Last night I got an email from a reader who wanted me to discuss an older Tor article, A Modest Proposal For Increased Diversity in D&D, about diversity in the art of Dungeons & Dragons. For those of you that haven't clicked the link yet allow me to save you the tedium and aggravation of reading a guy excusing himself for being white, male, and calling for diversity to cut to the chase. The author of the article, Mordicai Knode, wants to have people who aren't white in the core books and not just in the oriental supplements.
I'm in support that sort of thing. Having lots of people of different ethnicities beating the hell out of orcs and goblins; shitting down the throats of giants and slitting the scrots of ogres pleases me to no end. Of course I don't really give a shit whether the characters my players are playing are black, gay, or trans-gendered. In my games we're not out to explore those themes; here we're all about killing some fucking monsters and looting the treasure so we can by better shit to kill more monsters with in the next dungeon.
I know that some of my readers would like for me to look at the game in a deeper way - one in which I force my players to confront their own feelings about race, sexuality, and gender - but that isn't what my players come to my table to explore. My players like combat, exploration of lost tombs, dungeons, and underground caverns. They like learning bits of lore and building a world together through our shared story where I set up the playground and they build marvelous stories through their choices. But hey, if your players would rather sit around a fire imagining what it's like to be hated because of their skin color have fun with that . . . I guess.
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| Judge of Ages by John Harris |
We'll be over here. Killing dragons on our floating island in the sky. And orcs, lots of orcs. And looting anything not nailed down. Strike that, the girls remembered their crowbars and sledgehammers! So we're looting everything!
