Larian Studios Forums Baldur's Gate III Baldur's Gate III - Suggestions & Feedback Racist Tropes on Drow STOP IT

yet these companies keep listening to them.

As an old lady, I find hags in DnD extremely problematic. I would elaborate, but I am currently making a pie for some children in my neighborhood.

Made *for* them…not made *of* them.

(this time)

Do not feed the troll

The satire implied by this is exactly why I find Tieflings to be a stupid and tiresome idea for a player race.

I am aware that D&D has some rather more tangible expressions of both good and evil. But my point is, "good" and "evil" is not that deeply defined. Part of the game, essentially a premise for the game world making sense, is that we generally speaking accept its notions of what good and evil is, without trying to analyze them into oblivion and bog the game down with all the shades of gray that are part of the real world.

That being said, the "tea with orcs" thing is of course largely a joke, but not entirely, because technically orcs are people too, and technically there might be a solution to the problem of villages getting slaughtered by orcs that does not involve waging a genocidal crusade against the orcs. Technically there might be some pathway to a mutually acceptable solution where everybody gets to live in peace. The greenies raise squigs and sell delicious pork and the humies farm veggies, and then there's peace and happy times, and occasionally they join forces and raid the dwarf ale stores. Good times. And maybe a franchise mixup, whatever. But if this is possible then is it not the duty of any good and civilized adventurer to seek out this path first and foremost? Is it then not actually quite evil to just be prejudiced against the orcs and condemn them to genocide, simply for being orcs?

Amusingly, even Baldur's Gate 2 had some fun with these angles. Remember how Keldorn was being a bit of a jerk for ragging on Viconia, just because she was a drow? Well, he was. But at the same time he was undeniably a lawful good character and she was undeniably an evil Shar-worshipper. The whole thing further got nuanced by Keldorn's family quest showing him to have more than a few broomsticks up his rear, whereas Vicky turned out to be strongly shaped by her tragic backstory rather than just evil for the sake of it.

And that is how I feel we ought to use our somewhat more complex real world understanding of what good and evil is. Not to get offended over this or that detail in the game, but to look for funny angles and odd twists and maybe occasionally reflect over the contrast between the game world's relative simplicity and the real world's almost impenetrable shades of gray.

Case in point, there is a reasonable enough complaint about how the treatment of drow in D&D has unpleasant connotations for a lot of real world people. While the game world is a fair bit deeper than "black elf is evil elf", the reality is that the sentiment is largely validated in a lot of stories, where all the white elves range from amazing to meh whereas all the black elves are fanatic followers of the hindparts for headwear fashion trend. It's not real nice, is it? So making this part more nuanced is quite reasonable, because it does express a game world situation in a way that is obviously painful to a lot of people.

But the reasoning should not be extended to the point where all races that are humanoid and intelligent must be considered "people" and treated as such, because otherwise we are essentially justifying racism against some minority group. That takes a reasonable perspective and dials it way up to eleventy. It is not racist to consider orcs evil, because they are not humans and they are not demonstrably capable of acting humanely. For game world purposes, it really does not have to go deeper than that.

This sort of nuance is
Did anyone else make a true neutral character in Baldur's Gate 2, and continually drop/re-add Keldorn before he went on one of his rampages so as to keep a party of good and evil characters together throughout the game? (This poster apparently did.)

'A lot' of people is quite an overstatement. People getting offended by fantasy characters are but a tiny loud minority that companies can't rightfully ignore because of the annoyingly polarized times we live in.

As others have mentioned, the current king of the Many-Arrows nation (Lorgru I, son of Obould XVII at last reckoning) would possibly like a quiet and altogether quite diplomatic word with you.

This is great stuff. love everything about this topic

I want to add a bit of moral scepticism to this debate.

I don't see how that justifies limiting the configuration space of potential fantasy beings and societies.
You assume that the racism (or speciesism) in ficitional settings is a representation of racism in this world. That reads a bit like: "It can only be there because it exists in our reality." Are you a devout follower of Parmenides by chance?
So the low tech societies have less 'moral value' than those with more sophisticated technology? If not: Where is the problem with the low-tech portrayal?
It is their current position in the space of possible cultures. Why does the obvious truth that there are other possible coordinates need to be represented?
Could an elephant be blue? Sure, if someone painted it. Could there be smilodons still roaming the forests? Could the cannibal turn herbivore? Could the 18th century british government abandon colonialism?
That counterfactual goblin societies are not represented does in no way indicate that they could not exist in theory or in the future.
Are people responsible for their own actions or not? Let us assume that freedom of will does exist. What does that make your suggestion? A call to (self)censorship.

