My previous post provoked largely reasonable debate, proving how old fashioned dialectics can get us to the heart of the matter. I thought it would be interesting to summarise the points on which I think agreement was reached, and where the truth probably lies. People almost never take the effort to take stock after internet debates; let's give it a shot.
- There is certainly a problem that arises when people adopt a vision of the orc as 'noble savage'. The is far too close to real-world historical conceptions of people living in particular societies, and leads to clear insensitivities.
- It was probably extremely ill-advised in the first place to have adopted the word 'race' to refer to orcs, elves, dwarves, humans, and the like. And however ill-advised that may have been, it is even more so nowadays when the word has become almost unbearably fraught.
- If somebody you're gaming with says something in the game makes them feel uncomfortable, you're probably an arsehole if you keep doing it. As I said back in 2009, almost all gaming advice can be reduced to the simple maxim: Don't be a dickhead.
- Orcs work really well as a representative of the worst human tendencies (on which more below) - aggression, cruelty, resentment, and so on. Watering that down by trying to make them sympathetic ironically seems to have the result of making it feel 'wrong' to stereotype them as evil, leading to weird discomfort with what is a core element of traditional D&D (killing evil humanoids and/or taking their stuff).
- Almost nobody likes racists or wants to be one, so debates should be had in good faith.
What I think this boils down to, to reframe the main point of my previous post, was that if one is to use 'orcs' at all, it is better to do so expressionistically rather than naturalistically. In other words, orcs (like all monsters in general, really) are best thought of as representations or evocations of mood and emotion rather than natural species with genes and psychologies and histories of their own. They're like fairy tale goblins, devils or evil spirits - and not like Klingons.
Some interesting orc types would therefore be:
- The pig-faced militarist, embodiment of belligerence and tyrannical discipline, like a hypertrophied perversion of ancient Sparta
- The aggressor, glorying in violence and self-aggrandisement and worshipping nothing but the principle of might makes right - an embodiment of what people really seem to mean when they talk about 'toxic masculinity' (and in the same sense that Nazism seemed to embody a distortion and glorification of the most negative of male traits, unmoored from any of the positive ones and freed from traditional morality by Nietzschean nihilism)
- The dehumaniser, representative of how cruelty develops from conceiving of human life, and certain individual human beings, as lacking in intrinsic value, and therefore fair game for whatever torments one wishes to inflict upon them; these orcs would look upon humans as lacking any inner life or moral worth, and hence as mere playthings (or worse)
- The resentor. Human beings know love, they know kindness, they know friendship, they know art. The orc does not understand those things, except insofar as it grasps that it will never have them. It embodies spite: it will make us suffer because it can never be what we are.
Add your own.
wow, an actual good take. poggers.
ReplyDeletetbf I think if you ever want "evil humanoids" portrayed "naturalistically," just use humans! and ideally, humans without any of the traditional markers of marginalization.
there is, of course, a question left of what to do with that stalwart monstrous/sympathetic figure of D&D, the half-orc. but that's a whole separate discussion. (personally I'm of the opinion that themes surrounding half-orcs DO skew irredeemably racist, and half-orcs should be "cancelled" even when orcs stay, but yeet lmao)
Tieflings seem to have been a more successful take on half-orcs.
DeleteI think tieflings work because fiends are humanized a lot less than orcs. They're treated like conceptually evil spirits, whereas orcs have always been more... fleshy.
Deletealso, a thought on your third bullet point: people aren't always in a position to voice if something makes them uncomfortable. assuming that "oh, I've got a Black player at my table, they'll let me know if I cross any lines" is already inherently othering the Black player and putting a burden of extra emotional labor on them. oftentimes marginalization is invisible as well: a closeted trans person might not be able to speak up about certain issues without feeling like they might out themselves.
ReplyDeletelistening to people at your table is a great first step, but we can't stop there lol
I like to think people can behave like adults and just discuss things, rather than needing to tread on eggshells around each other all the time.
DeleteSpeaking from personal experience, people can get EXTREMELY defensive if you talk about something they did that made you uncomfortable, especially if it's related to gender or sexuality or race. Sometimes bringing it up can lead to conversations that are helpful, but sometimes people just double down or freak out.
