D&D Racial Diversity Bullshit

[Ancient History]

http://www.tor.com/blogs/2012/04/a-mode ... nd-dragons

Let's stop for a minute here: this guy is bitching that different real-world ethnicities are less well-represented in a fantasy roleplaying game than red-skinned tieflings. What the fucking fuck-fuck? How in the name of the seven-headed goddess of hate is that even remotely an issue? Fantasy! Christ, this is like people bitching there weren't any Hispanic Vulcans on Star Trek.

[icyshadowlord]

I stopped reading once I noticed this guy's a total Pathfinder fanboy...

...that is, in addition to being an idiot comparing humans to Tieflings, of all things.

[angelfromanotherpin]

What's your objection? Seems perfectly reasonable to me. Racial diversity in game art is good, and the fewer fucking stupid 4e tieflings the better.

[Prak]

Honestly, I think this could best be accomplished by just telling your artists "hey, when you get to skin, pick up a different crayon once in a while, yeah?"
Because if you sit around and say "Ok, draw more black guys. Ok, now draw more asians. K, now we need a bunch of native americans." It's absurd and actually not a very good job of increasing diversity, but rather having a "skin colour of the week."

Of course, anthropologically speaking, it's not like race is really even much of a thing, but.....

[FatR]

Let's stop for a minute here: this guy is bitching that different real-world ethnicities are less well-represented in a fantasy roleplaying game than red-skinned tieflings. What the fucking fuck-fuck?

I assume that's just another attempt to rack some Internet fame points on the theme that makes politically incorrect to tell him to shut up.

[Wrathzog]

How in the name of the seven-headed goddess of hate is that even remotely an issue?

Racist.

I stopped reading once I noticed this guy's a total Pathfinder fanboy...

Racist.

Honestly, I think this could best be accomplished by just telling your artists "hey, when you get to skin, pick up a different crayon once in a while, yeah?"

You know there's more to the different races than just skin tone right? Body and Facial structure can vary between different races.
Of course, you'd have known that if you weren't such a racist.

Because if you sit around and say "Ok, draw more black guys. Ok, now draw more asians. K, now we need a bunch of native americans."

I can assure you that that's exactly how talks like that go down. Not that it matters because the end result is more [not-white] people represented in your book. In the long run, it's not a bad thing.

Well... as long as it's not like... the ninja is represented by an asian chick and the barbarian is a black dude and the druid and ranger are crying native americans while the cleric and wizard are both represented by clean-cut white guys.
That might be kind of offensive.

[hogarth]

Let's stop for a minute here: this guy is bitching that different real-world ethnicities are less well-represented in a fantasy roleplaying game than red-skinned tieflings. What the fucking fuck-fuck? How in the name of the seven-headed goddess of hate is that even remotely an issue? Fantasy! Christ, this is like people bitching there weren't any Hispanic Vulcans on Star Trek.

In theory, having more minority representation in an RPG might make that RPG more popular with minorities. Well, it's a theory, anyway.

Well... as long as it's not like... the ninja is represented by an asian chick and the barbarian is a black dude and the druid and ranger are crying native americans while the cleric and wizard are both represented by clean-cut white guys.
That might be kind of offensive.

That is offensive! The black guy should be a thief, not a barbarian.

[ishy]

Honestly, I think this could best be accomplished by just telling your artists "hey, when you get to skin, pick up a different crayon once in a while, yeah?"

You know there's more to the different races than just skin tone right? Body and Facial structure can vary between different races.
Of course, you'd have known that if you weren't such a racist.

I'm going to assume you are either trying to be funny or something is wrong with your brain Wrathzog.

There might be a reason why Prak was talking specifically about Skin colour you know, like maybe fucking this:

My observations are also tilted toward a “black” and “white” dichotomy that isn’t really reflective of reality, either. I don’t want to minimize the impact of Asian, Hispanic, Middle Eastern and other backgrounds or marginalize them in any way. Simply put, it was easier to deal with the extremes of the continuum of skin color.

