Yeah, our experiences greatly differ. Aside from like, introductory games for new players, I can’t say I ever played a game that was simplistic good vs evil. And settings that aren’t Greyhawk or Faerun (Eberron, Planescape, Dark Sun, and many others) don’t really lend themselves to simple good vs evil plots anyways.
Dark Sun had ziggurats and one of the cities was named Tyr. It wasn’t a fantasy version of Gilgamesh or anything, but the Fertile Crescent was certainly an influence.
That article states that…
[Gary Gygax] believed that different races of people were biologically distinct and capable of different things in life.
…and its cite seems to be an article in Dragon Magazine written by Gygax and about how he might potentially integrate half-ogres into his game. An I missing something? Because that’s a heck of a claim to make based on what what’s linked as evidence.
Sometimes when Gygax’s name comes up I think of that quote, “Count no man happy until the end is known” as Solon told Croesus. Some of what Gygax has written has been reevaluated in recent years, and it does not place him in the best light. A lot of people these days interpret AD&D’s races with their attribute modifications as racial essentialism, which, understandably, rankles people the wrong way today. But, as Gygax himself said in the article you linked to, he considered D&D to be a game first, and it’s necessary to maintain some balance.
Gygax was referencing Colonel John Shivington of the US Army who said, “Damn any man who sympathizes with Indians! … I have come to kill Indians, and believe it is right and honorable to use any means under God’s heaven to kill Indians. … Kill and scalp all, big and little; nits make lice.”
In case it’s not clear, Gygax is defending the idea that a Lawful Good Paladin could murder women and children orcs because “nits make lice.” Just as Shivington murdered women and children at the Sandcreek Massacre. Which is another reason why people wanted to get rid of what they saw as racial essentialism, alignment, or the idea that any race is always evil (thought most are okay with demons or mind flayers always being evil).
OK, yeah, that’s an ugly idea.
Sure, but I’m specifically wondering what’s up with the PBS article making the claim that Gygax thought different (human) races were capable/limited of different things and using a column about how to balance half-ogres as its linked citation.
I see your point. I read the article, and it seems to me that Gygax was quite clear that he was talking about a game and the need to balance the different races for game play purposes. I do think some younger people interpret things from the game in the most uncharitable light possible, and likely the author came to their conclusion, in part, because of other things Gygax has written. Though you’re right, just from that article alone I wouldn’t argue Gygax felt that way about human beings.
And just to be clear, when I say I think some younger people interpret old material in an uncharitable light, I don’t mean to suggest that all criticisms are invalid. Sometimes I agree with them.
As mentioned above, the key difference is that Gygax, a wargamer at core, saw D&D purely as a game, whereas modern players - especially younger ones - see it as a form of self-expression.
I think this D&D race discussion conflates 2 different things:
The problematic continuities between racist propaganda and D&D depictions of humanish monsters
Aversion to Species Essentialism
I mean, I have no problem with Mind Flayers being irredeemable.
Re Eurocentrism . As a middle aged white english guy my mind is an cornucopia of pseudo-tolkein sub-gygaxian quasi-medieaval imagery and tropes to set fantasy rpg adventures in. Dropping non-europeans into this feels tokenistic. Yet my imaginings of non-european medieaval fantasy settings alternate between barren dullness and utter cringe.I can escape this dilemma with a gonzo setting like Judges Guild Wilderlands is the Fallen Empire but … i like the medieaval.
They’re not separate. The racist depiction of human-ish races is rooted in species essentialism. “All drow are irredeemable evil baddy bads, and the rare few good ones are shunned from society” is both of those things.
I think a lot of that has to do with a lack of western exposure and fundamental cultural differences. Chinese mythology is extraordinarily rich, but 9 times out of 10 the only fantastical stories that make it to us are the same stories about Sun Wukong. When I read sci-fi like The Three-Body Problem or 1Q84, I always feel like I’m shifted 15 degrees in the wrong direction to really appreciate the work. European fantasy is comfortable and draws on tropes already embedded in our culture. Fantasy anchored in other traditions has three choices: assume knowledge and be difficult to penetrate, teach knowledge and be bloated and unwieldy, or avoid depth and be dull.
So is having Essentially Evil Demons and Devils Racist?
