Meme - "Cw blatant racism
I'm in genuine awe that this shit came out for THIS edition of D&D holy shit
ROLEPLAYING AN ORC
Most orcs have been indoctrinated into a life of destruction and slaughter. But unlike creatures who by their very nature are evil, such as gnolls, it's possible that an orc, if raised outside its culture, could develop a limited capacity for empathy, love, and compassion. No matter how domesticated an orc might seem, its blood lust flows just beneath the surface. With its instinctive love of battle and its desire to prove its strength, an orc trying to live within the confines of civilization is faced with a difficult task."
Why is it okay to be racist and have negative "stereotypes" about gnolls?
Comment: "I realized the real response to this should be "You just don't understand fantasy gaming" like the Cleric in D&D is alot like a Christian priest from the middle ages, yet ultimately he isn't."
D&D: WotC Adds Three New Types Of Drow, Retcons Drow Lore - "Wizards of the Coast is trying to reckon with their forty-odd year history and the implications that all drow are evil just because, or even that all drow follow Lolth and are all on board with being evil, with the “lone exception” of Drizzt, aka the Model Minority. It’s great to see them moving away from the harmful stereotype while at the same time opening new doors to explore what drow are and how they fit into the canon of the Forgotten Realms. I hope that this is just the first step, and that the days of “all evil” races are gone. Orcs, as written now, are always evil savages, and that’s neither fun nor particularly satisfying writing. But with this move to a more broad, diverse perspective of drow, we’re getting an idea of what a more inclusive future of Dungeons & Dragons could be like, and honestly, it’s about time."
Apparently you can't even "stereotype" imaginary characters
Dungeons & Dragons Officially Removes Negative Racial Ability Score Modifiers From Rules - "The Volo's Guide to Monsters errata was particularly important in that it removed the negative ability score modifiers for playable kobolds and orcs. While kobolds originally had a -2 modifier to their Strength score, and orcs had a -2 modifier to their Intelligence, the updated rules remove those modifiers entirely from the game. Additionally, the errata also removes the orc's "Menacing" trait with the "Primal Intuition" trait, which grants players proficiency in two of the following options - Animal Handling, Insight, Intimidation, Medicine, Nature, Perception, and Survival. The updated rules reflect previous comments by the Dungeons & Dragons team that promised better representation and a movement towards giving the player characters individualism as opposed to forcing them to fit within cultural stereotypes within the game's lore"
Triggerhappy: Wheelchair accessible - "Dungeons & Dragons, in it’s recent wave of nonsense, is releasing “wheelchair accessible dungeons”, which has obviously generated quite an amount of mockery among players due to how ridiculous a concept is to fight with a wheelchair in a fantasy world in which even a level 1 spell can cure you of your disability, or the idea that evil goblin lords would make their dungeons compliant with disability regulations XD."
Man Who Claimed Dungeon & Dragons' Depiction Of Orcs Is Racist Admits "D&D Is Overwhelmingly Not My Game of Choice" - "Quinn Welsh-Wilson, the person who started the recent controversy surrounding orcs’ depiction in Dungeons & Dragons recently admitted that the roleplaying game isn’t even their game of choice... Not only would Welsh-Wilson accuse Dungeons & Dragons’ description of orcs of racism, but he would also accuse Professor of Psychology Chris Ferguson of being a “slavery defender.” The accusation came after Ferguson penned a piece in Psychology Today arguing against the idea that Orcs are racist... As Twitter user @Lyde15 points out, Welsh-Wilson appears to be the latest in a string of individuals who decide to attack hobbies and franchises that they don’t really care about in order to radically alter those hobbies and franchises in order to adhere to their vision of what they should be. And we’ve documented a number of these individuals here at Bounding Into Comics. Probably the most prominent are Star Wars creators. Recently Star Wars The High Republic author Daniel José Older promised that he would introduce more gender nonbinary characters into Star Wars canon.Marvel Comics has also fallen prey to this ideology. They let the wolves inside the hen house and they are now creating characters named Snowflake and Safespace... Even once successful franchises like Terminator and Charlie’s Angels have been beaten down and killed as seen with their recent box office returns just last year.In order to combat individuals like Welsh-Wilson who decide to attack franchises they don’t even appear to care about, journalist Sophia Narwitz called for gatekeeping of hobbies and franchises... Narwitz would add on Twitter, “Gatekeeping keeps your hobby healthy. The last thing you want is people like this invading it. Pass it on.” These attacks on hobbies and franchises don’t seem to be slowing down. They appear to be going full steam ahead, revenue and profits be damned."
