Quote from: Ratman_tf;1036635But is a character who is willing to kill, enslave, torture, etc, but simply never "gets around to it" evil?

Chaotic Slacker.

Quote from: Kiero;1036645And again, Alexander didn't have the way helpfully prepared for him by disease wiping out most of the population.

OTOH, the end of Alexander's conquests had a lot to do with disease:D!

Quote from: Ratman_tf;1036635Sure. But is a character who is willing to kill, enslave, torture, etc, but simply never "gets around to it" evil?

A lot of my characters have gotten around to it:).
A lot of my characters have also gotten around to serving, protecting and saving people.
Sometimes those are the same characters. Because people are more complicated than paladins would like them to be:p!

Quote from: CarlD.;1036570I've lost track of if they thread is about racist players or racist characters. I have no problem with the latter. For game set in violent, more primitive and visceral times, hatred and contempt for other species, for other nationalities and ethnic backgrounds would be par for the course. Its doesn't mean the players are advocating those things or share them. These are role playing games with some components taken from Acting and writing, a person playing out a role is not supporting that role.

Agreed on all accounts! I'm just saying that when a player keeps playing only these, it's time to make some OOC inquiries.
I've played anything from abusive pimps, assasins, slavers and corrupt generals to superheroes and paladins (who just didn't get powers for it). If we count the NPCs I've played as a GM, it gets worse.
I'm not a single of these things;).

QuoteAsenRG, I don't think you're suggesting anything against this, your post just brought these thoughts to mind.

I'm glad to provide food for thought while I'm still here;).

QuoteA racist player (particularly one the brings their issues to the table/online venus) is another kettle. But, IMO, its up to the people involved to make their choice if they want to share their free time with that person. I wouldn't, barring some odd circumstances but its not my call to make for them.

We didn't want to, either. Well, one of them was trying to hide it, and wasn't talking politics...so I let him play to the end of the campaign, several sessions later. He knew not to reapply for the next session:).
Of course, at least one of the guys who got booted for racism is a GM as well, and published a book where the elves were racist bastards... so I doubt he has stopped playing.

QuoteI've also "orcs" used a racial slur but not by anyone not involved in gaming though.

AFAIK not involved in gaming. In many cases, I simply don't have information.

QuoteI don't think there is any intentional* message behind the nature of orcs or other non humans but it would be somewhat obtuse to ignore that a line can be drawn and ignore or decry that or that it can can give a negative impression to some especially those looking in from the outside or non Caucasian gamers.

I've only had a couple of non white players look askance and their issues where settled when they got more information. But the impression is possible, even if unintentional. If it comes up, I think its best address frankly sand directly by the people involved.

*Dogwhistles, innuendo and implication are real and it serves to really muddy the waters when assholes have co-opted role playing for their racist fantasies or racial preaching. I've seen it more in sci-fi/modern setting than fantasy but I have less personal experience. And its been individual games, not the industry as a whole or professional writers. Every occupation has assholes, '-isms' are prevalent enough that there's going to be some overlap in just about anything.

Agreed on this account as well. Except I've never had people questioning my orcs.
Of course, I usually use humans-only settings. When I reworked Aragos in the setting of Erisa (Legends of Steel) to be like Spain during the Reconquista, I mentioned it explicitly. The players were fine with the Sikkar being more inspired by moros, and less by Native Americans, as in the "default" setting;).

On a more serious note, the SJW garbage has a tiny kernel of truth. If you will allow me to reference discredited psychology, orcs are more accurately described as shadow archetypes than a metaphor for non-white people. (Although they could easily stand-in for any race depending on who is telling the story.) They represent everything we hate and fear about ourselves as a species, but secretly desire and admire.

That is why orcs are generally depicted as war-like, tribal, misogynistic, etc, but are also fetishized at different times as excessively masculine, rugged survivors, amazonian, idiot savants, etc.

You will notice drow get a similar treatment. While officially evil, it is clear that most gamers have the hots for drow.

Killing orcs and drow is carthartic because it allows us to delude ourselves as being morally upright, up until we open our orc and drow drawn porn stash.

SJWs only see the surface and think malicious racism, rather than the much more complicated and disturbing truth of the matter.

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1036776On a more serious note, the SJW garbage has a tiny kernel of truth. If you will allow me to reference discredited psychology, orcs are more accurately described as shadow archetypes than a metaphor for non-white people. (Although they could easily stand-in for any race depending on who is telling the story.) They represent everything we hate and fear about ourselves as a species, but secretly desire and admire.

