What do you think of ...

Quote from: Adam DrayAs I designed my setting for Hinterlands, I struggled with a key problem regarding all the typical genocidal bullshit in fantasy gaming. Here I am, building a setting and populating it with stuff for characters to kill. It's very difficult to get around that in a D&D setting, because fantasy gaming is so tightly integrated with the killing.

To some extent, the literature is about the killing, right? Swords and sorcery is full of morally ambiguous warriors and thieves slashing first and asking questions after--usually after they loot the tombs. And even if fantasy gaming exaggerates that aspect of the literature, gamers have come to expect it and the games reward that behavior and punish everything else.

To run an Old School Renaissance (OSR) game, you're basically saying "let's kill a lot of monsters and take the treasure and not really think too hard about what that means." It's one of the core tenants of OSR, even if I can't find it written down anywhere. I'm pretty sure that's what everyone really means when they say, "This product is compatible with the original White Box edition."

Before White Box, people were playing miniatures games like Chainmail. Generally, it was player vs. player (PvP). I could play the elves and you could play the orcs. This is a moral dynamic that is totally different than D&D. Two forces have met on a battlefield and we're not even sure why or what the stakes are. Different players have different stakes. There might be a referee for some of these battles, but he or she is supposed to be an impartial judge to maintain the fairness of the competition (between two opposing _players_).

When you get to White Box D&D, the DM's role changes. Now all the players are basically on the same side vs. The Rest of the World (played by the DM), or player vs. environment (PvE). Most of that DM advice to remain a "neutral arbiter" "(in Gygaxian parlance) echoes the old PvP-driven necessity for a fair referee, but it is really an admonition to the all-powerful DM to use his or her power in a reasonable way "against" the players. Basically, there's very little to check the power of the DM, so the rules basically tell the DM not to be a dick.

But now the players are all on one side and they're set up against the environment that the DM created, and they know they get 1 XP per quart of blood spilled and 1 XP per gold piece pried out of an orc's cold, dead hand. At least later on, in Basic D&D and so on, and at many game tables across the world, there's this growing expectation that the player characters (PCs) have a bit of script immunity and a certain amount of protagonism. These two things are signs that now we're supposed to be rooting for the PCs, because they are the "good guys."

It starts with two very simple rules in Basic D&D: 1) if your ability scores suck, the DM can let you reroll them, and 2) you can trade points two-for-one to increase your prime requisites. This is the first indication that PCs are special, a cut above the rest of society. Over time and many editions, this meme grew tremendously, to the point that 4E characters start out with 22 hit points and magic beyond the ken of mortals, and it's pretty hard to kill them if there's a cleric around, since they can go to a negative hit point amount equal to their Constitution score (so add like another 8-18 hit points before they really croak).

Script immunity gets embedded in the minds of DMs with advice to fudge die rolls to keep characters alive ("for the fun of the game"). Script immunity transforms the game from a true PvE challenge into a story, and once it's a story, everyone is asking who the heroes of the story are, and it's pretty clear that the PCs are those heroes. The early texts used the term "adventurers" a lot but seemed to avoid "hero" (and while the "name" level for Fighters was "Hero," they meant a hero like Conan or the original hero, Hercules, who didn't always do the right thing but had to face terrible challenges. As the edition numbers on our rule books increased, so did our tendency to make our PCs protagonists.

So we're telling stories about heroes who go into a post-apocalyptic fantasy wilderness, face terrible monsters, kill them, and take their stuff. For a while, taking their stuff made the characters stronger. 1 gold piece translated into 1 experience point (XP), and lots of XP advanced the "level," or killing ability, of the character. Nowadays, no one earns XP for treasure, only for surviving encounters, which most of the time means meeting a hostile monster and killing it, though the DM is expected to sprinkle traps and puzzles and negotiations and challenges of skills in there, too. But let's be honest, killing is a huge part of the game. Note that there is a Fighter class, but no Negotiator class.