And that’s kind of where I sit. While I don’t view D&D as a war game, I do view it primarily as a game before anything else. It’s a rather unusual game in that it does have narrative, but the game part is just as important as the role playing.
These idea are connected. And I admit I find it odd that species essentialism bothers people. A gorilla is much larger and stronger than I’ll ever be, but these days people expect a 30 pound halfing to be just as strong as a 240 pound goliath.
I don’t either, but it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me why it’s okay for mind flayers to be always evil but not okay for orcs or hobgoblins. It’s not like WotC has to require mind flayers to use intelligent beings to reproduce, they could decide on something different and give us good mind flayers.
People have expressed a desire for non-European settings not just dropping non-Europeans into a pseudo European setting. (How many times can I use European in a sentence?) There was a game on Kickstarter in 2022 called Coyote & Crow that did rather well. It’s set in an alternative future where Europeans never colonized the New World. While I’ve enjoyed several non-European fantasy settings over the years, even for D&D, I do not believe they sell as well, and for whatever reason, WotC really isn’t in the business of selling settings these days. Even the new Spelljammer release isn’t really a setting.
Coyote and Crow is a really cool idea, but a friend loaned me her copy, and I couldn’t make it through the manual. The setting comes across as nearly utopian in a way that doesn’t allow for much fun adventuring, IMO.
That said, there’s a wealth of non-European fantasy being written today as novels. If you’re interested in fantasy based on African cultures, consider Nnedi Okorafor or Marlon James or NK Jemisin or Evan Winter. For Middle Eastern culture, consider Tasha Suri or SA Chakraborty or Djèlí Clark. For Asian culture, there’s RF Kuang or Ken Liu or Fonda Lee. For Native American culture, consider Rebecca Roanhorse or Stephen Graham Jones or Darcie Little Badger. I can recommend all these authors; they range from diverting (Fonda Lee) to masterful (NK Jemisin).
Fantasy literature is making huge strides to move beyond Tolkien clones, and there’s a lot of room for games to catch up. Even though I’m not a fan of Coyote & Crow, I’m super glad it’s out there.
I’m not going down the rabbit hole of “is this discrete component of D&D racist?” because that’s not what this conversation is about. I know it’s a really long thread, but we’ve been around and around the nuance about D&D’s approach to alignment and how it’s contributed to systemic issues.
Orcs, giants, goblins, kobolds, etc. are, on some fundamental levels, like humans. They reproduce by mating with others of their species, which produces babies of their species, who are born (or hatched, for the kobolds) ignorant and nearly helpless, and learn language and skills as they’re taught and raised by their parents and other members of their culture. And so you can imagine that, even if most orcs are evil, an orc infant who’s raised in a different environment, with loving role models, could turn out OK.
Most of the “irredeemable” creatures, by contrast, don’t have any of that: They come into existence, when at all, already fully-formed, with all of their knowledge, attitudes, and abilities, and that process of coming into existence itself often involves the forced suffering of other sophonts. You can’t have a mindflayer that’s “raised differently”, because they’re never raised at all. You could, in principle, have a creature with abilities similar to those of a mindflayer, but without the evil parts, but such a creature would be sufficiently different that it couldn’t be a mindflayer.
Dragons are a sort of middle ground, here: They’re mortal bodily creatures, with free will, and not inherently dependent on suffering for their existence, but they still never really have an “infancy”: A newly-hatched dragon is already powerful enough to be an apex predator in most ecosystems, and has human-level intellect and speech. They’re born with an alignment, but can change.
They are also all humanoid. I mean, maybe that shouldn’t matter, but it does. We look at an orc and we see a distorted human being.
So are mind flayers and most demons or devils, though. Not the ingame term “Humanoid” but they certainly are two armed bipeds with a human-like body plan.
The thing about Mind Flayers and other Aberrations, in my view, is that they’re fundamentally alien. Their thought processes are so different from that of humans and humanoids that there is virtually no common ground between them. In fact, I wouldn’t call them “evil”, except in a purely descriptive sense - if they hurt people, it’s not out of hatred or malice, but rather a side effect of their own unfathomable agenda.
Demons and devils, on the other hand, are evil - but they’re demons and devils because they’re evil, not the other way around. If they ever stopped being evil, they’d stop being demons and devils.
Huh, demons and devils, yes, you’re right. I forgot about them. Mind flayers? I guess i don’t know what they look like.