DeleteDepends how the subject is broached, of course. It's human psychology 101 that people get angry the moment they feel they're being accused of something they don't think they've done.
DeleteSo what you're saying, noisms, is that the burden of broaching and managing difficult topics should fall on the marginalized and if it doesn't go well, be blamed on the marginalized, rather than everyone making a pro-active effort not to other and marginalize anyone. Got it.
DeleteNo, I'm saying real world social interactions are complicated. Do me a favour and grow the fuck up, honestly.
DeleteHere's a thought experiment (sincere, not trolling). Should we aim for a) A world where players pre-emptively moderate their in-game behaviour (based on... X?) so there's zero requirement for an uncomfortable player to speak up, or b) A world where players are sufficiently resilient* and confident that it takes less to make them uncomfortable, and when they are, they speak up.
Delete*I've tried to phrase these two options in neutral terms, but am aware I've failed to do so.
IMO, b) Feels like the harder, but better, option, both in terms of play experience, and just learning to be a better human.
If we agree that a bit of a) and b) is best, please let's also agree that it doesn't make sense to build our model by focusing on extreme edge-case strawmen.
Unfortunately even the grown ups are children these days. As we isolate into our bubbles and reduce our in-person social interactions, everyone begins believing they are island unto themselves and starts forgetting all the nuances and niceties of being a decent human being interacting with other decent human beings.
DeleteIf a minority player in a group is uncomfortable voicing displeasure at something occurring in a game, even in confidence with the host or GM, then that player needs to find another group. The uncomfortableness already exists. The trigger is only one more irritation on top of a layer of pre-existing unease. Game with people you aren't afraid to give a heartfelt "Go **** yourself" followed by having a beer with them.
Agreed. This.
DeleteYes, Paul, you hit the nail on the head.
Delete"listening to people at your table is a great first step, but we can't stop there..."
DeleteWhat's the second step? Listening to people NOT at my table? Good luck.
Great post!
ReplyDeleteThe old campaigners. Orcs were human once - or close to it. But their humanity burned away in the fires of razed fortresses and sacked cities as they marched and fought and plundered, year after year, age after age. Time has abandoned them; they neither age nor die; violent death is their only hope of release. The Orcish tongue is the military argot of far-gone times, all orders and ordnance and obscenity. Their roving companies blight the Earth; their tattered banners and ancient war-songs herald atrocity. Mighty sorcerers sometimes compel Orcs to serve their ends - but they need no master to extend their ceaseless warring on all that lives. It is all they know.
poggers
DeleteI like this take. Good work!
DeleteDrokk. Wanted to add that one myself. I also got the idea that this was partly Tolkien's inspiration for orcs. Didn't he mention something about orcs or huns being on both sides, during the war?
DeleteI suppose the problem arose when D&D players decided they wanted to play orcs (for some reason), and now that orcs are people, we obviously can't have them be inherently evil because that is racist.
ReplyDeleteFor some reason, people don't yet have problems with mind flayers or ghouls being inherently evil and irredeemable. (Yet?)
I will agree that casting orcs as primitive, violent tribes is sketchy, but as long as D&D wants to make orc a playable race, they kind of have to depict them as "just another type of people".
Wait until there are mind flayer and ghoul PCs, I suppose...
DeleteFor confirmation of your thesis, ghouls are inevitably a playable race in the 3.x SRD and when I did some worldbuilding around them, I did lean pretty hard into them not being better or worse than anybody else. The tropes built into the concept - cannibals among us who steal your children - perhaps made me especially attuned to does-this-look-like-IRL-racism concerns.
DeleteBut I also feel like this is related to the expressionist vs. naturalistic axis as well, however. Any PC with psychological depth (not that you need psychological depth! you can just be Bob the Fighter and have a blast!) is going to be a person more than an archetype; in fact I think the most typical thing is for Bob-the-Fighters to organically grow in depth over time. In fact I think the experience of playing someone gives you the felt experience of options genuinely being up to them - the felt experience of free will - which intereferes with a sense that someone must be naturally evil or the like. At least IME.
In two posts, a masterclass in prompting and moderating a reasonable debate. Very, very good stuff.
ReplyDeleteAnd you paid the "tax" too! Here's my orc archetype:
The nightmare, a creature from the tales of your childhood, of shadow and brutal, malign presence, waiting beyond the light of the campfire.