[Ancient History]

Here's the thing: it's a fantasy game. There is no logical need to deliberately seed a game with characters that resemble real-world ethnicities, because in the fantasy world they very well might not fucking exist. Human ethnic diversity palls beside the differences between races in a game with elves and centaurs and shit (except in Shadowrun, where the metahumans are explicitly independent of ethnicity and derived from humanity) - and while it might be a good consideration, that doesn't mean anybody is obliged to try and reflect real-world ethnic balance in a fucking fantasy game.

[angelfromanotherpin]

It's good when people make an effort to be inclusive. It's better when other people don't swear at them for trying. I really don't know why it puts such a bug up your ass.

[Wrathzog]

I'm going to assume you are either trying to be funny or something is wrong with your brain Wrathzog.

Racist.

But seriously, I'm talking as an artist someone who doodles a lot and unless your style is real basic, things are not going to look right if you swap someone's skin tone around. If they're doing it right, you should be able to tell what race someone is before any color hits the page.

and while it might be a good consideration, that doesn't mean anybody is obliged to try and reflect real-world ethnic balance in a fucking fantasy game.

They actually are if they live in the real world as part of a real business that employs real marketing strategy. It's perception that's important here and you don't want to be perceived as a racist because of something silly like, "There's not enough black people in this book."
It's just a thing, don't make it into even more of a thing.

[ishy]

It's good when people make an effort to be inclusive. It's better when other people don't swear at them for trying. I really don't know why it puts such a bug up your ass.

Well I think the *Green Lantern comic really illustrates why these things can really rub me the wrong way.

They seriously state that he helps everyone no matter what race colour etc, but why haven't you done anything for people of my skin tone ?!!?!?!

Things like casting only caucasians for the Avatar movie does actually bother me. But shit like this just dilutes legitimate stuff.

(*disclaimer: I know nothing about the Green Latern other than that he is a comic hero, with a green power ring and seen a few movie trailers)

[Ancient History]

I have a bug up my ass because I've personally been involved in making RPG books and I know how bloody clueless this post is. If you're a writer, you're probably not going to see the artwork on the book until it's in layout, if then. Most writers don't give art direction, and have little clue what the artist is actually going to give them - and whatever it is, the writer is usually stuck with it. I had a piece in Ghost Cartels that called for a guy to cut somebody else's head off with a machete; the artist drew a wakizachi-kinda-thing. It didn't matter how stupid it fucking was, or even if the dev in charge gave the right direction or not, it was easier to edit my fiction than to commission a change in artwork - and so I was stuck with crappy art and a story that made less sense.

Don't get me wrong, there are many good arguments for race-balance, gender-balance, sexuality-balance etc. I wrote characters of every ethnicity, gender, and sexual persuasion in SR. That was possible because of the setting, and I worked at it - but the majority of the art in the book was still full of white people. Why? Because that's how the artists did it, and I had no control of it. The art director could have been more careful about that kind of thing if he cared about it, but it was really out of my hands - and what this Mordecai shitwad is saying is that the game is not so much that the art guys need to get their shit together as it is that the setting is too euro-centric, and make it more inclusive.

I've been forced to make changes I don't like to satisfy the fuckups and personal quirks of other people, so I don't care for that type of argument. From a business or social standpoint, I can totally understand it - but from a creator's standpoint, I will write what I fucking well please. Sometimes a setting has a predominance of one race/ethnicity/gender/etc. - that is not a bad thing, or something that needs to be guarded or campaigned against.

If you have a gameworld of Amazonia, where everybody is a lesbian descended from an ancient Greek colony and new generations are born from the All-Mother, that is fine. If part of the Amazonians got lost, intermarried with an African tribe and returned, so there are some black and mixed-raced Amazons, that is also fine - but it is not objectively better or worse than the all-Greek Amazons, and it should be up to the creator(s).

I really fucking dislike it when a creator caves in and adds a token character type just to satisfy some loud fuckwit that just can't stand the fact that maybe this world doesn't prominently feature their special brand of catgirls. If they want to do it, great. If they don't want to do it, also great. But I don't think creators should be pressured to add or change shit just for someone's sensibilities.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Yeah, I'm still not seeing it. Seriously, what part of the proposal was addressed to you as a writer? It's pretty clear to me that it's for an artistic or line director. D&D isn't even a specific campaign setting, so whose creative vision is being compromised?