My problem with the whole setup is that the reason for all the ultraviolence is rarely explored in any depth. Simply put: why do these monsters need to die? Okay, so they're Evil. D&D has an alignment system that categorizes everyone into three, five, or nine (depending on which edition you play) convenient morality boxes like "Lawful" or "Chaotic Evil." We're told that every orc is Evil, and that's sufficient excuse to kill every last one, including their women and children, without guilt. We're also told that they have chieftains, tribes, and settlements. Their "lairs" are described in loving detail, showing how the community lives and eats. But they're all Evil, so leave none alive.

So it all stinks to me of a kind of privileged, colonial, expansionist, genocidal viewpoint that makes my stomach turn. And I've played this way for decades and mostly just looked the other way or found various rationalizations and justifications for it.

The biggest rationalization is "It's fantasy, so I don't need to worry about it." I am at a point in my life where I can't say that anymore. The setting I create as a DM and the character I create as as a player are a kind of artistic expression and thus subject to analysis. What is the message of that art? If I want to show how disgusting the genocidal viewpoint is, then I better make that clear. If I don't want to address that, then I probably shouldn't set up a situation where the only acceptable action for a "hero" to take is to slaughter every last orc. I don't want to create a game world that validates the gross stereotypes and bigotry of the real world.

No, it's not okay to believe that every creature of a race that looks different than you is automatically bad, subhuman, worthless, and destined for a quick death. Just because I can make that fact true in the game world doesn't make it less okay.

I think we create and explore fantasy worlds for a couple reasons: to escape and to explore "what if" scenarios. I would like to think that my friends and I aren't yearning for a world where we can just solve all of our problems with a fireball. I really hope that they don't believe that burning a dozen orcs alive for their treasure doesn't make anyone a hero. On the what-if side, we could tell ourselves that we're exploring what would happen in a universe with a clear right and wrong, where the bad guys were irrevocably evil, and the only possible solution is to kill them all. And somehow not feel like Hutu killing Tutsis. But why would we do that? Why do we need to pretend that? And if we did want to explore that, wouldn't we want to walk away from the table with the same feeling of disgust I get when I watch Hotel Rwanda?

I keep coming to the same conclusion: Running a typical "kill them all and take their stuff" D&D campaign is awful.

Don't get me wrong. I don't think every D&D player is a horrible person. Generally, we do these things without thinking about them. Killing hundreds of orcs doesn't make you a real-life killer any more than winning Monopoly makes you a heartless landlord. Yes, it's a game, and we don't really think about what it means. But D&D is more than a game because it can be a highly creative art form akin to storytelling, and I think we should think about what it means a lot more.

So what's the fix? Do we just stop playing D&D? I don't think that's necessary. I think there are few steps everyone can take to avoid genocidal racism in their games.

First, get rid of race alignments. If you want, keep alignments for individuals, but forget the idea that every creature can be easily categorized as good or evil based on anything but that individual's personal actions. That means getting rid of the idea that most orcs are evil, too; sorry, no loophole there.

Second, treat intelligent creatures with the respect they deserve. They have complex communities with goals and most have charismatic leaders that guide the communities in different ways. Some of those ways are great and some are terrible. Lots of the individuals might get on board with the leader and others might follow along to avoid causing trouble and still others might secretly or openly oppose their leaders. This means that you can have tribes of orcs led by terrible, terrible orc chieftains. This means that the individual members of those tribes might be terrible, neutral, decent, or even admirable. This means that players will have to decide if their heroes mow them down or not, and yeah, that might not be as fun of a game as Old School hack-and-slash, but if you just want to kill stuff, then you don't need a world and tribes and history and crap.

Third, DMs should reward morally admirable behavior, or at least not punish it. If the heroes kill a few orc warriors and let their spouses and children go, don't have the family turn around and betray them first chance they get. They don't have to be grateful, because after all the party did just slay their mommy or daddy, but they shouldn't swear revenge and encourage the players to leave no orc unslain.

Fourth, substitute mindless monsters for the tribes and nations of humanoids. Maybe not entirely, but to a large extent. I don't think anyone has a problem with the killing of a gelatinous cube or a skeleton. There's a whole class of monsters that are intelligent but solitary--that is, they aren't races of creatures that are born with parents and a culture but rather are spawned or summoned. A classic example is the undead, which are just dead creatures usurped by terrible evil forces. Similar are demons and devils, which generally aren't considered a culture or nation. Yeah, there are some ethical problems with slaying animals and animal-like monsters just for the experience and loot, but those are different problems than genocide, and frankly those problems don't bother me as much.