Rereading LotRs, it appears orcs do not have quit the same level of free will as the rest of the sentient races, though exactly how much is a matter of debate. Orcs in LotRs clearly have their own agendas and personalities but at the same time seem to be pretty much directed by the enduring will of the "forces of evil on Arda. Orc activity in the appendices seems to only occur when Sauron is gearing up to have another go at it, and the rest they appear to be content to live in their mountain holes and do whatever it is they do when not threatening the world. When Sauron finally goes, the orcs scatter or go crazy. So to me that means orcs are more of a hivemind hominid that responds only an evil will and starts reproducing and building when directed. That doesn't really solve the nature of them or how they were made, but it does give them something else to do, besides be hero fodder.
ReplyDeleteInvasive pest: they are the maggots of the underdark consuming the rotten, the dead, the useless. On or near the surface where there is plenty of food and little protection against them, Orcs are an invasive pest. Smart enough to adapt to using weapons and tools, even magic, they are dangerous. They see everything that isn't a orc as either food or weapon. A rock becomes a weapon until they find a sword, after which they smash the rock and eat it. They eat your meat and save your bones to make more weapons, which they might eat during a battle after picking up a fallen hero's axe.
ReplyDeleteThey spawn their eggs in the thousands. To allow those eggs to hatch can be fatal to any nearby community.
There are a lot of 'evil' creatures I can accept as just cannon fodder... zombies, robots, vat grown homunculi, 40K Space Marines... creatures without families or free thought/inner lives.
ReplyDeleteSo like you say, not natural... and thinking about that, it makes orcs much scarier to me.
Having utterly lost the war, the vanquished soldiers banded together, and had among themselves a great re-enactment of that initial disaster, wherein they managed to grind the battle to a negotiated surrender of their own side, where they conceded half the ground only. 'We have done well,' they said.
ReplyDeleteI think what you're describing is called "meeting in the middle"?
DeleteAssuming I get the joke, I think a better analogy might be:
Delete"A minority of progressives loudly populate the field with two armies of strawmen and declare themselves the victors. A near-sighted grognard laments the defeat. No one else notices."
What is the English term for meeting in the middle fifteen consecutively times, while your opponent maintains the same position?
DeleteIt's just a discussion about orcs in D&D. Who are my "opponents"?
Delete90& of progressive, 'woke' people have entirely good motivations and just want to do the right thing. A small minority are malevolent actors, either people with 'dark triad' personality disorders or petty Robespierre types imbued with resentment, who see internet mobbing, bullying and cancel culture as a route to power. The way you defang those bad actors is by engaging in sensible dialogue with the sensible ones.
That's fair, although I think the bad actors have very little real world impact, and can (usually) be safely ignored. Nonsensical and/or radical ideology rarely survives first contact with the man on the Clapham omnibus. For this, and other reasons, I'm trying (but failing) to care less about The Culture Wars.
DeleteMy biggest takeaway from this debate, though, is your "expressionistically rather than naturalistically" point. I hadn't realised how much I had internalised the idea that "all monsters have a culture and everything exists in an ecosystem with bounds and physical laws".
now hopefully to part 3: can you/we take the other of the big 3/4 (elves/dwarves/halflings/???) and wxpand on their niches in the same way your second bullet table had for the orcs? i think a significant fraction (tho not majority mind) is the fact that of the main 'races' represented, only one of them is generally treated as default bad.
ReplyDeletebring back the capricious fae of the summer and winter courts, dwarfs who delve greedily and deep, and... i guess just homebody little england hobbits? they are def the ones that could use the most work haha
Good point - though I think the dark side of hobbits is really their small-mindedness and insularity?
DeleteThe OSR inspired Forbidden Lands has a great take on the dark side of hobbits: They and goblins are the same. They may have children together but even similar looking parents will produce a hobbit looking one or a goblinish one at different times. The halfings are ashamed of this and never let non family members attend births. Due to social pressures, they surrender babies to the other "tribe". the "Goblins" ,lurkers in the forest do the same. This causes a lot of anguish, pain and resentment between the two peoples.
