarf in the 1970s. A quick glance online shows the Houri was a female only magic-user class that relied on charm and seduction to get things done. They had access to such first level spells as Kiss of Healing, Kiss of Sleeping, and Charm Person. Apparently they even had a Seduction Table!