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How We Talk Past Each Other: understanding how the war over the future of Dungeons and Dragons is the entirety of the culture war in a nutshell
In a thread on Reddit Motte at least six months ago, I became enlightened to the fundamental difference between drag and crossdressing. The latter is fundamentally serious, a personal choice of expressing something important about one’s inner self. The former is a form of playing, specifically, performing a role meant to be absorbed as part of a fiction. It is part of the larger genre of performance known as clowning, which can be described as colorful character archetypes performing bold actions with obvious consequences for an audience. Clowning also includes professional wrestling, F/SF cosplay, Muppets-style puppetry, and political ads.
The same split is seen elsewhere in fiction; genre fiction is considered non-literary because it typically involves stereotyped archetypical characters walking a well-trod path in a specific type of world: Hopalong Cassidy, Zorro, Sam Spade, Batman, Spider-Man, Elric of Melniboné, and so on. I used words containing the root “typ” three times in that sentence because typing is the core of genre: any individual is an instance of a type.
By contrast, novels focus on individuals as beings-in-themselves, and might use types as something they struggle against. So do graphic novels, explorations and deconstructions of characters in a more realistic or nuanced way, even if they have types. They are more akin to the arthouse spirit of crossdressing than the clowning spirit of drag: the sitcom without the laugh track, the invisible and silent audience who appreciates instead of enjoys. And these two spirits cannot exist in the same world.
That brings us to D&D. Gizmodo/io9 published an article about taking biodiversity typing out of the stats of D&D playable species.
D&D is an RPG which is built on the clowning spirit of types and power levels, using fantastic biodiversity to tell adventure game stories. It is a core nerd culture property, enjoyed historically by oppressed people with autism to imagine being powerful people who don’t just fit into their milieu but who thrive as adventurers and heroes.
This little corner of the culture war turns RPGs from Fun With Action Figures to Serious Representation.
It is strange how the the author glosses over the diversity of opinion among those quoted. Someone who thinks that changing the word “race” to “species” will do the trick has a very different critique from someone who thinks that neither the character’s species nor its culture should impact character creation. When Paizo¹ published Pathfinder 2 it used the term “ancestry” instead of race, but the article is wrong to say that it dropped racial ability modifiers altogether. It did change them to make playing against type less disadvantageous.
Over the years I have come to a particular view on the purpose of RPG rules: their primary function is for the gamemaster to communicate to the players how things work and what is possible within the game world; they establish a shared understanding. The GM is free to violate the rules, but he should do so selectively to preserve that shared understanding.
So if someone separates race from culture, I want to ask, “How does that fit your setting?” If it communicates the world better to the players and lets them situate their characters better within it, that’s great! Maybe your elves have several very different cultures, or your capital city has a cosmopolitan culture shared by the men, elves, and dwarves who live there. But if your elves are a reclusive people clinging tightly to their shared traditions, rules that let the player create an elf character from a dwarven culture are going to lead to confusion and frustration.
I think the article fundamentally objects to the givenness of these game mechanics for the character. That explains why the author is concerned not only with race (in either sense of the word) but also with multicultural characters or a 1976 Dragon magazine piece (!) trying to model sexual dimorphism. The player chooses the character’s race, sex, culture, background, and class, but the character only chooses the last one² or two. If you believe that real-world people are fully self-defined beings, I can see how that would rub you the wrong way.
[1] For non-gamers, Paizo is the company which publishes Pathfinder, another branch of the D&D family and a competitor to Wizards of the Coast’s current, fifth edition of D&D.
[2] I wonder how the author feels about sorcerers who inherit their powers through a bloodline, though D&D 5e leans into this less than D&D 3e did and far less than either edition of Pathfinder does.
My view is the rules developed to cover that one smartarse in every session who argues about doing something that shouldn't be permissible for the character on grounds of "Well, the rules don't say I can't do it!"
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