Obligatory:
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Someone’s having an interesting day.
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Exactly.
So “calling out” fantasy RPG games (which are fiction) as “racist” or “colonialist” is ridiculous. It’s a motherfucking game. People are reading their own emotional baggage into something that is, frankly, a non-issue.
HOW DARE games (fiction) make certain races (aka species) inherently evil, or low stats, or unintelligent, or weak. That’s racist! … No, it’s idiotic is what it is.
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Being inclusive is a major theme of discworld. Is Gurps discworld still around?
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This. From around 2000-2007 WotC commissioned a series of Forgotten Realms novels changing the story and status of the drow. They tried to retcon things into there having been a race of perfectly normal surface-dwelling dark elves who were cursed by a demon, then driven underground in an Elven civil war (I’m sure I’m misremembering lots of details), and that’s how the racism began; the stories were partly about the good members of Drow society reclaiming their heritage and having to fight violent prejudice to do so. I expect a lot more changes in the future.
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I admit I always assumed they called them “races” and not “species” because mixed parentage was possible. I also do generally prefer games and fiction that subvert the one race/one culture trope in various ways, because the base-rules-as-written often take it ridiculously far and require a very thoughtful DM to improve on. Even beyond that, the word itself is a problematic carryover from older editions that I’d be happy to see changed. Although I don’t think the elves, orcs, dwarves, or humans would appreciate being categorized as subspecies of anything. Harry Potter fandom calls all the sapient lifeforms “beings,” I think. That might work.
At the same time, I do think there are stronger reasons for culture to divide somewhat along “fantasy-racial” lines than there are for any real humans. If you live for many centuries, or can see in pitch darkness but not bright sunlight, or need half as much sleep, or are born with specific magical abilities, or have wings and claws and fiery breath, that is going to seriously change how your culture evolves. It’ll influence what metaphors you build your ideals on, what types of governance are stable, and so on.
One thing I think the best fantasy (and sci-fi) authors often do well is think about these kinds of things and explore how the world got to be the way it is, which isn’t generally a good place (since fantasy stories usually involve big crises).
Personally I think having a safe space to explore those questions is important. Sometime in the next century or two we may very well have the technological ability to self-modify into beings at least as different from our current selves as elves and dwarves would be, and it might be good to think about what that means before we get there. For one thing, it makes real-world racism and other forms of stereotyping, oppression, and social injustice just that much more obviously absurd. Like Terry Pratchett said:
“Racism was not a problem on the Discworld, because—what with trollies and dwarfs and so on—speciesism was more interesting. Black and white lived in perfect harmony and ganged up on green.”
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Is it safe to post again? 
Something else i find somewhat problematic of D&D is that there are plenty of living beings that within the setting they are known to be sentient but aren’t treated (usually) with much respect. As i mentioned in a previous post in here we encountered a monstrous spider race that our DM was setting up for us to easily kill, but we found out some rangers had been experimenting on it and torturing it so of course this creature was angry. We decided to appeal to its conscience and struck up a deal to treat it with respect, and set up a holiday where once a month the town we hail from goes to its forest and offers it a pig as a gesture of friendship. With our group its kind of become a running joke where we bring up Pig Day and how we’re buddies with The Spider King.
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The whole IDEA of “alignment” as an inherent, detectable trait that influences behavior is unrealistic. People’s behaviors are good or evil to varying degree and most of us conduct a mix of them. Much of fiction relies on “othering” people by declaring them “evil” and therefore deserving of death. And if you’re going to envision a world where violence is a good solution, regarding others as “evil” makes things easier, whether you are running murder hobos through an RPG or carrying an Glock on you trip to Walmart.
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You might also check out Harnmaster from Columbia Games. You could also check out lythia.com, which is the HarnForum home. I’m sure plenty of folk would be happy to discuss the various weaknesses, diseases, etc.
I for once had a very enjoyable-to-play priest (think man-of-the-cloth, NOT of the D&D variety; no/low magic world) that had crippling alcoholism as a disease (and a minor birth defect causing one arm to be shorter than the other). He was a stand up guy, always backed the party, good to have around in a fight. But that time he found a couple skins of wine during an adventure, sucked them down and became staggeringly / near black-out drunk causing the rest of the party to have to deal with his problems while also trying to deal with the adventure was classic role-playing time.