He doesn't even say that the setting is too Euro-centric. He's pre-debunking the shadzar premise that 'D&D is based on fantasy feudal Europe' (it really isn't).

[Ancient History]

You wanna see a neat trick? “The now-vanished Nerath was a highly cosmopolitan empire encompassing many tribes and kingdoms, with immigrant populations from the far flung corners of the world.” There; just like that. Fixed.

In a nutshell — maybe the makers of D&D should take some of the effort being put into bending over backwards to explain why they don’t need to reflect the diversity in the real world…and put it into a flowering of diversity in their imaginary one.

Right before the Green Lantern panel. That kinda galls me.

And part of this is, of course, missing the fucking point - Knode is bitching about the lack of human phenotypes and ethnicity in the artwork and attributing it to a failure on the part of the writers/developers. He doesn't take into account any of the details of the setting, or consider why humans should be given such a broad range of expression compared to all the other races - he shrugs of Tieflings as "red people" - well, why the fuck don't those count? Does he want to see black Tieflings and green Tieflings and Tieflings that look Asian or Polynesian or whatever? Nah, fuck Tieflings, Knode is counting humans.

I'll be honest, I'm probably giving this far more thought than the original asshole who wrote up Tieflings ever did - we've had a lot of fantasy races over the years where the variation between individuals is so minimal you'd think they were an inbred hill clan - but it galls me that in a product where you're trying to present a sweep of variation from dwarfs to half-ogres and dragonborn that you're pissing about because the humans in your artwork don't match up to your perfect idea of racial harmony.

[angelfromanotherpin]

Tieflings don't count because nobody is a Tiefling. Not since they stopped being 'people reviled for their unpopular ancestry' and started being Draenei.

Okay, I'm dropping this. Nothing you say on this subject has made any sense to me.

[shadzar]

i am so pissed of that there are no "black" little green men.

[/sarcasm]

this isnt a case of 4Kids entertainment changing the dark-skinned pirates into pink ones, but one where the artist draws what the artist wants to, or can draw.

imagine for a minute an art class with a nude model. how often are dark-skinned people used? does a dark-skinned person really allow you to see shadows on musculature to be able to properly define/depict them?

does the medium allow for such so that a person doesnt come out looking cartoony?

i honestly have REARELY heard of dark-skinned nude models for art because of the shadows reason. therefore maybe many artists that have had such training jsut dont know proper proportions and dont want to blow them up to be inconsiderate or even disrespectful (except Wayne Reynolds since ALL his females seem to have a "ghetto-booty")

its art. art is an expression, and that expression comes form the artist. how many artists out there can do decent "dark-skinned", "asian", etc real world people that are in the RPG industry, or employed by D&D companies?

since it isnt real world historic depictions, but a fantasy world..you dont see "black little green men".

why is Jesus most times artistically rendered as white, when he was a Jew from Africa? sometimes he is "black", rarely a women, asian, hindu, etc.

i didnt read the article, but is this person from the USA where is really the only place that African-___s exist?

Canada has descendants of Africa, but they arent called African-Canadians...just Canadians. England likewise doesn't have African-Brits, just Brits. Only in USA is there African-Americans. (funny Canadians are also Americans)

disassociate real and fantasy worlds as much as possible, unless we wont to go back to the "steam tunnels" incidents where RPGs are blamed because people can NOT disassociate them.

i have always said that 4th edition players should be able to have their game, jsut that they dont reqlly need it called D&D to affect or force their game on D&D players (same for 3.x players). likewise someone wanting an all non-white ethnic game, be it RPG or other, has the right to have it. so why hasn't anyone made it yet if it is such a problem that it doesnt exist?

because D&D has to serve the lowest common denominator and nobody will accept responsibility for creating another game to fit another playstyle or ethnicity, or whatever.

you dont like D&D, dont play it, make your own. doesnt give you the right to force D&D to be 3rd edition just so you can like D&D. make whatever game, featuring 3whatever types of inhabitants to the world of the game, whatever art, and whatever playstyle you want it to have.

