Race in D&D

Racial bioessentialism is a core design crutch for Dungeons & Dragons. Across fifty years of tabletop roleplaying games, multiple novels, supplements, and additional tie-ins, D&D has continually established monolithic culture building as part of its lore. The alignment charts that Gary Gygax (and many designers) focused on as a method of easy-to-understand character building did not help matters; entire races were designated as Evil using this alignment chart, and Gygax himself can be...

 How Racism Perpetuates Itself by Making White the Default

It is now common—and I use the word “common” in its every sense—to see interviews with up-and-coming young movie stars whose parents or even grandparents were themselves movie stars. And when the interviewer asks, “Did you find it an advantage to be the child of a major motion-picture star?” the answer is invariably “Well, it gets you in the door, but after that you’ve got to perform, you’re on your own.” This is ludicrous. Getting in the door is pretty much the entire gam...

 How Rules Make Games Pleasurable and Encourage Self-Regul...

Picture a child poised excitedly at the starting line of a footrace, ready to run down the track, breathlessly awaiting the starting signal. Rather than giving in to her intense desire to leap from the starting line, she waits for the signal that the race has begun. What's going on here? Why does our player anxiously hold back when she really desires to run? Developmental psychologist L. S. Vygotsky notes that "Play continually creates demands on the child to act against immediate impulse, i...

 Children are Smarter Than Adults

This precocity of childhood may be said to characterise all the known races of man, and to be even more marked the more primitive the race. On this point, ‘It is an interesting fact,’ says Havelock Ellis (183, p. 177), ‘and perhaps of some significance, that among primitive races in all parts of the world, the children, at an early age, are very precocious in intelligence.’ And again, ‘ It seems that, the lower the race, the more marked is this precocity, and its arrest at puberty. ...

 African Americans are the Descendants of Alien Abductees

Dery identified the parallels in "Black to the Future" as 'African Americans are, in a very real sense, the descendanmt of alien abductees," Dery writes. He compares the atrocities of racism experienced by blacks in the United States to "a sci-fi nightmare in which unseen but no less impassable force fields intolerance frustrate their movement; official histories undo what has been done; and technology is too often brought to bear on black bodies (branding, forced sterilization, the Tuskegee ...

 Distracted and Obsessed with Politics

My Dear Wormwood, Be sure that the patient remains completely fixated on politics. Arguments, political gossip, and obsessing on the faults of people they have never met serves as an excellent distraction from advancing in personal virtue, character, and the things the patient can control. Make sure to keep the patient in a constant state of angst, frustration and general disdain towards the rest of the human race in order to avoid any kind of charity or inner peace from further developing. ...

 Stapleton's Use of Religious Terms

At the risk of raising thunder both on the Left and on the Right, I have occasionally used certain ideas and words derived from religion, and I have tried to interpret them in relation to modern needs. The valuable, though much damaged words "spiritual" and "worship," which have become almost as obscene to the Left as the good old sexual words are to the Right, are here intended to suggest an experience which the Right is apt to pervert and the Left to misconceive. This experience, I should s...

 The Other Men

This planet, being essentially of the terrestrial type, had produced a race that was essentially human, though, so to speak, human in a different key from the terrestrial. These continents were as variegated as ours, and inhabited by a race as diversified as Homo sapiens. All the modes and facets of the spirit manifested in our history had their equivalents in the history of the Other Men. As with us, there had been dark ages and ages of brilliance, phases of advancement and of retreat, cultu...