D&D Made by Ignorant 'White Dudes,' Wouldn't Pass Modern 'Inclusivity Reviews': Sr. Game Designer
“Dungeons & Dragons” is the most popular tabletop role-playing game in the world, and for good reason.
Few games — even video games — do a better job of placing you into the thick of an “adventure” or “campaign” (which are D&D parlance for a single session of play and several connected sessions, respectively) than “Dungeons & Dragons” can.
The entire premise of the game, and this isn’t meant to sound like a pejorative, is for people to use their imaginations to place themselves into fantastical roles like paladin, fighter or cleric. You can also be any gender or race you want to be.
You then go adventuring (with critical moments decided by the roll of polyhedral dice) based on the whims of the “Dungeon Master.” You can think of the “Dungeon Master” role as that of a participating narrator, who crafts situations and scenarios.
“Chutes and Ladders” this is not.
“Dungeons & Dragons,” which first became available to the masses in 1974, has always been this sort of open-ended adventure only limited by the scope and imagination of the players and “Dungeon Master.”
So why in the world would those original games (D&D is currently in its “5th edition”) fail to pass modern “inclusivity reviews”?
That’s the virtue-signalling claim made by the game’s current Senior Game Designer, Jason Tondro, during a February podcast from the official “Dungeons & Dragons” YouTube channel.
Tondro appeared to discuss the upcoming “The Making of Original Dungeons & Dragons: 1970-1977” book with D&D content creator Todd Kenreck, and took some thinly veiled shots at the original creators of the game.
“There are things [in the upcoming book] – it was a different time, so we’ve had an inclusivity review of all these materials,” Kenreck noted.
“Multiple [reviews],” Tondro eagerly responded. “Let’s take a step back here. Let’s clarify there are materials in original ‘Dungeons & Dragons’ that would never pass our inclusivity reviews today.”
Tondro then failed to give a single example, but did offer a broad critique that white people just don’t know any better.
“These are a bunch of war gamers, and they’re using armies from history,” Tondro continued. “And so when they create a warrior class for ‘Dungeons & Dragons,’ they call it the fighting man, because that’s what they were all used to and they were all men, and they were all white dudes from Lake Geneva and the Twin Cities.
“But that’s just the top of the iceberg, right? There’s a lot of material in this book, and I won’t go over all of it, but it would not pass our inclusivity reviews today.”
The original creators of D&D — the ones summarily dismissed as dumb “white dudes” — are Gary Gygax (who is from the Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, area) and Dave Arneson (who’s from St. Paul, Minnesota).
Making things so much more insipid and worse? Neither Gygax (who passed away in 2008) nor Arneson (who passed away in 2009) are around to defend themselves against this sort of vapid historical revisionism.
But Tondro’s most curious remarks came when he brought up the left’s favorite non-sequitur: “Diversity.”
“We couldn’t change it, it’s history, what we can do is acknowledge it and show how far we’ve come because that’s not D&D anymore,” Tondro continued. “D&D gets more diverse and has a larger audience everyday. The more diverse the game becomes, the more people of different genders and ethnic backgrounds and faiths see themselves in the game, then they go make their own versions of the game and more players start to see themselves represented in the game.
“The more diverse the creators get, the more diverse the players become, and that’s the way it should be.”
Even if you drink the far-left Kool-Aid and think diversity for diversity’s sake is a salve for everything (spoiler alert: it’s not), hopefully you can see the fallacy in Tondro’s claims.
Just look at the man’s own words: “The more people of different genders and ethnic backgrounds and faiths see themselves in the game, then they go make their own versions of the game and more players start to see themselves represented in the game.”
This. Is. A. Game. Based. On. Player. Agency. And. Imagination.
A “Dungeon Master” can just as easily say that a woman can role play as a “fighting man” (the class has since been renamed to “fighter”), as he can say that a white male player can role play as a black female cleric.
Even on a meta level, Tondro’s rhetoric makes no sense.
Attacking your own foundations for failing to adhere to some post-modern sense of inclusivity sure seems like an awful way to pitch your book about said foundations, no?
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