31–40 of 63 posts
Also, on skimming through this again... I think this author would have enjoyed making the students create a GURPS character much more.
I think it's a shame GURPS is relatively less known in the world!
> Dwarves are good at building things not because of some essential genetic racial qualities, but because they are raised in a culture that values building and passes on a certain set of traditional practices around it. Really? Let's say that the DM chose to run a game with mermaids in it. Would anyone question the (theoretically) superior swimming ability of mermaids? Let's see how a similar statement reads: Mermaid…
In all seriousness though, Tolkien's worldview was more medieval than colonial. The north/south, high/low dynamic is a different dimension than the relationship between Europe and North Africa. It's altitude rather than longitude. Putting everything in relationship to the heavens is a touchstone of medieval culture.
Twisted (cf the article's 'ugly') things were considered a visual metaphor for evil by Dante. Dante imagined that beings who were living out their function/purpose with excellence were rooted in the ground but pointed at the stars [ie 'straight]. Men and women who succumbed to temptation were pointed at the stars by design but through concupiscence [getting caught up/busy; becoming obsessed/addicted], such 'crooked' people were turned inward on themselves and could no longer appreciate the things above them.
>Next comes one of the worst and one of the best parts of D&D’s character system. D&D’s Race system is, frankly, kind of gross. The idea that a person’s race tells you something about their character is a sign of the racist elements in the fantasy tradition before and around D&D. ...Really? This type of thought coming from MIT makes me question my sanity.
If one is examining D&D and fantasy tropes in the context of society's attitudes towards race at large, as well as Tolkien's cultural milieu > If you read Tolkein, it’s difficult to escape the conclusion that the tall pale people from the north are good and the dark ugly people from the south are bad. This reproduces the attitudes of the colonial era in which Tolkein came of age and its one of the worst aspects of hi…
It's really a joke, but hysterically brilliant.
(Edit - including a snippet of the 'commentary' below):
ZINN: You’ve spoken to me before about Mordor’s lack of access to the mineral wealth that the Dwarves control.
CHOMSKY: If we’re going to get into the socio-economic reasons why certain structures develop in certain cultures… it’s mainly geographical. We have Orcs in Mordor — trapped, with no mineral resources — hemmed in by the Ash Mountains, where the “free peoples” of Middle Earth can put a city, like Osgiliath, and effectively keep the border closed.
ZINN: Don’t forget the Black Gate. The Black Gate, which, as Tolkien points out, was built by Gondor. And now we jump to the Orcs chopping down the trees in Isengard.
CHOMSKY: A terrible thing the Orcs do here, isn’t it? They destroy nature. But again, what have we seen, time and time again?
ZINN: The Orcs have no resources. They’re desperate.
CHOMSKY: Desperate people driven to do desperate things.
ZINN: Desperate to compete with the economic powerhouses of Rohan and Gondor.
> Dwarves are good at building things not because of some essential genetic racial qualities, but because they are raised in a culture that values building and passes on a certain set of traditional practices around it. Really? Let's say that the DM chose to run a game with mermaids in it. Would anyone question the (theoretically) superior swimming ability of mermaids? Let's see how a similar statement reads: Mermaid…
Congratulations you removed all the context and qualifiers ("if you approach it from a very generous mindset,... You can soften the racism of deriving personality traits directly from a character’s race") in his statement and made an absurd analogy.
I'm not sure if the author of this page understands what "race" means in D&D terms. It's basically species. Dwarves aren't just little people. They're literally not inter-fertile with humans. Now, fair enough, much of the "race" difference manifests itself as differences in cultural background - cultural norms, language, etc. But it's not the same way people use the term "race" in the real world.
Even if on the surface the in-universe beings are from another species, that isn't necessarily a get out of jail free card. People can and will read between the lines. This happened in the context of sci-fi when The Phantom Menace came out. I remember reading criticisms of both the Gungans[1] and the Trade Federation aliens as weakly veiled racial stereotypes. [1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jar_Jar_Binks#Allegatio…
Except for the orc problem (ie, sentient beings we are free to kill), I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with having fantasy races with very broad physical and social similarities. Humans are distinctly weird in a lot of ways if you step back and think about it.
Unfortunate they use D&D with its simple and rigid class system. A classless system like Runequest is much better to express the wide range of possible fantasy trope characters (trope=young boy knows nothing, explorers the world, becomes famous, has powerful enemies, and saves the world by defeating them) Even more interesting would be a career based system like Traveller, with the restriction of maximum homeworld te…
Traveller's system had the odd effect of making the best characters (those with the most skills) also really old. It was odd as a teenager roleplaying a 48 year-old military veteran. My main thought was always "why am I out adventuring instead of just getting some rest?"
A balancing rule is, that older characters earn less experience, and therefor younger learn faster by adventure.
> Dwarves are good at building things not because of some essential genetic racial qualities, but because they are raised in a culture that values building and passes on a certain set of traditional practices around it. Really? Let's say that the DM chose to run a game with mermaids in it. Would anyone question the (theoretically) superior swimming ability of mermaids? Let's see how a similar statement reads: Mermaid…
Congratulations you removed all the context and qualifiers ("if you approach it from a very generous mindset,... You can soften the racism of deriving personality traits directly from a character’s race") in his statement and made an absurd analogy.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Apart from the point where Sam muses about that specific point - expecting Heroic fantasy to be the same as a modern day booker prize novel is not helpful. Just as a lot of the tropes of classical Athenian Theatre are alien to us nowadays doesn't mean its not great art.
I'm not disputing that the works of Tolkien are classics immemorial. I'm just saying that it's always good to take note of the biases of any creator- and they needn't be biases that run counter to "political correctness", either. Specifically to race in fantasy, I agree that LoTR wasn't really the place for that. However, D&D is actually the perfect place- RPG sourcebooks are expected to worldbuild, and describe fant…
Unfortunate they use D&D with its simple and rigid class system. A classless system like Runequest is much better to express the wide range of possible fantasy trope characters (trope=young boy knows nothing, explorers the world, becomes famous, has powerful enemies, and saves the world by defeating them) Even more interesting would be a career based system like Traveller, with the restriction of maximum homeworld te…
Traveller's system had the odd effect of making the best characters (those with the most skills) also really old. It was odd as a teenager roleplaying a 48 year-old military veteran. My main thought was always "why am I out adventuring instead of just getting some rest?"
Rolling new D&D characters was one of the first non-trivial programs I ever wrote. It was on a VAX-VMS in basic, but hey that still counts as programming, no?