A few years ago, Wizards of the Coast(WotC), who own Dungeons & Dragons, issued a statement on diversity. As would be expected, the responses split along ideological lines and the culture war continues to this day. The D&D front of the culture war is personal for me. I started playing D&D in 1979 and have been a professional gaming writer since 1989. This ties me into the gaming aspect of the war. I am also a philosophy professor, so this ties me into the moral and aesthetic aspects of this fight.

The statement made by WotC has three main points. The first addresses race in the real world. The second addresses the portrayal of fictional races, such as orcs and drow, within the game. The third addresses racism from the real world within the game, with the example of how a Romani-like people were portrayed in the Curse of Strahd. In this essay I will focus on the in-game issues.

Before getting to the in-game issues, I will pre-empt some of the fallacious arguments. While it is tempting to use straw man attacks and hyperbole in this war, WotC cannot prevent gamers from doing as they wish in their own games. If you want your orcs to be evil, vegans, mathematicians or purple, you can and there is nothing WotC or Hasbro can do. Any change of WotC policy towards D&D races (or species) only applies to WotC. As such, the only censorship issue applicable here is self-censorship.

As always in the culture war, there were (and are) ad hominem attacks on folks at WotC. Most of these attribute “wicked” motives to them and take these alleged motivations as relevant to the correctness of their claims. In some cases, the criticism is that WotC is engaged in “woke marketing” to sell more products. While this can be evaluated as a business strategy, it proves nothing about the correctness of their position. In other cases, those at WotC have been accused of being liberals who are making things soft and safe for the dainty liberal snowflakes. This is also just an ad hominem and proves nothing. One must engage with the actual claims rather than flail away with insults.

To be fair, one can raise legitimate questions about the ethics of the folks at WotC: their motives do matter when assessing them as people. If this is merely cynical snowflake marketing, then they could be criticized as hypocrites. But their motives are still irrelevant to the assessment of their position and plans. It is to this that I now turn.

While the Monster Manual from AD&D does allow for monsters to differ in alignment from their standard entries in the book, many fictional races in the game have long been presented as “monstrous and evil.” These famously include orcs and the drow (a type of elf). The concern expressed by WotC is that the descriptions of these fictional races mirror the way racism manifests in the real world. Their proposed fix was to portray “all the peoples of D&D in relatable ways and making it clear that they are as free as humans to decide who they are and what they do.” In the case of real-world racism manifesting in their products, such as the depiction of a fictional version of the Romani, they plan to rewrite some older content and ensure that future products are free of this sort of thing. These changes raise both moral and aesthetic concerns.

One way to defend the traditional portrayal of fictional races in D&D is to, obviously enough, appeal to tradition. Since Tolkien, orcs have been portrayed as evil. Since the G and D series of modules,  D&D drow have been evil. The obvious problem with this defense is that it the appeal to tradition is a fallacy, one I have addressed at length in other essays.

Another way to defend the idea that some fictional races are inherently evil (or at least almost always evil) is to use in-game metaphysics. Until recently, good and evil were objective aspects of the standard D&D world. Spells could detect good and evil, holy and unholy weapons inflicted damage upon creatures of opposing alignments, and certain magic impacted creatures based on their alignment. Demons and devils are, by their nature, evil in classic D&D. Angels and other celestials are, by nature, good in classic D&D. While alignment does have some role in D&D 5E, this role is miniscule by way of comparison.

In most D&D worlds, gods of good and evil exist and certain races were created by such gods. For example, the elves have mostly good deities, with the most obvious exception being the goddess Lolth, the queen of the demonweb pits. As such, the notion of races that are predominantly evil or good makes sense in such game worlds. As good and evil are metaphysically real, creatures could be imbued by divine and infernal powers with alignments.

While this defense does have its appeal, it raises an obvious concern: in the real-world people defend real racism with appeals to good and evil. They invoke creation stories to “prove” that certain people are better and others inferior. As the folks at WotC note, fantasy worlds often mirror the racism of the real world.

One reply to such concerns is to point out that most people can distinguish between the fictional world of D&D and the real world. Casting orcs and drow as evil and monstrous, even using language analogous to that used by racists in the real world, is nothing to be concerned about because people know the difference. The player who curses the “foul green skins” in game will not thus become a racist in the real world and curse the “wicked whites.” Thus, one might conclude, WotC stands refuted. There is, however, an ancient philosophical counter to this reply.

In the Republic Plato presents an argument for censorship based on the claim that art appeals to emotions and encourages people to give in to these emotions.  Giving way to these emotions is undesirable because it can lead to shameful or even dangerous behavior. On his view, viewing tragic plays might lead a person to give in to self-pity and behave poorly. Exposure to violent art might cause a person to yield more readily to the desire to commit violence. While Plato does not talk about racism (because the ancients had no such concept), his argument would apply here as well: engaging in fictional racism can lead people to racism in the real world. As such, Plato would presumably praise WotC for this action.

At this point it is reasonable to bring up the obvious analogy to video games. While the power of video games to influence ethics would seem to be an empirical matter, the current research is inconclusive because the “…evidence is all over the place” —so it currently comes down to a matter of battling intuitions regarding their power to influence. So, I will turn to Plato’s most famous student.

As Aristotle might say, players become habituated by their play.  This includes not just the skills of play but also the moral aspects of what is experienced in play. This, no doubt, is weaker than the influence of the habituation afforded by the real world. But to say that D&D games with moral components have no habituating influence is analogous to saying that video games with hand-eye coordination components have no habituating impact on hand-eye coordination beyond video games. One would have to assert players learn nothing from their hours of play, which seems unlikely.

