No, he's right, at least in D&D's original mode of play. The central foundational gameplay loop of D&D (and derived fantasy dungeon-crawlers) is to invade other peoples' homes and take their stuff. It is an explicitly settler-colonialist game that uses the exact same excuses as real-world religious and ethnic violence (these people are monsters, they worship evil gods, they are irredeemably corrupt, etc...) Gary Gygax was an arch-conservative and proud settler-colonialist. He explicitly condoned the murder of orc prisoners, including non-combatants like children because "nits make lice," drawing an intentional parallel between the killing of monsters in D&D to the genocide of Native Americans. To clarify, this is something that Gary Gygax said in 2005, not the 1970s.
Modern D&D has deviated from the dungeon crawl as the central gameplay loop, and I think that it's possible to develop a non-colonialist dungeon-crawling framework, but people should be very critical of D&D's roots.
i admit i didn't know any of that, my experience of the game is just that picking your race is mechanically important to a suspicious degree and the alignment system is shit
Which endured for a few years in the 1970s for a small audience before it was wholly eclipsed by subsequent editions, expansions, and authors.
The central foundational gameplay loop of D&D (and derived fantasy dungeon-crawlers) is to invade other peoples’ homes and take their stuff. It is an explicitly settler-colonialist game that uses the exact same excuses as real-world religious and ethnic violence (these people are monsters, they worship evil gods, they are irredeemably corrupt, etc…)
The earliest adventures posit a group of common people raiding the large fortified estates of land barons and aristocrats, in the style of English Privateers or Robinhood-esque revolutionaries. It is no more "explicitly settler-colonialist" than a game featuring a bank robbery is a story lionizing greedy capitalists.
Gary Gygax was an arch-conservative and proud settler-colonialist.
Gary Gygax was a guy obsessed with medieval themed war games who had about as much to do with settler-colonialism as Daniel Craig has to do with The Red Scare. What's more, he ceased serious input into the franchise when he sold the license to WotC in 1997. Long before then, the property was littered with derivative settings and works that ran counter to whatever gameplay one-liners buried under three tiers of links you can dredge up. Whitewashing D&D as uniquely the product of Gary Gygax erases the works of countless other openly progressive authors, from Margaret Weis to Monte Cook to Ajit George. Hell, it whitewashes away all the young people happy to play the game within a progressive context.
He explicitly condoned the murder of orc prisoners, including non-combatants like, children because “nits make lice,” drawing an intentional parallel between the killing of monsters in D&D to the genocide of Native Americans.
You could as easily argue he was arguing for the massacre of the Romanov Children or the execution of the scions and cronies of French Nobility. Hell, the original "evil races" included the pale pig-shaped Orcs and dog-headed Kobolds, far more closely associated with 19th century Europeans than the Good-Aligned Elves and Halflings who better paralleled American Natives or Pacific Islanders.
The leap of logic you're making is entirely the consequence of this sequestered western liberal view of history.
Modern D&D has deviated from the dungeon crawl as the central gameplay loop, and I think that it’s possible to develop a non-colonialist dungeon-crawling framework, but people should be very critical of D&D’s roots.
The critique of the Dungeon Crawl Loop skips right over where Dungeons even come from. Specifically, they are prisons constructed under the large fortified manner houses of the aristocracy, for the purpose of hording looted resources and imprisoning/torturing dissidents. Even as the game has evolved to focus on exploration and social encounters than the grind of room-to-room combat, there continues to be - as there always has been - a through-line of play that revolves around toppling villainous hierarchs by displacing them from their centers of power.
Monsters live in dungeons, not political prisoners. Adventurers go there for mass murder and robbery, not to liberate comrades. They swear fealty to lords, or become one themselves if a high enough level. At best, they are compradors. At worst, they are Generalplan Ost.
Monsters live in dungeons, not political prisoners.
Ravenloft, a campaign setting written in 1983, contained a number of dungeons and dungeon-like settings with prisoners of the Evil Vampire Lord or his minions locked in its depths.
A number of early Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms modules had prison breaks of local rebels and persecuted people worked into their adventure paths. Again, this was stuff worked up 40 fucking years ago.
Adventurers go there for mass murder and robbery, not to liberate comrades.
A guy in a fur hat squaring off against a big red dragon is on the front cover of some of the earliest D&D material.
Didn't you just post quoting the example of whitebox OD&D?
A guy in a fur hat squaring off against a big red dragon is on the front cover of some of the earliest D&D material.
Dragons are a representation of the natural world rebelling against the excesses of humanity. Chaos fighting back against artificiality of "law and order".
