(no subject)

[sev]

In my experience, when I'm having a substantive discussion about race or gender on a game-related discussion board, there's about 50% chance that the moderators will close or delete the thread. (too bad that the rate of shutting up people who are just being racist or sexist isn't so good!) So, I'm collecting the things I've posted over in a WotC discussion thread over here in case they vanish.

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When I'm reading published articles and adventures I want to see fewer mentions of NPCs who are "merchant's wives" and more who are "merchant's husbands. Fewer stories about the female adventurer who had to lose every single person she loved before embarking on a life of adventure. Fewer monsters where the *really* scary version is called "mother." Fewer articles that rate level-of-attractiveness of female NPCs (and only for females).

And, yes, I'd like to see fewer images of leather-armor-clad adventurers with bare bellies, because all I can think of when I see them is those poor adventurers getting their guts sliced out.

And I know that there are some articles, some books, some adventures that don't fall into these traps. They're just too few.

I want to see more NPCs who are male herb-gardeners or female woodcutters. More PC portraits that are something other than light-skinned people with western-european features. More women's names on the bylines of articles and books.

And there are certainly some of those out there. But again, too few. There's just enough so that people who complain get told that there's nothing to complain about. That somehow the tokens are supposed to be enough to settle for. That I'm supposed to be satisfied that the game I've loved for half my life has gone back to treating people of my gender as an afterthought.

The little things bother me, nearly as much as the more-obvious stuff does. Maybe more.

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and then, after the conversation got seriously off-track, and somebody objected to my "tone," somebody else posted a link to this discussion of the tone argument, I responded:

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oh, nice link. I'd been looking for some kind of 101 on "the tone argument" but they always seem to require so much context, which this post provides. Thanks. This thread has been a fairly extensive example of derailment bingo but I'm glad I learned something from it anyway.

In an attempt to drag it back to something resembling a conversation about D&D: What adventures have you played that have explicitly moved away from the tried-and-true fantasy cliches? My initial post was inspired by yet another mention* of "a merchant prince's wife" in one of the adventures published in Dungeon, contrasted with the book I recently read by Elizabeth Moon called Paksenarrion's Deed, which avoided the fantasy cliches without being terribly obvious about it. I'm looking for D&D adventures that feature more of the latter and less of the former: what have y'all found?


* that mention inspired a survey of 4e Dungeon magazine adventures: when an adventure described both a husband and a wife when describing NPCs, the wife was generally an accessory with little or no role in the adventure, with only a few exceptions: In two cases, they were a husband-and-wife team that shared power. In another three cases, the husband was dead. And in just one case, the wife was an important NPC and the husband was an accessory with little to no role in the adventure.

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I'm hoping that after this, I have the sense to just shut up. Because I'm sure that anybody who would have listened has already done so, and I should not argue with idiots.

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(from PostSecret (http://postsecret.blogspot.com), 5/16/2010 (http://postsecret.blogspot.com/2010/05/sunday-secrets_16.html))