No, Orcs Aren't Racist - "If this all sounds like a tempest in a teapot, it kind of is, but it harkens back to days in the '80s and '90s when the Dungeons and Dragons game was the target of a moral panic, mainly promulgated by Christian conservatives who worried about the game promoting Satanism, suicide, psychosis, and violence. As we debate the racism of a race that doesn’t exist in the real world, it helps to revisit an exceptionally earnest 60 Minutes documentary segment from the '80s on Dungeons and Dragons. Today’s moral panic over race and racism in the game has strange moralistic echoes of the 1980s panic with the exception that, today, there aren’t any bodies of dead teenagers for moral entrepreneurs to point to... there is no evidence that playing Dungeons and Dragons or, for that matter, watching or reading Lord of the Rings contributes to racist attitudes and behaviors in real life. In fact, evidence suggests that playing Dungeons and Dragons is associated with positive moral development and improved socialization, not increases in racism. Generally, whether looking at action video games, 13 Reasons Why, even sexualization in media, the evidence suggests that fictional media portrayals simply don’t produce the kind of attitude or behavior changes society’s pearl-clutchers on right and left like to worry about. The idea that attitudes can shift from media to real-life is based on a theory called Cultivation Theory, but Cultivation Theory has had a rough road, evidence wise, even for news media. Put simply, there’s little empirical reason to suspect that playing Dungeons and Dragons or watching Lord of the Rings is associated with real-life racism... are orcs meant to be analogous for certain real-life races? The method of modern critical studies of media appears to be to scour the writings of an author for the worst possible thing they ever said and interpret this in the least generous way. Tolkien once wrote that orcs were “degraded and repulsive versions of the (to Europeans) least-lovely Mongol types." However, the qualifiers “to Europeans” and “least-lovely” seem critical even in this supposedly damning description. Moreover, Tolkien historically wrote against and rejected racialist views particularly as they emerged prior to WWII. There’s an entire deep dive into the origin of orcs (who, at least in part, seem tied to humanity and elves, rather than wholly separate from them), but the characterization of orcs as intentionally depicting the entirety of human cultures appears mistaken. Despite the one quote above, Tolkien generally disavowed the notion that orcs were intended to portray an actual human culture. Some might argue that the authors’ intent doesn’t matter (death of the author), but there’s an incoherence here, one can’t argue from the author’s letters to show intent, only to claim intent doesn’t matter when the larger evidence doesn’t fit the narrative. Essentially this question boils down to something of a Rorschach card: If you want to see racism in Tolkien’s orcs, you will; if you don’t, you won’t. Related to the third point, in Dungeons and Dragons, the depiction of orcs is entirely monstrous, with few clear references to any actual human culture. Indeed in the first edition of the game, they looked more pig-like than anything, and are portrayed wearing vaguely European-style armor and wielding European polearms. Orcs are generally (though not always) depicted as inherently evil. They’re one of many bad guy “races” in D&D. It’s this depiction of biological essentialism, that the moral virtues of a creature can be defined by its biological origin as a “race” that some progressives appear to object to.Race in the D&D game though is not used in the same manner as it is for anthropology among humans. The closest analogy for D&D “race” among hominids might be to consider Homo Sapiens and Neanderthals as separate “races,” biologically distinct hominids with some similar features... To appease the critical theorists on this score would require a massive scouring not only of the D&D game but of fiction, mythology, and folklore... If D&D or Lord of the Ring orcs are indulging tropes of an anthropological race, observers can’t seem to agree which race that is. As noted, initial concerns seemed to focus on Asians, but others suggest orcs may trope Africans. These inconsistent observations suggest some observers may be projecting their own stereotypes onto orcs. Is it fair to say “race is socially constructed” when the races exist entirely in fiction and that fiction set out to define them as biologically distinct species? Why stop with orcs? Is the portrayal of Martians as inherently bent on Earth invasion (whether in War of the Worlds or Bugs Bunny cartoons) “racist” in some way? Can you be racist toward a race that doesn’t exist? Many media critics seem to reflexively tie much that’s in fiction back to real-world phenomena, but I’m not sure that’s correct. Sometimes an orc is just an orc. Back in the '80s, the moral panicking of Christian conservatives did lead to self-censoring of the game as the game makers sought to remove demons and devils and anything else “Satanic” from the game to appease moral crusaders. Most players just kept including devils and demons anyway, and demons and devils eventually returned to the game officially. We can only hope that the makers of D&D have learned from this episode. First, giving in to moral bullying only rewards those moral bullies. And related, once something is identified as “problematic," those moral entrepreneurs’ appetites will only be whetted, and the list of “problematic” things will only grow exponentially. This is a mistake made by the makers of 13 Reasons Why when they removed the graphic suicide scene from their show. Granted, there may have been legitimate artistic reasons for either including or excluding the scene. But once it was released, removing it in response to moral outrage did nothing to appease critics and only damaged the credibility of Netflix as a guardian of free expression. The missed element of D&D is that depictions, as presented, are just guidelines anyway. There are multiple playable versions of the orc race in D&D now. Some of these already change