apparently un-prompted – 4th Ed has been out for almost five years, but we’re only just hearing of the secret racism now?

Perhaps you haven’t heard, but WotC is working on 5th edition as we speak. This is a pretty good time to be giving them suggestions about it.

But his argument boils down to, “I was disappointed in 4E, and want WotC to be better in 5E. Along the way, I glanced at some other editions to see what they did, but admittedly not in a very thorough way.” He only devoted half of a paragraph to 3E — if he got that bit wrong, it doesn’t speak to his larger point about the direction he’d like to see going from 4E to 5E.

Anyway, having a strength cap is not the same as accurately representing the lives of women in the middle ages — they’ve always been free to be clerics, paladins, or whatever else they wanted. (Edit: Actually, that might not be true — I seem to recall a mention of gender-based class limits in the very early days, but whether that was in a rulebook or someone’s suggestion in the Forum I don’t know. Didn’t last long either way, anyway.)

Adding PoC characters shouldn’t just be a matter of a ‘skin tone’ checkbox, they need to be culturally integrated too.

Rules for physically disabled characters are a far more pressing concern, as I’d imagine they make up a greater proportion of the player base.  This should be much easier to incorporate with range penalties and perhaps hearing or intuition bonuses.

When I was 12 one of my evangelical friends was stopped from playing by his parents because there was quite a lot of content relating to demonic creatures in the Monster Manual. Again, these players could be catered for by removing references that are offensive to religion without significantly altering the flavour of the game.

Since the game is published with an age suitability of 12+ it would be worth considering the imposition of penalties on characters who engage in immoral conduct. Again, to minimise the impact on the game world, a background fiction could be inserted to account for this.

And finally, as a concession to the 3+ billion people outside the anglophone world, some kind of foreign language content should be included, perhaps starting with spell -casting languages which should sound more like Greek or Farsi anyway.

With a couple of simple alterations, D&D could easily be retro-fitted to resemble the real world we live in.

Here’s the big deal:  in on paragraph, he says “In the third edition, you’ve got Ember, the human monk — but other than her initial appearance under the class description, she’s absent from the rest of the book.”
Then a paragraph later: “I wanted to go through the Pathfinder Core Rulebook for the same comparison, but I got as far as the class breakdown and gave up.”

Ember appears in DD3E in the class breakdown chapter; you can’t say “she shows up in this chapter and then none of the rest, unlike the other book that shows these characters in the same chapter and I didn’t bother to check if the characters appear again” and claim proof of ill intent on behalf of anyone but yourself.

Of the characters in the same chapter as Ember that I count as non-white, he says “hardly pale but neither are they a deep brown in skin tone,” so, since they’re not *black,* he counts them as *white.*  I’m sorry, but telling someone “your characters are mostly not pure white, but you don’t have enough obviously black characters, so you’re not racially diverse” is literally racist: it is an attitude that discounts the relevance of persons based on their skin color.

In his last few paragraphs, he says:”I’ve heard a litany of excuses for why there are predominantly white people portrayed in roleplaying art, but I’m not buying it. Maybe your claim is that the people buying the game are primarily Caucasian?”"Maybe your claim is that Dungeons & Dragons is based on a fantasy feudal Europe?”Then he finishes: “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.”What effort?!  WotC made no effort to explain why they don’t need to reflect diversity – Mordicai presented rhetorical arguments to that effect himself.  If making up counter-arguments then attributing those arguments to a party of your choice isn’t a straw man, I don’t know what is.  

You’ve made 16 out of the last 20 comments in this thread. Please…..go have some pie or something.

Are you in America?  Because a lot of the black people my age have been afraid of white nerds since Columbine.

Ugly issue: the descendants of former slaves – what I’ll assume comprises the majority of black Americans – don’t identify as “former Bantu” or whatever, because the  North American slaveowners spent something like 500 years willfully obliterating literacy, culture, and community among their black slaves and those slaves’ children, to destroy their connection to home and history.

The people responsible for that are all dead, but they never really admitted it, and certainly didn’t repent, atone, or make reparations for what they did.  Then, once the ink was dry on the 14th Amendment, all white Americans, not just the former slaveowners, spent the next hundred years willfully obliterating their memories of any harm that had ever occurred to those former slaves.

I’m not sure what could’ve been done differently, and there’s no room here to even start speculation.   Regardless, the damage was done, IS done, and that damage leaves the larger part of the majority completely unable to talk to the larger part of the minority on almost anything like culture, community, and history.  

We’re still on different drinking fountains, in no small part  because people like to keep trying to change the white fountain to work better for black people.

My problem with Mordicai isn’t that he called out what he thought was racism, it’s that he did a really lazy job of it.

PS: I thought alcoholism was a serious issue, but since you say it isn’t as important as “sexism, racism, ect,” it would be great if we could get a list of the et cetera.

PPS: Is sexism or racism more important?  This whole blowup is over racism, and if sexism is more important we should tell WotC to fix misogyny for 5th Ed and maybe save racism for 6th.