Last, create real reasons for nations to fight, and make it fairly clear what you think the right thing to do is. This is fantasy gaming, so the author gets to bring Right and Wrong to the forefront of the story. Make it clear that slaying everyone who looks different than you is not acceptable behavior. However, find more acceptable reasons to fight certain groups. This group of orcs keeps attacking the keep. Make them stop. Maybe talking is a good first step but if that doesn't work, some of them might need to die. If your mental picture of fantasy gaming can weather it, you can even say a creature reduced to 0 hit points is apprehended and can be taken to trial.

I think these changes don't erode the fun of a D&D campaign. The complex moral issues that arise during play when heroes face a culture of intelligent "humanoids" can be interesting in their own right. There are plenty of terrible, mindless things to destroy if the fighting is what floats your boat. And if all of this makes you groan and roll your eyes and go back to your fantasy world where all orcs need to die, ask yourself why you need that.

Thanks to Levi for bringing this to my attention via this G+ entry.

Quote from: Benoist;477696What do you think of ...



Thanks to Levi for bringing this to my attention via this G+ entry.

Generally my games are set up as defensive situations.

Right now my group is fighting back against an goblinoid invasion force, which in my mind removes most of the issues he raises.

Quote from: Piestrio;477701Generally my games are set up as defensive situations.

Right now my group is fighting back against an goblinoid invasion force, which in my mind removes most of the issues he raises.

But is there an issue to be raised in the first place if you play this type of scenario?

I think the guy is taking his game too seriously and overestimating its impact on the himself and the world.

Quote from: Benoist;477702But is there an issue to be raised in the first place if you play this type of scenario?

You mean like "Why is it always race X doing the attacking"?

Well, it is and it isn't.

FREX in my current game the PCs are trying to stop a goblinoid host because the local lord is off trying to fight off grasping human enemies in other parts of his realm.

I think the "defensive set-up" removes the issues raised by humanoid families. I've never felt the need to present a situation where the players would need to decide to kill a bunch of children because... well... that's fucked up.

On the other hand I also "don't think about it much".

so.... *shrug*

Good and evil should really be defined by actions. If you take your regular superhero game, the supervillains are not the bad guys because they dress in black but because they are out there killing, stealing, trying to revive the Third Reich or plotting to bring the world to an end with doomsday device. Any one who can stop these guys may not necessarily be a saint but certainly deserves a pat on the back.

Now if you take a typical fantasy game or even something like Shadowrun, in effect it's the player characters who are doing the stealing and killing. And that's perfectly fine. It's just no worth pretending the players are good guys - I don't think anyone ever accused Conan or Elric of being good guys. At best there are no good guys, it's a just a question of who dies with most stuff wins.

Of course you can also play fantasy in a more heroic vein, fighting the good fight and saving the princess, only using force when necessary in the vein of Lord of the Rings. But in the scheme of things I lot of players just don't need to what right on their side. Might is more than enough to keep them happy.

tl;dr past "genocidal racism".

OOP is a fuckhead.

What gets to me is the narrow-minded approach to interpret what this or that game element might mean in the grand scheme of things. If you see an entry with "Orcs, Chaotic Evil" then it's automatically got to do with racism, with "portraying others different than you as things to kill". It's therefore totally a pass for colonial genocidal stuff, see. And it's bad. It's dirty. So here's what I'd do to fix the game.

Nevermind that this might not be an allegory at all. That this particular game element, the Orc, Chaotic Evil, might be interpreted in any number of ways in the game's context.

And nevermind that not all D&D games are about just going there killing chaotic evil orcs for no reason whatsoever. That's convenient to portray the game that way to then say "here's what D&D does so horribly wrong, and here's how to fix it!"

This is so narrow minded. So petty and ... just fucking stupid.

There's a spectrum.  At one end, monsters are evil by default and exist to be slain.  Just past that, there's the at-one-time-clever idea that maybe some of these monsters have their own motivations, and there are variants within a species.  That can make the game interesting.

At the far end of the spectrum, there's deconstructionist counter-colonial wankery.  That's where this guy lives, or is headed.

