Player Character Racial Tendencies

This heading can be found on the bottom right corner of page 15 of the original DMG.  I sincerely hope this concept dies a mean, permanent death.

Published quotes from 1979:

"Dwarves tend to be dour and taciturn ..."

"Elves are often considered flighty and frivolous ..."

"Gnomes are most lively and full of humour ..."

"Half-orcs are boors." 

 

Stuff we've heard before, and largely based on templates established by Tolkien, who has been worshipped since culture discovered the man's work in the 1960s.  It's still not popular to mention it among hardcore D&D traditionalists (of which I am not one) that there are uncomfortable relationships between Tolkien's "fantasy races" and possible real-world counterparts.  For myself, I tend to take the word of canon that he never intended such relationships ... but that doesn't exempt him from being a product of his time, which others have connected to Victorian values that existed among the scholars that Tolkien worshipped.

In any case, that doesn't excuse the willingness of post-1960s white males to casually codify racism into the game's framework, afterwards adopting stuffy, pouting foot-stamping behaviours whenever it was proposed that dwarves had every right to be happy, elves could be serious and gnomes were allowed to be depressed or have no interest in tool-making ... at least in the context of what emotions we force players to play.

Personally, I considered dwarves-are-this and elves-are-that as a worthless contribution to the game world, along with alignment and anything else that dictates what a player feels or how a player acts at table, whatever their race.  Space wasted in books to tell us who hates who and who gets along with who is just as ill-considered.  It paints a bleak picture of how poorly we've managed racism since the beginning.  There is half a page of this nonsense in the DMG, and part of me can't help seeing Gygax and crew patting themselves on the back at how literary and clever they were being.

The inclusion of this nonsense in the DMG is an embarrassment.  I say this as a 56-year-old white male raised in a region just right of Texas.  And this is something I knew in 1979, when the book came out.