Let me just say that I see a reason why this psychology is discredited;).

Quote from: BoxCrayonTales;1036776SJWs only see the surface and think malicious racism, rather than the much more complicated and disturbing truth of the matter.

SJWs think every ethnic conflict in all of human history is one group going "HURRRRR I DONT LIKE THE WAY YOU LOOK I KILL YOU NOW DURRRRRR" and picking up arms against a peaceful people who did nothing at all.

Quote from: AsenRG;1036771Agreed on all accounts! I'm just saying that when a player keeps playing only these, it's time to make some OOC inquiries.
I've played anything from abusive pimps, assasins, slavers and corrupt generals to superheroes and paladins (who just didn't get powers for it). If we count the NPCs I've played as a GM, it gets worse.
I'm not a single of these things;).

I can see that ringing some alarm bells,yes. I've gotten to the same point but it was over other issues than racism. It would have be pretty egregious and/or making other players uncomfortable. I admit its a "know it when I see it" definition which isn't satisfactory for many.

QuoteAFAIK not involved in gaming. In many cases, I simply don't have information.

Got it, I was just comparing experiences.

QuoteAgreed on this account as well. Except I've never had people questioning my orcs.
Of course, I usually use humans-only settings. When I reworked Aragos in the setting of Erisa (Legends of Steel) to be like Spain during the Reconquista, I mentioned it explicitly. The players were fine with the Sikkar being more inspired by moros, and less by Native Americans, as in the "default" setting;).

Would you say that you encounter more tensions along these lines in fantasy/history/pesudo historical settings or modern/future settings?

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1036145I think orcs should try being less evil if they don't want to be killed.

Sort of like beligerents resisting the cops of today. Cause and effect, go figure.

Not really, no.

I don't know what's worse: the affected hand-wringing over a non-existent race in a niche hobby or the doubling-down by the other side.

For God's sake, orcs do not resemble any ethnicity in the real world. Neither are they analogous to one, either.

If anybody chooses to make them resemble a particular ethnicity or decides to draw an analogy, then that is up to them and has nothing to do with anybody else.

Quote from: Mike the Mage;1036804I don't know what's worse: the affected hand-wringing over a non-existent race in a niche hobby or the doubling-down by the other side.

I would say that 'what's wors[t]' is the online fretting that somehow this is a big deal that suddenly needs to be addressed, when in fact this is just a minor little bit of philosophical wheel spinning that has been happening since the hobby started, and that gaming tables out in the real world are in fact continuing to play without this being a big concern just as they always have.

Depicting the hobby as something intrinsically racist is something that I feel should be opposed not only for the sake of the people who play it but also because it undermines the struggle agaisnt genuine racism.

IOW it's not only a false accusation but also a cry of wolf.

Quote from: Mike the Mage;1036804For God's sake, orcs do not resemble any ethnicity in the real world. Neither are they analogous to one, either.

If there's an argument to be made about Tolkein's orcs, it would be a discussion of classism, not racism. They're clearly more analogous to the urban poor than to a specific ethnicity.

Indeed in Warhammer and in Peter Jackson's films, they were given working class cockney accents.

As a person born into a British working class family, I see nothing analogous, nor do I wish to encourage any such analogy.

Quote from: fearsomepirate;1036790SJWs think every ethnic conflict in all of human history is one group going "HURRRRR I DONT LIKE THE WAY YOU LOOK I KILL YOU NOW DURRRRRR" and picking up arms against a peaceful people who did nothing at all.

Funny how I've never met these SJWs that the anti-SJW chorus seems to be plagued with, and how the anti-SJW chorus seem to complain and demonize SJWs rather like you say they demonize others... only the anti-SJW chorus is the side I actually experience making lots of noise on gaming forums (though again, I tend to not even read forums that are too annoyingly moderated, and I don't like any WotC games so I don't read their forums either - I take it you folks are referring to actual people on other game forums?).

Quote from: Mike the Mage;1036804Not really, no.

I don't know what's worse: the affected hand-wringing over a non-existent race in a niche hobby or the doubling-down by the other side.

For God's sake, orcs do not resemble any ethnicity in the real world. Neither are they analogous to one, either.

If anybody chooses to make them resemble a particular ethnicity or decides to draw an analogy, then that is up to them and has nothing to do with anybody else.