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Tax the Elves!
So, as is my nature, I’ve read the flagged posts. And I agree that there’s a lot of flaggable content in there, but they also implied what is (to me, at least) an interesting question (that has undoubtedly been answered somewhere, and I’d be happy to be pointed to that answer).
Clearly the various races of orcs, elves, dwarves, etc., in D&D and similar High Fantasy (or at least High Concept Fantasy) fiction and roleplay have adopted tropes and stereotypes (often via Tolkien) that make them pretty plainly racist if you spend ten or twenty seconds thinking about it. But is there room for a fantasy or science-fiction author to imagine and portray a species of beings so antithetical to what we think of as generalized norms (e.g., being against the indiscriminate murder of thinking beings) that most reasonable people would describe them as evil, without the fiction or game being inherently racist?
Of course, one problem I’m running into is that the potential examples that spring to mind and that I can think of are from the fiction of authors whose thinking is irredeemably tainted by the ugliest kinds of prejudice–like HP Lovecraft, or maybe Orson Scott Card. But to the extent we can set aside his 100% bullshit personal views for the moment (and I totally understand if we can’t), Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones (or perhaps the versions of them seen through the lens of later authors) seem like the sort of archetype I’m thinking of. They’re beings with motives so opaque to human experience and so antithetical to what we (rightly or wrongly) consider universal norms, perhaps even beings driven by biological imperatives that are incompatible with continuing human life, that regardless of their actual motives, we would consider them evil. As we get closer and closer to humanoid forms, presumably the author’s inherent biases are likely to start creeping in, and so maybe it’s impossible to imagine and portray a race of, say, elves that are irredeemably evil but also free of the stereotype. Certainly a lot easier when the baddies are interdimensional multitentacled monsters of immense power and unknowable motive.
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Big, big shoutout to GURPS here, with no alignments, and actually an easy way to break physical traits from cultural ones. The whole Advantages, Disadvantages and Quirks helps to inspire role playing over roll-playing. Fantasy “races” are just starting points, the character can deviate as much as the player wants.
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Bah! This is the whole thing with Neal Stephenson all over again.
If you have characters whose traits and destinies are decided by who their parents are, that’s the problem. It doesn’t matter whether you call it “race” or “ancestry and culture” or “family background”; it’s all the same thing. You’re saying that people can be understood by knowing that they belong to some assigned category, without knowing anything about them as an individual. Applied to real life, there is no version of this idea that isn’t racist.
Technically, in fictional world-building, it’s a bit different. If I say all orcs are crude and violent, or that a certain bloodline is destined to rule over everyone else, then that’s an actual fact, because in fiction I get to make up the facts. And if I need a one-dimensional antagonist to move some plot along, it saves time if I can use a stereotype, rather than spending pages establishing why a particular character has all the traits of a bridge troll.
But to be clear, this is still racism. It’s only acceptable in the way the Nazi race science of dog shows is acceptable: no one cares about dehumanising dogs or bridge trolls. (Except PETA I assume).
Like in real life, the fix for racial determinism in D&D and other SF isn’t to find politer ways of couching it. The fix is to understand what racist worldbuilding looks like, and then decide where it is and isn’t worth it. Which it usually isn’t, in either moral or storytelling terms (see: Klingon Space Trek episodes). And it’s never good to practice thinking the way a racist thinks about people.
OTOH
In Breath of the Wild, Bokoblins are the best characters in spite of how they’re Othered as subhuman arrow fodder. You can’t talk to them, and they will just bother you until you kill them, but by the end of the game they’re also not a threat, so you start to notice the little details of their lives, like how they don’t have a lot of teeth or clothes, and one day after you’ve easily murdered everyone in their sad camp, you kick open their “treasure chest” to find, like, a rusty shield and two apples, and you suddenly realise ohhhhh right I’m the monster. These people were just riding horses, sitting round campfires and getting excited whenever they found a fish, until Link showed up carrying 60 expensive weapons and feeling threatened.
Now that’s good racist world-building!
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Mod note: Cleaned up this topic.