Universal moral truths are assumed to exist as elements of reality. Their assumed existence is then used to argue for changing fiction into a tool for preaching them. There is no natural law. People from Plato to Sam Harris have tried and failed to prove the existence of universal moral truths. A given system of morals manifests itself as a local truth only in a given society (or individual) at a given time.
Projecting the current mainstream of western moral thought on the rest of the world is dogmatism. Demanding other cultures or even fictional characters to comply with ones own morals is the mindset of the inquisition.
Darker aspects that "need to be purged" to make a better world. Interesting choice of words. Many of those whom you would consider evil had the same goal and said similar things.

Other cultures have different ideas about what is morally right. My own countries (germany) culture of the past had radically different ideas about it. They would think of us as being mistaken. We might think of them as being mistaken. Was the maori chieftain right to hold slaves or was he wrong and evil as the slaves would have said? Who shall judge? We might sympathize with the "from the watery eyes of the slave" perspective, but that does not prove a moral truth.

It is my humble and fallible opinion that any kind of censorship is inherently totalitarian. I happen not to be a big fan of totalitarian systems. Not to demand limits to imagination in the name of political correctness or representation seems appealing to me. I could be wrong, but so could you.
The inherently volatile nature of systems of morals results in a huge array of contradictory ideas of right and wrong over time. That means that most of these ideas must be wrong and a maximum of one could be correct. Probability suggests that we should remain highly sceptical of our own moral ideas and ideals.

A refreshing breeze of not anthropomorphizing fictional species and races.

Empirical turn:
Is there any proof that racism in video games causes racism in reality?
Only then would there be reason (if accepting the current morals as true) to change the games.

In my Defense, I can only say that i assume i really am a Fantasy / scifi Fan for at least my 10 Birthday which is almost 4 decades ago. Probably read more Books and watched so many Movies and Series then you... its allmost a shame that so much time went int this Hobby.
But the Debate about Racist tropes is valid and important. Its not about my personal agenda vs Evil or how soemthing should allways be like i want.
Its what the Author Salvatore wrote and that he himself learned to make change. You need to read the Article to understand. If you disagree with me having same opinion as Mr. Salvatore then so be it.

So with all due respect and dont get me wrong.
But i beg ye, dont start trolling and misleading other people to follow your wishes of me leaving and never return.
That is more near the area of Racist Tropes then accepting that its possible to write storys without making people use Racism as a way to excuse themselves for wearing a blinder as horses do.
Because it is more easy behavior.

I want Baldurs Gate 3 to succeed and not fall into the trap of having Dialog which can break the games neck by having bad critics two years later,
when most people changed their narrative and use of terms for the better to not hurt people by using tropes etc..
But BG3 stayed maybe in the same old slur for some reason, or just nobody suspected that the times change and its no more appropiate to write this or that.

As you can follow in the Newsmedia in the last years, there is a lot of talk about racism, workplace conditions, Salarys, equality, Genderering etc.
This is in the past year especially happening around the vicinity of Publisher Houses and Developers. AS allready said.
At the actual moment we can follow Activision Blizzards Problem, which might bring Blizzard down forever.
So many people are dissapointed, myself too because i played a lot of time with their games. I love them. And here we are we realize they are grounded on inequality and all kinds of misconduct.

People go Protest and that directly hurts the Product most of the time.
People can lose their job in ther aftermath of this mediaspectacle.

I dont want that for Baldurs Gate3 and Larian Studio.
So if you can prevent this then accept what kind of arguments and experience Mr. Salvatore made with his own Books and will adapt his writing in future books.
He grows and you can too!

That article is in large part a pile of inane drivel, like most of what Polygon loves to publish these days.

Is it serious or...?

As serious as you'll take it

I think Niara made the best point and also provided the most fair solution here. Racism in Faerun is a thing - but we should have the ability to confront it / or not - how we see fit.

There is an elegance to this solution in that it doesn't rely on censorship - quite the opposite. Taking advantage of the tools we have available - it being an RPG - we can give people additional roleplaying options.

As a side note -Its interesting that The Absolute has united all these disparate races under a single banner despite there being significant racial tension between them. I mean Lolth Drow are serious racial supremacists. And my own perception of them up to this point was that they represented White Supremacy, Racial Nationalism but with purple/grey skin.

