This guy's not a gamer, he's an "Intellectual Hobbyist".  
He plays 4e and Sorceror.
His game design blog is filled with ideas for "conflict resolution".  
His wife is a paranormal harlequin romance novelist.  
He's never gotten a blow job from a woman without both parties carefully considering the power dynamics involved.  
He's the least interesting GM in the world.

The OSR needs this guy like it needs the Fatal body part tables.

Quote from: JimLotFP;477722I wonder how this guy would react if he sets up a culture and home of some humanoid cast explicitly as oppressed minority (or better yet, actually uses a real-life oppressed people appropriate to the setting) in order to "show how disgusting the genocidal viewpoint is," and a player still treats it like Keep on the Borderlands?

I imagine lots of tears involved...and therapists.

I don't think there is a problem with "All Orcs are chaotic evil".  I think the problem with this debate that I've seen when it comes up in the past is that everyone seems to get caught up arguing about the concept.  The problem comes when in order to characterise this chaotic evil race designers or GM draw upon elements of real world cultures, or stereotypes about real world cultures.

In the situation of a small frontier town being attacked by Orcs, it may well be hard for the DM, creating things on the fly, not to draw upon half remembered sterotypes of natives american plunderers.

It also that role-playing games have an inherently deconstructive element.  One can read Lord of the Rings without ever wondering if Orcs have children and if they are inherently evil too, you can just accept the narrative as given.  But, in a game, players are going to do the unexpected and periphery elements, such as whether Orcs have children, are going to need answers.  


The real dick move here is if the DM isn't clear.  i.e he acts as if the Orcs are inherently evil creatures as the players may expect, and then a la, it turns out that they are just badly misunderstood and the players have been pandering to in game racist stereotypes.  Or vice versa, if the players seem to think the Orcs are meant to be an example of racist misunderstanding than the DM needs to quickly clarify that the opinions NPCs hold about them in the game are meant to be objectively real.

Quote from: CRKrueger;477724This guy's not a gamer, he's an "Intellectual Hobbyist".  
He plays 4e and Sorceror.
His game design blog is filled with ideas for "conflict resolution".  
His wife is a paranormal harlequin romance novelist.  
He's never gotta a blow job from a woman without both parties carefully considering the power dynamics involved.  
He's the least interesting GM in the world.

The OSR needs this guy like it needs the Fatal body part tables.

The RPG hobby needs this guy like it needs a hole in the head.

I always thought Wizards and Evil gods make orcs out of fungus to bother humans.

Seriously. I've never really encountered the idea that orcs were people or had free will. We always knew they were monsters.

The idea of killing a bunch of orcs, later to discover they were the one tribe of good orcs, has been a running joke in gaming circles around here, but never taken seriously.

I'm with JM on this on. Monsters are monsters and people are people.

I think the man quoted in the original post needs to get his head on straight. Orcs aren't the place to start fighting fantasy about racism, Drow are.

"Don't judge me by the color of my skin."

Quote from: Cranewings;477731I always thought Wizards and Evil gods make orcs out of fungus to bother humans.

Seriously. I've never really encountered the idea that orcs were people or had free will. We always knew they were monsters.

The idea of killing a bunch of orcs, later to discover they were the one tribe of good orcs, has been a running joke in gaming circles around here, but never taken seriously.

I'm with JM on this on. Monsters are monsters and people are people.

I think the man quoted in the original post needs to get his head on straight. Orcs aren't the place to start fighting fantasy about racism, Drow are.

"Don't judge me by the color of my skin."

During a run through of G1, the group got down to the dungeon level and ran in to some orcs locked up in the prison area.  The orcs, seeing that they might well be freed, were all to eager to point out the "trap" of a cell containing skeletons wearing suspiciously expensive looking jewelry.  The orcs gesture and smile at the nearby cell and tell the first character they see (the Ranger): "We harp yu!  No go!  It trap!" whereupon the ranger opens their cell door and makes orc cutlets, all the while they're begging for their lives.

It's pretty much a running joke with the group now.  "Don't let Richard talk to anyone.  His character's liable to stab them."

I went back and skimmed a little more.  This made me laugh:

"When you get to white box D&D, the DMs role changes"

No it fucking well doesn't and the OOP is a dumb cunt and that line proves it.  THERE ISN'T ANY FUCKING DUNGEON MASTER IN CHAINMAIL.  No...no, deep breath, it's a troll, IHBT, there's no way someone can be that stupid...

I blame it all on GLEE.

Oh Nos, a Bully!!!

Quote from: a cocksmockIt's one of the core tenants of OSR

Tenets, you pretentious semi-literate fuckstick.

And anyway it's not.

Didn't this guy read Unearthed Arcana? The gods cast lots for the lands their peoples would inhabit. The dwarves received the lot that let them live in the deep mountains, the elves the green forests, the men the lot that should let them live in any place with work, and so on. Then the other gods turned to Gruumsh and said "haha! there is no place for your peoples!"

And Gruumsh was angered, and the earth shook, and he took his great spear and plunged it into the plains, crying, "my people shall live here!" and then into the mountains, "and here!" and the forests, "and here!"

And this is why the orcs war endlessly to destroy and conquer all. They're looking for lebensraum.

If you're going to get offended at an imaginary mythology about an imaginary race, at least get it right, you cocksmock. Killing orcs is like killing Nazis: fun and amusing.

