Problems and Poleaxes

The team that produces the National Public Radio podcast Pop Culture Happy Hour didn't release an episode on Martin Luther King Day, and so the Code Switch team stepped in to present "Rolling the dice on race in Dungeons & Dragons." Not sure that I see the relevance, but whatever.

The episode was, as might be expected, a rather tired and perfunctory examination as to why the construct of races in Dungeons and Dragons (which are really better described as species) doesn't pass muster in the 2020s. On the off chance that anyone with even a passing interest in both tabletop role-playing and the social justice movements in the United States couldn't have figured that out.

It all felt kind of Nostradamus to me, in the sense that here were a group of people, examining a game that was first published in the mid-1970s through the lens of modern ideas of social justice and concluding that it was intentionally problematic by standard that didn't exist yet.

But here's the thing... it's not that Dungeons and Dragons, especially in its early incarnations, isn't wildly biased. It's just that the biases weren't tied to early 21st century notions of White supremacy. Rather the game reflects the biases of the sources that Gary Gygax and company consulted in putting it together, which were genre fiction and reference materials that in some cases, dated back decades. And the fact that Dungeons and Dragons grew out of fantasy wargaming. More than simply funny-looking people based on Norse myth and J. R. R. Tolkien's novels, Dwarfs and Elves were troop types. Which is why in the "basic" versions of the game, they were also classes unto themselves.

The biases, and occasional outright bigotry, that was present in many of these sources finds its way into the game, and it worth talking about. But in order to do that, one has to be familiar with the game in a broader context, rather than just trotting it out as curiosity to demonstrate to an audience that one finds problems in the same things (and for the same reasons) that they do.