DeleteI read the study done by Christopher Ferguson (the psychologist interviewed in the podcast) and looking over the scope of his career, he's done a lot of work researching media effects in experimental settings. He wants the conclusions of the experiment to demonstrate that a leftist moral panic is out to stop fun, but that only mars the text of his interpretation without, in my opinion, fundamentally harming the results of the study. The ultimate conclusion, that playing with 5e's description of orcs is not likely to make players more racist, is a reassuring one.
ReplyDeleteBut psychological experiments of this kind don't tell the complete story on the processes of creating and engaging with games or issues of race, conscious or otherwise. Christopher Ferguson has done a yeoman's service in the field of psychology as it relates to media effects and games, but the problems of interpretation aren't dispelled by that work. Ferguson could learn a lot from the field of literary analysis just as literary or cultural critics could learn a lot from his research.
Coming to the issues with curiosity and humility tends to make for better conversations in general, even if they are often in short supply online. Listening and responding to the people you’re interacting with, online or in-person, instead of reacting to a caricature or stereotype will mean actually conversing instead of repeating the same shouting match. This is especially important when the conversation exits the realm of the abstract and become topics of how you are going to play in the game at the table.
As a DM, I’m pretty flexible with players when it comes to their characters and I’ve mostly played with groups of friends who have an already established rapport or with total strangers (who tend to be complete newbies). None of them have been Tolkien diehards, so the traditional characteristics don’t loom large, and to whatever extent they are interested in making their character races more detailed it’s a pretty easy conversation to have at the table or privately. I try to center issues of geography and class rather than biology, which doesn’t necessarily dispel racism but puts the focus on an aspect of verisimilitude I’m more comfortable working with. Some things, like tieflings or dragonborn, I don’t outright ban, but I make it clear from the onset that you will have very specific reactions from people because to the ignorant you look like a monster and to the cosmopolitan you look like a person associated with particular social classes.
There has occasionally been questions about orcs, and what I came up with was a historical origin to the animosity. During the reign of some dragon kings, orcs were conscripted en masse and over generations served them as a janissary-like class of warrior slaves. In time, the dragons were overthrown with a coalition of most of the other player races, and while orcs did in time join the rebellion, there were longstanding generational hatred that isn't easily erased. Mix in a new power structure that saw orcs brought low on the social food chain and you have the ingredients for plausible social hostility without racial essentialism. This also has a benefit of being a neatly-wrapped story that players might interrogate further: is this really how it happened? What do the orcs say about this? It's not perfect (for instance, it's not especially fantastical), but it's a start, and if the players were interested it could be developed more.
That’s what I expect for most people’s games. While I have political sympathies, I don’t think the criticisms as they’ve been lobbed against 5e products are very useful because D&D and other tabletop games aren’t videogames or movies. There’s a lot more social negotiation involved where you can have issues worked through at the table and at least provisionally resolved. It doesn’t absolve tabletop games of issues around representation, but it would point us in the right place to look - the people who are at the table and the game that we're playing.
I agree with the last paragraph wholeheartedly.
DeleteThe whole point about RPGs is that they are played in small circles of prople who are, hopefully, friends.
So in other words, work backwards from "what circumstances would make it OK, even commendable, to kill a type of humaniform creatures on sight?" That works.
ReplyDeleteHa, that wasn't how I was thinking of it, but I kinda like it.
DeleteSome points in the beginning of this post I did not agree with:
ReplyDelete1. It's "race" as in "the human race", not as in "the white race". "Species" could fit, but that's not the word which took root and too scientific anyhow. Being extra careful not to trigger anyone, and making an effort changing the jargon for the benefit of people who can't distinguish the two has costs that might be cumbersome to bear - especially if the people making the demand put little to no effort into understanding the hobby they're trying to "fix" and will never be satisfied anyway.
2. Having someone feel uncomfortable should not be a sign the group should change immediately, but a sign some introspection and discussion are called for. Their discomfort is something that should be weighed against several other factors: past occurrences, the effort they've put in or willing to put in, how a change would affect group dynamics, fairness of said change, how it fits our value system, etc. There are clearly times where the best course of action would be to part ways instead of changing the whole group structure if a clash would be unavoidable, because changing would not have the benefit we were hoping for. Also, inability to tolerate discomfort leads to an unfulfilling life - it's a critical skill to have for success and happiness.