[PoliteNewb]

Here's the thing: it's a fantasy game. There is no logical need to deliberately seed a game with characters that resemble real-world ethnicities, because in the fantasy world they very well might not fucking exist. Human ethnic diversity palls beside the differences between races in a game with elves and centaurs and shit (except in Shadowrun, where the metahumans are explicitly independent of ethnicity and derived from humanity) - and while it might be a good consideration, that doesn't mean anybody is obliged to try and reflect real-world ethnic balance in a fucking fantasy game.

Do you feel that game artists ever leave caucasians out of the art because "they might not exist in the game world"? Because I'm going to suggest that something like that happens 0.00% of the time.

The only "logical" need to deliberately seed a game with real-world ethnic characters is to encourage players of those ethnicities to play the game. Because they will see "hey, people like me exist in this world". This is an incredibly common thing, and not just for games...consumers of all forms of entertainment (books, movies, games, etc) like to see people they can easily identify with represented in the media. It's not rocket science, and it's not offensive.

[hyzmarca]

Whitewashing is a problem is fantasy. I'm reminded of Legend of Earthsea, where Ged was played by a white guy for some inexplicable reason. But D&D isn't part of the problem. Most D&D settings have a significant amount of racial diversity. Art choices may not reflect that, but art isn't the most important part of the book.

[Prak]

You know, thinking about it, something occured to me. I know four comics that include D&D (or it's derivatives) in their source material. In one, Zogonia, the human lead of the party is asian (And a samurai/fighter, but we'll forgive that). In Order of the Stick, the human leader of the party is black (and bald, making him a trope, but, again, we'll forgive that). In Guilded Age, there isn't a male human lead of the party, as the leader of the party is really more appropriate the human male's wood elf girlfriend. But, the humans of the party are all white. The last comic I can think of of the top of my head, is Looking For Group, which has no humans in it's main party. The closest is the lich-like undead warlock Richard, who, seemingly, was white. So in the media surrounding D&D, it's half white humans, half minorities (unless you live in California, in which white is becoming a minority...).

But... there's actually a very good explanation for the lack of minorities in Fantasy RPG art. What are minorities by definition? They are ethnicities which make up a smaller proportion of the population of an area than a single group, here in America, where most of the RPG companies are, that means people of African, Spanish/Mexican, Asian, and Native American Origin/Descent make up a smaller proportion of the population than people of Western European descent/Origin. What happens when one group makes up a smaller proportion of a population than other groups? They make up a similarly smaller proportion of the people in various industries (while of course being a majority with in other industries). Let's say that a population it 70% Western European and 30% African. What would you expect the proportion of WE RPG artists to A RPG artists to be? Probably roughly 70-30, if not worse. Now, here's the thing. When you're not drawing an elf, or orc, or whatever, but just a normal human, say, someone that, except for the sword or staff of eldritch power, could be seen walking down the street, you tend to draw what you're used to, unless you're specifically trying to not do that. So that 70% of WE RPG Artists are drawing WE featured human characters probably a good 90% of the time. Of course, the 30% A RPG artists are drawing African featured humans 90% of the time, but that doesn't really make up for it.

I'm not saying it's ok, or good, (though I don't necessarily think it's a huge problem), I'm saying it's the way it is.

[Whipstitch]

Yeah, it's always been a strange subject for me because I'm a half hispanic kid from the midwest who can't even speak Spanish because my upbringing was that white bread. I don't think I ever got to know a black person on a first name basis until I was 15; that wasn't some kind of racist thing on anyone's part, she was just literally the only one at my school. So while I'm pretty sympathetic to being inclusive just as a general principle my upbringing makes the strident "This media does not represent the multi-racial and multi-cultural mosaic I live in every day" arguments hard for me to personally relate to given that until I moved to the Twin Cities I found that media in general was much, much more diverse than anything going on in my day to day life. That's not to excuse anything, mind you, it's just pointing out that for a lot of us we're not actually distorting anything when we say there was less than 25 blacks in the entire county.