Are we really stanning Smaug, right now?
I never thought of it that way, but burning a kingdom of greedy dwarves who chopped down whole forests to feed the fires so they could not just become rich (they were already rich) but to become slightly richer? OK fine. Critical support to Smaug and all the other dragons who went all Ramón Mercader on the lords in their castles.
Dragons are the natural world rebelling against the excesses of humanity.
The thousand-year-old mega-monster that periodically rides out to plunder the surplus value of native peoples is... the natural world? And it's... rebelling? Against feudal peasants?
You don't see any parallels between a heavily armored fire-belching monster that robs from the countryside and a 13th century robbery baron?
burning a kingdom of greedy dwarves who chopped down whole forests to feed the fires so they could not just become rich
The dwarves didn't chop down any forests. Smaug was the one who originally torched the Murkwood. And Smaug didn't stop dwarves from becoming bourgeoisie land owners. He looted their accumulated labor so he could sit on it and feel strong.
Critical support to Smaug and all the other dragons
Unironically doing Patriotic Socialism to own TTRPGs.
The thousand-year-old mega-monster that periodically rides out to plunder the surplus value of native peoples is… the natural world? And it’s… rebelling?
I see you're not familiar with the mythical history of what dragons are, or what they do.
The dwarves didn’t chop down any forests.
It's what dwarves do. They chop down trees and feed them to the fires to create wealth. Grower vs. maker. Why do you think they are in eternal conflict with elves? That's why Legoloas' and Gimli's friendship was so exceptional. It was Saruman's great crime...only he did it to an ancient forest that still had its ancient defenders. Bad move.
you're replying to someone who posted an entire novelette trying to whitewash a hasbro game my poster in arms, you're not going to get anywhere here
the fact they called dnd a generic set of rules instantly tells you they've never encountered gurps or fate and therefore have made the colonialism wargame their personality and will defend it to the death :lenin-pensive:
I never understood the need to defend treats as being leftist, like Steven Universe is one of my favorite animated series and it's probably the most lib media product ever created on the planet, it's fine to enjoy things that aren't explicitly communist folks
Like sure, the game chock full of racial essentialism and colonialist tropes headed by a company that literally sends Pinkertons to people's houses is left wing :shrug-outta-hecks: It's just kinda vapid because there's tons of rpgs that literally are leftist and about leftist themes but instead we get dissertations about how Call of Duty is actually leftist because one of the DLC packs was made by Stephen King or something
I never understood the need to defend treats as being leftist
I've been playing D&D for decades and I fully accept that Gygax was a giant chud and that the game's premade settings are pretty fucked up and it's better to homebrew. :edgeworth-shrug:
The central foundational gameplay loop of D&D (and derived fantasy dungeon-crawlers) is to invade other peoples’ homes and take their stuff.
I subtly made it so the rewards/treasures that my party got in their most recent campaigns were voluntarily given gratitude gifts from the people they helped. :sicko-wholesome:
No, he's right, at least in D&D's original mode of play. The central foundational gameplay loop of D&D (and derived fantasy dungeon-crawlers) is to invade other peoples' homes and take their stuff. It is an explicitly settler-colonialist game that uses the exact same excuses as real-world religious and ethnic violence (these people are monsters, they worship evil gods, they are irredeemably corrupt, etc...) Gary Gygax was an arch-conservative and proud settler-colonialist. He explicitly condoned the murder of orc prisoners, including non-combatants like children because "nits make lice," drawing an intentional parallel between the killing of monsters in D&D to the genocide of Native Americans. To clarify, this is something that Gary Gygax said in 2005, not the 1970s.
Modern D&D has deviated from the dungeon crawl as the central gameplay loop, and I think that it's possible to develop a non-colonialist dungeon-crawling framework, but people should be very critical of D&D's roots.
i admit i didn't know any of that, my experience of the game is just that picking your race is mechanically important to a suspicious degree and the alignment system is shit
Which endured for a few years in the 1970s for a small audience before it was wholly eclipsed by subsequent editions, expansions, and authors.
The earliest adventures posit a group of common people raiding the large fortified estates of land barons and aristocrats, in the style of English Privateers or Robinhood-esque revolutionaries. It is no more "explicitly settler-colonialist" than a game featuring a bank robbery is a story lionizing greedy capitalists.