No group is completely free of interpersonal hardships. Panicking and self-blame in the face of making someone feel uncomfortable is not actually doing anyone justice. We should judge every situation on its own terms. Plus,anyone who ever ran horror games understands negative feelings such as discomfort, disgust, frustration, fear, boredom and despair are great tools when used in moderation; they give us the lows necessary for experiencing the highs.
1 - Yeah, I know that's what the original designers were thinking. It's just that the term is too loaded. There has to be a decent alternative.
Delete2 - I would agree with that - in the end, it's all about people figuring it out for themselves with the group they're playing with. That's the good thing about human beings. We're social; we can communicate.
The latest edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has changed from using 'race' to using 'species', but interestingly that's opened up a whole new can of worms. Because different cultures are represented under the same set of rules, you get the situation where ethnic groups are defined as 'subspecies'.
DeleteIt never ends, really.
Haha, yeah, they didn't think that one through very carefully, did they?
DeleteBurning wheel uses "stock" or "character stock". I don't know if that has any troublesome history.
DeleteStock could definitely make people feel uncomfortable, in the same way as breed. Terms felt to adhere more to cattle than humans.
DeleteI've heard the term "heritage" brandished.
Increasingly with the bad humanoids I'm torn between a "we're all humans more or less, you fight Bad Humans who are bad because they're fascists/nihilistic cultists/gangsters" to side-step the issue, or just leaning into "if you go around murdering and pillaging people you *become* an Orc - Orcs are a condition humans can fall into, not a kind of person." I think both avoid the creepy racist assumptions whilst also letting people fight intelligent humanoids and steal their shit.
ReplyDeleteYes, these days I tend to either create my own "bad humanoid" races, or rely on humans. Nobody who knows anything about 20th century history will disagree that orcs could do nothing worse than what human beings are capable of.
DeleteDoesn't having only humans as adversaries worsen the situation, though? Or at least return us to the starting point of having to deal with the complexities of human ethnicity in a game?
DeleteViewed purely through an historic lens (which is how the past should always be viewed), orcs are absolutely intended to represent the various barbaric (human) hordes that once ravaged ancient civilizations. Orcs *are* the Saracen, the Moors, the Mongols, the Huns, the Norsemen, et al. A modern version of them would be ISIS (the non-Archer version). They don't have to be "evil" to be destructive or a threat to society, but we damned well better take care of them when they show up or there will be consequences.
It seems to me that using a fantasy analogue (an "orc") actually alleviates the problems of suggesting real-world cultures and people in this regard. The entire argument against orcs is entirely backwards, but if we switch to only using humans as our existential threats to civilization, then does their ethnicity or culture (even in an analogous sense) matter? If not, then what is the point of world-building? If we decide to use a generic "human" for our campaigns, then how do we describe them (i.e., what color is their skin/hair/eyes)? The answers are fraught with peril in our current environment.
Going further, are we allowed to create a southern continent occupied by primitive tribes of dark-skinned people? Or a northern land inhabited by bloodthirsty barbarians with pale skin and blond hair? Or a desert land crisscrossed by clans of nomads? Or must we invent entirely new ethnicities and cultures that bear no resemblance to our real world, so as not to offend? Can we have enemies who are anything but colorless and devoid of cultural markers, for fear of being called out as bigoted?
I am of Swiss-Dutch-Sicilian ancestry; am I obligated to only view the world through those cultures, or can I pretend to be a Japanese samurai or a Zulu tribesman without being accused of appropriating someone else's culture? For that matter, does a black player have the right to play as a European knight or a Viking, or is that also appropriation? This entire line of racialist logic being foisted on the gaming community has an absurd conclusion.
Fantasy fiction is a dream-land...a mirror to our own world in which the fantastic exists. Its purpose is to explore real-world dangers, and to safely demonstrate the virtue of being brave and steadfast in the face of them. Every culture on Earth is responsible for some sort of atrocity because, as you rightly point out, human beings of every creed and color have a tremendous capacity for awfulness.
Tiptoeing around that fact doesn't seem to be doing anyone any good, and it sure as hell isn't teaching us about the real world outside the fantasy.