I suppose he gets upset playing Pac-Man because "won't somebody think of the poor ghosts"?  Especially that transgendered one.

Quote from: Benoist;477696What do you think of ...

I've said most of this before but I'll add it here, too, I personally think the problem is that people no longer understand what evil is or believe that a sentient creature can be irredeemably evil.  Where that causes a problem in this piece can be found here:

Quote from: Adam DrayMy problem with the whole setup is that the reason for all the ultraviolence is rarely explored in any depth. Simply put: why do these monsters need to die? Okay, so they're Evil. D&D has an alignment system that categorizes everyone into three, five, or nine (depending on which edition you play) convenient morality boxes like "Lawful" or "Chaotic Evil." We're told that every orc is Evil, and that's sufficient excuse to kill every last one, including their women and children, without guilt. We're also told that they have chieftains, tribes, and settlements. Their "lairs" are described in loving detail, showing how the community lives and eats. But they're all Evil, so leave none alive.

If alignment is simply a team marker (as Adam Dray seems to assume it is here), the label "evil" doesn't actually mean much behaviorally, and the sentient non-human creatures are simply funny looking people who behave the way they do as free moral agents and because of the culture they were raised in, then Adam Dray is absolutely correct because then the monsters are basically people, not monsters, and wiping them out because they are different does closely mirror the worst of the colonial expansionist mindset.

If, on the other hand, an "evil" alignment actually means something behaviorally and sentient non-human creatures are not free moral agents and have a compulsion to "debase or destroy innocent life", enjoy "hurting, oppressing, and killing others", "have no compassion for others and kill without qualms if doing so is convenient", and/or "actively pursue evil, killing for sport or out of duty to some evil deity or master" and no amount of compassion, kindness, negotiation, or treatment will change that (essentially, they are a species of violent psychopaths), then they are monsters and Adam Dray's concerns are not, in my opinion, relevant.  

How can a species of violent psychopaths "have chieftains, tribes, and settlements"?  The same way Dennis Rader (the "BTK Killer") managed to have a wife and two kids, hold a job, get elected president of his church's Congregation Council, and be a cub scout leader.  The same way Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka managed to work as a team to brutalize and kill others.  Being compulsively evil does not necessarily require an utter lack of intelligence or restraint, nor does it mean that one can't cooperate with other like-minded individuals toward and evil end.  Psychopathic serial killers are an excellent model for how sentient evil works and I think that part of the problem is that the evil monsters in most games are depicted as what I'd call "naughty" rather than truly evil.  If they peacefully farm the land, herd animals, have pet puppies, and generally mind their own business, then they aren't really evil.

Many people find the second choice as distasteful, if not more distasteful, than the first because it still sounds an awful lot like how racists and oppressive colonialists characterized other races and cultures in order to rationalize brutalizing or killing them (I discussed this at some length a while back) and because modern Western culture has pretty much taught most people that it's a great moral wrong to stereotype and categorize an entire group like that, largely as a sort of cultural inoculation against racism and other forms of bigotry being able to use stereotypes to promote group hatred.  Similarly, we are taught that human behavior (with the apparent exception of sexual orientation) is a matter of nurture or choice rather than nature and that all evil is a product of environment or free will rather than instinct and nature.   To treat those monsters as monsters requires not thinking about them as humans but as monsters, which means thinking about them in a way that most have been taught is a very bad and unacceptable way to think.

I do find curious is that I don't see similar arguments being made in objection to being expected to kill devils, demons, and other supernatural evil monsters on sight.  So perhaps the best way to think of evil monsters is as a sort of lesser demon or devil.  If you take the orc babies home, be kind to them, and send them to a nice school, it won't matter.  You'll still find them standing over a dead body or torturing a human child someday because they just can't avoid being evil.  It's their nature.  And if you want to argue that simply killing them still isn't the solution, you can, but what's the alternative?  Reservations?  Internment camps?  And doesn't that raise a whole host of other sins of humanity to deal with?

So my suggestion is either stop treating monsters as people and instead play them as evil monsters or stop treating monsters as monsters and treat them like funny looking people (or don't use them at all) but trying to treat funny looking people as monsters creates all sorts of problems, as does trying to treat monsters like funny looking people.

