So, are you suggesting that homosexuality and homosexual prostitution had exactly the same cultural status as heterosexuality and heterosexual prostitution in 1979 in popular American culture?
I don’t disagree with your overall argument, but it’s a 2022 argument. The cultural Zeitgeist was very different in 1979. Or do you think that’s not true?
No.
I’m suggesting references to homosexuality and homosexual prostitution weren’t completely banished from popular culture then. Could even win 3 Oscars ten years before.
The biggest problem with the Random Whore Table is that there’s no context where it makes sense. If you’re in a cheap wood-alcohol bar in the slums, you might encounter a Slovenly Trull or a Cheap Trollop, but you won’t find an Expensive Doxy or a Haughty Courtesan. If you’re at the Duke’s Grand Ball, you might find the Doxy or Courtesan, but not the Trull or Trollop. What the game really ought to have had was a Dive Bar Encounter Table, that included the Slovenly Trull, but also the Smelly Beggar, the Belligerent Drunk, and the Opportunistic Cutpurse, and a Society Function table, that included the Haughty Courtesan, but also the Arrogant Noble, the Upwardly-Mobile Merchant, and the Unproven Bravo.
I don’t think anyone would disagree there. But Midnight Cowboy, The Boys in the Band, and Deliverance aren’t works of fiction that had a lot of influence on D&D.
So, not really a relevant point when it comes to D&D then in 1979.
A lot of the random encounter tables were like that, if I recall correctly.
It’s not as if random tables always made a lot of sense. But you might run into an expensive doxy or haughty courtesan on the rough side of a town for a myriad of reasons. Maybe she’s there to settle an old score, maybe she visiting a loved one, maybe she’s going through the bad neighborhood because she doesn’t want to show her face in the good one for some reason. It’s up to the DM to figure out why she’s there.
OK, sure, you can contrive some reason why a courtesan would be in the slums, but you’re not going to get there via “The party encounters a prostitute. Let me roll to see what kind”. And certainly, the relative probabilities aren’t going to be the same for all of them: Trollops are much more common than courtesans in the slums, and courtesans are much more common than trollops at royal balls. The proper way to deal with that would be for the Dive Bar Random Encounter Table to have an entry of “00: Slumming Upper-Cruster”, and then instruct you to roll on the Society Function Random Encounter Table for the details.
The random encounter tables were dumb. That’s why the satirical Hackmaster rulebook was absolutely stuffed with ludicrous tables, some of which had thousands of entries.
As I said above, this kind of problem was pretty common in the original books. I think there was a very different concept of how the game worked. A lot of these tables, I think, weren’t meant to necessarily be followed by rote. I think the expectation was that the Dungeon Master would do a lot of improvisation and roll dice really when E wanted to for whatever reason. When we played as kids, we certainly used the random generation tables as more of a source for understanding the breadth of possibilities overall rather than always to roll and then figure out how the die result would fit into the game.
There was a lot more burden on the D.M. in that version of the game than in modern versions, which do a lot of the consideration and planning for you. The D.M. was expected to be able to come up with a lot of stuff off the cuff.
I think I was reading that Gygax imagined that a campaign could have something like 40 regular player-characters. The idea wasn’t that they would all be attending every session, but rather that the D.M. was expected to come up with a scenario based on whoever decided to show up to play that evening and make it fit into the ongoing campaign.
Well… anyone following the dungeon master’s guide that closely would not overlook the instructions on the previous page:
Since when do people read the DMG?
It’s been awhile since I read any Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, or Conan, or the other texts on which D&D was built–but I vaguely recall sex workers being portrayed pretty often, and not exactly in a feminist, sex-positive way. The only portrayal of same-sex romance I can remember from the source books was Frodo and Samwise.
I suspect Gary thought he was being very mature and sophisticated by including that kind of table alongside “magical properties of gemstones” and descriptions of the hateful race-mixing that swarthy orcs engaged in.
But they do speak to the awareness of, and representation of, homosexuals “in popular culture”
I think it’s a relevant point that 10 years later D&D doesn’t make any reference to homosexuality at all, yes.
<Legolas arches his eyebrow at you, Gimli merely glares>
I’m missing the salient point here regarding the lack of male prostitutes in the the 1st edition of the AD&D Dungeon Master’s Guide.
What is that relevant point?
There’s a lesbian couple in one of the Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories. IIRC, Fafhrd and Gray Mouser are trying to fence the proceeds of their last mission, and after a variety of shenanigans, they both end up ripped off by their respective fences. The story ends with the two fences, both women, in bed together gloating over having got the upper hand on the heroes.
The original Forgotten Realms box set had the earliest mention of homosexuality in a D&D product that I’m aware of, and it’s not great: Elminster’s scribe, Lhaeo, is described as a “lisping man-lover.” It’s all a put-on, though, and he’s actually a very heterosexual prince in hiding.
Relevant to what? I’m struggling to understand your point, unless it’s that gaming culture has been terribly uninclusive until pretty recently, and there’s still lots of work left. And I don’t think very many people (here) disagree with that.
Yes, that’s my point.
And yet I got pushback when I called the harlots subtable “sucky”, and some people do consider it not “so bad”. And no agreement to my other point that the real reason it was put there was for cheap tittilation.
Okay, you win. Gaming in 1979 was a lot less inclusive than it is in 2022.
Is that what you got pushback for? I think you’re getting a lot of satic because you seemed genuinely confused over why they didn’t include rent boys and hustlers in an AD&D product from 1979. A game like Thirsty Sword Lesbians would never have been produced in 1979. Things have changed since then.
You tell me, you’re the one doing most of it.
If that’s what you thought, you were mistaken. What about my post in particular indicates confusion, rather than snark?
I have no illusions as to why the people who would go on to stuff their game’s artwork with bikini-clad Playmate clones would be developmentally-arrested heteronormative creeps.
Yes, I’m aware. So I don’t understand why pointing that out gets flak.