Quote from: Kyle Aaron;477743Tenets, you pretentious semi-literate fuckstick.

And anyway it's not.

Didn't this guy read Unearthed Arcana? The gods cast lots for the lands their peoples would inhabit. The dwarves received the lot that let them live in the deep mountains, the elves the green forests, the men the lot that should let them live in any place with work, and so on. Then the other gods turned to Gruumsh and said "haha! there is no place for your peoples!"

And Gruumsh was angered, and the earth shook, and he took his great spear and plunged it into the plains, crying, "my people shall live here!" and then into the mountains, "and here!" and the forests, "and here!"

And this is why the orcs war endlessly to destroy and conquer all. They're looking for lebensraum.

If you're going to get offended at an imaginary mythology about an imaginary race, at least get it right, you cocksmock. Killing orcs is like killing Nazis: fun and amusing.

Hell Gruumsh even has an eyepatch, how does this stuff get missed?

I think it's possible to engage with and enjoy fictional tropes even though they can be problematic - just like how I can enjoy R.E. Howard's and H.P. Lovecraft's fiction even though they were extremely racist and related themes often show up in their writing.  (John Morrow, I think, first pointed me to this essay on Howard's attitudes toward race.)  I like to bring my own ideas into gaming, but I don't feel like my PCs have to be carbon copies of me acting out 20th Century morality.  

However, I have had conflict with other players related to morality of behavior.  My heroes tend to be violent to fit the adventures, but some players have complained about how that violence turns out.

I don't think this is just an "intellectual gamer whatever" thing.

I just started running Keep on the Borderlands last night, and one of the "regular" non-gamer folk attending was really put off by one of the gamer-dudes calling to slaughter the surrendering kobold warriors, as well as the kobold children and women.  The person in question isn't even really that emotional, nor are they outspoken about any sort of sensitive issues IRL -- they're not a politically-correct warrior in the slightest.  They were just honestly uncomfortable with the situation.

It works like this:

• Person X equates orcs with black people
• Person X looks at game materials, and becomes horrified by their racism
• Person X writes a long essay on the subject
• Persons Y, Z and N hold a long, productive and intelligent discussion on racism, privilege, misinterpreted Tolkien quotes and Keep on the Borderlands
• Curt closes the thread and bans 1d3+1 users

The trouble is, sometimes an orc is just an orc. You, Person X, drew the parallel between orcs and black people. How about examining your own goddamn biases and hangups instead of blaming ours?

(Coincidentally, it had never occured to me to portray orcs as any sort of minority before I read one of these threads - in the games I knew, they were "basically, pig-faced, potbellied brigands", and behaved as such. Brigands are generally bad people because they rob merchants, waylay travellers and sometimes terrorise villages. Brigands are also human, so a minimal level of decency applies even to them, but if they die, well, they die.)

(Also, as for the "orc women and children" argument, you don't kill them. Not because they represent black people but because killing women and children, or unarmed people in general is reprehensible.")

(Finally, Way Back Then when we played Photocopied AD&D that had bits from both 1e and 2e in it, every second player I knew wanted to play a half-orc, an assassin or a half-orc assassin. This was because of a local fantasy series which featured a half-orc fighter-cleric serving the god of Chaos and wearing "a cloak that reeked of chicken guts" as its protagonist. Half-orcs were just in).

Thing is I like ambiguity in Orcs.  There's no shortage of pure evil races if I I want one.  I can have armies of undead, vampires, demonic invasions etc.

I find Orcs are more fun if they're like Klingons.  A war-like culture that you can ally with or play as a character if you want.

Edit: And when a warlike band of Orcs is looting their way across the land it doesn't really matter if they're closer to Viking than they are to demons.  It's still heroic to beat them down and stop them.

Quote from: Melan;477748(Also, as for the "orc women and children" argument, you don't kill them. Not because they represent black people but because killing women and children, or unarmed people in general is reprehensible.")

I agree, but then you have people in this thread arguing "evil is evil, monsters are monsters, and those babies will eat us someday."

Honestly, I just try to avoid those situations altogether unless I'm purposefully aiming for a game that addresses moral issues.  Roleplayers may be able to adjust to situations like that with hard choices because of prior experiences, but coming from the impression I got last night, non-gamers do not expect to be tested like that in what they initially perceive to be a fun and relatively light-hearted game about dungeon-delving.

Put short*, I'd probably be more comfortable running this for regular folk if the monsters were truly monstrous and unnatural.  Once you give them ecosystems, families, tribes, culture, whatever, it goes uncomfortable places.  Not because of some perceived parallel to IRL races/minorities, but because most people won't even agree to exact violence on lower life-forms, let alone intelligent creatures.  Self-defense?  Ok.  Having the game implicate you've just slaughtered nearly the entire male population of a tribe, and thus threatened the survival of the women and children, not to mention the sort of retaliation said tribe could one day muster if it happens to survive and grow?  Not quite everyone's idea of super-fun imagination time.

I don't know, though.  We'll see where this current game goes.  I make no moral judgment on players because of the actions of characters, even if I was very much taken aback by the one RPGer's call for slaughter -- the player will have to face the consequences of his actions eventually in-game if he ever decides to act on his whims.  I just hope these sorts of situations don't turn off the few new gamers I managed to gather for Keep.

*or maybe not.