The reason is quite clear: the worse the creature is, the less guilty we should be about killing them ... so we heap on the gore and hideousness and what not. It's precisely the same tactic used in hateful propaganda, familiar as Donald Duck fighting the Nazis and the Japs. Make the enemy look stupid, make them look like cowards, preach about how they stab babies and drink blood, anything that alleviates any possible guilt that anyone can ever have about killing these creatures. Keeping in mind that this isn't propaganda from world war II, this is published in 2014. When the anti-racists online carp about the questionable nature of slaughtering orcs and black elves in D&D, they can pick up a book published in the last year (every splat book from the company indulges in this) and see it right on the page. Where you see Jackalwere, think Jap. Think Jew.
These murderous sadists are not my jackalwere. Admittedly, I have a race or two like this; the players just finished helping wipe out a frogling lair, and they were pretty bad. But the average orc in my game is a farmer; the average kobald builds a village where they can raise meat for food; the average bugbear is a hunter gatherer. True enough, some of them raid, and some of them kill. But that's true of humans. We humans invented this grilling-babies-on-pitchforks shit. Not all of us, obviously. Just enough of us who happened to be in charge of the war effort, who thought this was a good idea, and just enough people working for the company, who no doubt literally get off on the ooey-gooey magnificence of their writing prowess. "Kewl, Mike! But wait -- when I'm done writing the gnolls, the readers will barf!"
But of course, all the people in charge at the WOTC are adults. They're not infantilized man-boys. The repeated theme of the passage written above throughout all their splat books proves that!
I prefer humanoids that can change sides in a fight. Humanoids who appear to have learned something through their mastery of large political sub-divisions. Humanoids who love their children and their partners. Humanoids that are, at least in some ways, like us ... in a way different from sociopaths. With D&D, you're either all bad, incredibly so, or you're so squeaky clean you shit soap. This polarization is boring. Being good or evil is okay; but I'd prefer if we could stop being so two-dimensionally evil. Or good.
I had more trouble with the Jackalwere than usual. But there is no mythological "jackalwere;" and the Anubis warrior thing appears to have been an invention for the Scorpion King. It doesn't fit Anubis, at all. A little looking turned up cynocephaly, but the content here and elsewhere on the net is, well, meh. I kept on looking and turned up this god, Wepwawet. But yeah, no jackalwere here either. At some point you just have to make things up.
I remember my creative writing instructor telling me in university, way back 30 years ago, not to make things up. It's much better to write about what you "know," because then you will always write from the heart. If you write about things you just make up, readers will be able to tell and it won't sound genuine and authentic.
One has to admire the obtuseness of this point of view, given the mountains of literature and religious influence on society that were clearly "made up" on truly gargantuan levels; and the purebred evidence of how many people cheerfully and violently believe it, to frightening degrees. There's something so utterly navel-gazing about post modernistic writing, which yet finds a way to exist in a universe that has Poe, Scott and Shakespeare books aplenty. I wonder; did my instructor suppose that Lew Wallace learned to drive a chariot before writing Ben Hur, or that Jules Verne actually built a submarine? More likely, she just didn't "believe" it. A rather idiotic standard to hold fiction to, if you ask me.
Anyway, you can read the whole wiki page for my Jackalwere here. I made it all up.
History teaches quite plainly that the vast, extreme overwhelming majority of people were farmers.
ReplyDeleteWhy on earth would this be any different for a fantasy humanoid race?
Everyone wants more weird races: no one actually appears interested in making those races interesting.
I do feel I've done well. I've massively remade the Lich, Doppelganger, Lamia and Jackalwere in the last two weeks, and enjoyed the results.
ReplyDeleteI personally just want a justification for each monster race why it's untenable as a player race.
ReplyDeleteI'm not arguing for more player races (far from it), I just want the descriptions of each of these creatures to make them alien enough that it makes sense that people are okay when Gimli and Legolas show up alongside Jeff, but don't like Hrog the Mog.
Sure, most Kobolds or Orcs or Gnolls or whatever are farmers/herders/nobodies. But what is it about their culture or physiology that makes it so they can't and don't integrate into the larger world. Why are they Monsters, capital M?
Maybe Kobolds just don't get why it's not okay to let your kids eat each other, and they see their kid eating yours as a favor to you: they got rid of your weak offspring!
The trope I'm looking for is blue and orange morality.
My personal issue with it relates to the rising habit in western culture, not just in D&D, to tailor materialism to mockingly promote an idea that what you can BUY makes you an individual. A toothpaste company invents 33 kinds of toothpaste, just so that YOU can have the toothpaste that most feels like YOUR toothpaste. This ideal has permeated to every facet and part of the consumerist model.
ReplyDeleteD&D bent to this will hardcore, because D&D is a business. All the businesses that did not bend to this model were crushed, except for those very few whose one product was so perfect, every other version of that product failed. Heinz Ketchup. Heinz tried to invent forty types of ketchup, but as it turns out, none of them taste as good as the original formula. Comet cleaner. The product survives because, hey, it cleans. But D&D could not stand up to the wind of demands that people be able to have their individual choices, just as you're asking for here Pandred, without breaking off.
(cont...)