To be clear, pointing out that certain races and constructs were intentionally created that way is a valid point, but the idea that the reality of that fact is immutable or beyond criticism obviously is not.
Non-Mod-Note:
Many evil races in several fantasy universes I can think of were stolen from a good race and twisted into an evil one. Whether or not that “happened” from a lore perspective isn’t really the problem, of course - it’s that these “twistings” so often have racist underpinnings in what that transformation was, or the cultural effects of that action have historically or culturally racist foundations.
It’s one thing to say "I created this evil race in my universe to be a universal enemy/antagonist/villian, but it’s a whole other thing to realize “hey, how come so many of these evil races, cultures, and actions have consistent and repeating racial stereotypes that so closely represent IRL racist beliefs?”
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This might have been fun to look at when I was creating my first (and so far, only) D&D character, a high elf who was raised by halflings. Still, I don’t think the racial traits ended up being a problem- they were almost all physical attributes which made sense because he was still, regardless of his upbringing, an elf, and hence agile, able to see in the dark, and able to resist charm and sleep spells because of his fey ancestry. I just added halfling to the list of known languages (and still included elvish, because wouldn’t you, if you were an elf and had a century in which to study before you reached adulthood?) and made him more laid-back, friendly and appreciative of a good meal than your usual elf. The Ancestry and Culture thing might have been interesting to consider if I’d had it at the time, but it was hardly necessary- D&D is a very flexible system, even when you’re following the core rules closely.
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Part of what I see the issue is that cultures that are seen as uncivilized are barbaric and bloodthirsty, and how coincidental that a good number of the antagonistic peoples in d&d are non-white. While the fair skinned ones are civilized and blessed. That’s the racist thing. Sure someone can write a totally reasonable backstory for why orcs and drow have been baddies, within the cannon that makes sense but they written to be that way and it shows the bias the writer has for tribalist cultures and non-whites.
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It would be interesting to know and understand the mythological origin of these “race” distinctions. Why did Norse mythology have Ice Giants and Dwarves? Why did the Greeks have Skiapods and Cyclops? Was this partly an impulse to see people from different regions as “other”? Was it a mythological vestige from a time when there were Neanderthals?
The reason I ask is that it seems profoundly weird that there are “races” at all in D&D and its origins seem to be directly traceable to the presence of “races” European mythology. While Tolkien adopted this mythology as a source of fiction, part of the Nazi imagination seemed determined to reify it. In order to overcome that tendency, it would be nice to know whether it is just an accident of the mythologies involved or if there is some human tendency to create mythologies that separate the actors into different “races”. Certainly it seems helpful not to separate out and essentialize different kinds of sentient beings in our play.
I’m interested in the idea that everything in fiction can be mapped onto the real work and that it must be thus mapped.
Because over the last 400 years people have been interpreting Shakespeare, and given that PHDs are still being granted to people studying his texts, there is still more possible analysis. Those studies have found many, many possible ways to map those texts onto the real world. Those texts have been constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed and examined and still the cows haven’t come home. The texts haven’t changed. The events, social mores, and cultural shifts of the passing centuries have driven the differing critiques of them.
So insisting that if one reader/player sees a given agreement between the text and our reality that is the way that text must be seen seems reductionist to me.
Yes, unconscious biases will creep into created content. Yes, examining those biases is essential on a personal level. But fiction is just that-fiction. Seeing the societal and cultural biases expressed in fiction is revealing. Not to allow fiction to explore ideas that are difficult or unsavory is to limit exactly what fantasy and SF aim to do. Would LOTR be half as engrossing if it was written as a WWII story set in Europe? Beyond JRRT’s linguistic obsessions, as written the story is a metaphor- and what that metaphor maps to can and will change over time.
All politics is personal, all responses to fiction are personal. Asking the question “why are these changes seen as necessary?” is not, in and of itself wrong. In fact, without doing so we can’t begin to examine what problems exist. Dismissing the question reflexively is short sighted and narrow minded.
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Biologically defined, species are a group that can interbreed and produce viable offspring. It’s not really been addressed, so if Half elves or half orc are fertile, then Elves, Orcs and Humans are the same species.
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