Racial Alignments in DnD

It was rare for me to see another person of color playing, or a girl. Dungeons & Dragons was still largely confined to the white, nerdy, male subculture in which it was born. Most of these players wouldn’t have thought much about the racial meaning of the game—even when the stereotypes were blatant, like one inspired by a “traditional African-analogue tribal society” set in a jungle featuring dark-skinned “noble savages” and “depraved cannibals.” But for kids like me, the meaning was always there.

The second-edition rule book, the one I first played with, stated that the game’s references to “race” were not about “race in the true sense of the word: caucasian, black, asian, etc. It is actually a fantasy species for your character—human, elf, dwarf, gnome, halfelf, or halfling. Each race is different. Each possesses special powers and has different lists of classes to choose from.” Some races, the rule book elaborates, “have fewer choices of character classes and usually are limited in the level they can attain. These restrictions reflect the natural tendencies of the races (dwarves like war and fighting and dislike magic, etc.).” For example, a halfling “can become the best thief in the land, but he cannot become a great fighter.”

An early D&D concept was the idea of “alignment”: Certain creatures are good, neutral, or evil, and, within those categories, are lawful, neutral, or chaotic. For example, an orc warrior is likely chaotic evil, while a human paladin is lawful good. In a 2005 forum post, Gygax wrote that it was fine for a lawful-good character to kill an evil character who had surrendered, because “the old adage of nits making lice applies”—intentionally or not quoting Colonel John Chivington, who led the 1864 massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho people at the Sand Creek reservation. A congressional committee at the time referred to the slaughter as a “cowardly act” that gratified the “worst passions that ever cursed the heart of man.” You might say 1860s lawmakers did not see it as lawful good.

Tolkien was hardly the only influence on D&D. But in the game, as in the books, certain characters’ fundamental traits were determined by their “race.” A dwarf couldn’t do magic; an orc was dumb and violent; an elf couldn’t be ugly. Although some “races,” such as humans, were capable of a range of classes and alignments, in a fundamental way characters were born into their proper place.

The prevalence of racial stereotypes in such games stems partly from the necessities of game design. Games, especially those meant for teenage boys, are likely to revolve around action and adventure, which means violence. A game designer needs disposable enemies—baddies who are immediately recognizable as such and whom you can slaughter without regret.

Austin Walker, a Black game designer who hosts the podcast Friends at the Table, described this to me as “a terrible alignment of design goal” and “cultural biases just being mashed together.” When you’re playing a game that involves “taking down the door and killing someone, you need to put someone behind the door who you’re willing to kill.”

Read: The far right is becoming obsessed with race and IQ

Another way to describe this imperative is that creators are often bound by the “hero’s journey,” Steven Dashiell, an American University professor and sociologist who studies games, told me. “The easy way to make sure that there is that moral struggle between good and evil is just to say that individuals of a particular group are inherently evil.”

One of the most enduringly legible symbols that a character is different and therefore more disposable is race. Of course, the fact that this is also true in the real world is the reason it became such an effective shorthand.