(...cont)
ReplyDeleteI could easily modify my system to let you play kobalds and orcs and gnolls. I could help you play scarecrows, lamia and minotaurs, or ropers and treants and mind flayers. I could let you play mimics, wraiths, nycodaemons, meazels and flail snails. Even if the intelligence of the creature isn't technically there, we could handwave it, granting you the perspective of Watership Down, Toad of Toad Hall, Peter the Rabbit, The Secret of Nimh, the Borrowers or Hammy the Hamster, for all that. There's absolutely no game reason whatsoever why not. Having you play all these other things (though heaven knows how you'd play "yellow mold," but hey, it would be easy to run) wouldn't change a single game rule, it wouldn't markedly break the game and as a DM, I have no doubt of my ability to run it.
But ...
It wouldn't be fair to you.
There is hedonism in chasing the green lawn across the fence, because there is always green lawn there and once you commence to chase it, you will never catch it to your contentment. You will chase and chase, and the game becomes about your chasing, and NOT about you making due with what you have. Consider your own life, Pandred. You'll never be anyone but you. You'll want to be other people; you'll think about being other people; and you'll feel a strong compulsion to try to be other people, and even do it for awhile. But in the end, you'll always come back to being you. And the more you run from that, the less happy you'll be.
Letting you have unfettered access to the whole list of monsters won't make the game better for you in the least. For a moment or two, you'll have a burst of novelty; but then it will wear off, and your kobald or mind flayer or treant won't interest you anymore. But having had that taste of novelty, you'll want another one. And another and another. And another.
(cont...)
(...cont)
ReplyDeleteAnd so, as it has with later D&D editions, it won't be about what you did as a player character, it will be forever about that time you were a tiefling or a dragon born, or this, or that. It will also be about WHAT you were, not WHAT you did, or WHO you were.
If I force you to play one of the same 11 classes, AGAIN, or I force you to play one of the 7 races, AGAIN, then yes, you'll ask and crave the pleasure of being something else. You'll wonder why it has to be so darned mundane. You'll look at all that green grass right over there and oh, my, doesn't it look so damned green! My, my, my.
Instead, you'll sigh, and say to yourself, "Okay, if I have to play an elf, I guess this time I will..." and there you are, thinking about what you're going to DO, not who you ARE. Which is just where I want you, and just where you want you too. You just don't realize it.
This is not a fantasizing game, though people play it that way. This is not a game where you find your identity. This is a DOING game. If I made an agreement that everyone was going to play a mouse in a Nimh universe, and everyone ALWAYS played a mouse, year in and year out, then you'd get over the tiresome problem of being a mouse and start doing things that, going around the barn, established your identity.
But having your identity handed to you on a silver platter won't make you happy. It's my role to be a gatekeeper on that sort of thing. Because I'm not offering you a bromide for all your problems. I'm offering a chance for you to be a better you.
To be clear, I'm 100% on board with that. My thoughts on Tieflings/etc are "Half-Orcs for people who want an edgy backstory but can't stand to not be pretty." Virtually nothing of value is had by allowing them.
ReplyDeleteThe value of XYZ being playable versus not to some degree will always boil down to "it's a game, gotta draw the line somewhere". What I'm saying is I prefer if the line does not appear arbitrary, because avoiding arbitrary is what I value.
WotC tries to have it both ways by making 90% of bipeds playable or intrinsically evil.
What I'd like is a game world that acknowledges that the average Orc is probably an ok guy, but that something about their makeup just doesn't gel with human ethics well, not because the actions are "evil" in intent or even application, but because they are alien.
I get the human experience is more than varied enough for infinite possibility, but if I'm gonna venture into the unknown then it would be nice if the things I met there felt just a little bit unknowable.
I opened the comment box to commend you on the final paragraphs criticizing the outlook of post modernist writing but the string of comments you made here regarding people wanting an identity served up on a plate with an apple in it's mouth and a spit up its ass truly deserves to be printed, framed and hanged above the fireplace, Alexis, spot on.
ReplyDeleteIt feeds directly into my experience, as overheard from players reminiscing about the times they played "a goblin", "a fiend", "a giant" or "a kenku", endowed with a handful of defining traits that amounted to nothing but a shtick.
Funny how such a shallow novelty-seeking mentality will play oh-so-well into a business model of reiterated commercial releases. Surely but a coincidence.
Not at all a coincidence. This attitude of "buying" individualism permeates throughout the culture, in both political and artistic manifestations. Does it not seem strange that so many radical points of view on both the left and right automatically align themselves as much as possible with some "contigent." If I am whatever, a Vegan say, I find a ready-made identity in calling myself a Vegan; and momentarily, I experience moments of novelty and satisfaction in calling myself one. But very soon, I find I don't have much in common with other Vegans; and we don't actually agree on what Veganism is; and soon enough, we end up being just as unsatisfied as we would be, were we forced to manage our identity alone.
ReplyDeleteI know you know this, but it needs to be said. There is no salvation in the politicization of our identities; not in Veganism or in being some kind of fan of some packaged art form. Yet politicization is a corporate strategy designed to sacrifice individuals in exchange for power. It is a burning shame that so many of these individuals fail to see that.
We're not buying our identities. We're selling them.
Yes, this commodification of identity has gone on for quite some time now.
ReplyDeleteMind you, in the scenario I describe above the characters were being reminisced about not for the sake of their names (which nobody recalled), nor for their exploits (which were hand-waved in anyway) but just for the comedic pathos of "oh, and do you remember how we had to buy seeds or else your character would get maaad!?".
And just so this being the reason why these races should never be playable, because the best us humans could hope to make of them would be mockeries.