Gary Gygax was a guy obsessed with medieval themed war games who had about as much to do with settler-colonialism as Daniel Craig has to do with The Red Scare. What's more, he ceased serious input into the franchise when he sold the license to WotC in 1997. Long before then, the property was littered with derivative settings and works that ran counter to whatever gameplay one-liners buried under three tiers of links you can dredge up. Whitewashing D&D as uniquely the product of Gary Gygax erases the works of countless other openly progressive authors, from Margaret Weis to Monte Cook to Ajit George. Hell, it whitewashes away all the young people happy to play the game within a progressive context.
You could as easily argue he was arguing for the massacre of the Romanov Children or the execution of the scions and cronies of French Nobility. Hell, the original "evil races" included the pale pig-shaped Orcs and dog-headed Kobolds, far more closely associated with 19th century Europeans than the Good-Aligned Elves and Halflings who better paralleled American Natives or Pacific Islanders.
The leap of logic you're making is entirely the consequence of this sequestered western liberal view of history.
The critique of the Dungeon Crawl Loop skips right over where Dungeons even come from. Specifically, they are prisons constructed under the large fortified manner houses of the aristocracy, for the purpose of hording looted resources and imprisoning/torturing dissidents. Even as the game has evolved to focus on exploration and social encounters than the grind of room-to-room combat, there continues to be - as there always has been - a through-line of play that revolves around toppling villainous hierarchs by displacing them from their centers of power.
That's about as Leftist a theme as they come.
:order-of-lenin: well said, comrade.
Also, :dog-faced-pony-soldier:
Monsters live in dungeons, not political prisoners. Adventurers go there for mass murder and robbery, not to liberate comrades. They swear fealty to lords, or become one themselves if a high enough level. At best, they are compradors. At worst, they are Generalplan Ost.
Ravenloft, a campaign setting written in 1983, contained a number of dungeons and dungeon-like settings with prisoners of the Evil Vampire Lord or his minions locked in its depths.
A number of early Dragonlance and Forgotten Realms modules had prison breaks of local rebels and persecuted people worked into their adventure paths. Again, this was stuff worked up 40 fucking years ago.
A guy in a fur hat squaring off against a big red dragon is on the front cover of some of the earliest D&D material.
Are we really stanning Smaug, right now?
Didn't you just post quoting the example of whitebox OD&D?
Dragons are a representation of the natural world rebelling against the excesses of humanity. Chaos fighting back against artificiality of "law and order".
I never thought of it that way, but burning a kingdom of greedy dwarves who chopped down whole forests to feed the fires so they could not just become rich (they were already rich) but to become slightly richer? OK fine. Critical support to Smaug and all the other dragons who went all Ramón Mercader on the lords in their castles.
The thousand-year-old mega-monster that periodically rides out to plunder the surplus value of native peoples is... the natural world? And it's... rebelling? Against feudal peasants?
You don't see any parallels between a heavily armored fire-belching monster that robs from the countryside and a 13th century robbery baron?
The dwarves didn't chop down any forests. Smaug was the one who originally torched the Murkwood. And Smaug didn't stop dwarves from becoming bourgeoisie land owners. He looted their accumulated labor so he could sit on it and feel strong.
Unironically doing Patriotic Socialism to own TTRPGs.
I see you're not familiar with the mythical history of what dragons are, or what they do.
It's what dwarves do. They chop down trees and feed them to the fires to create wealth. Grower vs. maker. Why do you think they are in eternal conflict with elves? That's why Legoloas' and Gimli's friendship was so exceptional. It was Saruman's great crime...only he did it to an ancient forest that still had its ancient defenders. Bad move.
:wall-talk:
you're replying to someone who posted an entire novelette trying to whitewash a hasbro game my poster in arms, you're not going to get anywhere here
the fact they called dnd a generic set of rules instantly tells you they've never encountered gurps or fate and therefore have made the colonialism wargame their personality and will defend it to the death :lenin-pensive:
I never understood the need to defend treats as being leftist, like Steven Universe is one of my favorite animated series and it's probably the most lib media product ever created on the planet, it's fine to enjoy things that aren't explicitly communist folks
Like sure, the game chock full of racial essentialism and colonialist tropes headed by a company that literally sends Pinkertons to people's houses is left wing :shrug-outta-hecks: It's just kinda vapid because there's tons of rpgs that literally are leftist and about leftist themes but instead we get dissertations about how Call of Duty is actually leftist because one of the DLC packs was made by Stephen King or something
I've been playing D&D for decades and I fully accept that Gygax was a giant chud and that the game's premade settings are pretty fucked up and it's better to homebrew. :edgeworth-shrug:
I subtly made it so the rewards/treasures that my party got in their most recent campaigns were voluntarily given gratitude gifts from the people they helped. :sicko-wholesome: