I am sorry if this is something basic that has been discussed to death before but I feel like I need to get this out of my system before I ruin friendships by wishing centuries of humiliation on people for the way they play pretend.
I had a casual chat with a friend and fellow GM about our current campaigns and worldbuilding. At some point beast races come up and I mention I like gnolls and give a few short details about their society in my setting. In response I get an explanation that he can't have this kind of characterization because of Goebbles level bullshittery about how beastmen are inherently savage and destructive and basically a swarm of pests that has to be put down. And how this is necessary in order to address the moral issues of what to do with beastmen non-combatants. Essentially giving players moral license to commit genocide and still be considered "good" in-universe.
It felt so fucking unreal seeing how normally chill people can almost reproduce word for word the vile shit that Zionists are using right fucking now as a justification for mass murder and not have a single moment of "oh shit wait wtf am I saying". I had to step away from the keyboard and calm down. I hate how concept of "sapient creatures that are completely and irredeemably evil and are specifically designed to be slaughtered" is seen as something completely normal and even expected. Gygax was a piece of shit genocide enthusiast who deserves to rot in hell and it's high time that we move on from colonial plunder sims with dragons and obligatory others that exist only to be killed and looted.
You are building an imaginary world and there are no limits. The genre is literally called imagination. There is no excuse for consciously designing entire species that are designated for slaughter and reproducing some of the vilest ideologies ever thought up by humans as a pillar of your worldbuilding.
That's it I guess. That's the rant. Thanks for reading. I am doing my best trying to give positive portrayals of non-human societies in my games and also trying to get my friends to play other games that aren't built from around breaking into others' homes to kill them and take their stuff.
There is something very fundamentally wrong with D&D and it comes down to its roots and original influences. First off you have Tolkien, who, as other comrades have mentioned already, had some deeply problematic elements in his worldbuilding that went on to greatly influence the genre conventions of fantasy ttrpgs. Then there's Gary Gygax, creator of OG D&D, and also famous racist and biological essentialist. One thing that should be highlighted is that once you get past the medieval aesthetics, D&D really has more in common with the American West than Medieval Europe, and here again other people have already mentioned how he compared a paladin killing "prisoners of Evil alignment" to actual atrocities by US settlers. The core gameplay loop itself boils down to: go to a dungeon (inhabited by always evil monsters), kill all the inhabitants (who are evil by nature so it's ok), and take their stuff by right of conquest and the moral implications of killing sentient creatures to loot them are handwaved away with the very same type of arguments that real life colonial powers have used to justify their own real life crimes. Just a glance at how orcs/goblins/bugbears/gnolls etc are commonly portrayed as rag wearing tribal savages in contrast to the generically anglo-saxon knights-and-castles humans and other "civilized races" is enough to spot more red flags than the October Revolution had. It's disgusting and we can and should do much better.
Yeah but gnolls are big hyena ladies right? Theyre hot
correct on both counts
Yeah, the dungeon crawl loop is a roleplay of colonialism, and replacing a sentient creature with a non-sentient one (zombie, etc) doesn't help because it just changes the in-universe justification to avoid the issue. I'm not really sure it's salvageable or worth salvaging. I still play cause it's the main way I interact with a couple friends. We don't do dungeon crawling though, but I don't know how different "story" games actually are because the characters can only really interact via that gameplay loop even if the aesthetics are different and we're fighting knights or w/e.