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1 year ago ::
Feb 22, 2012 - 7:10AM
#1
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Date Joined:
Sep 13, 2009
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- For Black History Month, this column discusses the role of blacks in tabletop role-playing games.
- The essay employs the term black rather than African-American or Africa because most fantasy settings do not have an America or an Africa, even if they do include black people.
- Race is an important part of character creation, though there it usually refers to what should be called different species (elves, orcs, humans, etc.) and there is no real mechanical difference between blacks and whites.
- The default assumption of both the text and art of most RGP games is the characters are white.
- White Wolf Games are transgressive and progressive, making an effort to include blacks in the text and art of their games.
- Some fantasy versions of Africa do exist, though your mileage may vary as to the quality and results.
- RPGS lag behind other areas of society – such as business, sports and politics – in terms of including blacks. This will change only when fans make it change.
February is Black History Month in the United States, a month designated to acknowledge accomplishments of black men and women in all occupations, from sports to business to science to politics and so forth. However, the presence of blacks in gaming is thin on the ground, so to speak. In this column, I will discuss the issue and while a conclusion is reached, this is a podcast column and not a comprehensive study of the subject. Black People in Gaming Yes, this post is a hyperlink to elsewhere but the essay is 12 pages and 3,500 words long.
But here is the short version, while black's constitute above 12% of the U.S. population, the appear in less than 1% of the art depictions of humans in the core D&D books in the past.
Here D&D 5E/Next Challenge; make at least 10% of the humans depicted black. Not all art must depict humaniods and not all humaniods must be human, but of the humans 10% should be black.
If not, then why not?
Reviews Blog: thegrumpycelt.blogspot.com/
Image Gallery: grumpy-celt.deviantart.com/gallery/
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Right, where was I...
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1 year ago ::
Feb 22, 2012 - 8:44AM
#2
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Date Joined:
Jan 30, 2012
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While admirable, there is an issue with implementing some of this; namely the fact that color defines race for some D&D fantasy species. It is a classic D&D trope that black elves are drow. A black dragonborn? That's just a dragonborn with black dragon heritage. A black dwarf, halfling, or gnome? Probably a duegar or derro.
The idea that color defines type is a whole 'nother discussion in and of itself, but outside of your normal humans there's really no good way to use skin color in art without tripping over preconceived notions. That said, I'm all for more variety in my artwork.
You fell victim to one of the classic blunders - The most famous of which is "never get involved in an thread with GM_Champion" - but only slightly less well-known is this: "Never go in against AzureShade when card design is on the line!
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1 year ago ::
Feb 22, 2012 - 9:24AM
#3
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Date Joined:
Jan 28, 2012
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If not, then why not?
There really isn't a good reason and overall I agree with you because it's not going to hurt anyone but I'm going to play the devil's advocate for the sake of discussion:
1. Not everywhere the game is sold is America. Many people around the world take offense whenever Americanisms are forced on them regardless of what the Americanism is. So this point has nothing to do with it being a issue of Blacks, just the issue of "keep your America out of my internationally marketed game".
2. You wouldn't be expecting there to be 10% Blacks or even 10% Whites in a game about Samurai. Why should a game focused primarily on European mythology be forced to conform to this when the theoretical Samurai game isn't? That would itself be a racist double standard.
3. Geography of the settings. Look at a map of Toril, tell me one place where people would have high melatonin levels that races with skin live. You can't, there is almost no equatorial land on Toril and what little there is is inhabited by races without skin.
In my games players have always been Exceptional individuals, not Exceptions to the internal logic of the game world.
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1 year ago ::
Feb 22, 2012 - 10:24AM
#4
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Date Joined:
Oct 17, 2008
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Well, congratulations. You've now inspired a tribe of redneck orcs who think elves have "purdy mouths" in one of my settings. I hope you're happy with yourself.  Back to the topic, I think the solution, rather than regimenting a bean-counting system. Is just to get those crazy marketing execs out of the art department. The only thing that happened with the way Redgar turned out is that some of my white male friends who like to play fighters came to the conclusion that "WotC hates fighters." As to what race said people usually played, it was Half-Orc. For that matter regimenting artwork requirements will lead to things like Redgar again but with races. I say let the art department do as they please. Artists tend to produce better and more varied stuff when they aren't under guidelines. Maybe that's just my opinion. YMMV. Also, as SantaClaws mentioned, there are problems with not everyone having the same racial population percentages as America, etc... On a side note, I don't think treating the characters as being all-White in the really old stuff is fair unless the pictures were in colour. A lot of that old artwork consisted of monochrome line-art. When there's only white background and black lines defining everyone, I think it makes a lousy sample for an argument on skin colour. I mean, yes, technically their skin was white, but so were their clothes, the flora, the fauna, etc... It's not really appropriate to the argument and reaks of "Seeing it because one is looking for it." All in all though, more Black people (and other groups for that matter) in D&D human art is fine by me. Variety is the spice of life.  And just to repeat myself, I've said it before and I'll say it again, we should have more group art in D&D. I think it'd solve a lot of these problems as having more people in the picture would likely cause the artists to subconsciously vary the characters more just to get the extra variety in.