Quote from: Benoist;477709What gets to me is the narrow-minded approach to interpret what this or that game element might mean in the grand scheme of things. If you see an entry with "Orcs, Chaotic Evil" then it's automatically got to do with racism, with "portraying others different than you as things to kill". It's therefore totally a pass for colonial genocidal stuff, see. And it's bad. It's dirty. So here's what I'd do to fix the game.

I think that happens because people are taught that stereotyping people is bad and they are seeing the orcs as people.  So seeing "Orcs, Chaotic Evil" can look an awful lot like seeing "African American, Criminal" or "Muslim, Terrorist" or even "Caucasian, Racist".  It pushes buttons because people are taught that stereotypes are bad and behavior is a product of upbringing rather than inherent nature.  The very idea that all orcs will behave a certain way leads to the same lines of thinking that the idea that all people of a certain human race behave a certain way does.  And let's be honest that a lot of the legends and pulps that served as a source for a lot of role-playing genres were not exactly racially sensitive and could even be downright racist.  They also draw on ideas that are, at the least, outmoded, such as the idea that an ugly evil soul will be manifest in an ugly monstrous appearance.  So I'm sympathetic to that line of thinking but I think the critical mistake is thinking of monsters as people in the first place.

And as I explained in an earlier thread, there is a lot of overlap because the goal of racists is to depict the group they hate as monsters.  As such, they claim that the group(s) they hate have monstrous attributes that often have a lot in common with the monstrous attributes of monsters in role-playing games because those attributes strike the same psychological chords to make one hate, revile, and want to kill a monster.  If a group really is an irredeemably vile inhuman threat, then it makes it reasonable to want to destroy them.

So even if you accept that they monsters are monsters and not people, you can still wind up swimming around in the same pool of monstrous traits (ugly or bestial appearance, violent disposition, physically threatening physique, lack of intelligence, etc.) that racists and other bigots draw on to encourage hatred of those that they hate, and I can see where that can bother people, too.  So I'm also sympathetic to that line of thinking, even though I think there is an escape there, too, so long as you can separate people from monsters and understand that the monstrous traits that monsters have are not simply an unfair, inaccurate, and cruel stereotype driven by bigotry but an accurate reflection of the reality in the game setting.

Quote from: thedungeondelver;477708tl;dr past "genocidal racism".

OOP is a fuckhead.

Agreed, the guy is thinking way too much about a game played for fun. That, and his whole arguement has that "D&D is a game of murderous hoboes" false equivalency flavor to it.

The jab that's leveled at D&D here is the same one leveled at Tolkien, Howard, Burroughs et al - a rich white adolescent fantasy where darkies can be killed in endless numbers for treasure and no repercussions, indeed, praise and growth through it.

That notion is wrong, it's stupid, and I'd wager that there's nobody actually so  goddamn dumb as to believe anything said in that.  This is just someone trolling.

There are no facts to back up his assessment.  There's plenty to back up the notion that he's a sour-grapes, hung-up-on-self 3rd rate nobody RPG author.

QuoteSo it all stinks to me of a kind of privileged, colonial, expansionist, genocidal viewpoint that makes my stomach turn. And I've played this way for decades and mostly just looked the other way or found various rationalizations and justifications for it.

The biggest rationalization is "It's fantasy, so I don't need to worry about it." I am at a point in my life where I can't say that anymore. The setting I create as a DM and the character I create as as a player are a kind of artistic expression and thus subject to analysis. What is the message of that art? If I want to show how disgusting the genocidal viewpoint is, then I better make that clear. If I don't want to address that, then I probably shouldn't set up a situation where the only acceptable action for a "hero" to take is to slaughter every last orc. I don't want to create a game world that validates the gross stereotypes and bigotry of the real world.

I 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?

The solution always been simple which is to use what Tolkien used.

Orcs are bad because the evil god made them that way. Philosophically you can appreciate that it isn't really the orc fault as part of the free will was taken away or damaged. The fact remains that they are going to rape and pillage and can't peacefully coexist with surrounding cultures.

An interesting aside is that if Tolkein's orcs are twisted elves captured by Morgoth, the question is that do they retain their immortality.