At the Amazon store this weekend, I found their RPG collection.
Mostly pathfinder and D&D, as expected.
Earlier that day, my wife and I'd had a discussion on what the con is of peasants. So, I look up the peasant. It's in the back, with the humans.
Con: 10. All the stats are ten. Peasants are exactly average.
I look around at the other human-types, and notice 10 is the low point.... there's only one human-type wth lower than a ten in anything. Someone doesn't understand the definition of "average".
The human with less than a 10 is the "tribal warrior", whose got 8 INT and 8 Charisma.
What racist bullshit.
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Racist revisionist bullshit. Resisting my urge to delve into details, I'll just say that the idea that "civilized" people only portrayed "savages" as ugly and stupid is not a full reading of the historical record. It's not just perpetuating propaganda, it's perpetuating cherry-picked propaganda.
ReplyDeleteEh. They understand the meaning of average, you are misinterpreting how it is being used. The peasant presented is the average peasant, meaning they have generality average stats. There are smarter and dumber, stronger and weaker, etc. But game systems like these give you the "Standard" and assume you an deal with fiddling the bits as you need to represent something outside that range. This feels like a kind of pedantic criticism.
ReplyDeleteThis also gets in to what do stats represent? Is "Intelligence" actually how smart you are, or is it learning? In DnD it seems to be a bit of both, so it's hard to say what they are trying to represent. And charisma is such a wonky stat, but that has to do with people not using it correctly mostly. It's one of the limitations of how the system works.
Which is all separate from the racism thing. Which I have a lot of internal angst about.
I don't even...
ReplyDeleteIs this core D&D 5 rules, William?
ReplyDeleteRobert Bohl I sure hope so, since it was the Monster Manual.
ReplyDeleteTell me more about where to find this Amazon rpg collection. Typing "rpg collection" in the Amazon search bar did not yield....cohesive... results.
ReplyDeleteKaren Steele washingtonpost.com - Amazon to open a (real-live physical) bookstore in D.C. - The Washington Post
ReplyDelete