We are all free to make up any society we want for mythological dwarves in a fantasy game, and in most D&D settings nowadays I expect elves and dwarves are multicultural vegans free of any sexism or gender assumptions. But it did get me to thinking about properly alien nonhumans, like you find in Traveller or Tekumel. Let’s take Vegans -- beings from a planet orbiting the star Vega, that is. Just for simplicity, assume they have two sexes, which we’ll call priza and vysma. Vegan society is such that prizas are never seen in public and have no obvious roles in government. What would we do about it?
In a Star Trek game, obviously nothing. Dammit, Jim, it’s the prime directive. But what about other science fiction RPGs? Would player-characters take a stand? “We must liberate the prizas!” And would any player want to take a priza character, knowing that they would spend the whole game isolated from everyone else? Closer to home, if you were creating a character to play in a campaign set in Afghanistan under the Taliban or in classical Athens or among the Lev Tahor sect, you wouldn't get to do much if you chose to be a woman. Though no expert on either D&D or Lord of the Rings, I've got an inkling that dwarves in those settings sequester their womenfolk in a similar way, which would explain why Gygax didn't think they'd make viable player-characters.
It leads onto the whole question of whether the settings of roleplaying games should reflect 21st century mores or those of the period (if historical) or invented world (if fantasy). Personally, while I would like to live in a world with no hang-ups about ethnicity, sexuality, sex or gender, I don't expect novels, movies and TV to indulge my utopian dreams -- other than SF, where I enjoy a utopian vision but will settle for Blade Runner grittiness just as happily. On the whole I want fiction to be "warts and all". A WW2 movie in which the Nazis weren't a genocidal totalitarian movement wouldn't make any sense. What would Blade Runner be if humans were nice to replicants? The whole point of art is to confront the darker aspects of humanity, not pretend they don't exist.
And similarly in games. If there is slavery or sexism then player-characters could fight to overcome it -- that could be the point of the campaign, although history shows that they probably wouldn't even think to question it. The interesting thing is if and how they choose to react. I don't know if that moves us any nearer to resolving the squabble over female dwarves (are they still supposed to have beards?) but at least it suggests there might be some useful metaphors to be explored.
Years ago I read a story where Earthlings visit an alien world and have fights with these "Creatures from the Black Lagoon" people. They find dead beautiful humanoid women floating in the surf, looking like they'd been partially eaten. They connect the two and wipe out the Creatures so the pretty girls don't get eaten anymore. Too late they learn that it's one race and that's the life cycle. The offspring pop out of the girls and eat them when born. Now the Earthlings have committed genocide.
ReplyDeleteI'm going to be spending a morning on the Internet Archive looking for that one now!
DeleteTerry Pratchett definitively tackled the question of female dwarves when he created Cheery Littlebottom.
ReplyDeleteI can't tell if you're making that up!
DeleteIt's real: https://discworld.fandom.com/wiki/Cheery_Littlebottom
DeleteTo ignore your past is to deny the future (I think UK Le Guin in the Earthsea books). We do have a storied history. My group has played a few pseudo-historical campaigns, and acknowledging the past without celebrating it is sometimes precarious. It does become, at least for me, difficult when we're trying to stay in character, when that character is a product of their times and those times, viewed from a modern vantage, are difficult for the non-dominant group. Probably why I played a suffragette in the 20's Cthulu game :)
ReplyDeleteBut yes - alien or completely foreign cultures are really difficult to understand, and putting our sensibilities into a different context does not always work out well.
It's an easy route for lazy writers in TV drama too. To show us how good their protagonist is, they'll have them espouse views that are accepted today. Or vice versa -- look how vile these 1950s doctors are, they all assume a woman's place is in the home. But people see the world around them through the lens of their own society.
DeleteEven when they are progressive for their time, like the French revolutionaries I mentioned, they have their blind spots. Robespierre thought you had to have religion for morality and didn't seem to give much thought to equality for women, for example. That doesn't make Robespierre a bad man (we can argue that one for years) because it would have been pretty much impossible for him to conceive anything else.
If I'm roleplaying in a historical period, I try to play a character with beliefs appropriate to that period. In Legend games I'm usually far more devout than actual Christians around the table, who tend to play it like D&D and treat relics as if they're simply technological items.
It's important because, if we aren't able in fiction and roleplaying to adjust our worldview to conform to the society around us, we'll fail to realize that our own society is also rife with irrational assumptions and prejudices. That's the cultural chauvinism that Jonathan Miller always warned against.
That's it. I'm giving up on education and climate change. I have a new cause to champion.
ReplyDeleteIts importance dwarfs all other issues.
DeleteSorry that you think it's laughable utopian wokeness for wanting one's roleplaying escapist fantasies to allow people like oneself the basic agency over their own lives they have been denied for most of human history.
ReplyDeleteSorry that's how you interpreted what I'm saying here.
DeleteFigure there's two basic guiding principles that should apply here. First, don't be @$$holes. If there's a black person in your group, maybe think twice about running a campaign set in the Antebellum Southern USA. At the least make sure they're cool with it. Second, adventurers/PCs are basically crazy people. Everybody else is pretty much content with their lot (or at least too scared to stray from it). They're farmers, tavern keepers, blacksmiths and guards. PCs are the nutballs that decided to deliberately go where terrifying monsters are to try to kill them and take their crap. They are the definition of the social outliers in a world. Sure, 99.99-whatever percent of female Vegans will stay sequestered in their society. But the PC female Vegan says "Screw that! I wanna go outside and get a hamburger!"
ReplyDeleteIn Legend, which is "the medieval period as medieval people imagined it to be", there are few opportunities for female warriors, say. But that doesn't apply to PCs, who can be whoever they like. We discussed that in an earlier post: https://fabledlands.blogspot.com/2020/06/reclaim-dame.html
DeleteI'd certainly check with players if they are happy for the game to explore issues realistically. A comment above complained that I am against making provisions for escapism. Not a bit of it. I'm not much interested in escapist fiction or roleplaying myself, but I'm completely First Amendment about it.