[Prak]

Yeah, in my Kitchen class right now, lets see... there are (off the top of my head):
2 black students
1 hispanic, 1 half-hispanic
1 romanian
1 greek

Checking the class facebook group, everyone else is, so far as I know, Western/Central European White, or, rather, given that I'm including greek and romanian in the minorities, the usual Italian/German/Etc WE nations.

Granted, that's only one class, and if I expanded to the whole program, there'd be a lot more black and hispanic students, along with asian, but I doubt the ratio would be any better, really.

[Username17]

The definition of "White" is so fluid as to be fairly meaningless. Jews count as White in the US right now, but Spanish people don't even though they are Europeans with blond hair and blue eyes. In the EU, Jews are a weird minority, and Spaniards are proper Europeans.

Hispanic is a catch-all term that covers everyone who is generally from historically Spanish and/or Portuguese occupied lands, whether they are essentially 100% Mayan or essentially 100% White European. Unless those lands were specifically in Polynesia (because hey, Filipino is it's own deal), or conquered sufficiently long enough ago by the US and happen to have a pale skin color. It's not a real thing as far as skin colors go.

The US census has one question for "race" and an entirely different question for whether a person is "of Hispanic origin". Technically, Hispanics are supposed to answer "White" and check that they are originally from Mexico or something.

-Username17

[shadzar]

a reverse to this... why are so many "blacks" in sport video games?

why isnt there more white represented there? because they want to portray the REAL players of those sports in the games that EA makes. does this make it racist against whites? koreans? jews?

why aren't plus-size women used in more diverse commercials? how many does Mabyline, Noxema, L'orreal employ for their make-up or beauty products?

simply put people make what will sell, not what is PC.

if there was an all "black" cast RPG product, how many copies would sell? wasn't an iconic form 3.x non-white? Redgar? (where i think OotS steal the leader and maybe the entire part concept from. Lidda = Belkar, V = androgynous cricket girl).

how old is the OGL now? couldn't someone really offended by this have made a product featuring an all non-white cast and art, and seen how well it will do?

lets focus on "sex sells" as a concept from art design.

whites like white women...obviously
non-whites like white women.
im going to say MORE (RPG playing) males like white women, than non-white women.

IF this is true then, following "sex sells", the majority of white looking women will be higher, so how do you do that when you consider real world factors. white + non-white = non-white offspring most of the time. so how do you posit that most of the women in the art are white if their is higher non-white?

i would DARE someone to say they use magic to be white rather than "white+"... cause THAT would be a pretty damn racist spell! (and illusions can do that as well as disguise tools)

i just see someone looking to be pissed off, so easily getting pissed off. again i say to any of them. write a product featuring the art you think D&D or another RPG is missing using the OGL, and sell your product. i wish them good luck, because honestly for WHATEVER reason, i doubt it will do that well.

it is a fantasy world, not the real world. this is why The People (Native Americans) are called "Indians" because Columbus fucked up!

i dont have a problem that The People aren't represented in D&D, because they dont have to be in it. it is NOT the real world!

you know whats more offensive art wise, but i didnt mention in regards to the Dragon Eye View articles? the aboriginal looks of those fighters in the one mentioning "chainmail bikinis" and using the Merlin still saying women dont wear armor nonsense.

You might look at it and give it the generic term of "African." Another person might look at it and link it to the "Ethiopian" culture.

why wouldnt they have platemail since this isnt the REAL world, its a fucking fantasy world? why do they have dreads? why cant they have dreads AND platemail armor?

i would rather NO representation that cliche, stereotypical, or insulting representation in the art.

[Prak]

Well, and like I said, race is, anthropologically, and biologically speaking, a meaningless concept. It's essentially another word for culture, because the curliest, darkest skinned, heaviest boned "white" guy, is going to have curlier hair, darker skin, and have heavier bones than the straightest haired, lightest skinned, thinnest boned "black guy."