the “inherently evil” narrative to other backstories and options. And the D&D game encourages flexibility. If a player wants to play a happy, peaceful, non-violent, well-intentioned lesbian orc wizard, they can.The moral pearl-clutching of Christian conservatives was ultimately a bad look. It’s a shame that progressivism seems so intent on repeating it... Issues like criminal justice or education reform would be instrumental in actually benefiting people’s lives. But the concern about the racism of non-existent races, particularly when there’s no evidence fantasy role-playing does harm, borders on self-caricature. Increasingly, critical theories resemble rigid ideologies that have jumped the rails, and whose main contribution to society is moral outrage, all the time. Often the very fact some people are outraged is considered evidence that the target is “problematic.” This argument is a strange tautology, a kind of Mobius loop of aggressive morality. “I’m offended by orcs because they are racist.” Well, how can you be sure they are racist? “They are racist because people find them offensive.” This negativity bias, the ability to filter anything through the worst possible lens, often as part of a kind of performative virtue, achieves very little other than to contribute to polarization in our society today. The irony is that often, the very people who claim to be concerned about race or gender will use race and gender to silence anyone who disagrees with their ideology (either because they are white or male or because black or brown people aren’t speaking with black or brown voices). The culture around this kind of discourse needs to be challenged, in large part because it does nothing to foster progress on race or gender issues. This kind of shrill hectoring and fun-policing, I’d argue, is exactly what made people get fatigued with the nonsense of some Christian conservatives when they spoke about Dungeons and Dragons, pornography or a host of other issues" The problem is that unlike in the 80s, today the moral bullies have infiltrated the institutions themselves Stop with the inclusivity! Only FAN GATEKEEPING can save our favorite nerd passions - from D&D to Star Wars - "The inclusivity experiment has failed and it’s time to admit that gatekeeping served a purpose. Let’s bring it back!If you missed the online discourse surrounding ‘fantasy racism’ this week, in which case you are in the most enviable of positions, the short version is that orcs are now racist caricatures and Dungeons & Dragons should be altered.Yes, society’s seemingly most miserable are at it again and, as has become the norm, they’re looking to ruin everyone’s fun by barging in and uprooting a game that is already decades old. At first glance it may just appear as if a bunch of internet woke-scolds with zero influence are whining, so why bother paying them notice, but if recent history is any indication, corporations are listening to the tantrum-throwing toddlers and, as a massive nerd myself, I’m sick of seeing my ‘culture’ getting decimated.Throughout the past few years, the media built and consumed by nerds has been tarnished and morphed beyond recognition, all to suit a very vocal minority who have zero respect for what came before. Magic: The Gathering allowed tournament rules to be altered so a ‘non-binary’ human could write political messages on their cards that targeted the artist of said cards. This of course followed massive online outrage after the company originally remained steadfast and said ‘no.’ Star Trek, a series known for its deeper philosophical messaging, is now lazy modern-day agitprop that’s core messaging breaks down into… The Federation are actually the bad guys because ‘Orange Man Bad’ and, Fascism, or something. Please clap for how deep we are! Meanwhile, other beloved franchises such as Star Wars are being handed off to directors who clearly despise its core fans. And this is only scratching the surface as video games, tabletop card and board games, television series, comics, and film, are being constricted to conform to a modern-day crowd that’ll turn on it on a dime, all because the white female to black female ratio is off by .02 percent.All the while, the people who helped such properties get to where they are, and who stuck with them through all the many ups and downs, they’re left at the wayside and called bigots because they disagree that D&D is a colonialist fantasy.I wish I was being hyperbolic, but consider Vampire: The Masquerade... as is to be expected, the fragile humans made of glass shattered at its existence and when a new fifth edition was announced a handful of years ago, the outrage machine was flipped on, and changes were forced by a woke media going out of its way to create intentionally bad PR. It went so far that the studio behind it was gutted and production handed off to another team, all because they chose to address controversial modern-day issues. Spelled out further, a game where you can drain the blood of babies and gruesomely kill anything, was attacked for ‘controversial passages’ in its rulebook. It now carries with it ‘content warnings.’ This is where the inclusivity experiment must end. Everything cannot be made for everyone, no matter how much some people try. Popular media with decades of history should not be trashed just so individuals who didn’t even like it in the first place can feel at home. And since most companies don’t have the balls to stand up to internet outrage, it’s up to long-term fans to shut down those who want to forcefully enact change. So, for as much backlash as the woke crowd is already receiving, they need to get even more of it. These people don’t deserve to feel welcome in our hobbies. There is no place for them here.On the same hand, I don’t belong in theirs. If they create a new property built around stopping orc racism and snagging the land back from colonizers using the power of rainbows and hugs, who am I to barge in and demand they include more death and murder? That would be a game that caters to them, and they deserve to have that, just as we deserve to have our D&D with orcs as they have always been." Dungeons and Dragons fans call for a removal of the term "race" from the game