I am not claiming that D&D takes control of the players in a Mazes and Monsters scenario, just that experiences shape how we perceive and act, something that is obviously true. So, I do not think that people who play in D&D games casting orcs and drow as monstrous and even those that mirror real world racism would make players into white supremacists. Rather, I agree with the obvious claim: our experiences influence us and getting comfortable with fictional racism makes it slightly easier to get comfortable with real world racism.

For those who prefer Kant, one could also advance a Kantian style argument: it does not matter whether the in-game racism that mirrors real world racism has an impact on people’s actions or not, what matters is whether such racism is wrong or right in and of itself. If racism is wrong, then even fictional racism would thus be wrong.

As someone who regularly games, I can see the obvious danger in the arguments I have just advanced: would not the same arguments apply to a core aspect of D&D, namely the use of violence? I will address these matters in the next essay.

 

Most players agree that playing tabletop role playing games (TTRPGs) should be fun. But at the table, and away from the table, people are subject to the false consensus effect. This is a cognitive bias that causes people to “see their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively common and appropriate to existing circumstances.” In the case of D&D, a player will tend to think that everyone agrees with their view of fun. For example, a player who enjoys spending hours in deep role-playing encounters will assume everyone else is enjoying these encounters. But fun, at the table and away, is subjective. For example, I ran a 15k race yesterday and it was fun. Or, more accurately, it was fun for me. Football games are being televised today, but being forced to endure watching football is not fun. Or, as I should say, not fun for me.

Over the years, people have told me I am wrong about running being fun and watching football being awful. They are right and wrong: running is fun for me, not for them. Watching football is fun for them, awful for me. This is because fun, like food preferences, is subjective. What is fun is fun to you, but probably not everyone. What is fun for other people might not be fun for you. As with whether you like plantains or not, there is no right or wrong. There is only like or dislike.

While this might seem too obvious to be worth mentioning, the false consensus effect means that while we know that people enjoy different things, we still tend to assume that everyone at our table will share our view of what is fun in the game. For example, if you like minimal role-playing and maximum combat, you will tend to assume that is what everyone enjoys, and you probably wonder why other players sometimes won’t stop talking to the non-player characters (NPCs) when they should be killing them. This is why we need to remind ourselves that the other people at the table might have a different idea of what is fun, and we should make some effort to find out what that is. It is also worth mentioning that while there are selfish players who are at the table solely for their own fun, a person can appear selfish because they honestly think that everyone else is also enjoying their way of playing. For example, if a player loves going off on lengthy solo role-playing encounters in the game, they might think everyone else is enjoying this as an audience to their role playing. But the other players are probably bored and spend that time on their phones looking at memes. So, it is good to check in with the other people at the table and see if they are also having fun.

It seems reasonable to accept that players have a right to have fun at the table, and this is the approach I try to take a Dungeon Master (DM) and as a player. One should also remember that, just as with other rights, other people have the right to have fun as well. So, it is not that only I have the right to have fun, we all have that right. And, as with other rights, such as the right to free expression, this means that I should and must accept limits on my right so that other people can enjoy their right. For example, if I really enjoy combat, but I know that other players enjoy role-playing encounters in which they talk to the monsters, I should curb by murderous inclinations from time to time, so they won’t have to rely on speak with dead to talk to the monsters.

While, as noted above, fun is subjective, there are some things that are not fun for anyone. One example of this is being unable to act on your turn in D&D. At most tables, a player can spend minutes of time trying to sort out what they will do in seconds of combat. This might be because the situation is dire and complex, and the wrong choice could be the doom of the party. Or it could be because they do not know their character very well, they haven’t read up on their spells, or they were watching football when it wasn’t their turn. This means that if a player is unable to act on their turn, they might have to wait fifteen minutes or longer before they can do anything. While it can be fun to observe the combat, many players tend to check out when they cannot act. Phones, of course, have made this easy to do.

Since I know this, in my role as DM I try to ensure that a player is always able to take their turn. One key part of this involves being very restrained when deciding whether the monsters use spells or abilities that can “steal” a player’s turn (or turns). Spells like Sleep, Tasha’s Hideous Laughter, Hold Person, Hypnotic Pattern, and Banish can take a player character (PC) out of the action, leaving the player with nothing to do. Abilities that stun, paralyze, petrify or control a PC can also steal a player’s turn. And, obviously enough, knocking a PC to zero (or killing them) can steal a turn.

When judging whether to use such abilities, I make a quick estimate of how likely it is that it will steal a player’s turn. This involves some obvious things, like checking how likely it is the PC will be affected but also less obvious things, like how likely it is that another player will do something to save the PC if they are affected. If you, as a DM, know your party works together well, then you can use such things more often. For example, if you know that if the fighter gets held, the party will try to rescue them, then you can have the enemy cleric hit the fight with Hold Person, since they’ll probably not miss their turn, and the other players will have fun rescuing them. As with running the game in general, it is a balancing act in which the DM tries to present a meaningful, but fun, challenge. If you know the party can deal with “lose a turn” abilities and spells, then they can be safely used without risking killing a player’s fun. But if the party cannot or will not counter them, then it is best to avoid them. After all, the point of playing is to have fun and someone who is not playing is probably not having fun.