Plus I got to root for the Green Knight of Leon (where my grandmother’s side of the family has origins) in the jousting, even though the show’s storyline pegged him as the heel. Mu-hu-ha-ha!

OTOH, there’s plenty of evidence for women warriors and adventurers in African history, see e.g.

It still seems to me that what you need is a fantasy framework that’s not built on European models, and that includes all the “races” of monsters and prodigies. Once you introduce this kind of thinking, you’re plunged in Eurocentrism, and white folk become the default.

The Eurasian model of monsters and prodigies breaks down once you head into animism and shamanism. You can deracinate the Wendigo or Anansi, and turn them into monsters, but that’s just another kind of post-colonial appropriation.

Here’s a thought: It’s not a problem to be worked out in Boing-Boing comments. It’s a problem to be worked by people who are not us, in places and under circumstances we can’t imagine, because of who we are and how we came to be here.

We (and here I clearly mean “I”) are not the ones to solve this. That just turns it into another game of White Man’s Burden.

The world is changing faster than we realize, and an inclusive fantasy role-playing world will probably come from somewhere else. Of course, the whole idea of fantasy role-playing as a recreation is an avocation that comes from a position of privilege. 

What happens next depends more on the shifting economic fortunes of the world in the coming decades than it does on any determined effort on the part of reformers.

Knode is pointing at WotC and saying “get him! he’s a racist!” and a plurality, if not majority, of people are going along with it.  Only, as I keep saying, Knode didn’t really present any evidence, what evidence he did present is tainted – maybe even actively refuted – by his laziness and ineptitude: he says Ember appears once in the D&D book but not in the later chapters; then he says he never checked the later chapters in Pathfinder!  He says “four out of the eleven classes are represented by people of color” or five if you count the bizarrely-colored gnome; D&D 3′s count would be 5 out of 11 – it’s just that many of the humans, while “hardly pale but neither are they a deep brown in skin tone” – or, if you want to be crass about it, D&D’s characters don’t fit Knode’s ethnic stereotypes well enough for him to characterize them easily! D&D’s count goes up to 7 out of 11 if you count the purple-tinged artic elf and grey-tinged pinkish half-orc as non-white.  He presents strawman arguments against diversity without naming or quoting individuals, then, in his closing summary, attributes all those arguments to WotC!

His article is terrible, almost every time I re-read it I find something else wrong with it.

It puts me in mind of the Wizard’s First Rule: people will believe anything that they either wish to be true or dread might be true.

There were bitter arguments in the pages of Dragon magazine about it, and horrifically comically “realistic” game systems with tables for baby production and rape percentages, but obviously ahistorically liberated female adventurers are the norm today, in a perfectly unmarked way. There’s no reason at all game designers can’t say “Screw historicity!” again for racial inclusivity, and for the very same reasons.

When a conservative politician tries to justify locking down the internet because anonymous commenters on unnamed internet sites say mean or unethical things, we rise up in righteous outrage. When Mordicai Knode says it, we give him the front page on multiple websites.

Could you provide the citation where he’s a credible threat to shutting down the game? Or any kind of threat. Or making that demand.

Or are you equating him making a suggestion with the government undertaking totalitarian action? Because that would not be a good faith argument on your part. In fact, I would have to accuse you of being exactly like Hitler.

There’s a whole class of people who don’t feel guilt; they’re called “narcissists.”
/Pendantry

Knode’s article is poorly written (his critique of D&D includes the notion that a minority character doesn’t reappear enough later in the book, but then he says *he didn’t go all the way through the Pathfinder book*), full of unsourced third-party arguments (strawman?) and an unsourced assertion that WotC is “bending over backwards” to prove they don’t have to be racially diverse.

It’s a steaming pile!  There’s no reason anyone who can read, and remember what they’re reading from the start of the article to the end, should have approved of this guy’s work.  The most plausible explanation I have is the phenomena referred to as ‘white guilt.”

My whole point is that I see a lot more shaming than compassion in the pro-diversity comments.

Are you suggesting that people from groups that are actually oppressed and marginalized need to express compassion for the privileged who are upset about having their status quo jiggled? Because that would be ridiculous.

When I said it was a "solution," I meant, "Create a fantasy world where Europeans or Asians are highly improbable, and require some kind of special pleading in order to exist."

I don't think you can just add black characters to D&D and call it a day, because the assumptions that underlay that world are Eurocentric assumptions. Any Black kid with an interest in RPGs is going to feel just as self-conscious as a Black mage as she feels as a Black American. She's never going to be unmarked, and she's never to going to be completely comfortable.

Besides, anyone who's ever used any reasonably sophisticated software knows that the defaults are there to be changed.

(NB: IANA Gamer. My interest in fantasy fiction peaked prior to the introduction of D&D in the 1970s. This is because I am old. But, now that I’ve written the comment above, I might just play if there were a D&D: Bantu Expansion Pack.)