I wonder if I am the only one who ever viewed them that way? Any thoughts?

Interesting point about the Absolute. However, you could see those who do not know they have a tadpole in their head thinking that line. I can even see a good aligned NPC standing with the Absolute (like Gut, not knowing any better). Knowing that you have this thing eating at your brain and seeing visions of destruction and unless you are convinced by these visions, I don’t see a virtuous character siding with her.

That’s to say, good point. I still think the OP is going too far. It’s a fantasy world and species/races hate each other. I do agree that the innate evil should go away. I remember a reverse dungeon back in the late 90’s, you were a tribe of goblins defending against a group of adventures. At that moment, the goblins did not view themselves as evil…

Edit actually it may have been in 2000 not late 90s, It’s been too long for me to be sure but I think this is it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Dungeon

I have similar thoughts about the yuan-ti. But I doubt it's deliberate. The early game just grabbed a lot of ideas and used them without really considering such ramifications because largely people didn't consider it important. I just think it's a matter of wanting to reflect an evil society and grabbing behaviors you think of as evil in your own society. Eventually some accidental commentary is made.

Maglubiyet is very much desiring to be the one-true-god and destroy all other gods. So is Cyric. And both of those read to me like someone looked at the worst of Abrahamic attitudes deliberately or otherwise.

For Yuan-Ti, I look at them and their behavior, for all that it's covered in evil-cultist decoration, feels very corporate rat-race to me. Ambition and backstabbing among each other, kissing up to your superiors until you can betray them and take their place, and when presented with an external threat showing a united front. The Snake Gods feel very much like executive level positions, especially given that there's a fair amount of shifting of the roster at that level. The four big names (Merrshaulk, Sseth, Zehir, Dendar) are pretty head and shoulders over the lesser snake gods but some of them plot against each other. (Especially given there used to only be one of them) Though I'm not sure Dendar ever sought to be involved and just got discovered accidentally. Dendar IS a GOO after all.

Again, I wouldn't be surprised if its all accidental. We've had decades of bemoaning that sort of culture in our society and it has to leak in eventually.

I like the ability to confront this stuff directly in ways that aren't viable in real life. But again, it is a separation of racism exists in the universe vs some concepts in mechanics and meta are alienating to some players.

The yuan-ti are another case where I could see the vast majority of them are terrible people, because they are still actively engaging in the rituals that were used to create yuan-ti in the first place. And a person who was willing to commit cannibalism in order to gain some modicum of power is not a nice person. But it is also possible to be born a yuan-ti and those don't have any sin applied to them... though being raised in yuan-ti culture will pressure them that way.

I know Eberron has a group of LG yuan-ti (that are sort of full of themselves jerks, but at least well-meaning). And I've heard there are more yuan-ti splitting off here and there from the culture... which makes sense given the hostile nature of the culture, you'd get people peeling off naturally.

The main thing that interests me about the yuan-ti is the lore statements that they do not experience emotions in a normal manner, it sort of appeals to me as someone who is a bit neurodivergent. The struggle to escape a culture that is all about ambition and domination is also interesting.

The Lloth-drow are a bit less interesting to me, Lloth strikes me as someone who just doesn't really have a plan and is just torturing her followers for the heck of it and feeding the racial superiority thing to them as part of that torture. She doesn't seem to ever be pushing her followers to conquer anything, just fight each other for her approval. She's a gameshow host in a real-life game of survivor that gets off on it.

Vhaerun drow are a bit more insidious, not the least because their brand of evil can put on the appearance of being reasonable and friendly. Also because they have motivation to interact outside of their own culture as they strike me as being hella capitalist.

The Absolute feels very much like The Temple of Elemental Evil and certain famous and litigious cult-scams inferring a relationship with science in the real world. It preys on people looking for meaning. But I have barely touched the surface yet.

You say this as if it were a fact that any actual ramifications exist. As far as I'm aware, there's no proof there are any.

Except it's really not. No one is being oppressed because the Drow have grey skin. Unless the supposition is that it's only okay for evil races to have *white* skin, because it's only *white* people who are really evil (which is the actual state of the conversation these days). All you're doing is injecting this nonsense where it shouldn't be, IE these forums. It's destructive, and it's stupid. Just "STOP IT," to use your words in the title of this thread.

'Sits and watches while eating popcorn.'