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1 year ago ::
Feb 22, 2012 - 10:36AM
#5
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Date Joined:
Feb 17, 2012
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This is a great issue, but I think there might be some equivocation over whether this is a game world problem or a mechanics problem.
If it's a game world problem, then it's no problem. We'll just write up a new game world to cater to ultrarealists, low fantasy types, and people who want more social commentary built into their settings. The fact is that we can make up new races and cultures all day, regardless of what the classic tropes have been or how much we've invested in our current game worlds.
However, if it's a mechanics problem, that's a horse of a different color, and we might be looking for something more complex than a simple negative modifier to indicate the role of race in our games' social interactions.
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1 year ago ::
Feb 22, 2012 - 10:44AM
#6
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This is tangenital, but I wanted to throw it in. There was a study done a few years agon on several MMOs, of which Guildwars was one. The findings of the study boiled down to "This game has an option to play dark skinned characters. No one uses this option. People are racist."
But the actuall reason behind this escaped the researchers. You see when it launched the black characters in Guildwars were really ugly. They hadn't given these characters different faces or bone structures, so it was just a white man's body with a matte black skin draped over it. So it wasn't that people didn't want to play a black character but that they didn't want to play an ugly, unatural looking, black character.
Later on when they released the expansion set in Elona (Africa) and along with it attractive, natural looking, black people with appropriate bone structure and rich skintones. Boom - black characters everywhere
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1 year ago ::
Feb 22, 2012 - 11:08AM
#7
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Date Joined:
Aug 25, 2007
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most current campaign settings are based on medival europe, most mideval europeans might never have seen a black or asian person.
in the video colum world of darkness is mentioned but world of darkness plays in a time closer to ours where it is common for people of difrent skin collors mingel.
but ofcourse in a fantasy world long range travel might have developed earlyer and there might be more mingling of people of difrent skin color might happen.
the stero types are often based on history, if you ask a artist to make a drawing of a knight he will draw a white male, as historicly knights where a european phenomenon during a time when european culture was very male dominated.
part of this is due to lack of knowlage, many of us can imagine mideval europe.
but if you ask what was happening during that same time in history in places like africa and america and asia it gets a lot harder.
also if you ask people about great historical civilisations the most probeble awnsers would be:
the Egyptian,greek,roman, celtic and germanic tribes, moving a bit later in the time line and people would almost exlusivly name european civilisations.
many of us just know so littel about what went on in the rest of the world, part of the reason for this being that there is not much written history of the other cultures that survived.
I would like to see campaigns based on the mytoligy and history of other cultures.
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1 year ago ::
Feb 22, 2012 - 11:24AM
#8
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Date Joined:
Oct 17, 2008
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I would like to see campaigns based on the mytoligy and history of other cultures.
Indeed. Let's bring back The Known World/Mystara!
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1 year ago ::
Feb 22, 2012 - 11:36AM
#9
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Date Joined:
Oct 11, 2007
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While admirable, there is an issue with implementing some of this; namely the fact that color defines race for some D&D fantasy species. It is a classic D&D trope that black elves are drow. A black dragonborn? That's just a dragonborn with black dragon heritage. A black dwarf, halfling, or gnome? Probably a duegar or derro.
The idea that color defines type is a whole 'nother discussion in and of itself, but outside of your normal humans there's really no good way to use skin color in art without tripping over preconceived notions. That said, I'm all for more variety in my artwork.
Although, in some sense, it is silly, I like the fact that Hercules and Xena had ethnically mixed casts, particularly the extras. In a logical sense it is silly because there just wouldn't have been such ethnic diversity, but it was pretty cool at the same time. I like that in my D&D games. If it is at all plausible for diversity, there should be.
And drow happen to be black (as in the color). In my first 3e game, they were known as "white elves", because the game was set in a mythic Africa, and the "normal" elves had dark brown skin and black to reddish brown hair. The drow also had dark brown skin, but shocking white hair.
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1 year ago ::
Feb 22, 2012 - 12:19PM
#10
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Date Joined:
Nov 17, 2011
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3. Geography of the settings. Look at a map of Toril, tell me one place where people would have high melatonin levels that races with skin live. You can't, there is almost no equatorial land on Toril and what little there is is inhabited by races without skin.
Look at a map of Dark Sun, tell me one place where the fair skin people would live.
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