Orcs have never intentionally been modeled after a particular ethnicity (except in the Warcraft movie, where the studio made an intentional decision for all orcs to be played by black actors, and all other characters by white actors), but they do often resemble stereotypes of certain groups.

For example, orcs are often depicted using stereotypes about tribal groups in both positive and negative ways. The negative portrayal typical of D&D resembles the worst propaganda used to justify the genocide of indigenous people such as the American First Nations or Australian Aboriginals. The positive portrayal typical of Warcraft falls the other direction into the noble savage stereotype. While I doubt the resemblance is intentional, it can come across as insensitive to actual tribal peoples across the world. This is a problem inherent to all fictional cultures that are loosely modeled after stereotypes of real cultures, if care is not taken to depict the fictitious culture as having actual depth.

That was actually a big problem with Game of Thrones that took me right out of the story. The Dothraki, who are human (played by a rag-tag bunch of actors of various skin colors), are portrayed in a way that is completely at odds with any society that has existed in history on Earth and generally resembles the orcs of D&D. The Dothraki believe agriculture and construction is satanic, they always have sex in public, murder is common and normalized, women are treated as chattel, they destroy everything in their path, have no sense of tactics or warcraft, etc. They are not remotely believable as a culture.

In Tolkien's own fiction, the orcs (and their human allies) seemed to have been inspired by his own experiences with the nazis and the ottoman turks. Tolkien himself recognized this and could never accept the idea that anyone (including orcs) was beyond redemption due to his Catholic beliefs.

Quote from: Mike the Mage;1036809Depicting the hobby as something intrinsically racist is something that I feel should be opposed not only for the sake of the people who play it but also because it undermines the struggle agaisnt genuine racism.

IOW it's not only a false accusation but also a cry of wolf.

The hobby is intrinsically violent, since the typical party is a band of murderous hobos. That can be said of most media, actually. Almost all humanoids, the typical target of murderous hobos, are guys in makeup or fursuits wearing tribal getup. The barbarian character class, depending on the player's preferences, is some variety of scotsman, viking, native american or other tribal/clannish ethnic group in history or present time. The rogue/thief/assassin/whatever class has the whole shtick of literally being a lifetime criminal. Women are constantly fetishized in the artwork, such as boob plate or scantily clothing.

I can understand complaints about how the art design and writing are somewhat exclusionist (drow being cursed with black skin, a la the "curse of Ham" historically used to denigrate black people, then being excessively fetishized by gamers as a weird matriarchal BDSM mafia), rely on lazy stereotypes (humanoids being depicted in faux tribal getup as shorthand for EEEVIL!), and are inherently focused around anti-social activities like violence and looting, but the game is not intentionally promoting racist attitudes. I would argue that it promotes racial harmony, if very clumsily, since the typical party consists of characters of different races who fulfill different vital roles.

Really, I think we should just be honest that the game is a vehicle for our fantasies and that our fantasies are really twisted. Let's cut to the heart: as human beings, we want to kill other human beings. That is nothing to be ashamed of and we should own up to it. D&D is a game where you kill other people in order to loot their corpses and advance yourself, except that you dress it up as heroic and moral by painting them as evil orcs who deserved it because you are a scared little baby who cannot accept the truth that you love violence for its own sake.

Discard your pretensions and delusions of morality! Play evil campaigns as the default. I guarantee that a campaign where the party are literally murderous hobos who butcher villages with impunity will be vastly more entertaining and cathartic than those lame goody-two-shoes campaigns where paladins mow down orcs with impunity. Orcs are just humans in makeup, so why equivocate?

But seriously, the hobby could stand to become more inclusionist. Rather than doing something silly like depicting women wearing practical armor, we should depict men in equally impractical outfits that do more to emphasize their crotch and ass than actually protect anything. It is fantasy after all, so we might as well go the whole hog with regards to diverging from reality.

This PSA brought to you by the warriors of Khorne. Blood for the blood god! Skulls for the skull throne! Milk for the corn flakes! Black crusade when?!

Quote from: Kiero;1036814If there's an argument to be made about Tolkein's orcs, it would be a discussion of classism, not racism. They're clearly more analogous to the urban poor than to a specific ethnicity.

Revisionist Tolkien fanfiction like Morlindale, The Last Ringbearer, The Black Book of Arda, and Bright got a lot of mileage out of this.

Quote from: Skarg;1036822Funny how I've never met these SJWs.

Adam Koebel and Jeremy Crawford