I generally prefer to think grown-ups (or sensible children for that matter) can tell the difference between good faith imagining and bad faith stereotyping. I don't see the absurd conclusion - I just think people can sort most of this stuff out themselves with their friends.
DeleteIf that's what was being asked of us ("work it out amongst yourselves"), then you have a terrific point which I agree with completely.
DeleteAlas...we are dealing with insensible children (many of whom inhabit grown-up bodies).
I remember reading a couple of blog posts almost a decade ago that delved into the issue of handling the morality of killing humanoids. The first blog was by someone who was running a game for kids and for that group, once we're creates by witches or something like that. They were basically biological androids. They couldn't reproduce and the only way more were made is by witches.
ReplyDeleteThe other blog post had all of the animal like humanoids (porcine orcs, wolfish gnolls, etc.) as being originally human but they sold their souls to some dark gods who transformed them into their likeness. The orcs served a piggish god of violent gluttony and greed. The gnolls served a lupine god of merciless predation. Thus they become like Nazis in Wolfenstein or Indiana Jones, an irredeemably evil force that must be defeated. This is the route I went with my humanoids.
I like that idea. Seven deadly sins made flesh.
DeleteGood stuff. Let's Make Orcs Evil Again!!! >:)
ReplyDeleteI like my orcs as corrupt abominations brewed in a dark wizard's cauldron. Inherently evil, because kindness and honor and justice were not in the recipe. Should you by some miracle manage to redeem an orc, it'd just break the curse and turn him back to human or elf or whatever you used as the base.
ReplyDeleteyes, what you call an expressionist approach is exactly what is so strong in the guys and gals so hot on condemning your politically incorrect backside. :))
ReplyDeleteMike
Is it politically incorrect to call a race "race"? Amazing what science can do these days!
ReplyDeleteWell, I don't think that technically there are such things as "races" except in our own heads - or, at least, what we call "races" have no correspondence to actual distinctions between groups of human beings.
DeleteWhen it comes to D&D the point is that the categories of orcs, dwarves, elves and so on could have easily been called something else, with a less inflammatory connotation.
what people commonly call 'races' (white, black, Asian, etc.) in terms of ethnic self-identification actually correspond quite well (not perfectly) to genetic distinctions between groups of humans. If you do a cluster analysis on human genetic variation, you end up with clusters that map quite well to folk categories - which do, to some extent, derive from the efforts of 19th century anthropologists trying to make sense of human diversity on the basis of anatomy. (They catch a lot of flak for being racists and they undoubtedly were, but some of them also managed to do some real research along the way.) There's this rather common idea that race is just a social construct, and sure, it is that too, but it does turn out that if you start sorting people on the basis of their anatomy (cranial anatomy, skin color, limb proportions) or by their ancestry as inferred from their genomes, with no a priori classifications of any kind, you do end up with groups that match not too badly with how a lot of ordinary people understand the matter. That certainly doesn't mean there aren't a lot of misconceptions and bad ideas around, too!
ReplyDeleteI didn't mean to suggest it was all socially constructed, because of course it isn't, but it is partially.
Delete'White', for example, encompasses populations from Iceland, Greece, Estonia and Portugal. Does it make sense to speak of that as a 'race'? (This is one of the reasons the idea of 'white privilege' makes such little sense outside of the USA.)
Same with 'black' - is a Yoruba person really the same 'race' as a San?
And don't get me started on 'Asian'...
They are very reductive and simplistic categories that aren't actually very helpful in thinking about the real world.
well, Yoruba vs San, is, of course one of those cases where folk categories don't match the ancestry classification - the San split off from the common ancestors of everyone else quite a while ago and then experienced notable East African introgression recently. They don't cluster with West and Central Africans at all! As to the Europeans listed, does it make sense to think of them as the same race? Well, depends on what you want to understand or decide. They are all more closely related to each other than any of them are to a Cherokee or an Igbo. If you're interested in relatedness then maybe? And of course they're simplistic and reductive because that's what a concept always is, because reality is endlessly complicated and nebulous and our minds aren't. Are they more simplistic and reductive than concepts like 'the English language', 'middle class', 'commerce', 'justifiable' or 'fun'? I'd argue no, and I'm perfectly comfortable making use of those concepts, mindful that they're not carving nature at the joints with anywhere close to accuracy.
ReplyDelete